This is the twelfth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class ITSF5001: Ethnography and Participant Observation.
Transition notes
All the work of ethnography, since we talked about proposals, has been work under the direct control of the ethnographer and much of it was done by oneself (writing field notes, indexing, transcribing, etc.)
  1. 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.
    1. 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.
    2. Today, we will focus on the shape that one's argumentation and display of what is sometimes called the "findings."
  2. 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:
    1. more than one already has in these texts: simply publishing one's notes, even if edited is not quite enough.
    2. different, though related, from what has already been published about the phenomenon;
    3. well constructed to make the point one is trying to make through the whole research process.
  3. 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.
  4. 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":

    "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).

    1. "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.
    2. 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.
  5. Drawing the "map" of your "territory":
    1. 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.
      1. 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
      2. One can end with a statement about the form that all events within a set appear to take.
      3. One can attempt a "model" of the relationship between significant features that might have predictive value at some level.
    2. For example, moving from simple display to forms and to models:
      1. A map: Kilkelly (1992) on who speak about what in a group of Irish women discussing health issues.
      2. 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.
        1. analyses presenting themselves as searching for "themes" among a set of interviews are essentially formal analyses of this kind.
      3. McDermott: a modern reconstitution of a related form of analysis (reconstructed on the basis of a study of interaction in an American primary classroom).
        1. 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.
        2. 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.
        3. 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).
      4. 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
      .
  6. 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.