---

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

---

Transition notes

Interviewing can be helpful for instrumental reasons Interviewing as a means of entry among those groups who construct the social scientist as "one who ask questions." one of the tools with which one will map the social fields constructed by the participants (not quite what Briggs call "metacommunicative competence"). But interviewing, by itself is never enough to the extent that it is taken purely as a different ways of asking questions that are answerable in the very terms in which they are asked (as they are constructed in questionnaires);

The problem with asking:

1. how is the situation of the asking constituted given that this situation is constrained (and enabled) by everything that we have learned about human beings together? In particular, what must be the consequence of our awareness that "the interview" is a cultural (arti-)fact that has been made up even before two persons sit together around a tape-recorder.
   1. This is more than a question of cultural congruence between members of the interview situation. Even (particularly) "in our own culture," and to the extent that "the interview" is a well ritualized scene, it is more than probable that it is never a neutral setting. The "common sense" of what may happen in an interview must limit what is askable and what is answerable within the setting.
   2. Interviewing with people who have no experience with interviewing may reveal the underlying assumptions in the method (another instance of the value of ethnographic work to challenge the "validity" of our concepts).
      1. It is not certain however that it means that we will learn less in such settings. We might even learn more if we understand the question as a Garfinkelian mini-experiment: a challenge to the common understandings of both observer and participant that will reveal properties of their worlds. There are two possibilities:
         1. The informant refuses to cooperate and thus obliges us to recast our work;
         2. The informant works with us and thus should oblige us to wonder as to how he is doing this. (The risk, of course, is that we will not notice this work of the informant).
   3. One of the most powerful constraint on any situation of speaking is what is technically known as "indexicality": most of what will transpired during the interview will point to some feature of the situation of the interview. Whether we can get through these indexes to statements about what is happening outside the interview must remain an open question. Think for example of the differences in the talk if the setting is framed by a statement such as:
      1. "this is play"
      2. "this is a fight"
      3. "this is a funeral"
      4. "this is what I mean"
2. One solution: Briggs on getting to know how to ask in the forms of the informants will recognize or, more technically, how to ask through the forms that are the common sense of the informants.
   1. In Chapter 3 he mentions some of the central figures who have made all these questions about asking inescapable
      1. Jakobson (1960)
      2. Hymes (1974)
      3. Garfinkel
   2. In Chapter 4 he gives examples of possibilities in the constraining of who may speak about what to whom, constraints that from into configurations that, at any particular time, for any particular person, may seriously hinder what can be heard by the observer.
   3. In chapter 5, he paints a possibly overly optimistic picture of what is involved in "learning how to ask." I would agree with the title of the chapter: the first thing to do is listen and
      1. design your asking (p. 97)
      2. be reflexive (p. 100): what is being revealed in the form of the language you have elicited as you look back at it.
      3. analyze your interviews (p. 102)
3. The critique:
   1. the essence of Hill's criticism is that Briggs
      1. paradoxically naive in his goals. In the book Briggs rarely mentions what his research questions might be. When he does, it is indirectly and is stated with surprising simplicity: "My approach is to study transcripts ... as a whole to ascertain exactly what was said (the linguistic forms), what each question and reply meant to the interviewer and interviewee, and what the research can glean from these date. This technique reveals the points at which interviewer and interviewee had misunderstood each other." (Briggs 1986:4) Whether it is ever possible to determine this is the essence of the problem, and not one that can addresses methodologically.
      2. encumbered by a moralizing tone that would, taken strictly, take us fully away from research for knowledge.
4. our task is precisely to highlight that which is not easily said (otherwise our work would not be necessary). Our own problem is to figure out what to ask.