This is the seventh in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class ITSF5001: Ethnography and Participant Observation.

Table of contents of the lecture

  1. Confronting the limits of learning about the participants
  2. Learning what we need to know through the participants
  3. Garfinkel and ethnomethodology
  4. Anthropology as experimental science
  1. Confronting the limits of learning about the participants:
    1. The epistemological issues we discussed:
      1. How do we escape only asking participants what we imagine they might know?
      2. How do we place ourselves so that we can hear the questions (explanations, etc.) that participants may be asking of each other?
    2. The practical issues we discussed (somewhat generalized):
      1. Asking a question inevitably constructs a type of answer: can we find what we want to learn through other means than asking?
      2. Standing in one spot (watching, observing) also constructs that which we will see: can we find what we want to learn through other means than watching?
    3. Other practical issues relating to the fully social (interactional) nature of ethnographic research into groups that are always somewhat (or very) internally differentiated:
      1. multiplicity of participants:
        1. multiplicity in positions within the group;
        2. multiplicity 'within' the person as the person moves through positions within the group;
      2. the limits of meta-pragmatic discourses (that is discourses that explain, justify, criticize other discourses or practices)
  2. Learning what we need to know through the participants:
    1. Return to the broadest context of our research:
      1. who needs the report on what we will have learned?
      2. How does our research fit within a general field of inquiry?
      3. What exactly are we trying to highlight within our field of vision?
      4. What instrumentation are we going to use and what are the properties/limits of this instrumentation?
    2. searching for the best technique to un-cover among 1) the participants in our research field as a "polity of practice" (Varenne 2007) that which is covered to us initially as 2) members of another polity of practice (our scholarly or professional field) to which we will eventually return with our dis-covery (our dissertation or research paper)
      1. By implication I am returning here to the rhetoric of discovery:
        1. that was deconstructed recently to the extent that earlier versions of this rhetoric suggested that that which was discovered was "essentially" covered (when in fact it was available to many but precisely not to the discoverer: think Columbus and the Europeans who named America)
        2. this rhetoric can be reconstructed by emphasizing the dangers inherent in the authoritative and powerful (our professions given their status within the general polity) remaining ignorant if something relevant remains covered to them.
      2. The search will lead to techniques that are specifically designed to elicit something even if the eliciting prevents the researcher from "fading in the background."
        1. There are many of those, some used in the past, others currently used:
          1. Rorschach test and other in attempts to un-cover psychological correlates to cultural specificity (mostly discarded);
          2. cognitive tests (e.g. color charts to discuss color vocabularies) (still sometimes used);
          3. discussing photographs and other artifacts to get people to talk about their life (still used);
          4. asking people to talk about what others do through examination of artifacts (very successfully used by Tobin to compare practices and ideologies for pedagogy);
          5. asking people to produce artifacts (e.g. video documentaries);
  3. Garfinkel and "ethno"-methodology
    1. An radical theoretical gambit:
      1. participants are in the same position vis-a-vis each other as any other observers: they do not know, they need to know, and they develop practical means to discover where their co-participants are by continually eliciting comments from their co-participants, testing, instructing and otherwise "methodically" exploring their conditions to construct their next moves and their careers.

      2. most social scientists consider "trouble" a sign of disorder. Garfinkel takes displays of trouble as evidence of some order.

        Observers (sociologists in this case) can find out what is significant in the lives of participants by watching them react to each other's moves--and particularly when this re-action (work that builds on earlier constructions) is triggered by what appears like "trouble."
      3. Thus the ethnomethodologists' reliance on what is difficult rather than what is easy and, in various cases, in producing experiments when they make trouble.
    2. Some examples:
      1. The (service) line as an "ordinary thing" that is both "immortal" (think of a post office or any other setting where this always is a line for service) and must be co-constructed moment to moment by the set of people ("congregation") in the space where the line appears. Let's read Chapter 8 starting from p. 256-257:
        1. lines are available for dis-covery in the work people do to establish themselves within the line, a work that includes instructing others "when they start screwing around."
        2. the lines are nowhere else than in themselves: there are no rules (this is a theoretical point closely linked to the methodological point).
      2. "following instructions" as laid out in a manual: problems in construction
      3. working with challenges to our usual means to "learn" about the world or be told about it (the inverted lense experiments)
      4. constructing a kitchen and instructing its potential users
      5. constructing gender in multiple settings and with multiple audiences (from Garfinkel 1967: Chapter 5)
      6. doing the sciences
        1. discovering a pulsar (see also Latour & Wolger on laboratories)
        2. teaching a chemistry class
    3. "in each of these examples there was something to do and something to learn" (Garfinkel 216).
    4. The goal here is
      1. not to produce someone who will pass as a native,
      2. but rather to find out the work that might be necessary to pass as one within one of the settings that the native might occupy (e.g. standing in line, remaining a student in a classroom, etc.).
  4. Thus, I dare to say that
    1. Anthropology is an experimental science
    2. But not that kind of experimental science