What is ethnography?

There are two over-arching problems with ethnography: there is no clear consensus about what it is (Anthropology is what anthropologists do [Geertz 1977]) and many of the theoretical problems concerning interpretative practice, meaning,

representation, bias, authorship, embedded power relationships and influence are in my view unresolvable.

Spitulnik describes ethnography as three things:

1. A research method, however problematic, of participant observation or participant intervention, which is part of a long term immersion in the daily practices of a single community.

2. A writing method of detailed documentary description

3. A topical or analytical focus on the ‘taken for granted’ (or lived reality) and the ‘everyday’ (or ongoing practices) of a particular people.

- Spitulnik 1994²⁴

I have adopted all three of Spitulnik’s definitions, but all require further clarification.

The numerous debates over ethnography itself (Clifford 1988) are often presented as reinterpretations of old issues (Spitulnik 2000: 337). The act of struggling for a definition of ethnography is in itself a hugely powerful act.

‘Ethnography is not simply a collection of the exotic “other”; it is reflective of our

98 own lives and cultural practices even when discussing another culture’ (Tomaselli 2008: 352). Being an ethnographer is already an embodiment of power, the

manifestation of the ability to detach, observe, retract, think, analyse, organise and ontologically define, control and manipulate from a social, geographic, political, academic and intellectual position. (Prus 1999: 5)²⁵

Then there is the fusing of disciplines, the reckless disregard for subject areas:

Many anthropologists have an aversion to the policing of disciplinary borders. They draw broadly from comparative literature, cultural studies, critical race theory, gender studies, performance studies, philosophy, post-colonial studies, queer theory and social history. Efforts to determine what is or is not media ‘anthropology’ may be viewed as insular and

self-defeating.

- Peterson 2003: 339²⁶

With all this at the forefront, the added complexity of physical removal from the site of the fieldwork, my emotional detachment from conversations, the more theoretical I am, the greater the distance between ‘what happened’ and my theorising of it, the greater the opportunity becomes for fantasy, invention and contrivance. As John Berger eloquently puts it:

What separates us from the characters about whom we write is not

knowledge, either objective or subjective, but their experience of time in the story we are telling. This separation allows us, the storytellers, the power of knowing the whole. Yet, equally, this separation renders us powerless: we cannot control our characters, after the narration has begun …..The time, and therefore the story, belongs to them. Yet the meaning of the story, what makes it worthy of being told, is what we can see and what inspires us because we are beyond its time. Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the

99 timeless. If we storytellers are Death's Secretaries, we are so because, in

our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses - Berger 1984, 30–31

There are contradictions, inconsistencies and diversions in the findings. When the informants’ responses and information does not fit with a line of reasoning or a particular theoretical stance I have included it anyway: it is in the paradoxes and tensions of ideas that the real substance lies. Similarly even acknowledging the diversity of informants, the complexity of lives they live, the myriad processes and dynamics they engender, create, and are living within, the very act of writing down their conversations, removing them from the immediacy and the vitality of the actual moment adds a layer of deception, if not sterility. Donham (1999) expresses this well (and very amusingly)—returning to the Nuer studied by Evans Pritchard he is at a complete loss as to where this ‘harmonious’ society that Evans Pritchard rhapsodises about and packages neatly into an essay. If anything, he sees extensive domestic abuse. Like Parker (1999) he concludes that ethnography is more a

reflection of bringing to the fore the concerns of the writer and her society, not the one she is writing about during fieldwork.

I have used the term, ‘ethnographic interviews’, but not in the sense given to the term by US anthropologist James Spradley, who coined the expression. He uses the term to describe a culture. In contrast, Mol suggests that the term

ethnographic interviews should mean that the interviewees themselves become ethnographers (Spradley 2002: 15). In other words they observe and describe what is happening and accord agency in the construction of the ethnography.

Furthermore, Mol replaces the concept of tacit knowledge with embedded knowledge in her analysis…

…to denote knowledge accumulated in various parts of an action net, created by the actions of the producers, their suppliers, and their clients, which is activated by each of them for the purpose at hand without the need for anybody to master the whole of it.

- Czarniawska (2012: 129)

100 2.2.4 Being the Author/Ethics

Hartstock (1983) developed an episteme that was significantly expanded upon by Patricia Hill Collins (1990)²⁷ and Sandra Harding (1991). These early proponents acknowledge the subjectivity of the author and the power processes implicit in the academic project. Furthermore, they condone being actively self-reflexive about the ongoing impact of being the author and manipulating the material for particular epistemological ends. This process is spectacularly acute for me, since I am used to the process of making broadcast documentaries, turning this sort of raw material into media, and not fashioning and reworking it for academic ends.

Thus the subjectivities of who I am—female, a child of political exiles, educated in Europe and of mixed race parentage, a twenty-seven year career as a national journalist working in Africa—are important, because they are the

consequence of a dialogic process: my presence significantly alters the empirical findings I gathered: another person, at another time, with the same informants, would not get these findings. At least five times in the fieldwork period I worked for international media: I was known as both a researcher and a journalist. This would have increased my social capital but also inspired fear and caution amongst

informants. Therefore I use the first person, the grounding ‘I’, aware that I am an intersectional, knowing, self-reflexive being, just as my informants are. As Moore (2013) notes, much of my identity and agency is dependent on my role of

ethnographer being seen to be able to manage secrecy and trust.

Like Hill Collins, I use extensive detailed reproduction of my informants’

conversations, their dialogues. Hill Collins developed these ideas further by concentrating on the conflicts between herself and the informants, focussing on their resentment of her class and adademia in general. Her informants question, fairly aggressively at times, her right to use them for furthering her career, when they are stuck at the bottom of the socio-economic pile. So in some respects her work comes a full circle: once again the anthropologists’ notebooks take centre stage. I do not do this—because there were no vocalised conflicts, although the one ‘disagreement’ with Oi about the Koran is replicated in detail.

There is no single unified identity of the informants, and even by reproducing the conversations—or fragments of them—the implied essentialized ‘authorship’ of

101 this process is misleading…. Hill Collins advocates taking down the informants transcripts of the events too, and getting their versions of what is happening simultaneously. I have not done this because of time constraints. Perhaps what is striking about Hill Collins’s work is that by pushing for as much transparency in the process as possible, shecreates the conditions for obvious trust, and in what is clearly a dynamic relationship the possibility for blips, contradictions and change is embodied in the work. In this I have tried to copy both authors’ methods: perhaps the richest material emerges when I begin—late in the fieldwork—to challenge the informants’ received and conventional understandings of the Koran, and to be fairly tenacious in my disagreements.