11.3: Learning from Experience

One of the driving forces behind assigning ethnographic writing is that people learn more from direct experience than from second-hand experience (e.g., reading, lectures). When we ask you to go out into the field to do your participant-observation research, we’re expecting you to learn a lot more about the culture you study than you could by reading about it, or listening to somebody else talk about it. We’re also expecting that all the writing you do about it will help you come to terms with what you know, both by making you make sense for yourselves about what you’re experiencing, and by making you make sense of it for readers.

If you’ve written personal reflective essays (like many college admission essays, as well as assignments you might have done for courses), then you’ve done some of what I’m describing; you’ve written a narrative in order to help you reflect on an experience, to help you learn or understand something about yourself, and to make that as clear as you can to somebody else. Ethnography also requires you to do this kind of inductive reasoning, which means that you collect and consider evidence and experience without a hypothesis or conclusion in mind; your analysis and descriptions explain what you’ve learned, rather than confirming or disconfirming what somebody else already claimed or knew. But ethnography is different from personal reflective writing in at least these two ways. First, rather than writing about experiences you’ve already had, most of the writing you’ll do is about experiences you’re having. That is, your writing can actually change your situation in ways that reflecting on the past can’t. Second, while you’re certainly part of the story you’re experiencing and writing, you’re also writing about other people, which comes with a set of responsibilities that can become very complex very quickly.