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

Once one is, however temporarily, satisfied with one's corpus of texts forming the "data" for the project, the next step is to develop an approach to get the data to speak to one's overall interest while respecting them.

This is the beginning of the shaping of the final text, when matters of "interpretation" become preeminent.

  1. Alton Becker (1983) speaks of this process as a "philological" one (to recall the task of European scholars in the 19th century attempting to decipher and then translate texts in long dead languages) and demonstrates how this might be done when the data is a Burmese proverb and what a Burmese language teacher told him.

    What does he do:

    1. from literal message to that which makes it something to say/do at the time of the utterance. This what is implied in Becker's talk about the "past anchoring" of utterances and their constraining power on future utterances.
    2. this requires a determined focus on "how-in-context" leading to a search to what where the resources for, and constraints on, what was said and what the saying implie about possibilities.
    3. all language can thus be approached as indexical, that is pointing to, the conditions of the saying and that which it makes for the recipients and overhearers of the message.

    Note that Becker is making both a theoretical and methodological argument.

    An example from sec. 26-32 in minute 1 from my research (Ambiguous Harmony)

    I

    ? overmarking of speaker (root metaphor); individualism;
    had

    ? marking of tense
    the people

    ? anonymous mass (the counter-root metaphor)
    come

    ? deixis inscribing that marked movement is toward the speaker (see work by Clifford Hill)
    up

    ? not "over" thereby marking that the speaker is pointing to her living conditions in an apartment rather than a house.
    to check the sink

    ?

  2. Thus, the methodological issue is more encompassing than might be suggested by thinking of Becker as only talking about translation or cross-cultural understanding.

    1. The roots of Becker's stance in anthropology are partially in Malinowski's understanding of all meaning being produced by the "context of situation" of any symbol or utterance ([1935] 1965)

    2. This methodological stance is extremely useful in any research using natural language when the goal is to gain a new (different from common sense) understanding of what we know very well as intimate participants in the same kinds of settings where we have found our informants.
      1. the last sentence is an attempt to be more precise about the more common sense statement "as member of our own culture." The point is that, of course, our "knowledge," as participant, is not the same kind of knowledge that we hopefully gain by conducting this kind of analysis.

    3. We can then listen to our informants for what they
      1. affirm when they speak;
      2. what they say with difficulty;
      3. what they leave in the shadows (hide?); (see Kilkelly 1992)
      4. what they have not said;
      5. what they cannot say;

    Note that the last two "statements" are impossible to document though analysts, often following the participants in some settings, are often very willing to say what has/can not be said in some settings. Justifying these sometimes permissible "interpretations" must be done with great caution and be received with great skepticism.

    Above all, one must respect the text, not only as "meaning" but in its form-in-context: "meaning-for-ethnography" is in this total text ("total social fact" to paraphrase Mauss), not elsewhere. Meaning is not "attached" to behavior in the now cliched rendering of the human condition. Meaning is immanent to the joint behavior of the significant group (that is the group for whom the behavior makes a difference).