Five stories of accidental ethnography: turning unplanned moments in the field into data

Finding revelation in the mundane

Field research has featured prominently in the work of scholars from across the social sciences. By field research, I mean ‘research based on personal interaction with research subjects in their own setting’ (Wood, 2007: 123) regardless of methods or methodologies used. Political scientists, for example, have used field research to sharpen measures of key concepts; process trace contingent events (Wood, 2007: 124–5); uncover previously hidden power relations (Jourde, 2009: 201); and challenge the universality of existing concepts and categories (Baiocchi and Connor, 2008: 151; Rudolph, 2005; Tilly, 2006: 409). The centrality of fieldwork to studies of politics has, in turn, led scholars to reflect on issues related to the ‘doing’ of fieldwork, such as positionality (PS: Political Science and Politics, 2009; Turner, 2011) and ethics (Fujii, 2012; Wood, 2006).

What scholars have yet to theorize more fully is the productive potential of ‘accidental moments’ – those instances when the researcher is not engaged in an interview or archive, but in the mundane tasks not often specified in the research design, such as standing in line, drinking coffee, buying food, or talking to hotel staff. By paying attention to the conversations and scenes that play out in these moments, the researcher can deepen her understanding of the research context and gain local knowledge that can be vital to the larger project.

I call this process ‘accidental ethnography.’ I use the term ‘ethnography’ to signal the method’s resemblance to participant-observation, which generally involves the researcher ‘going out and getting close to the activities and everyday experiences of other people’ (Emerson et al., 1995: 1). My use of ‘ethnography,’ however, does not make any assumptions about how close or immersive the researcher needs to be, making it possible for scholars going to the field for even brief periods to adopt this method.

The term ‘accidental’ refers to the unplanned way these moments arise. With procedure-driven methods, such as interviews, the researcher plans ahead whom she will talk to, what questions she will ask, and what prompts she will use. With accidental ethnography, moments of insight arise by happenstance or chance. The researcher cannot control their content or timing; she can only learn to observe and record her observations in more systematic fashion.

The idea of treating encounters from daily life as a form of data builds on the work of Trigger, Forsey and Meurk (2012) and their exploration of ‘revelatory moments’ that arise during long-term, ethnographic fieldwork. Trigger et al. (2012: 516, 525) define these as felt and unplanned moments that generate insight by provoking strong or noticeable feelings in the researcher. Tonnaer (2012: 572) writes about one such moment, which she describes as ‘15 dense minutes that helped determine the course of my analysis.’ When a pretentious tourist reveals his recent change from married to widowed traveler, Tonnaer suddenly sees him as a multi-dimensional individual, rather than a ‘part-person,’ the category tourism scholars often assign to tourists. This realization then leads Tonnaer to try to help the man avoid paying inflated prices for indigenous art. Seeing the man as an individual, rather than a category, allowed Tonnaer to feel empathy toward him and to recover her own humanity in the process (Tonnaer, 2012: 573).

While revelatory moments such as Tonnaer’s might last but 15 minutes, ethnographers tend to attribute such revelations to the researcher’s long-term immersion in the field (Schatz, 2009; Shweder, 1997). This insistence on deep immersion, however, overlooks other avenues of discovery. Scholars who use other methods and spend less time in the field also regularly report surprises (Wood, 2007: 125), so revelation is not unique to ethnography or ethnographers.

The mundane and quotidian of field life are filled with smaller dramas that generate similar feelings of awkwardness and delight as those that characterize revelatory moments (Henry, 2012; Trigger et al., 2012). Treating these smaller moments as data is to adopt Burawoy’s (1998) extended case study in miniature. Where Burawoy urges scholars to think outward from their specific case to the larger social or political forces that shape (and are shaped by) that case, I propose that researchers think outward from the time spent conducting interviews or surveys to those periods when the researcher is no longer trying to ‘control for bias,’ but navigating a social environment that may be unfamiliar and from which she cannot fully remove herself.

Once the researcher begins to pay closer attention to accidental moments, she might begin to make discoveries. She might become aware of expectations she did not know she had. She might notice the different ways that people type her. She might detect similarities in social dynamics across dissimilar sites. These smaller, less dramatic moments can reveal patterns, logics, and practices that other, more procedure-driven methods cannot.

I present the following stories of accidental ethnography to illustrate my argument. The stories come from research conducted in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the United States, with brief stops in Croatia and Belgium. Some stories take place at the very start of fieldwork while others come much later in the process. The focus of the research was local involvement in organized violence. The violence occurred at least a decade before the research began, so direct observation was impossible. ² The methods I was using were interviews and archival research.

Story #1: Signs and signifiers in Zagreb

One of the benefits of doing fieldwork is the chance to see in from the outside (Bucerius, 2013: 702). Being new to a place can enable the researcher to observe sense-making in action.

It is my first trip to Zagreb. On my last day, I visit a museum of very, very, old and dead things – entire floors of ancient rocks and stones followed by more floors of equally old seashells and insects, followed by room after room of dead creatures, some made to look alive, others frozen in time. It is the frozen-in-time specimens that I find most disturbing. They include a brown bear with her cubs and wild cats with their babies. The stuffed and posed specimens remind me of hunting trophies. Hunting trophies remind me of war trophies. Why do these various ways of preserving the dead have such different meaning, I wonder.

The next morning I am at the airport, awaiting my flight back home. The lines are chaotic. The sign reads Frankfurt but those boarding are headed to Berlin. Oddly, there is even a gate with a sign that says ‘Berlin,’ but somehow all the Berlin-bound passengers know that if you want to go to Berlin, go through the gate that reads Frankfurt.

I ask the gate attendant in my kinder-Hrvatski (baby Croatian ³ ): ‘Još Berlin?’ (‘Still Berlin?’) He replies brusquely, ‘Da, još Berlin.’ (‘Yup, still Berlin.’) At least my feeble language skills get me that much, valuable bits of information that confused travelers hold onto like nuggets of gold. The group of Frankfurt-bound Chinese tourists cannot figure out why they are not allowed to go through the magic door that says ‘Frankfurt.’ They keep looking at their boarding passes and then to the reader board above the doorway that reads ‘Frankfurt,’ which leads to a bus flashing a sign that says ‘Berlin.’ One of the confused travelers tries to ask the gate agent (in English) if it is time to board, but the agent scolds him: ‘Not yet, you can see on your boarding pass that the Frankfurt flight isn’t boarding until 2:10.’ Watching this exchange, I suddenly realize that in all my years flying through countless airports, I never once looked at my boarding pass to see what time the plane would actually be boarding. Boarding passes are notoriously unreliable as to actual boarding times. They are an instance of Weber’s ideal type, a ‘reality’ that exists only in the abstract.

The gate attendant locks the door behind the last passenger leaving for Berlin. The Frankfurt sign is still stuck in suspended animation, like the foxes and bears and sharks and fish at the museum I visited the day before. The aquatic section was the most perplexing, perhaps because the fish and sharks were suspended in air. Why suspend them in air? It seems strange for aquatic life to swim with the birds, but then as I continued through the exhibit, I realized there is something more disconcerting than trying to mimic water with air, and that is placing specimens in glass bottles filled with some kind of clear liquid. That strikes me as the most unseemly form of display. Then I wonder why war trophies never come home in bottles of unidentifiable liquid and why we deem one kind of preserved specimen as suitable for museums that cater to families with children (of which there were several during my visit) while we condemn another as a barbaric, war-time practice.

Thinking back on this brief experience playing tourist in Zagreb, I am struck by how people in the same space can interpret things so differently. For the families visiting the fossil museum, the sight of dead animals stuffed to look alive appeared normal, while to me, they looked like trophies from a hunt, for how else does one acquire a mother bear and her cubs than by slaughtering a whole family at once?

In the airport, people were also interpreting objects very differently. To the gate agent, it was ‘obvious’ that a sign that read ‘Frankfurt’ meant ‘Berlin first.’ To the group of Chinese travelers, however, ‘Frankfurt’ meant Frankfurt and the passengers moving through the doorway meant it was time to board.

These clashes of interpretation also highlighted how certain meanings become hegemonic. At the airport, it was the gate agent who enforced the dominant meaning by controlling who went through the gate. In the museum, the presence of families helped to construct the space as benign and child-friendly, erasing the reality of how the specimens came to be there in the first place – that someone had to first to capture and kill these animals.

Watching sense-making in action helped me to see how certain meanings not only become dominant through subtle forms of power, but also how their hegemonic status can lead people to forget that other interpretations are even possible. In fact, the Chinese traveler’s confusion did make sense, even if the gate agent could not see how bewildering the boarding procedures were. Watching how power both enforces meaning and erases other possible interpretations gave me insight into a micro-process that literatures on violence and state power rarely capture. As these experiences taught me, these processes can unfold in both big and small ways, through spectacles of state power (Handelman, 1997) and in much smaller moments and spaces.

Story #2: Being typed in Rwanda, Brussels, and Bosnia

If unfamiliar places present opportunities for observing meaning-making in action, our field sites present daily opportunities to see how people make sense of us, the researchers. ⁴ Observing how others type us can reveal a great deal about the various clues and criteria that people use to categorize others in general.

I have just arrived in Rwanda to begin dissertation research. It is 2004, ten years after a war and genocide that killed at least half a million people (Des Forges, 1999). The first time it happens, I am in a Ministry building, trying to secure a letter of authorization I need to do my research. A woman – a secretary or clerk – says to me in a friendly voice (in French), ‘You must be Rwandan. Is one of your parents Rwandan?’ She says this more as a comment than a question. I laugh it off as small talk. At home in the US, people often asked me ‘what’ I was but I had never expected Rwandans to do the same.

Shortly after that encounter, I begin to notice similar remarks coming from other Rwandans in a variety of contexts. My interpreter sometimes alerts me, but other times, not. A few times I hear the question myself, when, for example, a young man rides by on his bicycle yelling (in Kinyarwanda, the local language): ‘Is she Rwandan or muzungu?’ (‘muzungu’ being a generic term for foreigner). On a street in Kigali, the capital, I hear a woman commenting to her friend as she passes me: ‘Eh, métisse, c’est bien’ (‘Ah, mixed, that’s nice’). I hear the cab driver ask me (in French) just after I have just flown in from the US, ‘Are you Rwandan?’

Even in my field sites outside the capital, people make similar comments. At the prison where I am conducting interviews, the prison director (who arrives by car while I am doing an interview in a far corner of the courtyard) tells me that he knew I was Rwandan by my body language. In my other field site located in a different part of the country, an interviewee mentions that a rumor is circulating that I am the long lost daughter of a local woman who had had a baby with a muzungu man. It happens in the market near my research site. My interpreter overhears some women nearby trying to figure out whether I am Rwandan or muzungu. Once they hear me speak a few phrases in Kinyarwanda to my interpreter, they are certain I am Rwandan.

In every instance, people are typing me as part Rwandan but the criteria they use varies. In the eyes of the prison director, it is the way I carry myself that marks me as Rwandan. To the clerk at the Ministry office, it is my facial features. To the women in the market, it is my spoken Kinyarwanda. To those in my research site, it is my very presence – my decision to do research in that particular hill and not any of the other one thousand in the country ⁵ – that confirms not only my Rwandan parentage, but also my personal connection to the place.

Rwandans were by no means the only people to type me. A few months before I arrived, I had spent several weeks in Brussels doing archival research. On my first morning there, I went to buy a mobile phone. The Congolese woman helping me asked (in French) if I was Congolese. A few weeks later, as I was walking down a street in central Brussels, a white woman made a beeline to me to ask me (again in French) where Chinatown was. Both women were typing me but using very different criteria, one seeing me as familiar (‘Are you Congolese?’) and the other as foreign (‘Where is Chinatown?’).

The two encounters also had very different meaning for me. The comment from the Congolese woman led to a friendly conversation about whom in her family I resembled. In the other, I was stunned by the woman’s racial profiling of me and replied angrily, ‘Aucune idée’ (no idea), at which point, the woman simply walked off.

In Bosnia, no one has ever asked me if I were Bosnian or had family there. I assume it is because the same features that make me ‘familiar’ to Rwandans or the Congolese woman in Brussels mark me as a ‘foreigner’ in Bosnia, though not so foreign that anyone there has ever asked me where Chinatown is (which does not exist, as far as I know) or where to find a Chinese restaurant or store (which do exist).

And yet, I have noticed a change in how people talk to me. As my language skills have improved, I have noticed that people more frequently greet me in the local language, despite the fact that almost everyone in Sarajevo speaks very good English. In fact, during my first few trips, most people greeted me in English or switched to English if we had exchanged initial ‘hellos’ in the local language. On recent trips, however, I began to notice that waiters and store clerks did not always switch to English, even when I stumbled with my Bosnian.

The shift in how people talked to me must have been based on some sign they were reading, but not the same signs others used to type me ethnically or racially in Brussels or Rwanda. Somehow I was ‘passing’ as someone who was more conversant in the local language than I really was. One particular exchange confirmed my sense that people were talking to me more in the local language than in English. I was in a shop in the tourist part of town. The shop sold expensive handmade children’s clothes and catered mostly to foreign tourists. While browsing, I heard the shopkeeper talking to some other customers in English. When she came over to me, however, she not only greeted me in the local language, she asked me a series of questions about what I was looking for (‘Are you shopping for a boy or girl?’ ‘How old?’). As I left, I wondered how she knew to speak to me in the local language and not English.

What these varied experiences in Rwanda, Belgium, and Bosnia taught me is that people do not type others based on ‘objective’ physical characteristics or proven language proficiency. Rather, people type others through multiple criteria at once: they pick up on some physical features and not others (skin tone, hair texture, eye shape) and certain non-verbal cues (use of the local language, accent, body language). Rwandan women at the market did not need to hear me converse in Kinyarwanda to confirm that I was part Rwandan. It was enough to hear me use a few well-worn phrases. Bosnian shopkeepers did not need to see a white European to ‘see’ a Bosnian speaker; they needed only to pick up on certain clues, such as, perhaps, my accent when I first greeted them. ⁶ Others did not need to see ‘proof’ of Rwandan, Congolese, or Chinese ancestry to read those origins into and on me and act as if they were true.

Why is this important? As a scholar of identity and violence, these lived experiences not only alerted me to a range of ways in which people read and type others; they also taught me that physical features are not objective signs, but that people read faces, bodies, and body language according to local categories and meanings. As Horowitz (1985) teaches us, even physical features that we often assume are immutable, such as eye shape or skin color, can be read in different ways depending on the context or ignored completely if other criteria take precedence. This is not something I ever fully appreciated from reading the literature on ethnicity, ⁷ and only began to understand more fully from my own experiences of being typed and ‘raced’ in the field.

Story #3: Neighbors vs. neighbors in northwest Bosnia

The micro-level literature on violence has shown that local people use the opportunity of war, genocide, and other forms of organized violence to pursue personal agendas. When it comes to who carries out violence against whom and why, the answer often comes down to personal jealousies or resentments that have nothing to do with the larger conflict. ⁸ Because researchers usually hear about such sentiments second-hand, it can be quite illuminating to see them play out in real time.

I am eating breakfast at the guesthouse in my research site in Bosnia, which is several hours from Sarajevo. Over many trips, I have become friendly with the small staff. Sometimes I am the only guest for days, so there is ample opportunity to talk with them in the mornings and evenings. One day, the staff member who serves me breakfast each morning interrupts our conversation to step outside to talk with a neighbor. The neighbor woman has called him over to relate the following story: The day before, two visitors drove up to the guesthouse in search of a room, but found no one there. They asked the woman if she knew when someone on the staff would be coming. She said she did not. They asked her if she knew a phone number they could call. Again, she said she did not. Having no way to secure a room, the visitors left.

I was quite surprised at this story, knowing that living next-door, this woman would have known exactly when the staff came and went, the exact number of guests at any time, their country of origin (read from their license plates), and the fact that the manager’s mobile phone number was posted on the front door. She would have known that the place was too small to be staffed 24 hours a day, but that with a quick phone call, the manager would arrive in less than 10 minutes. And yet knowing all this (and probably more), she still did not say anything to help the visitors who had come the day before.

I asked the staff member why she would do such a thing – deny all she knew about the guesthouse. He explained it as jealousy. Rather than wish good fortune on the small business (the only guesthouse for miles), neighbors took every opportunity to limit or even hurt its chances for success, despite an unemployment rate that hovered near 50% (a situation he and I had talked about often). This particular region was not flush with tourists and many small businesses depended on the few who came each summer and fall. And yet, this neighbor made a point of discouraging the two people who had come the day before.

I related the story to the manager the next day. He was not surprised. He gestured with a toss of his hand that meant ‘who cares’ and then told me an even more astonishing story. One day, police had stopped a car for a minor infraction as it passed over the bridge that led into town. While they were stopped, the people in the car asked the police if there was any place to stay in town. The policeman paused to think, then said, no, he knew of no place, despite the fact that the bridge – the very place where the police had stopped the car – was literally a stone’s throw from the guesthouse, no more than a quick drive down a narrow, and unfortunately for the guesthouse, poorly marked, lane. The policeman then directed the two visitors to a place they could stay twenty km away, in a much smaller village, owned, no doubt, by a relative.

After telling me this story, the manager emphasized that such behavior was the norm, not the exception, that people routinely went out of their way to direct business away from the guesthouse. People also treated him and his staff member as outsiders, even though both had been living in the town for ten years. When he first arrived, the cold treatment bothered him, but after a while he let it go. It was an entrenched culture he could not change. These were people who were not educated and did not travel outside their small town. By contrast, he had grown up in a bigger town and even in high school, drove to Zagreb just for fun. He learned to deal with the neighbors’ small mindedness by letting their stories go in one ear and out the other, underscoring this last phrase with appropriate hand gestures.

That was the first time I heard about this dynamic among neighbors in Bosnia. I had heard quite a bit about jealousy and resentment in Rwanda. Hearing a similar story at the guesthouse in Bosnia made me think that Rwandan communities were not so unique in the way they operated, that perhaps small town life was similar everywhere, that people’s intimacy with one another bred a feeling of belonging, but at the same time heightened and sustained personal resentments and jealousies within the community.

This experience also opened my eyes to a social dynamic that is difficult for an outsider to observe because so much of it rumbles in the background of everyday life, shaping how people talk to and act toward one another. It is not a subject I would have known to bring up myself because I had grown up in a suburb where anonymity was the rule. Thus, I learned about small-town dynamics firsthand from talking with the guesthouse staff and observing ‘neighborly relations’ in real time. This experience also helped me to imagine how such a dynamic might have played out during the war, during a time when a gun could turn a nobody into a somebody and enable former nobodies to act on long-held resentments by terrorizing those whose habits and routines they knew all too well.

Story #4: Landing from Mars in Maryland

If personal resentments were a constant of small-town life in Bosnia, so, too, were the distinctions people made between insiders and outsiders. Seeing how people draw such lines in other, small communities in other countries provided insight into how people construct belonging in general.

It is my first day in the small town in rural Maryland that I hope will be my research site. The town is less than a three hour drive from my home in Washington. I park on the main street and walk over to the local library to see what materials they have. I then proceed across the street to an historic-looking building that has the sign ‘hotel’ on the front. I go inside to inquire about rooms, knowing I will need a place to stay if I do research in the town. The lobby is darkly lit and has the feel of another era.

A petite, older white woman comes out and asks me what I need. Let us call her Miss Jeanne. I tell her I want to inquire about rooms. She asks whom the room is for. I say myself. She asks me where I am from. I tell her Washington, thinking that will dispel any notion that I am an outsider since Washington is but a three hour drive away. She registers no recognition, as if I had just told her I had come from Alaska or Mars.

She asks if I am from the university, meaning the local university, which has since become part of the University of Maryland system. I tell her no. (Because this is my first visit to the town, I do not even know which university she is talking about or where it is.) She studies me intensely. I have never felt anyone study me so intensely before – even in Rwanda where people stare at foreigners as if they had indeed just landed from another planet.

Her gaze feels more like suspicion than curiosity. Who am I and what do I want? These seem to be much more important questions than whether there are rooms available or whether I would even find them to my liking. Indeed, the questioning feels like a test, as though she is trying to decide whether she will rent to me at all, rather than the other way around.

She asks again if I am from the university. I tell her again that I am not, that I am from a university in Washington. At this point, I realize that the names of my university and city have no meaning for her. She keeps staring at me, studying me. She is trying to place me – literally. Her inability to do so seems to increase her suspicions.

Finally, after what feels like several minutes of long, hard, uncomfortable stares and questions, she begins to tell me about the rooms that are available. At this point, all I want to do is leave. She describes the rooms, then asks if I want to see them. I demur, trying to exit as quickly as possible. She gives me a card with a phone number. I ask if this is how I contact her. She says yes. I tell her I will be in touch, then leave. The daylight is welcoming. I feel as though I have escaped from a time portal. I am relieved to be back in the present.

During the following months, I hear other stories about Miss Jeanne and her hotel. One story that circulates is that Miss Jeanne once took a reservation over the phone, but then refused to honor it when the visitor arrived and turned out to be black. Whether this story was true or not, I could not know, though I had no reason to doubt it, based on my own encounter with her.

Then I heard another story. This time it was from a friend who is a superb story-teller. This story gave me added insight into Miss Jeanne, the hotel, and the culture of the town more generally. The story the friend told concerned a state politician. The politician had come to the town for an official visit. He was a very tall man, over six feet, and more importantly for this story, he was also black. His itinerary was packed with a series of ‘meet and greets,’ which town leaders had carefully scheduled and arranged. One of the local organizers was just about to usher the politician to his next meeting when one of the politician’s aides ran up to tell him that a local woman was celebrating her 92nd birthday nearby. Before the local organizer could dissuade him, the politician was off.

The party was taking place in the same hotel I had visited months before. The room was filled with all white guests, seated around large, round tables. When the politician bounded in, the guests, startled by the interruption, rose quickly from their chairs, scurried behind their tables, and huddled together to protect themselves from this very tall and very black intruder. Intent on his original mission, the politician asked in a playful, sing-songy voice: ‘Who’s the birthday girl?’ Then he turned to see Miss Jeanne, all five feet of her standing there, with mouth agape, I imagine. He bent down and gave Miss Jeanne a big hug and kiss and wished her a happy birthday. The guests, still cowering, watched in stunned silence.

Having done his ‘good’ duty, the politician alighted from the hotel and had not gone one block when the local organizer explained to him the implications of his birthday gesture. In the most delicate terms he could muster, he told the politician, ‘Those people aren’t too comfortable with your people.’ At that, the politician realized what had just happened and suddenly burst into laughter, roaring so hard he collapsed on a bench, holding his stomach.

This story made me think back on my own experience meeting Miss Jeanne. What I felt was not simply racism or fear of outsiders – the kind that movies depict in one-dimensional, cartoonish terms – but something much more layered and complex. Miss Jeanne was part of a small elite. Their elite status was based not so much on money as birthright. These were people who were born in the county and had lived there all their lives. They loved it for what it was and all that had endured over time, not for what had changed. Their pride was not simply based on race and class or on being part of a small group of fairly well-heeled whites who were used to getting their own way, but on a way of life that time and social change threatened to make extinct. This way of life was built around certainty, certainty around social roles and rules, around who belonged and who did not, and where people belonged and where they did not. That is why, years later in a much different context, Miss Jeanne would mention to me that the best waiter at the hotel restaurant had been a black man, with no hint that she had ever contemplated the limited number of jobs available to black people during her career or the fact that for decades, black people could work in her hotel’s restaurant but not dine there as guests.

During that same conversation, Miss Jeanne was friendly and talkative. By then, I understood the bounds of that friendliness. It extended only so far as it could go between two people who lived in separate worlds. For Miss Jeanne, keeping those worlds separate was the natural order of things.

Story #5: All things distant and strange in the Eastern Shore

The same friend told me another story about how people circumscribe the world they inhabit, the geographic lines they draw to keep certain people in and more importantly, to keep other people out.

Ed is a fairly recent arrival to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, though his family has roots in the region that go back generations. According to local rules of belonging, however, having ancestral ties does not make Ed an Eastern Shoreman. One must be born in the Eastern Shore to be considered an Eastern Shoreman (a gender-neutral term) (Stewart, 1990); everyone else is relegated to the residual category of ‘foreigner.’ Ed is most definitely a ‘foreigner,’ though no longer a stranger. He knows many people in town and many people know him.

Ed’s story starts with his driving home from a nearby town. Along the way, he stops to buy tomatoes from a farmer selling produce from the back of an old battered truck, parked alongside the road. Ed is a self-identified ‘talker.’ He will talk to anyone, including the ‘old-timers’ leaning lazily against the side of the truck. As Ed starts chatting with the men, a woman stops to buy some corn. She looks at Ed, then approaches him, not to say hello, but to comment on the obvious – that he’s not from around there. Ed’s MINI Cooper loudly proclaims him as such.

The woman says to Ed, ‘Where you staying?’ Ed paused the story to explain that by then he knew that ‘where you staying?’ meant ‘where do you live?’ Ed tells the woman the name of his town. The woman keeps staring Ed in the face, then says, ‘I know that town. I been there once. I didn’t like it and I never went back.’ The woman was from another, equally small town less than thirty minutes away in the same county.

The story leaves us laughing hard. It is as funny the second time he tells it as the first. But what is it that we find so funny? Part of our laughter is recognition of the vast cultural differences between this woman and Ed. Her radius of what is familiar and comfortable does not extend very far, even within the same county. Indeed, the county seat is as distant to her as Washington DC was to Miss Jeanne when I first walked into her hotel lobby. With a clearly circumscribed radius comes a clear distinction between local and outside, familiar and foreign, worthy and unworthy. For this woman, what is foreign and outside is unworthy of her time.

But it was not the woman’s preference for the known that we found so funny – for urbanites also stick to familiar routes and locales – but rather, how tightly drawn, both literally and figuratively, that radius seemed to be. It was the suspicion and even derision she hurled at Ed for living in a place she had long ago decided was not to her liking and not worth a second visit, despite the close proximity of Ed’s town to her own and its nearly identical size and make-up. This woman gave the phrase ‘local’ new meaning.

But there are further insights from this story. By so tightly circumscribing the world she lived in, she could also control who populated her everyday life and who did not. In this way, there could be fewer surprises, fewer moments of puzzlement at a man who drives a sports car and ‘stays’ in a town that elicits no positive memories. It is not only that Ed was a stranger and a foreigner, but that his world was clearly not her world, and she preferred it that way.

Turning stories into data

When I first embarked on field research, I thought that data only came from pre-planned, structured methods, such as interviews and archives, not unplanned and unstructured moments drinking coffee with a friend or watching travelers trying to find their way at the airport. How wrong I was. It took me years to begin to think about such small encounters (which I noted irregularly in my fieldnotes) as data in their own right – as sources of insight that informed how I collected and interpreted my other data. Once I started to make regular note of these accidental moments, I began to think more systematically about what they were teaching me. The stories and experiences revealed quite a bit about context, culture, and social relations that interviews and primary sources could not.

They allowed me to see firsthand how people make sense of the world around them – how people parse and assign meaning to signifiers, whether literal signs in an airport, bodily signs across a prison courtyard, or facial signs in a mobile phone store. They taught me the kinds of knowledge people take for granted and how power and authority can tilt the balance toward one set of meanings and away from others. They taught me how people deploy local categories and background knowledge to type researchers as well as neighbors.

By becoming an accidental ethnographer, I was able to deepen and systematize my understanding of the local, research context in a way I could not if I had relied solely on interview data or primary sources. Greater contextual knowledge is vital to studies of violence because it challenges facile assumptions about the nature of groups, cultures, and boundaries (Brubaker, 2004; Wimmer, 2013), while providing a firmer basis for interpreting data collected through various methods. Surface understandings, by contrast, can lead researchers to assume that social boundaries are always drawn one way rather than many; that meanings are universally shared rather than widely contested; that intimacy among neighbors is a bulwark against danger rather than a source of potential threat.

Paying attention to accidental moments involves what Burawoy (1998: 6) calls ‘explicit consciousness.’ It starts with noticing stories and encounters that catch the researcher’s attention, without prejudging how they will relate to her research later.

The next step is to write down observations ‘as they occur’ for what is noteworthy at one stage of research may cease to be later, as the researcher becomes socialized to the norms and worldviews of her research site (Emerson et al., 1995: 13). These notes might be detailed or sketchy (Walford, 2009), descriptive or analytical; focused on others’ behavior or the researcher’s thoughts and feelings in the moment, or both. The purpose of writing these observations down is not to achieve the most accurate or ‘best’ account, for no such description exists (Emerson et al., 1995: 5), but rather to sharpen the researcher’s observational skills and to encourage the researcher to be systematic in capturing these ‘accidental’ moments on paper.

The last step is to reflect upon these observations. No moment speaks for itself. All require analysis to understand how they inform the larger project. Analysis might involve figuring out how the researcher’s own background knowledge shapes what she sees (Clifford, 1990; Wolfinger, 2002); considering what other interpretations might have been possible; or identifying possible reasons why certain individuals or communities have denied the researcher access. The goal of this step is to link observations from accidental moments to larger research questions and themes and to other methods and data.

The steps of observing, writing down, and analyzing may occur simultaneously or sequentially. However they unfold, they will enable the researcher to ‘extract the general from the unique’ (Burawoy, 1998: 5) and by doing so, turn ‘non-data’ into usable data. The process requires reflection, not alchemy, and its potential benefits are significant: more nuanced analyses, sharper arguments, and better theories – the very stuff of good social science.