The Critical Ethnographic Perspective

 THREE BASIC KINDS OF ETHNOGRAPHIES 

Critical ethnography is a qualitative approach to research that explicitly sets out to critique hegemony, oppression, and asymmetrical power relations in order to foster social change.

• While all forms of critical ethnography work to interrogate the structures of power and lay bare inequities suffered by marginalized communities, some critical ethnographers work directly with community members, engaging in participatory research and ongoing dialogue with those being researched. 
• Recently, critical ethnography has taken a turn toward exploring indigenous ways of knowing and producing knowledge, which has led the field in new and exciting directions.

Critical ethnography has been referred to as: critical theory in action. 

• This means that researchers are actively engaged in critique throughout the research process. 
• Critique means to deconstruct taken-for-granted assumptions about what is considered true. (In other words, to deconstruct means to constantly ask "why?")
• In the 1960s, “critical ethnography” (Carspecken 1996) was often based on classic Marxism or neo-Marxist critical theory. As new race, gender, sexual identity, and post-colonial social movements emerged, the philosophical basis for critical ethnography expanded greatly.
• These expansions underscore the growing disenchantment with the positivist notion of an objective social science that produces value-free ethnographies. 
• Post-1960s critical ethnographers began advocating “cultural critiques” of modern society and its institutions. 
• Critical ethnographers not only rejected positivism, but they also worked the divide between the powerful and the powerless. 
• Most ethnographic cultural critiques studied ruling groups and ruling ideologies and/or the sentiments and struggles of various oppressed peoples. Most were deeply committed to research that promotes an egalitarian society. Most hoped to produce both universalistic theoretical knowledge and local practical knowledge.
• This academic revolt is “political” in the sense that it seeks to transform the knowledge production of the academy.

As is obvious from the three kinds of ethnographic analysis described above, 

Traditional ethnography is the most common form of ethnographic analysis in anthropology. The goal of traditional ethnography is to be as objective as possible and to front and amplify the voices of our informants and the culture we study.

Case Studies are most commonly carried out by sociologists, although there are anthropological case studies which look a lot like traditional ethnographies (but drier)

Critical Ethnographies are unlike traditional ethnographies in that they do not pretend to be objective. They are a call to action aimed at correcting the ills wrought by inequality. 

• concerned with how human actions and experiences are generated by the social worlds that we study,  and in turn how these social worlds are generated by them.
• the researcher is a participant observer within a sustained embodied context- FIELD RESEARCH (not like all qualitative research)
• methods are deeply grounded in critical theory and intersectional experience
• ethical responsibility to address problems of inequality and injustice.--based on principles of freedom and wellbeing. 
• CE looks at what COULD BE along with what is
• contributes to the knowledge of life-sustaining knowledge and restorative justice (and knowledge)

Michel Foucault on "critique"*

• critique is to deconstruct and reinvent those certainties that foreclose alternative possibilities for ordering and reordering authoritative regimes of truth
• ...to discern and unveil the relationship between the mechanisms of coercion and what constitutes knowledge
• ...to interrogate the politics of truth that pertain to those relationships of power/knowledge that determine in advance what will and will not count as truth
• ...is the recognition that the "will to be governed" is also "the will to not be governed like this--by these people---at this point.it is not a refusal to be governed or a claim to anarchy.
• ...occurs when a subject gives itself the right to question truth as truth operates through power and to question power as it operates through truth
• ...is to expose the relational processes of subjugation to reveal the possibilities for one transforming oneself (out of subjugation) to become a subject -with agency (rather than object).
• this serves to deconstruct truth/knowledge regimes

*Both Habermas and Fine see the ethnographer as an activist. This means that they take a fowrad stance or position in the service of social justice in their writing. Where social life is represented and analyzed for the political purpose of overcoming social oppression.

The Problem of "POSITIONALITY"

positionality describes the differences in power in dynamic social interactions. The critical ethnographer is acutely aware of their greater authority when positioned aside those they study. Like other ethnographers they much consider their relative position of power when doing ethnography, even as they advocate for their informants. This requires a reflexivity (a looking back on ourselves and our actions).

• recognizes that there is no such thing as true objectivity (ethnocentrism/politics of knowledge)

System of Knowledge

• faulty generalizations-differences and distinctions are ignored or discounted
• man or mankind means everyone
• circularity-when rationality is conceptualized from only one tradition and then used to prove irrational all others
• one religion proclaims that it alone holds all truths.
• peculiar theoretical constructs and faulty paradigms-ideal models or applications suggest universal applicability without explicitly stating that they do (metaphors)
• employing metaphors and fables as examples of universal truths
• falsification of the status of knowledge- confuse the subject matter as constituted by a particular history of their field with the entirety of the subject matter itself. 
• Great white mens writing ---as English Literature

because of the way knowledge is constructed and given power, as ethnographers we strive to:

• be more self-reflective and self-critical of our own value laden perspectives
• to be aware of where our theories come from and who may have been excluded (as well as included) in these discussions and formulations.
• to be precise in our theoretical and methodological choices

from: Dwight Conquergood

Conquergood (1982) describes dialogical performance in ethnographic fieldwork as the only "ethical" stance in anthropology. These reveal the positionality (one aspect) of the ethnographer. This is seen as the quintessential encounter with others. 

The Nexus of Theory and Method in Critical Ethnography

theory is necessary to try to understand the meaning of what we are witnessing in fieldwork, but we are careful NOT to let theory trump our methodology. Understanding theory as one possible interpretation, while leaving open the possibility that a new explanation or competing explanations may emerge.

• contemporary critical ethnographers are beginning to use multiple epistemologies. 
• They often value introspection, memory work, autobiography, and even dreams as important ways of knowing. 
• The new, more reflexive critical ethnographer explores the intense self-other interaction that usually marks fieldwork and mediates the production of ethnographic narratives. 

Critiques of CE:

---It is simply politics

---it is no less biased than any other interpretation

---it can not speak in plain language

---It is too self-referential (as is the general critique of post modern theory)

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10 Misconceptions about Ethnography

1. Ethnography is Unscientific
• Assumptions
• science must test hypotheses
• science must be based on experiments
• science must be predictive
• science must be quantitative
• ALL science is culture bound 
• Ethnography is multivariate  and focuses on complex processes rather than being "reductionist" -- artificially controlling for variables so that you can test one. 
• ethnography is empirical and rigorous
• Ethnography centers on discovery and interpretation rather than hypothesis testing-this creates a wide angle on research, where research questions can shift- work within the unknown rather than the known (on which hypothesis testing is based) This is more likely to give you broad, potentially unbiased information. Wide range to narrow focus.
• study phenomena their natural environment
• science should not be conflated with experiments-- field sciences meet organisms in their natural environments (scale, complexity, flexibility)
• experiments can not reproduce normal experience.
• GOAL: to generalize WITHIN cases rather than generalize ACROSS them
2. Ethnography is Less Valid Than Quantitative Research
• even quantitative studies require interpretation and are based on assumptions
• validity: how scientific experimentation reflects the natural world.
• quant. data gives us crisp, easy to grasp results. Quant. data requires more complex processes of understanding
3. Ethnography is Simply Anecdotal
• a rigorous appraisal of massive amounts of data spanning participant observation, interviews, artifact collection, historical research, and content analysis.
• try to draw attention to cultural practices (local theories) by offering the reader concrete examples of the issues under discussion.
• these observations are situated within the larger more holistic context of cultural patterns
• attention to nuance and detail rather than generalizations
• focus on validity from months of intensive research
4. Ethnography is Undermined By Subjectivity
• all science contains elements of subjectivity (bias)
• the dynamic flow of social interactions and engagement between people is one of the foundations of the ethnographic encounter
5. Ethnography is Merely Intuitive
• analytical protocols are derived from intense participatory exercises- rigor is embodied in this approach
6. Ethnography is Writing About Your Personal Experience
• auto-ethnography, even when used is not the same as auto-biography (small percentage of research)
7. Ethnographers contaminate Fieldsites By Their Presence
• maintaining a lengthly presence works against this "observers bias" which is inevitable but lessons as the ethnographer becomes a fixture (if, successful)
8. Ethnography is the Same as Grounded Theory
• grounded theory, unlike ethnography is focused of discovering theory through data collection and ethnography is not (although that may happen)
9. Ethnography is the Same As Ethnomethodology
• using experimentation and ethnography does not consciously alter normal interactions
• not what ethnographers do
10. Ethnography Will Become Obsolete  
• becoming more and more popular and extending to almost all disciplines outside of anthropology

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF ILLUSTRATIVE STORIES. THEY FUNCTION IN THE SAME WAY AS GOOD ART. THEY PRESENT AN EXAMPLE WHICH ALLOWS THOSE ENGAGING WITH IT TO HAVE A DEEP AND AUTHENTIC STRUGGLE WITH MEANING.

Fieldwork in the Time of COVID

   In an online age, what is “social” about social distancing? 

• What does this pandemic mean for the world(s) we continue to build our careers studying, and how should we take it into account when advising students whose own research projects coincide with this period of upheaval?
• Moving methods online may be one part of the answer, but ethnographers should also look at the Covid-19 pandemic – and more explicitly, at the expansion of digital communication technologies and platforms within it – as a “revelatory crisis.”
• They are a series of “cues” for ethnographic attention in this moment of multiple cultural, material, and political transformations. 
• Three themes that anthropologists might attune ourselves to in this period of global disruption.
• In the movement of labor and personal relationships to digital platforms, what differentiations – implicit or explicit – emerge between the kinds of relationships that can be materialized digitally, versus those that require face-to-face contact? What are the implications of these differentiations for power, and vulnerability?
• The movement of life to online forums is a form of privilege, available largely to those whose work was computer-based before the pandemic. 
• It reveals and exacerbates inequalities between those whose paychecks are secure and those whose paychecks are not. 
• But reliance on digital media is not only a function of privilege, and not always in the ways one might expect. 
• Digital platforms, for example, facilitate the continued employment of some “essential” work like Instacart shoppers, restaurant delivery workers, and an assemblage of increasingly insecure employees that make the Amazon empire possible. 
• Digital media are also important forums for sharing information, like news about unemployment benefits and employment opportunities, as well as government advisories and medical advice. 
• The “digital divide” – between those online and those not – is real, but not stark; it takes on unexpected contours, increasingly visible under current conditions. 

• three-tiered system: (1) labor that can be performed remotely has largely shifted to work-from-home online platforms; (2) “essential” labor, which cannot be performed remotely and is necessary for the functioning of basic health and economic systems continues, ideally under social distancing guidelines; (3) and work that cannot be performed online and is not “essential” has been curtailed. The formation and deepening of labor and social differentiations is one focus of research

• Ethnographers might consider, for example, the gendered implications of these convergences of labor, or track how and for whom these shifts in time-use and responsibility endure as the scaffolding of stay-at-home orders begins to dissipate.

• Ethnographically, we are compelled to ask: how do digital forums offer possibilities for extending care, and caregiving, when face-to-face contact is inadvisable? Where do they fall short? What forms of relating are curtailed, and what novel social relationships do they enable? What insights may be gained by thinking comparatively about labor, grief, and digital technologies across contexts before, during, and after the pandemic? 

• How are collective experiences imagined/enacted through social media? What is the role of algorithms and other forms of amplification in creating collectives (or the illusion thereof), and across what scales? 
• For many under stay-at-home orders, interactions with social and digital media (e.g. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, online journalism, etc.) have taken on outsized importance for social interaction and learning. 
• media creates narratives that help people make meaning of this period of time (including various iconic images)
• As ethnographers, we can track the contours of these debates and the claims made within them. In the process, we can (and should) contest simplistic explanations of contemporary political difference as forms of “tribalism.” 
• As stay-at-home orders are lifted, what are the ensuing effects of public health efforts to trace, count, and manage populations, or failures to perform these actions? And what role do digital media play in these efforts or omissions?
• numbers play key roles in developing intelligibility from the unintelligible; of making the incomprehensible comprehensible, and governable. 
• digital media and private markets for “big data” seem likely to define how tracking and tracing are integrated into the development of a new sense of “normalcy,” in the vein of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism.
• Even while the Covid-19 pandemic opens opportunities for connections across geographic space, it also foregrounds the “local,” and the material, embodied experiences of locality. 
• The spread of the virus requires physical encounter. These encounters link human lives not only with each other, but also with the more-than-human, including microorganisms, bats, pangolins, and our shared, non-living mediums of existence, like air, water, and surfaces. 
• The importance of locality is also reflected in representations of lived experience. Images shared on social media underscore unfamiliar experiences of familiar environments (like streets, monuments, and mountain ranges) seen through newly clean air, and absent of people. 

• Digital technologies, including physical devices, apps, and social media platforms are already playing a role in how these events are developing, and in how they are communicated, interpreted, and enrolled in other projects.  (1) This role may not be entirely negative; if used well, these platforms may enable more just and effective public health interventions, widen the reach of social safety nets, or amplify voices of protest. (2) Even in this moment when the classic research designs and methodologies of ethnography are disrupted, we have the opportunity to track new phenomena as they emerge by turning our ethnographic attention to these digital platforms and their intersections with lives offline. 

The Disappearance of Everyday Life & Fieldwork as we Know it-IMPOSSIBLE to do REASEARCH?

• For anthropologists, the COVID-19 pandemic brings with it immense challenges for work and research. 
• the heart of our research, the activity from which all of our findings are derived – namely the observation and analysis of the everyday sociocultural world – is not possible without direct contact with the people living these lives. 
• --There is little discussion of how the corona restrictions affect research in the social sciences. But social science is also based on empirical research, and many researchers are confronted with much the same difficulties as their colleagues in the natural sciences. And this includes anthropologists. 
• The “laboratory” that social anthropologists use is not located within the walls of their research institute, but in society itself, and their “experiments” are the social processes that take place there. Thus, when we pull the plug on social life, anthropologists are deprived of the source from which they produce knowledge.

Empty Streets, Closed Doors

Ethical Responsibility during the Crisis

• The official order to reduce social contact to a minimum made it impossible to build relationships with the local people – an activity that forms the backbone of ethnographic research. 
• public spaces for people to meet and mingle are empty, the conversations of the regulars at the village tavern have gone silent and people seek out the safety of their own four walls, and so...anthropological research also has to be put in hibernation. 
• we have a responsibility to carefully consider the consequences of all our actions and avoid causing harm to the people who will serve as partners in our research. Because anthropologists constantly circulate among their contacts, moving between various households, social groups, and people, engaging in such activities during an acute outbreak of a pandemic means to risk contributing to the further spread of the virus. 

Reinventing Anthropological Research

• many anthropologists have adapted their methods to online research - online tools and social media platforms offered a way to stay in contact with our research sites and the people who live there. 
• Online observation can only provide insight into the very specific spaces of the online world, where other rules apply than in the realm of offline social interactions. 
• Online research must depend heavily on narratives, but one of the strengths of ethnographic research is the way that it sees more than just the information that people give us in interviews. 
• Only long-term immersion in the realities of a place enables us to observe phenomena in their full complexity and notice and analyze the inexplicit, unwritten rules that govern the social world.

Understanding the Pandemic and Its Implications

• There is a growing mistrust directed towards political decision-makers, the dissatisfaction with the media and its reporting, and the (dare one say) viral spread of conspiracy theories. 
• Through its ability to distill knowledge from people’s lived experiences, social anthropology can play an important role in understanding the socio-political upheaval created by the coronavirus. 
• Questions of belonging and alienation have become even more important in the wake of the societal transformations set in motion by the pandemic. 

Bearing Witness:

• At its most general level, bearing witness is a valuable way to scrutinize violent encounters, traumatic events, dislocations, and structural inequalities. It can help obtain support from those who might feel distant from those events, diffuse pressure from communities most directly affected, and bring about change. 
• Bearing witness can take the form of communicating traumatic personal experiences or documenting for others the dislocations, institutionalized violence, and kinds of difference-making that often escape social examination. 
• A time for ACTION...It is a time to push back against those who think Black, disabled or elderly people don’t have lives worth saving. 

Writing From The Quarantine:

• The Great Quarantine, - three reflections on ethnography after COVID-19, centering on design, theory, and the digital. COVID-19” will become part of the social fabric. 
• The challenge of COVID-19 is unprecedented,--ethnographers have contended with disruption before. 
• This has included global events like World War II, which resulted in the “culture at a distance” framework best known from Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). 
• It has also included more individualized events like the loss of one’s fieldnotes due to arson, as in the case of M. N. Srinivas’s The Remembered Village (1976). 
• These disruptions presented opportunities for innovation—for instance, the “culture at a distance” framework is recognized for helping establish the anthropology of mass media. 
• So often the most powerful ethnographic insights are not present in a proposal, or even known while conducting research—they emerge through the work of analysis itself. 
• Something that appears to be research for research’s sake might produce interventions of more lasting relevance than a hundred proposals crafted around a response to the immediacy of the pandemic. 
• Anthropologists must move beyond treating the digital as a necessary evil or inauthentic substitute, not least because such prejudice flies in the face of how billions of persons engage with digital socialities. Such dismissals threaten the relevance of anthropology after COVID-19 and deny ethnographers outside anthropology the contributions we have to offer.
• a greater share of human sociality will move online, and this will reshape offline socialities, and that anthropology must take this into account. 
• Digital anthropology is a methodological resource but it is also a domain of inquiry like medical anthropology, legal anthropology, or economic anthropology, and this should be recognized in our disciplinary frameworks. 
• We should steer a ground between either valorizing the digital as a magical solution to ethnography in a time of pandemic, or dismissing the digital as an intimidating, unpleasant thing we address as minimally as possible so that we can “get back to the real.”
• Going online creates new social intimacies. It is not necessarily a last resort: it is often a familiar space, even a new frontier. It is not always a second-best substitute for the physical, and digital socialities have their own meanings and implications. 
• Anthropologists excel in the study of particularity, and there is a real need for digital ethnographic work that explores the similarities and differences between online games, virtual worlds, social network sites, texting and message, memes and image-based socialities, and so on. 
• Additionally, in many cases digital socialities allow for greater anonymity than in the physical world, and less surveillance as well. 

How to acknowledge the entrenched injustices that COVID-19 lays bare and the new inequalities the situation reveals.

A “can’t do” framework for research methods under a pandemic

• There will be many people so preoccupied with the coronavirus crisis that they will be unable to discuss,  show interest, or concentrate on any other aspect of life that the anthropologist might want to draw attention to.  A lot of our interlocutors will be facing serious financial hardship.  They will have lost their jobs and become unemployed.  They will be trying to pay rent, incurring debt, and paying or trying to pay bills and in need of actual, practical help from the anthropologist, including, where possible, financial assistance. Many will be displaced as migrant laborers or refugees, and as people who are experiencing domestic violence.  Having a disability may make it impossible for many to use online resources
• Consider the point of view of interlocutors assessing the reliability or trustworthiness of the anthropologist.  They may not be sure they want to have a conversation with somebody they haven’t met in person or known for a considerable length of time. Some interlocutors will worry about being recorded during their interviews even if they haven’t given consent, because they’re not able to observe what is happening in the Zoom room the anthropologist is working from.  And some might feel intruded upon by the technology and may have ethical misgivings about being researched in this way.
• Beyond turning online resources into an instrument for research, an engagement with online methods will also need to take on board the forms of conceptualization that have emerged from work in digital ethnography. 
• Some of this work has contributed to a re-imagining of intimacy and a re-theorizing of social relations. 
• Rather than just trying to boost our technological adeptness and get to grips with technology as if it were simply a tool for research under extraordinary circumstances, we will also need to think about the changes that the use of Zoom, Skype, and Whatsapp is bringing to social relations across the board. 
• A whole lot of questions about how we constitute our sociality, gender relations, intimacy, and sexuality have been revived and are being revisited. 
• Going on lockdown, being furloughed from work or working from home, taking care of one’s children 24/7 without relying on supporting institutions such as schools, or being unable to attend the funerals of family members in person has brought ‘the social’ under a magnifying glass. 
• the way we now have to relate with one another and about how that differs from how we used to engage prior to the pandemic.

• Likewise, reflections on intimacy have exploded: what is friendship at a time of Covid-19? what is love? how will one live one’s sexuality? As fundamentally differentiated as the answers to these questions would be, reflections on them have come hand in hand, as well, with gender, class, and race theory. 

• The deeply uneven way in which the pandemic has hit people by reference to their social differences has elevated critical reflections on inequality to a level unforeseen. People have become anthropologists of themselves and their own societies. CRISES AND DISASTERS ALWAYS REVEAL INEQUALITY (of all sorts).

My Fieldwork

  Field Experiences:

1.Guatemala & Yucatan

2.Belize

3.Beach Channel (LI) & New Orleans

4.USA Communities

-Working in familiar and unfamiliar environments

-Working as an outsider/insider

-establishing rapport

-sticky situations

·     Ethics

• informants
• academic community
• funders

·     The problem with power and the researcher’s “gaze”

·     Protecting your informants: remembering who you work for

·     Jealousies and disturbances

-Combatting “Observer’s Bias” (GUMPERZ)

·     Group interviewing

·     The “aside”

·     Creating relationships of trust

-Recording and writing up

Experiences in the field—

·     Keeping the peace

·     Catch 22s

·     The epiphany of the “other”

·     Between Class clown to town idiot

Emic perspective—getting at voice/person/identity

·     Using  personal narrative

·     Biography and life history

·     Validating memory

·     Validating the individual experience

Choosing a focused theme from the journals/notes etc

·     Keeping it “small”

·     Topics are discovered through the process of interaction with the community being studied

·     Topics should have ethnographic examples available and are important to the cultural group being studied

·     Topics should include data that can be collected (principle informants should be identified)

·     Topics should attempt to shed light on a research question

(1) What is the temperature matrix of Mayan medicinal plants and how are these indicated in Yucatec & Cakchiquel Maya according to traditional healers

(2) Is there a dialectal difference between Belizean Creole speakers in the North American diaspora? Do these differ from the Creole spoken in belize? What are the proceses that create and maintain these differences?

(4) How do the Garifuna of Honduras remember their pilgrimage from St. Vincent to Coastal Honduras: an ethnohistory through memory. 

(3) Student’s Experiences with embodied practice as mediated by culture: How does culture create self perception of one’s body and how is one’s body a reflection of the culture?

What the hell do I do?

• I talk to people and directly elicit information. These questions are open ended and interviews can be hours long. This all has to be transcribed and analyzed.

• I go to performances and take fieldnotes, not just about the performance, but about the cultural scene in which the performance is enacted. This all must be transcribed. and analyzed.

• I note every aspect of a culture and what these objects and beliefs and behaviors are, and try to discern the MEANING and RULES behind them 

• I scour historical sources and interview people about culture history to try to contextualize a culture and look at their historical importance and evolution. (this has to be transcribed, interviews, sources, etc. and analyzed!)