Ethnography as Fieldwork

Since fieldwork is exploratory in nature, ‘classical ethnography requires from six months to two years or more in the field’ (Fetterman, 1998: 8). I started my

30 My main contact in the village where I conducted my research was my school friend whose husband owns most o f the land in that village.

research in rural and urban Multan from the last week of September 2002 and conducted it until the end of April 2003. Due to the time constraints and the terms of my award I could not spend longer in the field. In this period however, I was able to collect the data I had decided on and planned in Lancaster before flying to Pakistan.

The qualitative ethnographic research methods developed by anthropologists are well suited to a social and discourse perspective in speech practices. For this reason, much of the research that has taken a social view of bilingual/trilingual language practices has applied ethnographic principles to their research design (e.g. Li Wei 1994). My familiarity with studies such as these shaped the design of this study both directly and indirectly. Before describing how and why I want to locate my research in this tradition, I would like to discuss what ethnography is.

Ethnography is defined as, ‘the study of people in naturally occurring settings or ‘fields’ by methods of data collection which capture their social meanings and ordinary activities, involving the researcher participating directly in the setting, if not also the activities, in order to collect data in a systematic manner but without meaning being imposed on them externally’ (Brewer, 2000: 6). Ethnography, ‘the art and science of describing a group or culture’ (Fetterman, 1998: 1) is, ‘a holistic perspective, contextualization, and emic, etic, and nonjudgmental views of reality (ibid: 18). Sociologists tend to call it ‘participant observation’ or ‘field research’ but it means the same thing in the way research is conducted (Brewer, 2000).

Ethnographic research has a distinguished history in academic work (Denzin & Lincoln, 1998). Traditionally, particularly in the field of anthropology, ethnography is associated with the fieldworkers exploring exotic foreign places to study the customs and habits of ‘other’ societies. In recent times, however, there has been a tendency to

conduct ethnographic study in one’s own environment (Jackson, 1987). Now social researchers are increasingly utilizing these methods in studying their own complex localities, settings, and identities (Warren & Hackney, 2000). It is believed that this renewed interest in ethnographic methods in social research has been stimulated by both ‘contextual considerations’ and ‘epistemological reflections’ (Hughes, Morris & Seymour, 2000: 1). The increasing complexity of social contexts, especially the dissolution of ‘old’ social inequalities into the new diversity of milieus, subcultures, lifestyles and ways of living requires a new sensitivity within empirical study (Flick, 1988). The use of ethnography is upheld over other methods of social research (Brewer, 2000; Fetterman, 1998; Hamersley & Atkinson 1983; 1995) because it does not neglect ‘the fact that we are a part of the social world we study.. .By including our own role within the research focus and systematically exploiting our participation in the world under study as researchers’ (Hamersley & Atkinson 1983: 25) we can reconstruct the social meaning which occurs in these social contexts. Yates (1987: 62) also seconds this view, ‘What an ethnographer attempts is the reconstruction of an observed reality. This requires selection, translation and interpretation’.

I situate my research within the ‘new ethnography’ (Hughes, Morris & Seymour, 2000: 3) because in this tradition, ethnography centres on a very particular epistemological standpoint which concerns the subjectivity of knowledge. Rejecting the idea of value-free32 science, this approach acknowledges the researcher’s subjectivity as an explicit part of knowledge production. The researcher’s positionality, thoughts and feelings are accounted for in the interpretation process. Instead of taking the researcher as an objective/neutral observer or participant,

ethnography takes him/her as equally positioned in, and interconnected with the research context as the researched (Cook & Crang, 1995). This ‘new ethnography’ is influenced by post-modern,33 post-colonial34 and feminist discourses35 in the social sciences which reject objectivity, notions of universal truths and meta-theories (Clifford & Marcus, 1986).

While there is some disagreement over the main purpose of ethnography (Hammersley & Atkinson 1983; 1995), my study followed a number of the key tenets of an ethnographic approach to social enquiry, which I describe below.

Firstly, ethnographic methodology is flexible in its approach to data collection and data analysis. Unlike most quantitative methods, which adhere to pre-defmed research strategies, ethnography permits the researcher to re-evaluate and make decisions regarding the appropriacy of specific research methods on an ongoing basis. I had to take certain decisions in the field about my research strategies and data to be collected which were not what I had initially planned, so this approach enabled me to be flexible in my research strategies. I will give two examples here to illustrate my point. I had initially planned to ask the families to record their home conversations in my absence to ensure natural conversation and male participation. I could not do so with all the families because some insisted that I be present during the recordings

33 The term postmodernism first used by Lyotard in 1979, ‘denies the existence o f all universal truth statements, which are replaced by variety, contingency and ambivalence, and plurality in culture, tradition, ideology and knowledge’ (Brewer, 2000 :4).

34 It is argued that the two ways in which post-colonialism can be characterized are: ‘one which constructs it in terms o f those societies whose subjectivity has been constituted in part by the subordinating power o f European Colonialism, and another which conceives it as a set o f discursive practices involving resistance to colonialism and colonist ideologies and legacies’ (Childs and Williams, 1997: 232). Suleri (1992: 21) believes that, ‘the idiom o f post colonialism is necessarily reactive and...m ust engage in the multiplicity o f histories that are implicated in its emergence’. 35 Talbot (1998: 15) states that, ‘Feminist interest in language and gender resides in the complex part language plays, alongside other social practices and institutions, in reflecting, creating and sustaining gender divisions in society’.

which eliminated the chances of male participation (cf. 3.11.1). I, therefore, had to give up the idea of including gender as a variable (cf. 1.3) as I realized that I would not get enough male participation in the recorded data of home conversations. For the interviews I had planned to audio record all the interviews of the school heads and teachers because some of my questions demanded lengthy answers and it was not possible for me to transcribe every single word. What I encountered in the field was that the teachers and heads of the government schools were not comfortable with the idea of my recording their interviews. As a result, I took notes during these interviews in order to elicit ‘honest’ responses from them which they might not have given had I insisted on audio recordings.

The second key tenet of an ethnographic approach to social enquiry is that it typically approaches the investigation of particular social phenomena such as bilingualism or code switching through the participation of the researcher in the daily life of a designated group of people over an extended period of time. In this way, ethnography provides a means of researching language choices in a holistic sense and as a part of people’s everyday lives. An important part of this holistic and situated approach is that the perspectives and understandings of the people being researched are taken into account and incorporated within the analysis of the given phenomena. My participation in the lives of the Siraikis living in Multan during my research helped me in understanding the reasons behind the language choices the Siraikis make in their speech in home domain. I could see their acceptance or rejection of certain languages in a different perspective, which I am sure would have remained obscure had I not spent an extended time with them. In my analysis also, I have tried to look at each interpretation and explanation of the data from a holistic point of view by

locating it in its own cultural ethos. These interpretations make sense if placed within the perspective of the socio-cultural context of Multan.

Thirdly, documenting multi-perspectives of reality in a given study is crucial to an understanding of why people think and act in the different ways they do (Fetterman, 1998). Thermic perspective is the insider’s or native’s perspective while the etic perspective is that of the external, social scientific perspective. I have tried to ground my work in an emic understanding of the situation and Siraikis as a group by collecting data from the emic perspective and then have tried to make sense of the situation both from emic and etic perspectives.

Finally, ethnographic research typically combines the use of multiple research strategies, commonly referred to as ‘triangulation’ (Denzin, 1970), ‘mixed strategies’ (Douglas, 1976) or ‘multiple strategies’ (Burgess, 1984). As discussed already (cf. 3.3) I have used this as a research strategy in my study.

The following section deals with my decision to adopt the technique of participant observation for data collection and what it entailed.