Abstract
This article reviews innovations in ethnographic methods that have developed over the past 25 years, specifically the emergence of multisited and short-term fieldwork, digital ethnography, various kinds of participatory and collaborative ethnography, and the use of interviews. Ethnographic methods, once primarily employed by anthropologists, have now been embraced by many other social science practitioners. The article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of how these methods are being implemented and applied; the ethical challenges their use raises; and the kinds of novel modes of interpretation, analysis, and representations of research findings they are producing.
Keywords
This article examines innovations in ethnographic methods that have been employed by social scientists since the 1990s and their strengths and weaknesses. At the outset, we offer a general definition of these methods, most of which, until recently, were primarily used by anthropologists in their fieldwork. Signe Howell (2018) explains that ethnographic fieldwork is carried out according to the method of long-term participant-observation. . . . The method is inductive and open-ended. As such, the method directs the anthropologist to study that which is of significance to the community studied rather than test a number of hypotheses formulated in advance of the fieldwork. Anthropology is a comparative discipline, seeking to unravel the complexity and variety of human understanding and human social and cultural life.
Over the past two decades, scholars, policy analysts, and researchers in business (e.g., market and user experience researchers) increasingly have incorporated ethnographic methods into their tool kit.
The principal innovations in ethnographic methods we discuss in this article are as follows: (a) the engagement in multisited field work as a means to address questions of scale, power relationships, and comparison; (b) the growing number of cases of short-term rather than long-term fieldwork stints; (c) the burgeoning and important use of digital ethnographic methods; (d) the range of experiments underway in the form of activist, engaged, participatory, and collaborative ethnographic methods; and (e) the reliance on interviews rather than participant observation as being equivalent to ethnographic methods and the serious questions this raises with respect to the validity of findings. We also touch on novel ways in which these ethnographic methods are interpreted and presented since ethnography refers both to the array of ethnographic methods that are employed in fieldwork and the product of that fieldwork—that is, the representations that emerge from the interpretation and analysis of the data gathered through fieldwork. Usually, these have taken the form of written accounts but, recently, other innovative modes of representation have emerged that we will briefly discuss. In the course of the article, we will suggest sources that we think illustrate well the methods we are discussing.
Ethnographers have usually coupled participant observation—the method they are most famous for having developed—with additional ones such as interviews (formal, semistructured, and informal), sifting through written archives, gathering life stories and oral narratives that could be of many genres, and collecting audiovisual records and written documentation. These methods together have been well-suited to an exploration of the very intimate, mundane, and quotidian, as well as of processes and structures and their impacts that take place at varying scales and locations (see, e.g., Bernard, 2011; Schensul & LeCompte, 2013; Seligmann, 2005).
The intent of participant observation has generally been that as researchers became more familiar with their interlocutors—their values, relationships with each other, and daily activities—they would behave less like objects of study and more like themselves, and the longue durée of fieldwork would reveal patterns rather than chaos. The intersubjectivity that emerges on the basis of day-to-day interactions should allow for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of shared (or contested) values and practices that structure people’s lives. Even when anthropologists have focused on a particular aspect of culture, they have attempted to look at and analyze it broadly or holistically, taking account of myriad dimensions of social life that impinge on and shape that particular aspect.
Long-term fieldwork has allowed for anthropologists to track the dynamics specified above. Many have spent one or more years doing their research in the field and have often returned to their field sites regularly over their lifetime. Anthropologists have also been aware that in the course of doing fieldwork and relying on participant observation, they are simultaneously interpreting raw data and selecting among them as they write up their fieldnotes and craft their ethnographies (see Sanjek, 2004).
Multisited Field Research
Two major shifts in ethnographic methods have involved where researchers conduct their investigations and the length of time they take for their research. Postmodernists (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986) critiqued how anthropologists conceptualized and represented their field sites. They argued that anthropologists artificially delimited their field sites as contained loci when, in fact, what transpired in a small village in the Andes, for example, could be deeply shaped by structures, information, policies, and values from afar that traveled via tourism, neocolonialism, and media currents, to name a few conduits that have an impact on research findings and interactions. Furthermore, a small village in the Andes could have notable effects on what happened in the United States and Europe. The embrace of quinoa, a minor staple among Quechua highland dwellers, as a super food is but one example of how Andean agricultural and culinary practices have dramatically influenced eating habits of people in the United States and Europe. Not recognizing the porosity of borders; constructing borders that, in reality, did not exist; and ignoring things, people, and information that crossed borders all resulted in distorted research findings. Consequently, researchers, including anthropologists, have taken seriously the call for multisited field research as well as the idea that ethnographic research should not just take place “elsewhere” but also “at home” (Fabian, 1983, p. 37; Ingold, 2014, p. 393).
Home is often where centers of political power emanate from. Fieldwork can and should take place anywhere, whether in one’s home environment or not. However, it is worth noting that doing fieldwork in one’s home environment—even if that “site” stretches into multiple places far from home—requires that fieldworkers have the skill to defamiliarize what they have taken for granted, to do fieldwork with those who are part of powerful organizations, institutions, and bureaucracies—often located where they live—and much more rarely mentioned, to place in comparative perspective how their fieldwork findings might be shaped by or have repercussions for one or more others that are not at “home.” (See, for example, the successful use of multisited ethnographic methods in McGranahan and Collins (2018), on the ramifications of the reach of U.S. empire at multiple scales—historic, symbolic, economic, political, and cultural—across a range of cases).
One goal of employing ethnographic methods is to arrive at a better understanding of knowledge systems and to challenge one’s own knowledge systems and practices, whether they take the form of research on the exchange networks of the world of U.S. academic anthropology (Kawa, Michelangeli, Clark, Ginsberg, & McCarty, 2018), ritual battles in the Andean highlands (Arkush, 2012), the reasons for the angry expression of murderous grief (Rosaldo, 1989), or the adulation of great men as oil barons or chiefs (Marcus, 1983). Doing good multisited fieldwork is, nevertheless, not easy, especially if researchers seek to go beyond doing interviews to doing fine-grained participant observation. Researchers must follow unpredictable “chains” and “networks” and use their skills to persuade gatekeepers to provide them access. It is hard enough to figure out the topography of power in one locale, let alone multiple sites. This kind of research demands that researchers fully take advantage of contacts they have in order to persuade gatekeepers to permit them access. (See the article in this collection by Crump.)
Returning to the case of quinoa again, an example of multisited field research would be following the value chains that a particular commodity, such as quinoa, travels, not only in light of its economic value but also its cultural and political value. Using ethnographic methods to fully grasp the movement and transformation of quinoa from producer to exporter, from humble cheese soup to highly prized quinoa and kale salads or cookies, and from marginal staple to engine of agrarian development, requires time as well as knowledge of many locales and organizations. Researchers rarely have the luxury of time that such multisited research entails and very few anthropologists work in teams, which we think would be an interesting alternative that has not much been explored.
Short-Term Research and Shifting Field Sites
A growing number of anthropologists are spending shorter periods of time in the field or shifting field sites over the course of their lives. The latter is not new but the contributors to Gottlieb (2012) offer varied and in-depth accounts of the rewards and pitfalls of shifting field sites, including the insights gained from comparison (see also Seligmann, 2012). As for undertaking shorter periods of fieldwork, it is worth noting that length of time depends so much on the groundwork that has already been established. We do not think it is possible to do short stints of research that are meaningful unless one has already undertaken longer periods of work. Given that more and more anthropologists are doing what they call “multisited” fieldwork (aforementioned), they may, indeed, need to shorten the length of time they spend in the multiple sites that constitute their field site. This, of course, goes hand in hand, with the challenges of doing fieldwork with mobile populations.
On the other hand, because of the ease of travel and sophisticated communications technology, even in many remote areas, those relying on ethnographic methods much more often make two, three, even four trips to their field sites over a year or two. This is an interesting development that produces insights into the rhythms of change and stability and constitutes another kind of familiarization that takes place through participant observation. Instead of a great welcome and the finality of farewell, anthropologists come and go and their movements actually may more resemble those of the populations with whom they work, who come and go and travel between city and countryside and even internationally on a fairly regular basis.
We end this section by offering a few examples of the works of ethnographers who have successfully used the innovative ethnographic methods described above along with more traditional methods, especially participant observation, to give us a much better understanding of the way complex systems and organizations operate at different scales and their impacts, and to explain patterns of behavior or practices that might, at first glance, appear not to make much sense.
Sean Mitchell (2018) pursued a complex trail of ideas, actions, and ideologies, over time, and was able to trace how the imaginary of U.S. empire created the rumor and the reality of U.S. control and sabotage of Brazil’s spaceport and U.S. support of quilombo 1 rights (and indigenous rights, in general) to land in the area as deliberate and hostile acts, threatening Brazil’s sovereignty. Mitchell shows why this position was embraced by any number of usually polarized actors. Andrew Orta (2018), tackling a very different subject, delved into the culture of training of international business students and its interaction with the business objectives of such cultural training. João Biehl (2005/2013) opened a disturbing and astonishing window onto the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness among poor people in Brazil, the broader institutional setting in which these activities transpired, how families viewed and treated illness and why, and the ways that both Biehl and his principal interlocutor expressed and acted on these conditions. Finally, Jason De Leon (2015), without intending to resort to theatricalities, created a dramatic and timely depiction of why and how immigrants make risky journeys from Mexico and further south to the United States.
Digital Fieldwork
Global access to the Internet, social media, messaging apps, and other digital modes of interaction has led to significant and productive innovations in fieldwork. Ethnographers of today may find it beneficial, or even necessary, to incorporate digital methods and tools into their fieldwork. Those studying online spaces and movements may even find that their fieldwork takes place largely behind a screen. Despite its growing prominence, digital fieldwork is not always practical and ultimately depends on one’s research questions, circumstances, and interlocutors (Pink et al., 2016). Digital methods and tools must be tailored to each study, but might include online participant observation; messaging over social media; collecting images, video, and text generated or shared by interlocutors; capturing screenshots and chat logs; or the more controversial act of “lurking” (passive observation), to name a few.
The use of digital methods in fieldwork and the study of how people engage online is by no means new. Scholars (Ito, 1997; Reid, 1991; Rheingold, 1993, 1995; Turkle, 1995) began studying online engagements—Internet relay chats, text-based multiuser dungeons, early online communities, and so on—that emerged from Web 1.0 in the 1980s and 1990s, and the number of studies, and specifically ethnographies, has only grown since that time. Ethnographers can now draw on a rich and expanding body of work that explores how to translate ethnographic practice to online spaces, including cyberethnography (Hakken, 1999), connective ethnography (Dirksen, Huizing, & Smit, 2010; Leander & McKim, 2003), virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000), ethnography for the Internet (Hine, 2015), digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2016), ethnography of virtual worlds (Boellstorff, 2008), netnography (Kozinets, 2010), chatnography (Kӓihkӧ, 2018), and others. While digital fieldwork can require one to be flexible and adapt to shifting technologies, the core tenets of ethnographic methods still apply. Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, and Taylor (2012, p. 4) note that while digital spaces structure the specific manner in which ethnographic research unfolds, the ethnographic method itself “does not undergo fundamental transformation or distortion in its journey to virtual arenas because ethnographic approaches are always modified for each fieldsite, and in real time as the research progresses.”
Digital fieldwork complicates traditional notions of the bounded field site and reinforces postmodernist arguments highlighting its constructed nature. Field sites often straddle both online and offline worlds, and ethnographers may not necessarily know what will ultimately encompass their “site” until they engage with respondents and learn what digital platforms they use. Because fieldwork can easily span multiple platforms, ethnographers will have to decide which ones to incorporate into their fieldwork, the practical and theoretical reasons for selecting these platforms, and how they will engage with each medium. It is important for ethnographers to reflect on these decisions and delineate how they construct their field site (Hine, 2015).
Ethnographers must also consider the contexts through which individuals engage with one another online. Access to the Internet is not equal, and some voices may be underrepresented or absent, especially those who lack access to technologies for economic or social reasons. Others may choose not to participate in social media or may limit or censor what they post online. For instance, Estes (2008) describes how the U.S. Army, in the interest of protecting operational security, originally required active-duty bloggers to register their blogs, submit them for quarterly review, and obtain their commander’s permission to create a blog or post online—requirements that raised concerns and led at least some to shut down their blogs.
For those who do use digital platforms, ethnographers must assess the media being used and how they shape interactions between users. One could expect to see different content, interactions, and levels of impression management on public platforms like Twitter compared with more private platforms that may require “friending” someone to see their content (Facebook, Instagram), offer secure end-to-end encryption (Signal, WhatsApp), or provide self-destruct messaging (Snapchat). Wesch and The Digital Ethnography Class of Spring 2009 (2012, p. 101) similarly stress how different platforms “create different architectures for participation” and that “every feature shapes the possibilities for sociality.”
Kӓihkӧ (2018), in her study of Ukrainian volunteer battalions who mobilized to combat separatists following the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia, provides an example of how a platform’s architecture and the context in which it exists can influence users. Her interlocutors rarely portrayed themselves as volunteers or discussed their conflict on Twitter, which is an open network where all tweets are either public (by default) and visible to anyone or all tweets are private and only visible to one’s approved followers. Instead, volunteers identified themselves as fighters on Facebook where they had greater control over privacy settings and disguised their real identities. Kӓihkӧ notes that her lack of proficiency in Russian and Ukrainian limited her study of other platforms, most notably the Russian social media site VKontakte, which was more popular than Facebook in Ukraine until it was blocked by the government. She also draws a sharp distinction from her previous fieldwork on Liberia’s civil war where there was little opportunity to engage interlocutors via social media due to low literacy rates, limited access to smartphones and the Internet, and the lack of discussion about the war in online fora, among other reasons.
Incorporating digital methods into fieldwork can offer a number of advantages that complement more traditional participant observation. Perhaps the most obvious benefit of digital ethnography is that it provides access to a potentially meaningful part of people’s lives, and when coupled with offline fieldwork, can help one develop a holistic understanding of everyday life (Hine, 2015). The combination of online and offline research can allow fieldworkers to better interpret their results by shedding light on the nuanced ways that people engage with different media and the potentially conflicting information that each may yield. For example, in Lane’s (2016) study of street life in Harlem, he examined how online interactions affected offline ones and vice versa, and used social media posts, private messages, in-person interviews, and observations to corroborate data, pursue new lines of questioning, and better understand the events in his interlocutors’ lives.
A second key benefit of the digital turn is that it increases the potential to access, recruit, and engage individuals in one’s research. Social media are designed to connect individuals and digital tools and platforms can easily put ethnographers in touch with potential interlocutors who can then connect them to others. Social media can also open up access to dispersed communities and hidden networks and populations, such as individuals with rare diseases who connect through social media platforms like Facebook. Increased access also permits for immediate diffusion of information to a general public, something that scholars have already noted as a key dimension of burgeoning social movements and interconnections among indigenous peoples, NGOs, and activists. Ethnographers can facilitate the dissemination of events, information, and urgent crises and in some cases, encourage the general public to take action rather than having to wait for the slow emergence of an ethnography or article to reach them.
Another advantage offered by digital tools, particularly social media and messaging, is the “hyperconnectivity” between ethnographers and their interlocutors (Pertierra, 2018). Anthropologists increasingly find that their fieldwork does not end when they depart from their field sites and that they now have greater access to interlocutors due to modern day communications (Jackson, 2016; Pertierra, 2018). For example, since 1984, Seligmann has returned periodically and for varying lengths of time to one Andean highland field research site, located south and west of Cuzco, Peru. When she first worked there, she would go back and forth between Cusco and the field site via a road that suffered from avalanches during the rainy season and was traversed mainly by giant lorries, a journey that took anywhere between 8 and 9 hours. Now, the road is paved most of the way, due to a massive mining operation not far from the district, and it takes between an hour and a half and two to get there. The district has established an association of chauffers, each of whom makes one roundtrip per day between Cusco and the district. Youth move back and forth between city and countryside on a regular basis, many villagers have cell phones, and an Internet center was being established for public use.
These conditions dramatically transform the place of the district in a wider orbit and the interactions between Seligmann, as an ethnographer, and villagers. She and villagers communicate by WhatsApp, Facebook, and occasionally by e-mail and cell phone (the latter is very costly). Over time, Seligmann learns what is happening in people’s lives and in their community and she shares her news with them. These exchanges range from typical life stage events such as graduations, illnesses, births, marriages, and deaths, unusual climatic conditions and how they are affecting people’s crops, accidents, and new infrastructure. Most recently, they kept her apprised of protests and demonstrations in the face of the encroaching mining initiatives that are underway near the district and that so many are fearful will pollute and diminish their water supply. These conversations often become semistructured interviews. They allow for longitudinal fieldwork in a way Seligmann could never have imagined 15 years ago.
Digital fieldwork is not without its complications and can amplify some of the challenges of traditional fieldwork. One worth noting here is how following interlocutors’ complex online lives can lead ethnographers to engage in multiple social media platforms that result in an overwhelming amount of data that require review, organization, and analysis. This is further complicated by the aforementioned hyperconnectivity with one’s interlocutors and the temporal blurring of fieldwork that can seemingly have no end date. While there are software and tools available to help researchers organize and code data, fieldworkers may find it necessary to limit their sample size to a manageable number and have a systematic, yet flexible, way of engaging with social media content and users. For example, in their study of how activists and social movements use social media, Postill and Pink (2012) employed a five-part routine to participating in social media: catching up with research-related developments via a variety of social media platforms and tools, sharing content with their personal network, exploring content provided through their network, interacting with research participants, and tagging content. They caution ethnographers to balance these methods with the traditional tasks of diary keeping and reflection.
Digital fieldwork presents other important complications, particularly a litany of privacy considerations that one must take into account such as obtaining informed consent in digital spaces, protecting interlocutors’ real and virtual identities, securely storing and transmitting data, and how to best engage with interlocutors in regions where Internet freedoms are restricted, to name a few. While these considerations are important, we do not have space to discuss them here and encourage ethnographers to investigate potential issues before undertaking digital fieldwork.
Participatory Fieldwork Methods
A final set of innovative ethnographic methods is intended to allow for more agency on the part of the researcher’s subjects or interlocutors, not only in how research is done—including what kinds of data are gathered— but also the topic of research and how it is presented. Ethnographers have tried to figure out what their own roles should be in order to support that agency (see, e.g., Low & Merry, 2010; see also Gusterson, 2005). They have participated with their research subjects to uncover the history of land litigations and usurpation of native lands (Field, 2008); research the provenance of material and human remains to determine if and when repatriation is in order (Fine-Dare, 2002; Mihesuah, 2000); craft pedagogical content and methods for schools (Burford, Kissmann, Rosado-May, Alvarado Dzul, & Harder, 2012); publicize environmental hazards and seek reparations (Johnston, 2008, 2010); and to pressure policy makers and expose human rights abuses and atrocities (e.g., Goodale & Merry, 2011; Scheper-Hughes, 1993; Scheper-Hughes & Wacquant, 2003).
Not only sociocultural anthropologists are employing these methods. Archaeologists, physical anthropologists, and linguistic anthropologists are using them as well, thus interlinking the subfields of anthropology in ways that are infrequently seen these days (e.g., Crate, 2011). Just as digital ethnography is tailored to particular objectives, problematics or questions, the same is true of participatory ethnographic methods. Some are considered engaged anthropology; others, activist anthropology; and still others, collaborative anthropology. And among these, some consider their work to be public anthropology.
The open mobilization to inform the public and change policy might be considered the distinguishing feature of public anthropology. Engaged anthropological fieldworkers seek to bring to the public’s attention a particular issue that preoccupies those with whom they are working; activist anthropologists become proponents of a particular position or issue—they have made a judgment and on the basis of that judgment have decided to actively take a partisan position; and collaborative anthropologists attempt to occupy a more horizontal or subordinate position in comparison with that of their interloctuors, striving to permit their interlocutors to determine what they (the anthropologists) can best contribute to the former’s objectives.
In all of these cases, there are concerns, controversies, and debates about the positioning of the anthropologist and whether some of these projects constitute ethnographic field research. Many anthropologists have embraced shifts from participant observation in which they retain ultimate control over their data and what happens to it as it is transformed into an ethnography, to partisan alliance with some of their interlocutors. The latter is, in part, a response to the criticisms of postmodernists about the unequal power relationships between researcher and subjects and is also seen as a significant way to make a public impact instead of having anthropology remain ensconced in the ivory tower as an arcane discipline.
Some have pointed out that these activities put into question the anthropologist as a reliable conveyer of knowledge with a degree of truth value and may lead to distrust. Although the gathering of field data always did and still does (even with the attention to reflexivity) entail intersubjectivity and interpretation, laden with a degree of power, the concern is that engaged and activist anthropologists necessarily and consciously judge and take explicit positions with respect to matters that are taking place among individuals who are part of a particular group or sector. 2 They have taken sides and they explain why they have taken sides. They expose the underbelly of injustices at many different scales and levels. The “observation” part of participant observation goes by the wayside, even though to get to the point of becoming an activist anthropologist, one would hope has required both participation and observation.
At what point, then, does the anthropologist simply become someone engaged in politics rather than being an ethnographer? How much field research is undertaken and with which people in order to arrive at such a positioning? Furthermore, do these kinds of positionings then make it impossible for field research to be done that is not sectarian either in the present or the future? What kinds of doors are shut and locked? Even in the case of more traditional participant observation, it is always the case that if ethnographers spend too much time with one group or individual, they risk being viewed as politically compromised and the understanding they gradually come to may be flawed. This may hinder access for future researchers. Ethnographers, through their fieldwork, are in an ideal position to communicate and convey any number of conditions of injustice. And they are in a better position to do this on the basis of fieldwork they have conducted with people across a wide spectrum so that they can adequately convey the interests at stake, the networks in play, and the kinds of practices exercised by those in power. The controversy—not easily resolved—concerns at what point anthropologists substitute their hat as ethnographers for that of advocate and judge. This may also end up being a question of scope.
Collaborative Ethnography
One of the most fertile innovations in participatory ethnography is that of collaborative ethnography. Discussion takes place among collaborators and ethnographers concerning all dimensions of fieldwork, and power relationships and participation may shift in the course of collaboration. Lassiter (2005, p. 16) states that collaborative ethnography constitutes an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration at every point in the ethnographic process, without veiling it—from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, and, especially, through the writing process. . . . In turn, this negotiation is reintegrated back into the fieldwork process itself.
This approach might seem like an ideal way to challenge inequities in power relationships that prevail between ethnographer and interlocutors and to embrace ways that ethnography can be put to use by interlocutors as well as by the anthropologist. Nevertheless, unpredictable and problematic situations may ensue. Collaboration involves one or more persons, each of whom is embedded in networks, and those networks—some of which may be institutional in nature—impinge on the subject, sources, goals, and interactions that take place in collaborative ethnography. Individuals also bring to collaboration their personal histories and experiences and individuals selectively pursue some and not other kinds of collaborative engagement. Campbell and Lassiter (2015, p. 22) learned that these particularities mean that “collaboration does not ‘model’ very well from one partnership to the next.” Ethical decisions such as disclosure of information and harm to persons become ever more complex as well. 3 They caution that despite collaborative agreements made at the outset of a project, “differences in opinion, and disagreement—or even outright conflict” may unfold in the course of research. While recognizing these hazards, we venture to argue that those very conflicts and disagreements may also be highly productive and illuminating despite the danger of collapse of a collaboration.
Another major challenge of doing collaborative ethnography (both in practice and in preparation of some kind of final product, such as an ethnography) concerns language. It makes sense for such work to be accessible to cocollaborators and in their language. Yet presenting collaborations in languages and in venues that do not receive “high status” in academia may cause problems for anthropologists scrambling up the tenure ladder. Yet not making accessible collaborative research and “conclusions” reinscribes power inequalities and calls into question the whole point of such research. 4
In collaborative ethnographic projects, ideally, the ethnographer does not necessarily assert control or authority. Lassiter, Goodall, Campbell, and Johnson’s (2004) work on the African American community of Middletown and Lassiter’s (2005) review of the history, methods, and theoretical underpinnings of collaborative ethnography espouse this approach. Joanne Rappaport (2017) argues that fieldworkers frequently overlook how materials gathered in the course of fieldwork—that is “the research process”—and collaboration are used, interpreted, negotiated, and experienced by the various participants in the research. She suggests that if researchers pay more attention to the “collaborative give-and-take” among themselves and their counterparts, researchers will gain insight into how counterparts “envisage themselves as researchers,” what research is for them, and what they think they get out of it (pp. 4-5).
Rappaport does not devalue ethnographies as written accounts but, drawing from her field research in Colombia and her participation in a project sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Latin American Studies Association called Otros Saberes (Hale & Stephen, 1995), she distinguishes between collaborative and other kinds of participatory ethnography. In most instances of participatory ethnography, anthropologists have worked with interlocutors whose voices are incorporated into the final product to create a “polyphonic ethnography” but they were not “enlisted in the collection of ethnographic materials” (Rappaport, 2017, p. 4), which Rappaport views as fundamental to collaborative ethnography.
An entire journal, Collaborative Anthropologies, has been a key venue for publishing these kinds of experimental undertakings since 2012. We comment at some length on this as an innovation in ethnographic methodology because we think that it shows promise in three ways that make anthropology of continued relevance within and outside the academy: it relies on participant observation and many of the complementary methods we have discussed above, and the skills of doing ethnography well matter; it provides a roadmap to what so many scholars have called the need to decolonize anthropology by bringing to the foreground unexpected and significant conceptual apparatuses that have not been recognized by anthropologists in the past; and although it may or may not result in transformative undertakings, those lie as much, if not more, in the hands of collaborators than the anthropologist who takes a political or judgmental stance. There is a higher probability than in the cases of activist or engaged anthropology, that genuine knowledge production takes place for all the parties involved because of the very differences that emerge in the course of collaboration. How that knowledge is then disseminated is one of the big challenges and experiments of collaborative ethnography.
Technology offers some promise in the move toward a more collaborative ethnography. Social media, messaging apps, and digital tools allow researchers to engage interlocutors and colleagues in the research process and allow for collaborative, networked ethnography to more easily emerge (Collins & Durington, 2015). Some ethnographers have adopted the practice of “live field noting:” that is, the sharing of images, exchanges, notes, or emerging thoughts through digital platforms (Wang, 2012). While such a practice presents a number of privacy challenges, it also presents an opportunity for others to easily engage with one’s work. Digital collaborations are not without their limits, as demonstrated by Burrell’s (2016) experiment with “remote ethnography” in a study of fisheries and mobile phone use in Kerala, India. Burrell’s colleague conducted fieldwork in person and allowed Burrell to experience a mediated field site through electronic field notes, pictures, videos, and Skype calls in an effort to gauge the level of understanding she could develop from afar. While these tools promoted dialogue, Burrell, perhaps unsurprisingly, found it difficult to approach the immersive experience that would allow her to derive meaning from the fieldwork. As she notes, Photos, videos, and inscribed notes separate into different modalities what was, for the fieldworker [on site], an experience that seamlessly integrated the various senses. The remote colleague must . . . reassemble these dimensions, but with the disadvantage of even more missing pieces. (Burrell, 2016, p. 149)
Interviews as Ethnography
A curious pattern has manifested itself over the past two decades among non-anthropologists and anthropologists: the embrace of “ethnography,” in the most narrow sense, as being equivalent to interviews. We suggest reasons for why this has taken place and then examine the shortcomings that emerge from an overemphasis on interviews to the exclusion of participant observation. While it is usual, we think, to equate innovation with a positive valence, here we argue that the increasing emphasis on interviews as a substitute for employing a diverse panoply of ethnographic methods should be viewed negatively or, at the very least, with considerable skepticism.
Given the need for good fieldwork, why is it that scholars emphasize their use of ethnography in their research and think that it means solely doing interviews? Ingold (2014) points out that when “ethnographic appears to be a modish substitute for qualitative, [it] offends every principle of proper, rigorous anthropological inquiry—including long-term and open-ended commitment, generous attentiveness, relational depth, and sensitivity to context—and we are right to protest against it” (p. 384). Our initial impression was that this embrace of ethnography (fieldwork) as interviews took place primarily among non-anthropologists but many anthropologists’ fieldwork turns out to rest mainly on interviews rather than participant observation and more anthropologists are spending very short periods of time in the field. 5 It thus behooves us to ask why more ethnographers are not doing participant observation; and what the consequences are of relying more heavily—even predominantly—on interviews.
Interviews remain central to fieldwork for a number of reasons, not least of which is that they allow for a degree of comparability and sampling for the anthropologist. They also “slip in” easily into existing research methods among non-anthropologists. For example, sociologists are accustomed to coding and quantifying interview data to draw conclusions. The use of interviews that can then be coded and statistically assessed, along with being incorporated as “narrative” is a comfortable fit for sociologists who can then state that they are using mixed methods, creating a path toward both fine-grained analysis and broader generalization.
Sánchez-Jankowski (2018), in his recent introduction to a special issue on innovations in ethnographic methodology drives home this point and the innovations included in the issue, for the most part, although they are called ethnographic, are tailored to sociologists who must deal with challenges raised in the academy about the sampling, validity, and generalizability of data that they gather qualitatively. Sánchez-Jankowski (2018) hopes that the innovative methods proposed will “correct for existing problems” and “aid in bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative studies” (p. 151). This, we think, is a principal reason that non-anthropologists are relying heavily on interviews—it legitimizes their use of qualitative methods, especially in disciplines that have traditionally drawn on quantitative methods.
Political scientists also rely on interviews to decipher attitudes with respect to conflict, human rights abuses, or democratization, for example. Anthropologists with ethnographic training, are frequently employed or contracted by government agencies or nonprofits to provide quick information on key issues that then justifies a particular policy or application. 6 Because of these reasons, the interview has become a principal end objective of fieldwork.
While interviews may be necessary and helpful, they are not sufficient to qualify as ethnography. There is often a big gap between attitudes stated and actions taken among human beings. Anthropologists have relied on both participant observation and interviews because of questions of validity and the desire to discern patterns. They know that what people say they believe in or do or feel does not constitute a one-to-one correspondence with their actual behavior. Interview data give anthropologists important insights into ideologies and ideal behavior as understood by interlocutors; they can illuminate the roles and knowledge base of different interlocutors; and they may also allow for comparability and sampling that illustrate and explain key dimensions of social life such as income, education, and a number of variables that reveal inequalities and networks, for example.
Interviews, however, tell a small part of the story of people’s lives and cultural values and practices. Impression management and peer pressure structure interviews (as do other conditions about which the interviewer may be unaware). These conditions may also influence people’s practices and interactions but immersion in participant observation offers a glimpse into a less performative relationship between interlocutors and anthropologist over time. So much of what needs to be illuminated is not readily legible and visible. Anthropologists, in their field work, must pick away at these matters. 7 It helps to talk to people, but then one must make connections among conversations, between conversations, and put a finger on networks, practices, policies, belief systems, fears, imaginaries, and ideologies that motivate the underpinnings of these conversations. Otherwise, interviews, by themselves, are a very poor way to produce knowledge that makes a difference.
Translators and Brokers
When researchers do interviews, they often rely on the mediation of translators if they are not fluent in the language where they are working. Translators are invaluable to many anthropologists and often become co-ethnographers in their projects. They are also too often not acknowledged and the way they shape anthropologists’ field research and, more particularly, their interview findings, are glossed over or ignored by anthropologists (Gupta, 2014). Researchers should be aware that translators frequently occupy a different status position than they do as well as those they are interviewing, and there is always the question of how adequately translators convey interview questions and topics, especially given status as well as cultural differences. Schiltz and Büscher (2018) provide an excellent overview of the position and actions of brokers, including translators, particularly in regions that have been sites of conflict and where multiple organizations, individuals, and institutions are operating to provide humanitarian assistance. Many of their observations apply more generally to the need for anthropologists to reflexively take account of the impact of their work with brokers/translators/mediators, some of whom have little understanding of the particularities of “research,” and who have undertaken such roles to make a living.
Likewise, anthropologists who are pursuing fieldwork “at home” come to rely on brokers—including leakers—to gain some inkling of what goes on within powerful institutions whose walls they cannot penetrate, or among powerful individuals who expertly protect their position and information relevant to it. More and more frequently, social scientists are doing fieldwork that entails understanding the behavior of complex organizations, whether they be corporations, NGOs, or governments themselves. Resorting to interviews and mediators rather than participant observation are two alternatives but they do not constitute a wholly adequate alternative to fieldwork grounded in participant observation. Mediated interactions and positions create yet another possibility for distorting fieldwork findings and add another layer of complex multi-intersubjectivity.
In short, it is much easier to do interviews than participant observation and because of the value placed on codification, quantification, and systematization within academia, it satisfies the checkmarks for publication required by nonanthropologists. It is much harder to make sense of the cacophony and chaos of participant observation that initially confronts the fieldworker. And it does take time—there is no “trick”—to gradually discerning patterns in the chaos and cacophony. It also requires hard choices about what to pay attention to, and why, since all fieldwork entails choices and reflexivity. It is a risk to choose.
We think that questions of risk, expediency, cost, and the popularity of the idea of “doing ethnography” explain the turn away from participant observation and to interviews. We are not suggesting that the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater but rather that researchers should be cognizant of the hazards of solely basing their findings on interviews. Crump, in this volume, elaborates on the many ways that interviews can take place to yield significant and valid data for analysis.
Ethnographic Accounts, Presentations, and Products
Recognizing that fieldwork/ethnographic methods are irrevocably intertwined with written accounts of that fieldwork as “ethnographies,” anthropologists have begun to craft alternate modes of presentation that do not take the form of texts, such as art installations, podcasts, and theatrical performances. There are many reasons for this. Ethnographies, with few exceptions, tend to remain within the walls of academia. A few escape and reach the general public. Even fewer reach the people whom anthropologists have worked with in their fieldwork.
Narrative forms tend to be overdetermined by linearity and presentation styles that themselves are imposed by publishing and academic institutions. Anthropologists have sought to move away from the text to modes of presentation that make metastatements about the subject they are working on. Hartblay (2018), for example, created an art installation in order to drive home how political agency was constrained physically for those who were disabled and to simultaneously cause those who were apprehending her representation to recognize how “othering” worked without recasting those who were disabled as “other.” The installation required an investment of great effort for those who were not disabled to cast a vote for “no” with respect to whether or not they “liked” her installation, which was open to the general public. In her words, such presentations lead to “coproduction of embodied knowledge because there is no ‘outside’ of culture” (Hartblay, 2018, p. 154).
While the art installation may make theoretical points that are important in possibly changing people’s consciousness, we remain less convinced that we learn anything about the lives of those who live in a city hostile to their ability to get around AND so many other facets of their lives. This is not intended to put a damper on experimentation with alternate modes of presentation but to encourage those who seek to produce ethnographic knowledge to reflect further on what kind of knowledge they seek to produce and why.
Podcasts have proliferated as well. As a recent New Yorker article by Rebecca Mead (2018) drove home, these podcasts vary enormously but they are viewed as both art and commerce. They are focused less on “producing programming in the service of a better, and better-informed, society,” as was the goal of public radio (p. 53) or on conveying knowledge, both about one’s own culture and other cultures, as has been the goal of more traditional ethnographies, than on creating an aesthetic, challenging boundaries of privacy, relying on entertainment and suspense, rarely striving for coherence, provoking emotional reactions, and sometimes serving as pilots for other commercial media ventures. 8
The Future of Ethnographic Research
Despite the hurdles that confront ethnographers in their current field research and in how they then process and present their field research, rather than abandoning field research—participant observation, interviews, digital fieldwork, multisited fieldwork, and collaborative and participatory experiments—this article argues that ethnographers should rise to the challenge. Table 1 summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of each of the innovative methods we have discussed in this article.
Strengths and Weaknesses of Innovations in Ethnographic Methods.
Ethnographers should heed power inequalities and dramatically differing value systems and practices explicitly without abandoning the principal objective of anthropology: to produce and communicate knowledge that challenges our taken-for-granted worlds, in the field here and there. Furthermore, we think that using ethnographic methods to gain knowledge about what humans share in common is as significant as learning more about what differs among us. We also expect that despite the demands and standards of audit culture both within and outside of academia, nonanthropologists will continue to attempt to incorporate ethnographic methods in their research.
We cannot read the future in a crystal ball, but we expect that, increasingly, ethnographic methods will include digital fieldwork and participatory research; that researchers will strive to straddle the world of academia and media in making their findings available to the general public; that they will need to work hard to confront the difficulties of operating at multiple scales and border crossings. 9 We have laid out strengths and weaknesses in all of these innovations. Our greatest concern is that if researchers find it too difficult to incorporate questions of scope, scale, mediation, and border crossings into their ethnographic methods, they will abandon participant observation and limit themselves to interviews that do not tell the whole story.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.