Reconstruction 9.1 (2009)
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Fieldwork and Interdisciplinary Modes of Knowing / Vibha Arora and Justin Scott-Coe
<1> Central to ethnographic construction and production of knowledge(s) is the fieldwork experience and the location of the knower. Anthropological fieldwork conventionally privileged knowing the Other and the going elsewhere. As a spatial practice, fieldwork refers to "a specific style, quality, and duration of dwelling"; that is distinguished from travel (Clifford 1997: 22). Territoriality of the field and prolonged immersion in the locality defined this fieldworker conducting fieldwork in the field (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). The growing acceptance and recognition of mobility among communities and the interface of the local and the global in everyday life of an individual have naturalized multi-sited ethnography as a fieldwork practice. The dichotomy of dwelling and travel that Clifford spoke about has a radically different meaning here. Tropes of entry and exit no longer define boundaries of fieldwork and the fieldworker's engagement (Arora 2006: 145). In the book In Ethnography through Thick and Thin, George Marcus underscored the role of complicity, circumstantial activism, and serendipity in multi-sited ethnography. Current debates on fieldwork underline how events and encounters mould ethnographic enquiries, the fieldworker's reflexive construction of knowledge, and finally the ethnographic present (Halstead 2008:1-2, Arora 2008: 131, 137).
<2> Ethnography can never be regarded as autobiography (Okley and Callaway 1992) although it is fieldwork experiences and the writing about them that produces ethnographic knowledge for a wider world. Meta-narratives have become passé today while the authorial voice of the ethnographers no longer occupies a privileged position as the knower (Clifford and Marcus 1986, Marcus 1989). Discussions on fieldwork emphasize the transactional interactions between the researcher and the field of informants or participants mediated by one's own body and experiences, research assistants, translators (native speakers), or an audience. Increasingly ethnographic knowing and the act of understanding is conceptualised to be a mediated activity requiring collaborative exchanges between the ethnographer, the objects/subjects of research, and others. Knowledge is no longer the product of objective distance or detached position but an outcome of reflexive understanding, local-political negotiations, and circumstantial activism (Marcus 1999, Arora 2006, Halstead 2008). This does not obliterate or make the inequality between the knower and the known irrelevant. Fieldwork produces fictions of wholes that are ‘economies of truth' where we can see how ‘history and power' work (Clifford and Marcus 1986). A politics of representation continues to structure all ethnographic knowledge, although the known are not powerless to challenge such narratives. The writing of culture is inherently partial and incomplete while ethnographic writing is accepting polyphony and polysemic readings (1986: 7). Anthropology has gone beyond cultural studies in offering a critique; nonetheless, cultural studies have played a vital role in the current acceptability of partial truths and experimental writing of ethnographies.
<3> Activism does not undermine knowledge production, as engagement provides vital insights and reinforces our long-term commitment to the field (Arora 2006). If the field is not distant or located in another land then we are conducting fieldwork at ‘home' and in one's ‘own' community. Here any knowledge generated is equally about knowing the self. Knowledge is gained corporeally, with our body becoming a mode of knowing and with knowledge about others and the self becoming undifferentiated. Conventionally fieldwork was territorialized in place and restricted by the metaphors of movement-- ; ideas of going and coming structured ethnographic engagement. How does one go anywhere or elsewhere if one is undertaking research on multimedia such as films, Internet, and virtual communities? The rise of network society with digital media and the creation of virtual e-communities have revolutionised existing sociality and our conceptions of community being rooted in a physical space: development of cyborg space. Hypermedia organizations and communities do not even have a territorial foundation. Communities and networks formed in cyberspace require different kinds of fieldwork engagements (Markham 1998, Miller and Slater 2000, Howard 2002) ranging from online chatting to offline interaction through telephones, undertaking email interviews (see Winkenweder) and social surveys using e-mails, list-servs, and web-forms. Here familiarity with social network theories and narrative analysis become methodological pre-requisites. The boundaries between anthropology/sociology and cultural studies get blurred further.
<4> Ethnography is not merely about ‘doing' but about writing and representing insights and framing them as knowledge (Halstead 2008). Acquisition of knowledge increasingly hinges on a self-reflexive awareness of content and the contextual interpretation of this content. Fieldwork is assuming an ever-presence in us (Arora 2006: 135) with ethnography becoming a self-reflexive process of writing and incorporating multimedia generated content and a polyphony of perspectives. These perspectives are not static either but evolve with reception of knowledge.
<5> Inter-textuality is becoming a normative practice and is influencing the dissemination of knowledge (Banks). Texts and writing are no longer privileged with the emergence of interactive hypertexts. Visuals have becoming a powerful mode of knowing, disseminating, and consuming ethnographic knowledge (see articles here by Grossman and Kimball, Sherman). Multimedia formats have transformed visuals into texts while texts are being interactively produced and consumed by a community of users. In interactive cyber-contexts (examples range from Facebook, Wiki, blogs to user-generated content) the knowing authorial voice is vanquished completely. These advances and exchanges legitimise interdisciplinary borrowing and experimentation in ethnography. This volume maps the multiple interdisciplinary ways in which an ethnographic moment is experienced or encountered and later constituted and disseminated as knowledge.
The Research Collective
<6> Disciplinary appropriations and translations, ongoing experiments and technological innovations in research methodologies are equivocally dislocating boundaries and helping evolve a shared vocabulary among fieldworkers. By becoming multi-disciplinary and using inter-disciplinary research methodologies, we are not seeking to turn away from our disciplinary roots, but aiming to enrich and populate future fields. We as editors visualized collating experimental ethnographies, documenting the progression of methodological tools and the application of technological innovations in research contexts different than hitherto considered fields of disciplinary enquiry. This would not have been possible to achieve without the incredible contribution of this research collective. Each exponent has singularly and substantively provided a form and definiteness to our charter for promoting innovation in fieldwork methodologies and breaking disciplinary limits. We have journeyed together virtually as a group through thick and thin over an extended period in order to bring this issue to public knowledge.
Locating the self in the Field
<7> Fieldwork at home is not easy and requires the researcher to self-consciously distance and transform the familiar everyday life into an object of study. Irmi Karl's narrative in Technology and Women's Lives highlights the challenges faced by a researcher undertaking fieldwork on the gendered use of Internet and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in everyday life among female-headed households in Brighton, England. This paper describes her experience while researching cultural familiarity and how it transformed the individual researcher. Karl advocates a greater sensitivity towards sexual politics in media ethnography.
<8> Our corporeal body is simultaneously an object, a means of knowing the world, and the site of reflexive knowledge (Lambek and Strathern 1998, Retsikas 2008, Wulff 2008). The human body is a canvas with a tattooed body becoming a field of academic research for Rhonda Dass who is a tattoo artist herself. In Avoiding the Peep Show, she describes the tensions she experiences between herself as an individual tattoo artist and the researcher writing about the tattoo artist community. Citing her own case she argues that ‘this insider perspective [as a tattoo artist] is reinforced through the authority that the academic lens provides'. She reiterates the need for greater communication and translation across the tattooist/academic boundaries in order to avert a peep show feeling. A reflexive ethnographic approach that incorporates voices from the community collapses all insider-outsider divisions.
<9> While Dass and Karl's paper document the difficult negotiations involved in researching and conducting fieldwork in own and familiar settings, Rina Sherman's paper is about fieldwork in a foreign land. Reading between the Lines emphasizes the triangulation between the researcher, the assistant and the informants or members of the community among whom Sherman conducted fieldwork over an extended period. Her discussion highlights the dynamic transactions taking place between different agents in the field setting. She acknowledges the role of translation in her discourse: ‘interpretation of the interpreter of his own or a closely related culture, interpretation by members of the society of their own culture, and the interpretation of the researcher of information received, recorded and experienced.' Sherman never evolves into becoming an insider but only as the knower. Her narrative displays an authorial tendency to know the Other. Using multi-disciplinary documentary modes (film, video, photography, drawings and textual recordings) the objective of her fieldwork was to provide a global ethnographic description of the Ovahimba people living in Namibia and Angola.
Knowing as Experience and Performance
<10> The phenomenology of experience is a central mode of knowing the world we inhabit and sometimes curate in the form of objects encoding social memory. An object is a simultaneously a sign, a document, and encodes personal experience to become a subject. Following a phenomenological perspective, Elizabeth Wood and Kiersten Latham argue ‘object knowledge' is created by transactions between objects, visitors, and staff in a museum setting. Museums no longer curate authorial representations of history but increasingly are recognized as mediating spaces for the re-construction of social memory and sometimes by communities themselves (Peers and Brown 2003) In Object Knowledge, Wood and Latham reposition the objects within a visitor-driven museum by advocating changes in museum practice by pointing towards multiple modes of representing material3). In Object K culture and archiving of culture in the ethnographic present.
<11> Objects of everyday life belonging to Communist Romania became subjective actors by fieldwork practices that animated, filmed, and later presented them in dual-screen installations. In Memory Archive, Alyssa Grossman and Selena Kimball underscore the need for experimentation and a greater dialogue between art and anthropology. This collaborative ethnographic encounter of Grossman and Kimball in Romania is founded on their prolonged personal friendship and an inclination to engage and experiment, and confront and negotiate. The description of the dynamics and shared experience of their fieldwork and later dissemination of knowledge highlights the tensions and shifts in disciplinary locations and blurring of boundaries between art and anthropology. While mapping respective disciplinary histories, they highlight how their collaborative research would contribute to furthering corporeality in visual anthropology and inter-texuality in art. They advocate development of new arenas for presentation of research in art and anthropology.
<12> Interdisciplinary arenas such as education and performance studies are dynamically acknowledging and integrating ethnographic fieldwork as a core research methodology. Searching for Conscientizaco underscores the role of mentoring in participatory action research in the context of International Service-Learning context. Lauren Ila Jones and Jonathan Arries weave social actions and reflections of students into a pedagogical narrative. This article explicitly highlights the fieldwork dynamics that govern the teacher-teaching assistant relationship and the position of First World students in a Third world context. They conceive and perceive this to be a transformative experience. Experience here becomes essential to performance and communication of any knowledge.
<13> Brian Winkenweder in The Homoetrics of eInterviews discusses the challenges of interpreting interviews conducted through emails (cyberspace). The face-to-face interview is a mediated encounter wherein words (talking) are complemented by expressive gestures and postures (non-verbal communication). Conversely, email interviews using the question and answer mode fall in an intermediate space of being ‘delayed' interactions/communications that are framed and given out as responses. Furthermore, the power dynamics of the einterview is radically different as the interviewer has control of real-time discussion and the flexibility of changing the conversation while the respondent need not be spontaneous and can take his own time to word precisely what he wants to communicate. EInterviews are a performance and a form of collaborative research.
<14> Kate Rossmanith's article Making Theatre-Making charts out how she successfully integrated Goffman's theoretical insights with extended participant-observation to provide us with a sensuous knowledge about the process of rehearsals and production of theatre. As she explains, ‘interviews can only ever offer particular knowledge, namely conscious discourses about practice.' Differentiating such fieldwork from traditional ethnographic research, she highlights how it springs from an insider perspective conducted in a clearly defined ethnographic present. Her paper is pedagogic in content and format outlining to others about what questions to ask, how to make sense of field-notes, and the subsequent construction of knowledge. She is not merely writing about fieldwork but guiding us on how to make sense of the tangled process of rehearsals and performances. This ‘knowing how to do it' schemata can enrich anthropological/sociological methodologies.
Interdisciplinary Modes of Knowing
<15> Fieldwork has largely focused on understanding the everyday life. This is not to ignore how critical events such as ruptures, crises, riots, ethnic conflicts, and terrorism have been the focus of ethnographic enquiry. In her paper about understanding the historic impact of the Vietanam war on the persons, families, and American society, Christina Weber uses a combination of inter-disciplinary techniques and data sources. In Methodological Approaches to Studying the Social Monad, Weber explains the creative use of inter-texuality with an analysis of data collected through interviews of children of Vietanam veterans (generational approach). Fieldwork was complemented by a textual analysis of films, television, and literature circulating on the representations of the Vietnam veterans and to a limited extent by the researcher's biography. Weber reflexively admits the profound impact her research on Vietnam had on herself as a person and how it helped in understanding her father who was Vietnam Veteran.
<16> Rachel Hurst in Complicated Conversations between Interviewing and Psychoanalytic Theory discusses the ethical implications of applying psychoanalytic theory to the face-to-face interview process. She argues that psychoanalytical sensibilities can positively contribute to interview methodologies. Interviews are encounters and a mediated activity: ‘it's an exchange for both contributors, this exchange of telling and listening to someone's story.' Not pretending to pass off insights gained through interviews as knowledge, Hurst concludes by saying ‘story is all we've got.'
<17> Ethnographic fieldwork and intertexuality is predicated in research on globalization of culture and media contexts such as the filmscape of Matamata that functioned as the Hobbiton movie-set for the Lord of the Rings trilogy and thereafter was promoted as a tourist destination. In Practice in Mediated Space, Robert Peaslee finds that ‘Hobbiton is not just a cluster of the conceptual, the corporeal, and the commercial.' It is neither a real nor an imagined space. Consumption, appropriation, and meaning making takes place simultaneously in this media-tourist complex. It is not a virtualscape, nonetheless the field presents itself as an unstable dynamic point of reference than as a place. The only way to understand spaces like the Hobbiton is to incorporate the subjective interpretations of various kinds of actors ranging from tourists, the guides, the other people maintaining the complex, and the researcher's own experience of this over an extended period in conjunction with analysis of media-content. Peaselee argues that such media anthropology constitutes an advance over ethnography.
Conclusion
<18> As a research collective we have discussed a range of methodological issues here and simultaneously worked towards dissolving existing boundaries between self with the field as the Other (Grossman and Kimball, Dass) while constituting or understanding social memory (Wood and Latham, Weber) and framing them as a field for our enquiry. Long-standing epistemological divisions between object and subject (Grossman and Kimball, Wood and Latham, Dass, Weber), observation, participation and performance (Grossman and Kimball, Dass, Rossmanith, Ila Jones and Arries, Winkewinder), notions of inside and outside (Dass, Karl, Weber), and place, space and imagined spaces (Rossmanith, Peaslee) need to fade away. We take positions in the field, off the field, in writing and by not writing ethnographically (Arora 2006). Far from arrogantly claiming to represent others, some of the contributors admit the transformative impact of ethnographic research on themselves (Weber, Grossman and Kimball, Hurst). The evolution of us as persons and as researchers undertaking fieldwork is intertwined and not distinct or separable.
<19> We end this introduction by arguing that in as much as we are governed and shaped by our disciplinary roots, in traversing these disciplinary boundaries we are equally in turn shaping future fields. We value disciplinary appropriation and are committed to translation and the evolution of shared vocabularies. Interdisciplinary methodologies can blur or change existing boundaries but not erode them altogether.
References
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