topic: interpretation

ethnographic unpacking

6 Oct 09
in

a newspaper dispenser for the Columbus Dispatch, outside a Subway a newspaper dispenser for the Columbus Dispatch, outside a Subway

Here's an example of one my favourite ethnographic analytic moves: 'unpacking'. Unpacking is one kind of interpretation, where an observation is examined for unstated (or implicit) assumptions, consequences, and meanings. Here's how it works.

Consider the above image: a newspaper dispenser outside a subway. Here's what we're going to assume about it:

  1. It is intended to sell newspapers
  2. It is designed to support this intention

Now, notice the statement on the bottom of the dispenser: "We capture history every day". Unpacking this involves finding premises that give this statement meaning:

  1. "History" happens every day
  2. Some things are Historic and some things are not
  3. History can be identified as it happens
  4. "Capturing" history - by identifying what is Historic and what is not - is a non-trivial task
  5. the Dispatch performs this non-trivial task every day

Taken together, the premises make an argument for how value inheres in the Dispatch, and why you should buy it. Note that in order to accept the statement, you have to accept the premises, but in order to unpack, you only have to notice something and wonder what makes that thing work. What, one asks, has to be true to make this true, to make this believable? The insight is in the unpacking, the discovery of assumptions.

The insights here have to do with the claims being made about the nature of history: if one wanted, say, to counter-advertise, one could devise an advertising strategy designed around these claims. For instance, one could reverse the time-orientation and claim value in reporting and making sense of the present, and pointing towards the future.

But unpacking doesn't happen in a vacuum: in order to perform this particular instance of unpacking, I had to have cultural knowledge - (that the statement is an advertisement, that advertisements are stories that help sell something, and so on, that advertisements can appear on newspaper dispenser). This is what makes unpacking a particularly ethnographic move: after all, that cultural knowledge had to be acquired somehow. In this instance, advertisements & newspapers are common enough and shared enough that I could do this analysis without having to do research (although you could count my living 5 years in the US as a process of gaining cultural sensitivity; just growing up as a city-bred person counts too, I guess).

In cases where the things being noticed are in less public or familiar contexts - a McDonald's in India, or on the shop floor of an oil rig, or in a hospital - cultural, contextual, and procedural knowledge has to be learned, and often the quality of the learning depends on the amount of exposure one has to that context (what we call 'research'). This is why anthropologists and ethnographers prefer longitudinal participation - the longer one stays in a place, the more one learns, the more things one can unpack and find the premises of, the more powerful the insights. This is also why the ethnographic method has little to do with mere observation alone - you have to do a lot more than that to interpret and find meaning.

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25 Jul 09
in

... to be reflexive is to structure a product in such a way that the audience assumes that the producer, process, and product are a coherent whole. Not only is an audience made aware of these relationships, but they are made to realize the necessity of that knowledge.
...the producer deliberately, intentionally reveals to his audience the underlying epistemological assumptions which caused him to formulate a set of questions in a particular way, to seek answers to those questions in a particular way, and finally to present his findings in a particular way. Ruby, J. (1980). Exposing yourself: reflexivity, anthropology, and film. Semiotica, 30 (1/2), 153–179. 

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studs terkel and the zen of interviewing

20 Jun 09
in
Before I studied Zen, mountains were mountains, and water was water.

After studying Zen for some time, mountains were no longer
mountains, and water was no longer water.

But now, after studying Zen longer, mountains are just mountains,
and water is just water.

first attributed to Master Qingyuan in the Compendium of the Five Lamps (Wudeng Huiyuan, 1252). [#]

When I first started interviewing, it was all I could do to just have a conversation, and have the other person tell their story. Following a lead was hard enough, and I could never be sure of what theme I was trying to pursue, even though I had this feeling that I should have one. After all, what use an interview that just meandered aimlessly? What would one learn if one wasn't trying to learn something? But I could never quite measure the distance between what was said to me and what I (should have) learned from it. For a while, all I could do with the interview was to quote bits of it, as a source of fact.

Then I discovered the writing of Clifford Geertz, and was impressed by the notion of writing, and ethnography, as interpretation. Every interview (and every act of doing research) was then an act of interpretation, and was worth doing only so far as it was interpreted, some meaning wrenched out of its atoms, the pace and beat of its sentences. Every phrase or word was, or could be, significant. Stories were ponderous with meaning, begging to be teased out. I would be the curator, bringing out with my writing what a mere quote could not. The words of the other person could not stand with out my foundation. Inevitably, the story became about me as well.

But now listen to Studs Terkel, radio show host and oral historian, interview someone on the American Dream:

I grew up in Paris, Tennessee. People in small towns considered nowhere identified with somewhere. So we were thirty miles from Murray, Kentucky, sixty miles from Paducah, a hundred twenty miles from Memphis, a hundred ten miles from Nashville, forty miles from Clarksville. We were on the L&N Railroad.
...
We were always train-conscious. We used to listen for the train, set your clock by it. You'd say: "Panama's late today. Number 619 is late."
...
[Country] people used to go walking on Sunday afternoons. They go down to the depot to see who's comin' in and who's leavin'. Or just to see the train comin' in. The trains always symbolized mobility. Somebody goin' somewhere, somebody leavin'. We were always aware there was another place outside of this. Somewhere. That you could go somewhere.

When I was a kid, we used to play a game called swinging, with a car tyre and a tree. One would push and one would be the conductor. You'd call off the cities: Paducah, St. Louis, Evansville. Somebody'd say: "I think I'm gonna get off here." And somebody'd say: "Naw, I'm gonna wait". And then everybody would say: "Chicago! Forty-seventh Street!" Listen to a lot of the old blues songs: "How Long, Baby, Has That Evenin' Train Been Gone?" "Going to Chicago." "Trouble in Mind"

Vernon Jarrett, interviewed by Studs Terkel. In American Dreams: Lost and Found (1980). Pantheon Books, New York. pp 83-84.

Something magical has happened here. (In the original text, Terkel's questions, if any, are not printed, so we have no way of telling how he actually led the interview). The interviewee's words stand by themselves again. They form this image, cutting across and connecting layers of meaning: context, history, memory, frame switches, episodes. There's the texture of the particular, the local. We are left with a stark impression of this particular person, and their particular history, but we take away from it an idea of a place and time distant from our place and time. Granted, these impressions have been building up and our sensitivities attuned by the time we read these words, because this is, after all, a book of dreams, of particular dreams of particular people in particular places. But after less than a hundred pages of stories and with barely 5 more of just his own words in the introduction, Studs Terkel wrenches us out of our context and deposits us in someone else's.

Somehow, with his invisible, unreported questions, and perhaps blank, inviting stares, a ready countenance, and - something else? - Terkel has made his interpretations unnecessary. Somehow his interviewees have become so fluent, so expressive, that they capture us. As Terkel vanishes, the stories come alive. This is Zen: mountains once again mountains.

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