This is the second in a series of notes to fifteen lectures
for my class
ITSF5001: Ethnography and
Participant Observation.
- Kaplan is
attempting to do two things:
- debunk the mystique of "methodology" in science (p.
3, 24);
- the paradoxical place of training in methodology in such a framework (are methods courses necessary?)
- argue for a particular view of science that stresses the independence
of the activity while recognizing its intimately human, that is social
aspect (p. 4).
- Science is not beyond humanity; it is an intimately human,
though special, form of activity. It is controlled by people, not
by (reconstructed) rules, with a particular (-in-use) ways of looking
at the world.
- Note that in recent years, in the
intellectual literature on postmodernism, and in the political
critique of elitism and Euro-centrism and such, this same argument
has led to a kind of methodological nihilism. Kaplan, on the
contrary, celebrates the humanity of research as a wonderful
cultural construction that allows us to do more than used to
be possible. This note is particularly important for anthropology
where postmodernism is most developed.
- The centrality of investigation (p. 15): The segmentation
of "truth" and the tools applied may be "human"
(cultural), the truth (i.e. the world) is not human.
- Trees fall in the forest even if there
are no human beings to hear the falling
- A scientist investigates that for which he has been made
responsible and he uses whatever he finds that he finds useful.
- As a human activity science is necessarily a social activity,
that is, it takes place within a community ( p.4).
- This is true of all scientific research. In the behavioral
sciences it true of ethnography and all "qualitative"
methods as well as of experimental research.
- What is different about ethnography is the stance one
takes in relation to this fact. One can attempt to "deal"
the sociological aspects through various tricks, from creating
"white rooms" where to conduct experiments, though
the independent scoring of test results, through the use of
third person singular syntactic forms in the final reporting
("the researcher, he or she ..."). From our point
of view, all these techniques are means to blind oneself and
one's audience to the condition of the research. It is a way
to deceive, lie, bury one's consciousness of one's situation
and of that of the human beings one is studying. Ethnography
wants to raise our consciousness of our situation.
- Community remains taken-for-granted. This ties Kaplan to the long tradition in "community study" that he belonged to and prefigures much that has come to surround Jean Lave's work on "communities of practice." In many ways Kaplan prefigures her work with his interests in apprentices, rites of passage, movement from peripheral to full membership, etc. But there is also a large body of work criticizing the concept of "community" in anthropology and sociology that would have to be brought to bear.
- As a human activity science is also a cultural activity that requires segmenting
experience in (hopefully) new ways--or rather ways that make us see more than we already knew. I
n that sense science is relative, about making differences, and arbitrary. this is not a construction
of reality but a construction of the means to see other aspects of reality: trees fall in forest even
when human beings are not there to listen to the sounds they make when they fall. The task of science
is to take human beings into the forest and give them the tools to hear the sound (e.g. the "sound"
of the Big Bang according to the New York Times (9/16/2003) "Astronomers say they have heard the sound
of a black hole singing. And what it is singing, and perhaps has been singing for more than two billion
years, they say, is B flat — a B flat 57 octaves lower than middle C.")
- Note that while Kaplan wrote this in 1964, and it was relatively new at
the time, his analysis has become somewhat commonsense following the more
popular book by T. Kuhn (The structure of scientific revolutions.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1970 [1962]) and much writing in the
"critical" mode. What distinguishes Kaplan from these critics
is that he does not take his affirmation of the fundamentally social
reality of science to imply a radical critique of science. It is only
if one clings to unreconstructed positivism that the affirmation that science
is a product of culture can lead to radical skepticism. That science is
cultural does not make it less scientific but specify better the processes
that participate in anyone getting the kind of knowledge about the world
that might be useful for particular purposes.
- A Durkheimian note on 'discipline' from both the original common sense
of the word and the usual sense in academia.
- Discipline as the reconstructive activity of a person in authority
faced by the deconstructive activity of another person for whom
the first has responsibility
- Discipline as the ensemble of authoritative practices that demonstrate
that some personal activity belongs to a particular conversation
(tradition, culture).
- For the darker version of all this see Foucault.
- Several things are implied by Kaplan's epistemology as it can be
applied to ethnography (and of course to any other methnodology):
- The research is not conducted by an abstract human being. It
is conducted by an "I," who has many "ME's" and
who is a YOU to various persons
- Thus YOU are not doing the research by yourself but in
concert with others:
- those who read your proposal
- those whom you study
- those who read your final report before the defense
- those who read your final report when you publish
- as you will hopefully discover, the requirements
of a dissertation committee are quite different from those
of a publisher...
- In each case the nature of the interaction determines what
gets done (a complex of what you do and what others do to you and with
you. The difficulty is in linking the various acts (proposals, field
study, report)
- The relationship between proposal and field research is
difficult for you.
- The relationship between the field and the report is difficult
for your audience. The difficulties ethnographers have had in making
the link is what has given ethnography its reputation for softness.
It is always hard for someone reading an ethnographic report to
know exactly what you experienced. (This is something on which we
will spend a lot of time in this course.)
- Practically, you must think in terms of a project where you will
encounter some human beings in their particularity. Given the "nature"
of human beings, this project can take many forms:
- Field observation (with more or less participation)
- Conversational analysis (based on audio or video recordings)
- Interviewing and other quasi-experimental procedures (dangerous
in the current context).
- Analysis of text or artifact.
- Each type of project is possible, and useful to the tradition--more
or less so depending on earlier research. Under most circumstances it is
essentially impossible to do several of these things within one project
for technical reasons which will become abundantly clear. Basically all
of them are time-consuming, take one in different directions, and cannot
easily be reconciled within a final report.
A note on proposal writing.