Welcome, all. Here's what we'll be up to this semester, as stated in the syllabus:
Q: What's ethnography?
A: Etymologically, it's "writing culture." According to the OED, it's "The scientific description of nations or races of men, with their customs, habits, and points of difference." In terms of composition, it's using field research and primary sources as well as flipping through pages inside of a library to, eventually, define a slice of the world with words (both yours and others') and sometimes images. At base, it's hands-on research that seeks to understand one branch off the unwieldy, broad term "culture," a word we'll try to define in the second week of class.
Q: So it's kind of like anthropology?
A: Yep, it's just more specific. Etymologically, anthropology is the science of humanity, and an anthropologist is, according to the OED, "one who pursues the science of anthropology, a student of mankind." Quite an open arms statement, isn't it? In this sense, we're already anthropologists.
Q: What's direct action?
A: For our purposes, it's becoming involved in a project of your own creation. As the Crimethinc workers say, "direct action, simply put, means cutting out the middleman - solving problems yourself rather than petitioning the authorities or relying on external institutions. Any action that sidesteps regulations and representation to accomplish goals directly is direct action." You won't necessarily need to solve any problems, but you'll need to put your internal resources to work for this course and choose a project you can immerse yourself in, with passion and gusto! For example, maybe you'd like to write the culture of "How I Made my First Short Documentary with Three Friends, $150 dollars, and One Month of Insomnia." Or maybe you're a little more abstract; your project may be something like "The Search To Define Punk DIY Ethics: Sewing with Dental Floss and Stolen Needles, Dumpster Diving, and Riding with the Rat Patrol."
Now put the two terms together, and you've got the gist of this semester. Ready, comrades?
Also, as a little intro to the course, here are some other ethnographer's ideas on what it is we'll be doing and who it is we are:
What is ethnography?
From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, “thick description.”
--Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, pg. 6
Rock n roll is more than music, or music in relation to culture, or even music in relation to politics; it is a way in which people are induced to know, to be, to do, and to act. Similarly, attempts to understand it require subjective immersion rather than objective distance, for rock n roll as a form of social life must be experienced to be understood. By this I mean lived through rather than merely observed and examined, read as a text in which the reader is a presence and the text is drawn into the mix of his or her life, rather than as a text in which the reader is absent and the life is abstracted into arguments that could just as easily be made without reference to the subject at hand. To do this, to accomplish this, requires a form of expression equal to the experiences of its subject, and such a form of expression is interpretive ethnography.
--H.L. Goodall, Jr., Living in the Rock n Roll Mystery, pg. 6
What does it mean to do ethnography?
Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript – foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.
--Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, pg. 10
…go to the source, immerse yourself in it, and try to figure out what it means. This is what I call doing basic research, and for me as an interpretive ethnographer, it requires getting out of the office and participating in the culture, acquiring new skills and associating with new people.
--H.L. Goodall, Jr., Living in the Rock n Roll Mystery, pg. 9
Who is the ethnographer?
Gerry Phillips once told me the story of the frog’s eyeball. It goes like this:
A frog is a simple creature, but probably belives himself to be very complex. Take, for example, his eating habits. Now as we all know, a frog eats insects. But you can take a very hungry frog, surround him with dead insects, and he will most definitely starve to death. Do you know why?
No, I don’t know why.
The secret is in the frog’s eyeball. You see, a frog can only see that which is in motion. Pick up one of those dead insects, flip it in front of him, and his tongue will reach out and capture the insect. He will eat it, and he will be happy. Bu tdead insects? They simply don’t exist in the world he sees; they are there to you and to me, but alas, not for the poor bullfrog.
The lesson, according to Professor Phillips, is that when we do research we act very much like the bullfrog. Our eye may be wide open, but we cannot account for what they don’t see. Our sophisticated methods cannot measure or deal with that which is beyond their power. We are human, after all, inherently flawed in matters of truth.
I like this story very much. For me it is a metaphor for doing interpretive ethnography and for writing the results. We cannot escape our limitations, and for humans, one of those limitations is personal history. We are, at any given moment, the sum total only of what we have become. Our past is always with us, our family dynamic always a source of what we see in relationships, what we believe to be true as much as any theory appeals to us only if, somehow, it fits into our experiences, helps us to explain what has happened, and why.
We can overcome, certainly, but not until we take stock of who and what we are. We can look for patterns, I think, only when the conceptual presence of patterns has personal meaning in our lives. Flesh and blood matters; genetics and environment matter; language and culture are the parameters within which we all work.
Behind the description, the analysis, the insight, always is the genetic material, and especially the genetics of the eyeball. And, as my father so carefully taught me, when you consider other people you must always be aware of those difficult questions:
Who are you?
Where did you come from?
What makes you tick?
--H. L. Goodall, Jr., Living in the Rock n Roll Mystery, pg. 169
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