Ethical Ethnography

Ethnography, a field of anthropology, is the study of people and cultures alongside their customs, habits and mutual differences: an ethnographic researcher observes a society or culture from an emic perspective in an example of a practise-research feedback circuit. Quetzil E. Castañeda writes that ‘fieldwork is intrinsically a collaborative (interactive, dialogical, collusive) endeavour’[1] and argues for a dramaturgy of research.  Castañeda speculates on the possibility of codifying a methodology of experimentation, within the parameters of a defined ethnographic research question which takes into account the flexibility and spontaneity inherent in the practice. Dwight Conquergood also calls for the recognition of intersubjectivity in research and a new language of research practise. Michael Taussig suggests this new form of writing could be beyond language: drawings.

A page from Taussig's fieldwork notebook

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Ethnographic ‘research is primarily based in participant observation’[2] meaning that the researcher is both inside and outside the research. The spect-actor, as Castañeda puts it. However, the researcher is always also conscious of playing this role, so in an example of the Hawthorne effect, does this change both the researchers behaviours and those of the people around him?

There is a difficulty in ethnography as practise, due to the ‘indeterminacy of […] research’[3] - because fieldwork is collaborative and immersive, often the theory does not align with the reality, and Castañeda posits the need for a recognition of the fluidity of ethnographic practice. It is impossible to theorise the potential of the ‘emergent audience’ in ethnography, their interactions and reactions are unpredictable, and any researchers attempt to lead the research will distort responses.

Distorted Images

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Quoting Augusto Boal, Castañeda writes that ‘This is theatre – the art of looking at ourselves […] Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society.’[4] Theatre is the recognition of the Other in performance: Ethnography is the recognition of the Other in life. Conquergood writes that ‘performance-centred research takes as both its subject matter and method the experiencing body situated in time, place, and history […] The performance paradigm is an alternative to the atemporal, decontextualized, flattening approach of text-positivism.’[5]

The theatricality inherent in everyday life suggests that all behaviour is performed and performative. We learn how to behave through observing Other behaviours; we modify our behaviour in different situations; and we rehearse behaviours until they become ‘innate’ rather than simply ‘inherited’. Using the frame of theatre in the practice of ethnography we recognise the codification of our own behaviours, enables us to study differences. Through this lens, the Body is subject and object; the body is text and archive; both the ‘I’ and the ‘eye’. Through theatricality, the body becomes the superior form of knowledge and experience.

Invisible Theatre

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Castañeda calls for a methodologization of embodied research, since ‘the overriding, governing logic of the text and its scriptural economy of knowledge production can be displaced in the face of the human value of fieldwork’.[6] Conquergood also writes that ethnography ‘privileges the body as a site of knowing’,[7]  placing embodied knowledge as superior to textual learning. Body as archive and performance.

One of the problems of ethnography is the difficulty in writing about experience: the hegemony of the text places embodied and bodily learning as subordinate to textualization. And, writing necessarily confines experience into reportable language: language that is constrained both by itself, and by the stylisation of academic analysis. At the extreme of academic writing, Taussig writes that ‘the very words you write down seems to erase the reality you are writing about […] the writing is actually pushing reality off the page.’[8]

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In an example of the inherent imperialism of anthropological research, which I will look at next, Conquergood writes that ‘In a deeply contradictory way, ethnographers go to great lengths to become cotemporal with others during fieldwork but then deny in writing that these others with whom they lived are their contemporaries.’[9] Castañeda refers to this difficulty as ‘the social, discursive, political and cultural violence of representation’,[10] emphasising the problem of writing the research by constraining the experience into the style of writing mandated by the institution. Taussig compounds this problem by suggesting that even memory is fallible, writing that ‘all is clearly etched until consciousness “processes” the impressions’[11]. Since the conscious recall of memory is conceived in terms of language, it is subject to its structures, the limitations of language and textual conventions. Images, for Taussig, are therefore ‘truer’ than language. Images are ‘outside’ of language.

Taussig suggests another alternative form of documentation, using ‘fieldwork notebooks as a type of modernist literature that crosses over into the science of social investigation and serves as a means of witness.’[12] Notebooks, here, are considered as a form of performative writing: reflective and reflexive. Could notebooks become as a new way of writing research? I suggest they can be read as a discovery in process, allowing the reader to experience the journey along with the researcher rather than simply reading a summary of the research.

Towards the end of his essay, Castañeda writes that ‘fieldwork is necessarily multi-sited’.[13] I feel that this homophone suggests both work which is placed, sited, and the ‘seeing’ of the work from the perspective of the researcher. The researcher is both emic and etic, within and without, inside and outside the research question in order to gather the research. How can this be disseminated after the fact when language doesn’t account for this duality of experience? Taussig, writing about drawing, considers whether ‘the alienation one feels in being unable to get it down right, hence the resort to tricks such as drawing and the living scrawl of afterthoughts?’[14] Notebooks provide a conversation, allowing reciprocity in the researcher. They are ‘of’ the research, but apart from it. A/part. The form allows for the fluidity which is inherent in ethnographic research, without pinning it to institutional language.

I enjoy a good notebook - and coffee

Another problem with the practise is when ‘ethnographic representation […] reveals itself to be politically, morally, and socially questionable and ethically problematic.’[15] Since no individual can remove themselves completely from their own bias and cultural conditioning, there must be ‘an acknowledgement of the interdependence and reciprocal role-playing between knower and known’.[16] The researcher is always playing a role, no matter how immersed they may become. If the researcher-role is lost, then the research itself becomes compromised.

Conquergood writes that ‘Anthropology is complicit with imperialism and the ideology of progress when it rhetorically distances the Other in time’.[17] To me, this recalls the nomenclature that used to refer to developing nations as the ‘third world’; a term which disconnects temporality, and creates a phenomenological difference as well as a physical and literal one.

Conquergood calls for ‘a rethinking of identity and culture as constructed and relational’, and for us to see alterity as similarity as ‘Borders bleed, as much as they contain’.[18] Castañeda also attempts to mitigate accusations of imperialism by emphasising that ‘fieldwork is intrinsically a collaborative (interactive, dialogical, collusive) endeavour’[19] which, at its best, can take the form of a mutually respectful conversation between researcher and subject. However, if, as Conquergood suggests, identity is continuously reconstructed, it is never fixed. How can a culture be studied when it is constantly in flux?

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[1] Quetzil E. Castañeda, ‘The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography: Performative Principles of Fieldwork’, Anthropological Quarterly, 79.1 (2006), 74-104 (p.187-9).

[2] Castañeda, ‘The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography’, (p.79).

[3] Castañeda, ‘The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography’, (p.84).

[4] Castañeda, ‘The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography’, (p.80).

[5] Dwight Conquergood, ‘Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics’, Cultural Monographs, 58.2 (1991), 179-194 (p.180).

[6] Castañeda, ‘The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography’, (p.87).

[7] Conquergood, ‘Rethinking Ethnography’, (p.180).

[8] Michael Taussig, ‘I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own’, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Amazon Kindle e-book, (Chapter 2, Paragraph 2, Location 282-304).

[9] Conquergood, ‘Rethinking Ethnography’, (p.182).

[10] Castañeda, ‘The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography’, (p.86).

[11] Taussig, ‘I Swear I Saw This’, (Chapter 2, Paragraph 2, Location 322).

[12] Taussig, ‘I Swear I Saw This’, (Preface, Paragraph 2, Location 99).

[13] Castañeda, ‘The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography’, (p.96).

[14] Taussig, ‘I Swear I Saw This’, (Chapter 3, Paragraph 3, Location 443).

[15] Castañeda, ‘The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography’, (p.86).

[16] Conquergood, ‘Rethinking Ethnography’, (p.182).

[17] Conquergood, ‘Rethinking Ethnography’, (p.183).

[18] Conquergood, ‘Rethinking Ethnography’, (p.184).

[19] Castañeda, ‘The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography’, (p.84).

Bibliography

Castañeda, Quetzil E., ‘The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography: Performative Principles of Fieldwork’, Anthropological Quarterly, 79.1 (2006), 74-104.

Conquergood, Dwight, ‘Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics’, Cultural Monographs, 58.2 (1991), 179-194.

Taussig, Michael, ‘I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own’, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Amazon Kindle e-book.