- We are now moving to the public phase of ethnography when the researcher
prepares that which he will "present" to the audience for the
audience to acknowledge as useful or not.
- I am thinking of this work in the vocabulary recently
made theoretically interesting: the task is one of re-presenting that
is of making present something of the original field experience that
may be useful for some purposes. In the next weeks we will address the
actual construction of the text (report, dissertation, book) that is
the full public document.
- Today, we will focus on the shape that one's argumentation
and display of what is sometimes called the "findings."
- In other words, given an extended corpus of texts produced through the
field part of ethnography, the task becomes one of producing an account
that is:
- more than one already has in these texts: simply publishing
one's notes, even if edited is not quite enough.
- different, though related, from what has already been
published about the phenomenon;
- well constructed to make the point one is trying to make
through the whole research process.
"What is it in the territory that gets
onto the map?" We know the territory does not get onto the map. That
is the central point about which we here are all agreed. Now, if the territory
were uniform, nothing would get onto the map except its boundaries, which
are the points at which it ceases to be uniform against some larger matrix.
What gets onto the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in
altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure,
difference in surface, or whatever. Differences are the things that get
onto a map.
A difference is a very peculiar and obscure concept. It is certainly not
a thing or an event. This piece of paper is different than the wood of
this lectern. There are many differences between them - of colour, texture,
shape, etc... Of this infinitude, we select a very limited number which
become information. In fact, what we mean by information - the elementary
unit of information - is a difference which makes a difference
(Steps to an ecology of
mind . New York: Balantine Books: 457-459).
- The challenge, to return to our original problematics, is to now do what
Malinowsky challenge
us to do and make present again ("represent") for our readers
"the native's point of view" while fully understand the inescapable
limitations of any kind of representation, and particularly of the peculiar
form of representationt that is ethnography.
- The relationship between the original experience in the field and what
the current task of representation is well captured by Bateson famous development
of the quip that "the map is not the territory":
- "A difference that makes a difference" is the fundamental
concept in structural phonetics and produced a representation of the
way all human beings speak in terms of the limited number of phonemes
that any speech community uses.
- In ethnography, the tension is between the phenomenology of life in
a community and the un-covering for our readers ("discovery")
of some aspect of this life that makes a difference and of the ways
in which it does make a difference.
- Drawing the "map" of your "territory":
- This can be done in various ways depending on fundamentally epistemological
and theoretical decisions about how to teach something about humanity
that was not obvious in earlier representations.
- Some can end with a "theory" in Glaser and Strauss
"grounded theory" sense and propose a now more plausible
correlation between and among a set of well formulated categories,
along with a proposed coding scheme--all of which should allow for
the testing of the hypothesis
- One can end with a statement about the form that all events within
a set appear to take.
- One can attempt a "model" of the relationship between
significant features that might have predictive value at some level.
- For example, moving from simple display to forms and to models:
- A map: Kilkelly (1992)
on who speak about what in a group of Irish women discussing health
issues.
- Another map: a biology laboratory as represented by Latour and Woolgar (1979)
- forms in folktales as analyzed by Propp.
Note the outline of Propp's decision as to what is to count as "significant"
for his purposes of revealing the commonalities among the tales.
- analyses presenting themselves as searching for "themes"
among a set of interviews are essentially formal analyses of
this kind.
- Modeling classrooms and lessons
- Mehan and the lesson (1979)
- McDermott and the reading classroom - behavior:
a reconstitution of a related form of analysis (reconstructed
on the basis of a study of interaction in an American primary classroom).
- co-members of a scene tell each other, and thereby an observer,
what it is that they are currently doing together both in their
verbal and gestural behavior.
- on the basis of what they are telling each other, one constructs
a model, or map, of the event that emphasizes the significant
units that constitute the scene as a reality to which the participants
are orienting themselves.
- This allows for a kind of code (the four positionings participants
can assume) and gives you the instructions on how to code the
corpus McDermott provides (and the means on which to disagree).
- A version of McDermott's analysis that would move to the status
of "model" (in Lévi-Strauss's
sense, as well as in the sense this is used in recent systems
theory) would specify more carefully the conditions under which
the participants shift from one positioning to the next
- McDermott and the reading classroom - beyond the lesson
- issues of race, culture, and the local practices of meritocracy
- There has been much legitimate critique of analyses that focus on the
units of significance within a discourse and do not move on to address how
these units are used, how they came to become significant in history, how
they can be used, how people may play with them, etc.
It is however the case that one cannot legitimately move on to these
analyses until one has a good working knowledge of the units that are
actually significant within the discourse.