11.2: Some Nuts and Bolts- What Ethnographers Do

The term most synonymous with ethnography is participant-observation research. Ethnographers study cultures, i.e., the relationships, rituals, values, and habits that make people understand themselves as members of a group (or society, or what have you). We do so by spending lots of time in the cultures we study, interacting with members, watching and learning from how they act and talk, participating in their activities, and talking with them about how they understand their groups and their lives. That is, we adopt a stance that’s both distanced (observing) and interactive (participatory), and good ethnographic writing emerges from the juxtaposition of those stances. Good ethnographic writing also acknowledges the effects we have on the cultures we study—which, I’ll contend below, is both inevitable and desirable—and the effects those cultures have on us.

Put simply then, ethnographers: observe, participate, interact, analyze, reflect, write, rethink, and describe cultures, their members, and our own involvements with them. What pins together all these ways of thinking and seeing is that they all either happen in—or directly lead to—writing. I can’t even pretend to generate an exhaustive list of all the writing you’ll do for your project, but here’s some of it:

1. Pre-writing: reflections on what you know about the culture
you’ll study, what you think you know, your biases and predispositions
towards its members, the questions you’re interested
in trying to answer, and more.

2. Introductions/consent forms: letters/emails to group members
explaining your project and asking for permission to do it;
consent forms for participants to sign, indicating that they understand
your project and agree to be involved in it.

3. Fieldnotes/interview notes/transcripts: notes on your visits to
the group/research site; notes taken during interviews with
participants; transcripts of interviews with participants; descriptions
of physical locations, settings, physical artifacts, and
so on.

4. Journal: a running internal monologue, so to speak, of your
thinking throughout the project—what you’re seeing, what
you think is important, what you need to pursue further, what
you’re confused about, who you need to make sure you interview,
and/or anything else that helps you keep track of your
ideas; some instructors might require occasional “progress reports,”
which are slightly more elaborated, formal versions of
journal entries.

5. Drafts and revisions of ethnographies: your write-up of the
project will require multiple drafts and major overhauls in organization/
structure, voice, and content, all of which should
help you understand your own points as much as they help
your readers. Your instructor might even require that you share
drafts of your paper with participants in your study.

If you’re still wondering what this assignment can teach you about writing, then understand also that this list is not only incomplete, but also not in any necessary order. You’ll probably find that your process is recursive, e.g., that a journal entry near the end of the project might call on you to re-interview a participant, or that something you’d forgotten about in your fieldnotes makes you rethink your analysis in a third draft of the paper. And, just as importantly, you may find that sharing your notes, transcripts, and drafts with participants in your project heightens your awareness of what some of us call the ethics of representation, i.e., the responsibility to our participants to ensure that what we say about them is fair, reasonable, and accurate.