Ethnography as a Methodology

Eliasoph eloquently captures the relevance of ethnography to this study, stating how:

In many spheres of life, people can only learn by doing things together, so the sociologists who want to understand meaning making in everyday life have to observe and experience these embodied practices as they unfold in real time and space, and materialise in real bodies (Eliasoph, 2005, p. 160).

Originally associated with anthropologic fieldwork, ethnography has evolved into one of the most established qualitative research methodologies in the social sciences being used by a variety of researchers, with a variety of theoretical approaches (Markula & Silk, 2011).

Because of this varied history, however, Hammersley and Atkinson (2007, p. 2) argue that ethnography lacks a “standard, well defined meaning”. Despite this lack of clarity, ethnography, as an approach or ‘style’ of research, is often used in the study of people and culture (Brewer, 2000) and loosely refers to the practical steps researchers take to collect data from ‘natural’, ‘real world’ settings, from the position of an involved actor (Fetterman, 2010). These steps include gaining access to, and establishing a role and relationships within a research setting to procure information by a variety of means (Hammersley &

Atkinson, 2007) including participant observation, document analysis, and different forms of interviewing. Researchers then interpret their findings depending on their paradigmatic

85 and theoretical approach (Markula & Silk, 2011) to shed light on to the lives or lifeworlds of a particular group of people (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). As Krane and Baird state:

Ethnography is aimed toward understanding the culture of a particular group from the perspective of the group members. The group culture, then, will lend insight into the behaviours, values, emotions, and mental states of group members. Ethnographers employ multiple methods to gain a comprehensive understanding of the social environment and perceptions of the members of the social group (Krane & Baird, 2005, p. 87).

An ethnography, as a result, is often open-ended, unstructured, and quite informal in its nature, but unlike more formalised research approaches an ethnography enables the researcher, where appropriate, and with time, to become immersed behind the scenes observing first-hand, in great depth, a wide variety of interactions, behaviours, and responses to events in, as Angrosino (2007) points out, the search for patterns in lived human experience. In doing so, researchers, as Wolcott (1994, p. 6) notes, position themselves with a view to establishing:

…what a stranger would have to know in order to understand what is going on here or, more challenging still, what a stranger would have to know in order to be able to participate in a meaningful way (Wolcott, 1994, p. 6).

An ethnographic methodology is therefore seemingly straightforward; become a member of a culture and live alongside them doing what they do in order to achieve an in-depth understanding of their cultural practices and realities (Atkinson, 2016). This is, however, no easy task, and as Sands (2002, p. 20) notes, can involve, “surviving a year or two of fieldwork, complete with the culture shock, loneliness and perils of living away from the familiar.” Sands (2002) further warns us that as a result of this ethnography is not for everyone.

Nevertheless, ethnography has been employed extensively in research on sport, exercise and physical cultures over the last thirty years, including, for example, in surfing (Sands, 2002), boxing (Wacquant, 2004), skateboarding (Beal, 1995), snowboarding (Thorpe, 2011), windsurfing (Wheaton, 2000) and body-building (Monaghan, 2001). Each of these studies has helped shed light upon topics including: who participates in different sports and why; how sport is a site for the (re)production of identities (gender, sex, race, class); how sport involvement clashes with one’s cultural worldview; how the construction of one’s

86 social world and cultural networks are reinforced through participation (Atkinson & Young, 2008); and how the social-structural, behavioural or even cognitive/emotional components of life shape individual behaviours (Atkinson, 2016).

As Atkinson (2016) notes the majority of the aforementioned sport, exercise and physical cultural studies employ a realist approach. There are, however, other modes of ethnography at the disposal of the contemporary sport and exercise researcher. One such mode appropriate to this study is sensory ethnography. Described by Pink (2009a, p. 1) as

“a way of thinking about and doing ethnography that takes as its starting point the multisensoriality of experience, perception, knowing and practice”, sensory ethnography emphasises the need to account for how the multisensoriality of experience is integral to the “lives of people who participate in our research and to how we are researchers practice our craft” (Pink, 2009a, p. 1, empahsis in original). A position that is apposite with the phenomenologically sensitive approach adopted within this study. It should, however, be cautioned that although sensory ethnography is described by some authors as a new form of ethnography (Atkinson, 2016; Pink, 2009a), this does not mean that more traditional ethnography and ethnographers were not concerned with the senses. For example, the work by Stoller (1989), Feld (1982) and Classen, Howes, and Synnott (1994) are very much sensorially aware.

The need to develop reflexive skills to engage sensually via direct participation in the environment and the practice of others thus becomes paramount to the production of multisensorial and emplaced⁷ ways of knowing. For Pink:

…learning to sense and make meanings as others do thus involves us not simply observing what they do, but learning how to use all our senses and to participate in their worlds, on the terms of their embodied understandings (Pink, 2009a, p. 72).

One of the ways Pink outlines to do this is through ‘sensory apprenticeship’, where researchers actively engage in the activities and environments we wish to learn about.

Although I was not fully engaged with the swimmers in this project in terms of actively

7 Emplaced defined by Howes (2005, p. 7), as “the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment”

87 completing the various training sessions with them, nevertheless, I was still able to reflect on my own prior experiences of being a competitive swimmer to aid me in understanding the embodied, skilled, sensory process in which the swimmers engaged, therefore placing me in a strong position to comprehend their ways of knowing. I should, however, add a word of caution at this stage, that in order to do this, an active engagement with bracketing as demonstrated in the section 3.4 was maintained throughout the research project so as not to place my own presuppositions and assumptions onto the swimmers’ experiences.

Ethnographic field work is also inherently embodied (Okely, 2007; Wacquant, 2005). As Sparkes (2009a) and Sparkes and Smith (2012) emphasise, this embodied immersion in a culture develops embodied ways of knowing through an engagement with all of the senses as fieldwork is conducted. It is clear from what has been presented thus far in this section that ethnography provides the qualitative researcher with one way of effectively engaging with the body, but further questions remain, for example, which data collection techniques are best suited to generate the necessary in-depth descriptions, and how much time should be spent in the field. It is to the former of these questions that I now turn.