Apprenticeship as method: embodied learning in ethnographic practice

Apprenticeship as social inclusion

Anthropologist Michael Agar (1996) likened the ethnographer to a ‘professional stranger’, highlighting that the occupation demanded closing the gap with the unfamiliar, approaching new ways of life and entering a community as an outsider. One of the great challenges to ethnographic fieldwork is the simple problem that ‘non-participating observer’ is not an appropriate role in some social settings. Ethnographers may face a real challenge explaining what they are doing and then finding some acceptable position in social interaction from which to conduct their research. Sometimes, the result borders on the comical, as our subjects have to find ways of making sense of the incompetence of what appear, at first glance, to be otherwise normal adults (albeit odd looking or strangely dressed, in some cases). Apprenticeship settings are ideal contexts in which to gain entry into a community and provide a meaningful position for the researcher and research agenda, something that many ethnographic projects struggle to find (Downey, 2002: 490–505; see also Wacquant, 2011; Wolcott, 1999). ‘Bodily arts’, Downey elsewhere observes (2005: 205), ‘provide sites where an ethnographer’s collaborators may already be skilled at teaching apprentices to perceive and behave in culturally appropriate ways’.

For example, in her study of north Indian kathak dance, Dalidowicz found that she was immediately accepted, even treated as a participant ‘insider’ in her new field site in India through her connection to her guru in North America, Pandit Chitresh Das; their association promptly opened channels of communication. In an artistic community where status derived from affiliation to a guru and lineage, training under a well-known guru provided an instantly legitimate identity. Within the dance lineage, shared status as students generated a kin-like relationship, denoted by use of dede or ‘sister’; fellow students felt a duty to share their guru’s teachings with the ethnographer-apprentice. In most cases, the authors found that practical apprenticeship was the only means to gain access to and participate in these communities.

As Wacquant (2005: 459) argues, in defending his own fieldwork on boxing against critics’ accusations that he ‘unduly’ generalized from the Woodlawn Boys Club, any single intensive apprenticeship is a ‘particular case of the possible’. ⁴ Although some apprentice positions are chosen for their ‘typicality’, our choices were driven instead by the sense Wacquant describes of ‘targeting’: a particular configuration of factors, rather than any claim to representativeness. Atypical groups may be chosen precisely because of their significance or another advantage they provide. For example, Downey chose to embed primarily in the most ideologically sophisticated Afrocentric capoeira group; that was the only way to access the wary, controversial organization, but affiliation also generated debate in the broader community of practice. His association with the unusual Afrocentric group, coupled with his anomalous willingness to play at other schools (anomalous for the closed group), provoked rival practitioners to engage with him; the researcher provided a rare chance for outsiders to play against a group member and to debate their ideas directly. Downey’s position as an apprentice, even to a rival teacher, created a meaningful local identity with which his subjects knew how to interact (see Downey, 2005).

The choice of a group, lineage or school in which to embed oneself, then, needs to be both pragmatic and strategic. Access to a desirable target may mean that an apprentice-researcher must be willing to endure hardship or curtailed freedom in order to get close to a particular teaching tradition. ⁵ Mason, for example, only used apprenticeship-based methods in part of his research. In West Java, he accepted the conditions of apprenticeship to facilitate data collection (Mason, 2008). Specifically, Mason lived and trained under the widely respected Pak Haji Uho Holidin, and the affiliation gave him a clear role at pencak silat events. In contrast, when Mason moved to West Sumatra to continue his research, the strict initiation rites required to work with a single guru there would have been too limiting; in this context, attending performances of competing Minangkabau pencak silat groups would have been met with suspicion and reticence.

Apprenticeship-based research can be de-contextualizing as its tight ethnographic and analytical focus on skill acquisition may make it difficult to follow practitioners outside the studio, gym, dojo or training setting. Relationships based on apprenticeship may be circumscribed by the context of practice, and a community of practice may dissolve in the intervals between training sessions or performances. Although we know our subjects in practice settings, commenting upon their family lives, occupations or domestic worlds may be much more difficult. Whole portions of the local population may be excluded from the ethnography because the community of practice specifically insulates training from outsiders. This tight ethnographic focus and social isolation can make certain kinds of sociological or hermeneutical analysis particularly challenging. While linking the empirical field of observation to macrosocial factors or institutions, like social classes or political systems, is always a risky analytical leap, doing so when the environment specifically seeks to exclude them can be especially fraught.

Apprenticeship and interpersonal power

Apprentice-ethnographers assume social roles, at least partially, that are already established in their respective communities of practice. But this fluid integration imposes its own set of constraints. Participation through apprenticeship means social subordination, especially at novice levels of expertise. All the authors were students, ‘like any other’, and were dependent on our gurus and teachers for ongoing access to our object of study. At the same time, we were subject to the local obligations of discipleship. Each of us became an active player in the hierarchical relationships that constituted teacher–student affiliations and structures of legitimacy. Being foreign academics accorded relatively little privilege in our respective communities of practice (paradoxically, having foreign students sometimes increased the status of the teacher in relation to his or her peers). In fact, because the ethnographer depends so heavily upon the teacher for the viability of the project, the apprentice-researcher may be more docile than other disciples, more vulnerable to arbitrary authority or unreasonable demands because one’s research is at stake. Unlike the conventional view of ethnographer–subject relations as privileging the educated outsider, or at least granting the ethnographer a degree of independence, the master–disciple relationship necessarily constrains the researcher. For example, Downey found that most capoeira practitioners demonstrated no interest in academic qualifications. On the contrary, legitimacy derived strictly from the capoeira roda in the community; practitioners had long resisted outside authority, especially as a result of Afrocentric assertions that foreign, white researchers were inherently disadvantaged in understanding black arts. One informant intentionally sought to humiliate Downey in a training session only two weeks after he arrived, leading to a broken wrist that severely hampered initial field research.

While competency did not guarantee access, demonstrating commitment to learning certainly helped. The requirement meant not only steadfast dedication to practice and technical improvement, but also devotion to our teachers. Limits on with whom we studied and where we could observe emerged out of our affiliations with particular masters or schools. Dalidowicz, for instance, found initial research plans derailed by the requirements of the artistic tradition: the cultural particularity of the guru–shishya (teacher–student) relationship in kathak precluded studying other lineages, effectively requiring her to study a single guru. The pre-eminence of lineage meant that a broad survey of the dance field was unacceptable. Loyalty to the lineage, norms of respect, as well as the requirement of everyday training made it almost impossible practically to observe, let alone study at other institutions.

In Downey’s case, attempts to research at multiple schools were controversial though not forbidden, but eventually proved unsustainable. Although he initially resisted the social norms of apprenticeship, over time, Downey was disciplined into community standards and achieved a compromise: although he ‘played’ in other schools — much to the consternation of his teacher — he abandoned ‘training’ with any other figure. This locally-specific arrangement was acceptable to his teacher and other mestres alike although, in practice, he was still accused of insufficient loyalty when it was to his teacher’s tactical advantage. Apprentice ethnographers must continually balance the requirements of loyalty with their own research agendas.

In all of our cases, the reciprocity of learning relationships meant that we all had to fulfil a variety of obligations. Full membership often relied on service. We were expected to assist with anything from set design, prop building, instrument making, archival work, translating, and photography and audiovisual documentation to the most mundane chores, such as cleaning the academy or teacher’s house, setting up for public events or basic maintenance tasks. While Dalidowicz found her transition into the community facilitated by her peers’ sense of duty to teach her, she soon discovered this obligation was reciprocal: she was expected to teach novices without remuneration as a condition of apprenticeship. This acceptance of our qualification to teach constituted a valuable confirmation that our knowledge of the arts was growing – all of us found the demand gratifying – but reciprocity meant that we were sometimes required to spend our time transmitting the tradition that we would have preferred to be studying more deeply. Reciprocity with host communities is nothing new for fieldworkers, but the requirements of full membership as an apprentice often add heightened expectations or duties specifically ordained to remind us of our lowly status. An apprentice cannot choose how or when to reciprocate. Although frustrating, even exhausting at times, these demands helped us to more clearly see the comprehensive social formation of disciples, a process that likely would have been concealed from us had we not become apprentices.

Performing artists like Mestre Moraes, Pak Haji Uho Holidin and Pandit Das were public figures, concerned about their images, especially about advancing their own vision for their arts. Controversial figures in their communities, student loyalty was an especially fraught issue. Downey, for example, exited the field before a wave of defections among Moraes’ students led to the formation of several new splinter organizations. While we remained students, our masters knew we were also writing dissertations, thereby creating a historical record of their work. They invested effort in seeking to influence our accounts. They suggested research topics, or sought to censor or direct what we wrote. ‘Put that in your dissertation’, we were told repeatedly.

Deep inter-subjective entanglements in the field complicated what we were willing to say and write. For example, the particularities of the guru–shishya relationship, where learning is predicated on complete submission, forestalled the possibility of commenting critically on her guru for Dalidowicz. Downey had to steadfastly avoid discussing his analysis of some dubious but ideologically important historical claims about capoeira or risk precipitating an insoluble conflict. While these restrictions imposed a set of constraints on public expression, they also encouraged deep immersion in emic perspectives, offering insights otherwise unavailable, including into the formation and preservation of orthodoxy within these traditions. The social requirement to stifle scepticism and dissent at an early stage likely forced us to more deeply investigate practitioners’ perspectives with a kind of pragmatic agnosticism.

Each of us developed individual tactics for dealing with our teachers’ influence, overt and implicit. All authors found writing in popular forums – newspapers, magazines or online – provided a venue to advocate our teachers’ artistic or political visions. Popular writing allowed us to leave scholarly pursuits to the side, in a sense, ‘outside’ the field relationship, and gave us flexibility to pursue a more independent scholarly agenda in less public venues.

Not surprisingly, accountability to our teachers continued long after we left the field. As future embodiments of the tradition, we bore a certain responsibility to maintain the tradition and favourably represent the arts, not only in what we wrote, but also in performance. We became living examples. Even today Mason still contacts Pak Haji Uho Holidin to ask permission to perform Sundanese choreography in Australia. In addition to writing about these performance arts, Mason also became a representative of Sundanese culture in Australia. Research was not only documented in words, but also was performed regularly as choreography.

Apprenticeship as practice, and practical issues

Recent discussions of ethnographic note-taking have highlighted the layered nature of writing in fieldwork, with different sorts of notes and stages in the process of transforming sociocultural field research into a public written representation (Emerson et al., 1995; Sanjek, 1990). Apprenticeship poses an almost unavoidable obstacle to certain sorts of note-taking practices. The difficulty of simultaneously being a practitioner and taking notes was driven home for Downey when he discovered one evening after a training session, exhausted, that his sweat-soaked practice clothes had smeared his notes, making many illegible, and even warped the stiff cardboard cover on his notebook. The metaphor of the sweat-drenched commitment to participation erasing other forms of knowledge and distorting the whole framework of ethnography was only too obvious.

The simple fact is that note-taking in apprenticeship-based research differs from notebook-in-hand fieldwork. These variations occur within all fieldwork projects, as taking notes while events happen is not always practical or desirable. The traditional methodological advice, to ‘write down everything you see, as soon as possible’, can be manifestly absurd in the apprenticeship-setting, especially in practice-intensive environments where the ethnographer may be considered ‘in training’ for hours every day without interruption. Dalidowicz found that intensive periods of training with her guru, where students ideally ‘eat, sleep and breathe’ the art while living in the master’s house, meant that every minute of the day was viewed as an opportunity to learn. Finding opportunities to record fieldnotes relied on craftiness, taking advantage of periods when the guru rested, extending bathroom breaks, and finding opportune moments to record key ideas. Apprenticeship-based research demands its own sorts of rigorous, systematic, conscientious inscription practices, often retrospective, sporadic, or otherwise opportunistic.

At times, our roles as ethnographic observers and practicing participants conflicted. When they did, we usually set down our notebooks, tape recorders or video cameras, opting instead to join in the action. We trusted that what was learned by participating was more important and elusive than anything that could be recorded passively. This tendency to privilege participation certainly reduced the volume of material that we collected. Some days we lamented the missed photographs, unfilmed performances, and absence of recordings from which to transcribe verbatim quotes; but joining in deepened our relationships with other practitioners and our own understandings. Because some of the genres we studied were already well documented, the choice to participate was easier than in situations where a practice seemed particularly at risk or undocumented; Mason, for example, shifted his research strategy when studying rural West Sumatran forms of Indonesian fight-dancing, considered in danger from the growing dominance of nationalist styles of the martial art, so much so that some performers were uneasy or even retreated to partial secrecy to protect their local forms.

When we did opt to observe or to video, we also felt the lost opportunities and the temporary distance it introduced into our relationships. Downey found it virtually impossible to videotape performances, except at special events where other participants also videotaped. On the other hand, Mason made use of two static cameras: one to film dancers and the other to film the musical accompaniment. Static cameras limited the flexibility of the audio-visual documentation, but the footage facilitated recall and later analysis. Viewing the footage in post-production created a new experience in its own right, one that had to be framed by skilled analysis and description (see Pink, 2007). Despite shortcomings in filming, post-production in collaboration with local experts in the field permitted initial analysis to be shaped by insiders; the researcher and experts were able to discuss events while observing and editing the footage. Skilled use of audio-visual recording was useful when note-taking was restricted.

Apprenticeship and types of knowledge

Perhaps the most important shift that occurs when the ethnographer adopts the role of apprentice is that communication between researcher and subject changes. Various pragmatic channels of teaching and feedback open up between the researcher-student and informants, now transformed into teachers. The incompetence of the researcher-student becomes a shared problem, and a range of pedagogic intervention is brought to bear on the ethnographer’s emerging competence. We are able to study what Wacquant (2011: 86) called the ‘pedagogical work’ because that work is being done on and with us. When the researcher becomes an apprentice, he or she becomes a well-defined local problem rather than a potentially unprecedented interrogatory challenge. Teachers are called upon, not to explain or interpret what they usually do, but to put their pedagogical expertise to work directly on the researcher, and indirectly on the ethnographic project. When we ask our informants to teach us, rather than asking them ‘about’ their culture, we ask them to use their expertise in familiar ways (but see Rice, 1995: 268). We can see, hear and feel the workings of the social pedagogical machine from within, noticing how demanding different portions of training are, recognizing how practices come together to shape expertise. ⁶

Apprenticeship inserts the ethnographer into a social position where being inept is appropriate, as is striving for greater understanding. In fact, our ineptness as learners has proven useful to elicit critical reflection from our informants. As students we were constantly subject to the scrutiny of teachers and peers, reminded whether we were incorrect and guided to greater competence. The demands on teacher, master and coach are often so similar to performance analysis that criticism makes them potential collaborators in our research, not just as subjects but also as ‘para-ethnographers’ (see Downey, 2008). The authorities in these contexts monitor our pragmatic grasp of the subtleties of practice, often making explicit the cultural criteria we seek to understand. As teachers monitored our development as students, they were also monitoring our advancing understanding as fieldworkers. Our ineptness became an object of practical concern and a provocation for cultural reflection.

The ethnographic opportunity of ineptness is especially pronounced when the kinaesthetic style of the researcher, including his or her previous bodily knowledge, is markedly different from the discipline being studied. The student-ethnographer’s own distinctiveness becomes the object of the teacher’s interventions; sometimes, we are inept in such unprecedented ways that we flush out inchoate or tacit knowledge in our informants. Learning abhinaya, or ‘expression’, in kathak dance brought into focus for Dalidowicz the culturally specific ways of performing emotion absent in the bodies of novices, especially foreign students. Embodied differences among students due to generation, ethnicity, social class and regional backgrounds made visible the unspoken elements of a class-specific cultural aesthetic of Indian femininity. Students’ attempts to depict archetypal characters from well-known Indian epics like the Ramayana were subject to intense scrutiny, by both teachers and audience members, for their apparent differences from an idealized model. The instructor’s attempts to ‘fix’ what he saw highlighted some of the most difficult-to-reach, inchoate aspects of the aesthetics of embodied culture. Far from being invisible to the instructor, embodied differences were thrown into high relief in performance, commented upon explicitly, and subjected to correction. Put bluntly, in apprenticeship-based research, the embodied difference of the researcher is a problem that instructors seek to fix, sometimes to their exasperation, but often in a way that provides unparalleled comparative insights, even if it can be extremely uncomfortable to be under such scrutiny (see, for example, Rice, 1995: 269–70). John Blacking (1973: 214), an ethnomusicologist who worked among the Venda of South Africa, similarly felt that learning to perform was a crucial research technique and believed researchers had to participate ‘and invite criticism of [their] performance’ in order to confirm their practical knowledge.

In addition to technical know-how, apprenticeship also required an embodied understanding of the sensibilities, behaviours, values and shared cultural assumptions of the broader community; apprenticeship includes instruction in how to be a proper, socially-appropriate person (see Bryant, 2005; Coy, 1989; Marchand, 2008; also Stephens and Delamont, 2009 on ‘technical’ and ‘tacit’ learning). One of the key insights suggested by Lave and Wenger’s (1991) model of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ in ‘situated learning’, is that apprenticeship is, in part, the slow social movement from a position of peripheral acceptance in a community toward deeper and deeper integration, whether or not the learner is an ethnographer. ⁷ Our teachers intervened in our personal formation too, as did our peers; like other students, we underwent a ‘more deliberate shaping of the self’, whereby ‘one empersons a body of knowledge that also contains a set of values, both ethical and aesthetic’ (Bryant, 2005: 234). Outside of the classroom, Dalidowicz found herself reprimanded for breaches in etiquette, for example, failing to adequately offer the appropriate namaskar, a bowed gesture with palms together, to pay respect to her seniors. As experts gave explicit instruction on otherwise taken-for-granted aspects of their culture, embodied understandings found their way into discussion, opening up new channels of communication and reflection. But more intimate fieldwork required practical mastery of these standards, or the researchers were seen to be insufficiently respectful to deserve further instruction.

In our own fieldwork, we have found that the reverse move – from explicit explanation to embodied skill – similarly has a salutary effect on communication. Instead of communicating about the art, because of our apprentice positions, subjects sought to communicate the art itself, its practical foundation and aesthetic subtleties. Downey found that in normal interviews, subjects often gave explanations borrowed from well-known histories, political criticisms or academic theories from African Diaspora studies. In the Pelourinho Capoeira Angola Group, for instance, Downey discovered that subjects frequently resorted to contemporary theories of Black cultural resistance, from Robert Farris Thompson’s Afrocentric aesthetics, Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ or from the pop psychology of self-actualization. The group held seminars where students in the group also doing postgraduate studies in history, sociology or other fields offered sophisticated analyses of capoeira from their disciplines; the rest of the group quickly adopted these explanations and produced them in response to explicit questions.

Whether or not these academic theories were accurate, they were largely irrelevant to day-to-day practice. For example, while the group had adopted a Bantu-centric critique of Yoruba (or Nago) cultural dominance within Afro-Brazilian culture (the privileging of cultural expressions brought by slaves from the area of modern Nigeria rather than Angola), this critique had little effect on the transmission of musical styles or the successful execution of techniques. In formal interviews, the current theoretical interests of the group dominated individual reflection more than in instruction. Shifting our relationships by becoming an apprentice produced more ‘experience near’ discussion and analysis.

In kathak training, formal explanations of the Indian theory of rasa, which takes emotion as central to performance, repeated convention inscribed in several key texts, like the Natya Sastra, a Sanskrit treatise on dance, music and drama. The actual teaching of rasa was far more diffuse and idiosyncratic, relying on a combination of students’ personal histories, local understandings of emotion, and some adherence to the expressive style and authority of the individual guru. For Mason, only apprenticeship and the informal conversations that punctuated pencak silat training sessions revealed the tension between the project to impose a standardized nationalist form of the martial art and regional variants. While taking a break for a cigarette, a regional teacher might discuss his frustration that his own local techniques were not included in the rigidly codified ‘forms’ upon which students would be judged in state-sponsored competitions.

To put it simply, interviews often produced circular confirmation of academic theories that our informants, too, knew well. Explicit questions provoked formulaic recitation of accepted orthodox thinking, including traditional authoritative texts, or surprisingly shallow accounts, with the dominant framing that government officials or other authorities had successfully instilled. In contrast, the teaching context itself was rich with a completely different set of concerns, often extremely sophisticated and perceptive in the discrimination of correct practice.

Cultural learning as rediscovery

Whereas explicit explanations of practice sometimes proved to be quite uniform, apprenticeship-based practical research revealed that bodily learning, in contrast, was a constant process of re-discovery or reinvention that produced (and in some cases, weeded out) chronic variation. Often, we refer to the learning of physical arts as ‘transmission’, but close study of settings where individuals learn draws our attention to the fact that a student does not always learn exactly what a teacher knows. Or, more accurately in a discussion of practice, an apprentice does not always do what his or her teacher does (see Lock, 1980 on ‘guided reinvention’ in language). Capoeiristas, for example, widely recognize that the style of the apprentice will not be identical to the master’s, and they openly discuss this variation, including how to adapt individuals to the art, as well as the art to each individual. Training offers opportunities to develop skills; it does not inject an unvarying code or implant a uniform body of tacit knowledge in the student. As Tim Ingold suggests:

What each generation contributes to the next, then, are not rules and schemata for the production of appropriate behaviour, but rather the specific conditions of development under which successors, growing up in a social world, acquire their own embodied skills and dispositions. (2000: 387)

Even in the same classes, what each student discovers is distinct.

This account of culture as variable, independently-developed skills – rather than shared code or uniform mental content – suggests that innovation and instability are endemic in skill development. In fact, Ejgil Jespersen (1997: 183) suggests that apprenticeship (he discusses sports) almost inevitably has ‘centrifugal’ creative tendencies because individuals continually endeavour to improve their own performance and often draw on multiple role models of expertise. The more skill-like culture is (the less we treat it as explicit code or text, for example), the more apparent uniformity itself begs explanation. If guided rediscovery is inherently centrifugal, generating constant variation, cultural institutions must exist that curb the tendency toward fragmentation in any practical discipline. In an apprenticeship setting, we can see more clearly the institutional, structural and functional centripetal forces – the rituals, aesthetic standards and genre demands – that channel endemic creativity and variation because the ethnographer him- or herself is subject to the disciplining forces that maintain some degree of uniformity. As ethnographers, we must recognize that some of the corrections we receive are themselves recurring interventions to bend practice toward normative forms.

Calling bodily practices like kathak, pencak silat or capoeira ‘a culture’ or ‘a habitus’, if either of these implies a uniform and unchanging body of knowledge transferred from one generation to the next, has a tendency to conceal the constant innovation inherent in the rediscovery of the ‘same’ practice, as when each student invents anew how to do a bananeira, or the capoeira handstand (Downey, 2005). ⁸ We would argue that the mode of transmission may actually make physical practices, especially those not bolstered by strong disciplining, centripetal institutions, more liable to rapid innovation and change. Kathak dancers, for example, drill basic techniques like the heel-anchored pirouettes known as chakkars; sequences of up to one-hundred-eight turns are repeated, literally, ad nauseum. But repetitive sequences are more about each individual finding better and better ways to perform a technique like a chakkar and develop their own method. Students are not so much creating an exact replica, but rather adapting to the demands of the task (Bernstein, 1967: 134). In fact, the more strictly standards are observed in an established tradition like kathak, the greater are the improvisational demands placed on individual performers to ‘get it right’ (Hallam and Ingold, 2007: 5). While teachers parse the technique into manageable sections, outlining starting and ending positions, and try to elaborate the how-to of turning, becoming adept is a matter of problem-solving as we find creative ways for our bodies to produce skilled action.

Even at the level of basic technique, complete conformity was elusive. Dalidowicz’s teacher, Pandit Das, readily pointed out that his adept students did not dance as he did. For example, his dynamic of turning is markedly different to his students, and part of his skill as an instructor was in helping students to find their own distinctive solutions within the bounds of the tradition. Positing a fixed body of knowledge, wholly transferable from one generation to the next, contradicts what practitioners themselves say: their artistic culture demands constant adaptation, even to support continuity.

In fact, the close proximity to practice inherent in apprenticeship-based research quickly reveals the lack of uniformity in practice, the subtle variations that become more evident the more one becomes proficient. In our experience, as our own expertise grew, we became better able to perceive the variation in spite of the commonalities in style and practice within groups; and we found our apprentice-colleagues also growing connoisseurs and critics of variation. That is, once one is a student, subject to criticism for stylistic flaws and unable to precisely emulate one’s role models, the fiction that a discipline imposes itself without limit on individuals becomes impossible to maintain. Learning to appreciate variety, or struggling mightily to conform to stylistic expectations, reveal to the apprentice-researcher that discrepancy, variation, and even unintentional innovation are inherent to the learning process.

Acquiring cultural proficiency as method?

As an ethnographer lives in an unfamiliar place, he or she inevitably becomes accultured, although this acculturation process is liable to inconsistencies, erratic pacing and idiosyncratic lacunae of all sorts. The ethnographer who studies local learning processes by engaging in those same processes, however, is necessarily involved in a reflexive project because his or her own experience is part of the research (Roth, 2012: 205–6). This inherent reflexivity has led some critics to suggest that practitioners of apprenticeship-based research are engaged in what Fine (2004: 505), discussing Loïc Wacquant’s (2004) research in a South Chicago boxing gym, called ‘reflexive autoethnography’. Wacquant (2005, 2011) vigorously countered these arguments (as we would, too), but the criticism seems to dog apprenticeship-based accounts. Downey’s (2005) manuscript on capoeira, for example, was judged by one anonymous reviewer to represent the ‘worst’ excesses of reflexivity in anthropology, in spite of the fact that Downey chose a representational strategy that featured his own identity less than Wacquant’s exemplary work.

With apprenticeship-based ethnography, the researcher is poised on a rhetorical knife’s edge. One’s own experience provides crucial ethnographic information and analytical insight, but the object of knowledge is really another’s culture. The ethnographer him- or herself is an ethnographic tool, but the ethnographer is not the research object. Although the analytical method needs to be reflective, the writing must not be excessively reflexive (see also Delamont, 2009). One’s experience sheds light on practical knowledge, but that experience can become exaggerated, so that it seems to be the subject: ethnography as autobiography. In our opinion, excessive rhetorical self-reference, rather than analytical reflexivity, can undermine the credibility of the account, confounding the method with the research object.

We first want to emphasize that there is no trump position in the debate about reflexivity. No matter what balance one achieves, some readers will find an author focuses excessively on his or her own experience, while others will likely feel that there is too little reflexive self-disclosure. The attempt to bring a more lived tone and texture to ethnographic text requires more patience with each other as writers. We are asking ethnographic authors to attempt a bit more artistry, to endow their texts with creativity and accept personal risk. We should not be hyper-critical if all ethnographers do not demonstrate identical aesthetic preferences or always succeed with such difficult ethnographic experiments.

However, we also want to note that recognizing the inherent variation involved in learning helps us to explain the role of reflexivity in apprenticeship-based research: we interrogate what we are learning, not because we are necessarily developing knowledge or skill identical to our informants’. In fact, other apprentices are not themselves acquiring uniform knowledge or practical skills. Instead, we must be self-reflexive because we too have become the targets of ‘pedagogical work’, and the strains and frustrations we feel help to illuminate the mechanisms brought to bear on the novice, the rigours of practice, and the exhilaration of self-transformation.

Noting the inherent variation in practitioners’ ways of being expert (or failing to achieve full expertise) also provides us with a much better explanation of why, just because we are willing as apprentice-ethnographers to strive for expertise, the quality of our research does not depend upon our excellence as practitioners. If the research object is the learning process, passing through this process too quickly or too easily would arguably lead to less comprehensive understanding of how the social machinery of training functions. Likewise, our most articulate informants were not the most virtuoso performers; often, the best indigenous analysts, commentators and coaches combine a degree of competence with sufficient frustration that they have more thoroughly analysed the discipline (and their own failings). Technical and practical accomplishments in a field of practice do not necessarily translate into either ethnographic or reflexive insightfulness.

Conclusion: ethnography as apprenticeship

In fact, the authors all had little choice whether or not to engage in apprenticeship-based ethnography; inclusion in the community of practice, in our judgement, depended upon active participation. The assertion by Mestre Moraes that the ethnographer was ‘like every other student’ – and similar declarations elsewhere – provided a research niche, at once rich and yet tightly bounded. Subject to the same socializing mechanisms as other novices, ethnographers find their fieldwork interpretations constantly scrutinized in practice by their informants. These methods also provide a readily understandable position for the researcher in what may be, to our collaborators, a profoundly alien academic enterprise. As Fibiger (2010: 30) argues, the anthropologist’s analyses are constantly ‘shaped in collaboration with informants in the field by discussing situations and events while observing these informants and speaking with them about the observations.’ Depending on local expectations, apprenticeship-based methods can generate almost overwhelming obligations. Shared practice fundamentally changes how we communicate, and yet the demands of practice can prevent us, at times, from doing even the most basic ethnographic tasks.

The corporeal sensibility we developed through apprenticeship served as the basis from which to evaluate what we heard, read and observed. Anthropologist Maurice Bloch (1998) suggests that most ethnographies are based on similar forms of apprenticeship and non-discursive knowledge, as was the case in his fieldwork in Madagascar:

I am fairly sure that the way I proceed in giving an account of the Malagasy cultures I study is by looking for facts, and especially for statements, that confirm what I already know to be right because I know how to live efficiently with these people …. Like other anthropologists, I then pretend that the linguistic confirmations of these understandings, which I subsequently obtain from what my informants say, are the basis of what I understand, but this is not really so. My knowledge was established prior to these linguistic confirmations. (Bloch, 1998: 17; emphasis in the original)

Enculturation happens to all fieldworkers. Apprenticeship processes are not unique to ethnography in performance traditions, since, as Bloch describes, some kind of cultural apprenticeship occurs in all field sites. Processes of culture-making are, however, given a privileged stance in learning environments like the ones we write about, where individuals’ progress is actively analysed, explained and guided by teachers as students move toward the shared goal of cultural competency. The particularities of apprenticeship as method highlight shared problems for all ethnographers, bringing into focus the limits and opportunities generated by a method that requires balancing immersion and participation with systematic observation.

But perhaps more importantly, apprenticeship-based research helps us to better see the mechanisms of enculturation, the processes that shape individuals until they achieve competence. Apprenticeship problematizes expertise because, for the novice, gaining expertise is a problem.