Malinowski however, had failed to develop, what most anthropologists such as Ellen 1984, would have described as being one of the key methods of pre- 1914 fieldwork: the use of the ‘genealogical method’ to collect information with its emphasis on the study of kinship. Although his own fieldwork belonged more to the tradition of pre- 1914 survey work, Radcliffe-Brown was most influential in continuation of kinship studies backed up with intensive participant observation (like Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown came from a functionalist background).
Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown sought to understand the ways in which groups are formed in society, the rules governing the behaviour of their members, how groups relate to one another, and the functions, both latent and manifest, that they perform. However they did so in different ways. An example of Radcliffe-Brown’s approach was the analysis of ‘joking’ and ‘avoidance’ relations. A ‘joking relationship’ is one where an individual ‘is permitted, and sometimes required to take no offence’. Avoidance relationships are the opposite of joking relationships. They’re characterised by ‘extreme mutual respect and a limitation of direct personal contact’ (Monaghan & Just 2000:57). Radcliffe- Brown’s analysis looked at ‘joking’ and ‘avoidance’ behaviour as ‘standardized social relationships’ that represented not so much spontaneous ‘ribaldry’ or shyness between two individuals, as a ‘structural situation’ between a man and his mother-in-law. He had little interest in Malinowski’s concern with understanding the individual in society, and rejected Malinowski’s drift towards seeing social institutions as being concerned with filling biological needs. Radcliffe-Brown believed society was a thing unto itself and his desire was to approach it as a natural scientist. He termed his approach structural functionalism.
For Radcliffe-Brown and other structural functionalists the idea of social structure was used to describe patterns of relations between individuals and groups. These patterns were usually explained in terms of their function. Malinowski on the other hand, believed these functions had to do with what he called a ‘doctrine of needs’, that he described as supplying the basic wants of individual members of society, i.e. food, shelter etc. For other anthropologists, these functions tended to be more concerned with the process and maintenance of institutions in society. Functionalism however was criticised for an essentially ‘static’ vision of society that was incapable of explaining social change. As a result, the structural functionalist and the functionalist approach have since been disregarded in the use of ethnography.
The second development was the work of the Chicago school in sociology, ‘which used observational techniques to explore groups on the margins of urban industrial society in the US during the 20s and 30s (Brewer 2000:12)’. The main focus was on the ‘dispossessed’, the ‘marginal’ and the ‘strange’. This focus later became characterised as an attempt to address ‘the standpoint of the hip outsider rather than the dull insider’. Studies of numerous deviant sub-groups such as prostitutes, street gangs, drug dealers and relatively unknown social worlds like burlesque halls and Jewish ghetto cultures were conducted frequently. In every study sociologists actively participated in the setting or the way of life under study.
While social anthropology termed this approach ‘ethnography’, sociologists simply referred to it as ‘participant observation’ or ‘field research’.
As a consequence, much confusion arises from the lack of agreement on the use and definition of the term ‘Ethnography’. Ethnography is a word used regularly to refer to empirical accounts of the culture and social organisation of specific human populations (as in “an ethnographic monograph” or “ an ethnography”). However the meaning then alters if we speak of “ethnography” as opposed to “theory” or of “ an ethnographic account” (meaning living people) as opposed to an historical or archaeological account. Different again from all of these is the use of the term to indicate a set of research procedures, usually representing the intensive qualitative study of small groups or cultures in natural settings, through the use of “Participant observation” (Ellen 1984:7).
For the purpose of this essay, the term “Ethnography” will simply refer to the latter rather than the former.
Leaving aside practical disadvantages, there are two significant critiques of ethnography that have arisen from almost opposite directions within the social science discipline. The natural science critique derives from the natural science model of social research, and ‘accuses ethnography of falling below the standards of science (which form the correct measure for the social sciences). Next is the post-modern critique, which essentially comes from within the humanistic model of social research, as ethnographers themselves come to critically reflect on their practice under the drive of post-modernist theories. It accuses ethnography as being nothing, once it is deconstructed to its basic fundamentals.
The natural science critique, argues that ethnography falls short of the scientific method. According to Giddens (1996b: 65-8 cited in Brewer 2000:19) mainstream social science has been governed by the ‘orthodox consensus’ (notion that social science should be modelled on the natural sciences – positivism). As the social sciences address problems similar to those of the natural sciences; they should search for social causation when explaining human activity and aim for deductive explanations. There are four significant features of ethnography that go against ‘orthodox consensus’.
Ethnography focuses on people’s ordinary activities in naturally occurring settings, using unstructured and flexible methods of data collection, it requires the anthropologist to be actively involved in the field or with the people under study and explores the meanings which this human activity has for the indigenous people themselves and the wider society. Arguably in these terms, it breaches several principles held by the natural sciences. A key principle is related to the role of the researcher. The natural science model of research does not authorise the researcher to become a variable in the experiment, yet ethnographers are not completely separated from the research, but depending on the degree of involvement in the setting, are themselves part of the study or by their prominent presence come to influence the field in some way. If participant observation is used in the data collection, ethnography can involve introspection, or ‘auto-observation’ (Alder 1998:97-8 cited in Hammersley 1997:20). This is when the researchers own experiences and attitude change while sharing the field and to some extent become part of the data.
‘Ethnography in the laboratory’ by Hine (2001 cited in Gellner & Hirsch 2001) is a prime example. Initially the researcher entered the field with the aim of understanding how the mundane events in the laboratory become meaningful to the participants, rather than becoming a genetics expert. However during her duration the researcher acknowledged that such an environment, where participants have a highly specialized knowledge, there was little that the ‘unskilled ethnographer could offer.
She quotes “ As far as the scientific work was concerned, I was very much an observer”. She went on to mention, “As time went on confusion (both mine and my informants’) grew about my role. It was apparent that I was not like the other visitors. I found myself gradually becoming constituted as the IT expert. People knew that I was there with an interest in IT and the perception that I must therefore know what I was doing stuck, even though I had not mentioned my experiences with the computer systems developers. At first, I was highly uncomfortable with the idea of becoming the local IT expert: after all, I was there to study their use of IT, not to shape it myself. The last thing I wanted to do was to set myself up as an expert and to solve people’s problems”
On reflection she admits changing her role over time, and steadily accepting the role of the IT expert arguing that it enable better access in terms of initiating conversations and making suggestions.
The following principles are concerned primarily with the method of data collection. Methods that are flexible, unstructured and open-ended can appear to involve unsystematic data collection. The absence of structure prevents a review of the data because differences that materialise within the data can be ascribed to variations in the way(s) they were collected. For example, Malinowski and Weiner both conducted research on the Trobriand Islands of Papa New Guinea. Unlike Malinowski, Weiner focused on the importance of women’s work, influence and wealth in determining male behaviour and the nature of the Trobriands. Weiner’s work did confirm some of the writings of Malinowski on this group, but she also discovered things he failed to see, overlooked or simply misunderstood. These two studies demonstrate the likelihood of two independent researchers carrying out the same study, but reach two contrasting conclusions as a result of structure being absent.
Indeed the underlying principle behind structured methods of the natural sciences is to minimise the irrelevant variations in order to isolate ‘real’ differences in the data. Hence the procedural rules within natural science models of social research being designed to eliminate the effects of both the researcher and the tool used to collect the data.
Besides this, ethnography infringes the principles concerning the nature of data. The natural science model of social research seeks to describe and measure ‘social phenomena’, however both description and measurement are achieved by assigning numbers to the phenomena. It deals with quantity and numerate data. Contrastingly ethnography also describes and measures, but does so by means of extracts from natural language (i.e. quotations from interviews, snippets from personal documents, extracts from field notes) and deals with quality and meaning, rather than quantity and numerate data. Meanings are likely to seem unreliable, shifty and weak. Such data can ‘appear too subjective and contrast unfavourably with numerate data, which appears to be more objective’ (Brewer 2000: 21). Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) ethnography on the Azande, demonstrates this,
“Because I had to live in such close contact with the Nuer, I knew them more intimately that the Azande, about whom I am able to write a much more detailed account. Azande would not allow me to live as one of themselves; Nuer would not allow me to live otherwise. Among the Azande I was compelled to live outside the community; among the Nuer I was compelled to be a member of it…there is much that I did not see or inquire into”
Similarly, this is something I too encountered when conducting my own ethnographic case study. Upon entering the religious sect, it was important to remember that I was not entering into the group’s weekly services merely to just observe the rituals and chart the interactions – but also to be a participant in those activities as well, at least in so far as I were able to do so, given limitations on the time. This therefore couldn’t be a one-sitting project; it required several visits to the church, both to familiarise with the rituals and personnel, and to make myself known to members of the congregation. Although I immediately began making visits to the weekday fellowship meetings, and had formed a few friendships with key informants, I was still very much an outsider. As a result most rituals were not explained. Such ostracism meant that my earlier observations and notes were purely based on my own interpretations and assumptions.
It is for all these reasons that ethnography is criticised by supporters of the natural science models of social research.
Counter- arguing this is the claim that ethnography is more scientific than quantitative research. In the early 20th century, this was disputed on the grounds that ethnographies can produce universal laws (Znaniecki 1934 cited in Hammersley 1997). This argument is rarely used today, both because of ‘the statistical character of some parts of more recent work in physics’, and because most ethnographers have lost faith in the possibility of discovering sociological laws. However it’s more common to find the scientific character of ethnography being justified on the grounds that it is more suited than are experimental and survey research to the nature of human behaviour (Hammersley 1997:7)
This argument is supported by the work of Miner (1956 cited in Podolefsky & Brown 2003). He looked at ‘Body ritual among the Nacirema’ and found that the daily body ritual performed by the tribe included a mouth-rite. He acknowledged that despite the fact that these people were so punctilious about the care of the mouth, this particular rite involves a practice, which strikes the unprepared stranger as revolting.
“It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders and then moving the bundle in a highly formulized series of gestures.”
Moreover, ethnographers have argued that most ethnographers have developed and improved their procedural rules, suggesting that their practice was scientific. Fetterman (1989:2) explained that ‘ethnographers are both storytellers and scientists, in that if their practice is systematic, the more accurate is the account given and thus the better science’. Parker (1999 cited in Gellner & Hirsch 2001) utilised a systematic practice when conducting an ethnography in the department of Genito-Urinary Medicine (GUM). Throughout her time at the clinic, she had two distinct roles: first, was the role of an honorary health adviser with responsibilities to provide appropriate health advice to all patients and the second as a researcher. As said by Parker (1999)
“In my capacity as a researcher, I undertook open ended, unstructured and structured interviews with some of the patients both in and outside the clinic…interviews usually took place after I had dispensed appropriate health advice in my capacity as a health advisor”
The rationale for working in this way was to acquire a detailed understanding of the number and type of sexual contacts each patient had had, and to persuade patients to introduce Parker to each of his or her contacts as well as to the contacts’ contacts.
Not only could ethnography imitate the natural science model, it was part of it, and ethnographers such as Fetterman (1989) recognised its extra role. Subsequently it has been accepted that ethnography could be used as initial and pilot phase in quantitative research studies, it has also been suggested that ethnographers can give causal accounts, using structured methods of data collection in addition to the usual repertoire and present some data in numerical form.
Besides Fetterman (1989), other ethnographers have responded to the natural science model of social research critique, by asserting the pre-eminence of alternative models, which didn’t make use of the appropriate methods and approaches of the natural sciences, encouraging instead what Hughes (1990 cited in Brewer 2000:22) calls the ‘humanistic model of social research’. An example of this is the work of Goffman (1961) in Asylums (1968: 7-9). Adopted the humanistic model when carrying out his ethnography of a hospital.
“ My immediate object in doing filed work was to try to learn about the social world of the hospital inmate, as this world is subjectively experienced by him…it was then, and still is, my belief that any group of persons, prisoners, primitives, patients or pilots, develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it, and that a good way to learn about these worlds is to submit oneself in the company of the members to the daily round of petty contingencies to which they are subject. Desiring to obtain ethnographic detail, I did not gather statistical evidence”.
As the natural science model of research viewed human beings as being acted upon by external social forces, so that behaviour was the result of social causation, the humanistic model reasserts the idea of people as being ‘active, creative, rebellious and knowledgeable’. According to Brewer (2000:22) these capacities are summarised in the view that people are ‘meaning endowing’; they have the capacity to endow meaning to their world. These meanings are always bound by the structural and institutional location of the person, but people possess a ‘practical consciousness’- that is, a body of knowledge that enables them to know social life from the inside-and they possess the discursive capacity to articulate this understanding (Brewer 2000:22). ‘Interpretative ethnographies’ like Goffman’s dramatised approach have shown the complex knowledge needed for ordinary people to manage and achieve social behaviour. The ‘humanistic ethnography’ is a style of ethnography that seeks to explore these ‘reality construction’ abilities; thus portraying ethnography as a reliable means to disclose social meanings.
Disputing the natural science principle of separating the researcher from the experiment, so that s/he is unlikely to become a variable; Dey (1993:15 cited in Brewer 2000:23) argues, all data, regardless of method, is ‘produced’ by researchers, who are not distant or detached, since they make various choices about research design, location and ‘the approach’ which will help to ‘create’ the data they end up collecting. Debatably it can be claimed, all research, including science is subjective, in that it is personal and cultural (Hammersley 1992:9). Hammersley goes on to question the ability of any method to represent ‘reality’ accurately on the grounds: there is no one fixed ‘reality’ in the post-modern understanding of nature to capture ‘accurately’; all methods are personal and cultural constructs, collecting biased and selective knowledge; and since all knowledge is selective, research can offer only a socially structured account of the world.
Paradoxical ethnographers themselves have criticised the claim that ‘ethnography is a privileged method’. Arguing that it amounts to nothing, once it is deconstructed to its basic fundamentals.
The post-modern critique is based on the assumption that the idea of progress and freedom is a myth (as witnessed by examples of genocide during the present century) and so is the idea that knowledge can be truthful and objective. In this respect, scientific knowledge is too. Kuhn was an advocate of the notion that there are no guarantees as to the worth of the activities of scientists or the truthfulness of their statements. Brewer (2000:24) reasoned that science is ‘simply a language game’. ‘The deconstruction of both ideas into myths implies the breakdown of all the symbols of modern capitalist society, and specifically in relation to truth claims, post-modernism denies the existence of all universal truth statements, which are replaced by variety, contingency and ambivalence, and plurality in culture, tradition, ideology and knowledge’ (Brewer 2000:24).
Post-modern ethnographers such as Clifford and Marcus (1986) challenge the claim that ethnography can produce valid knowledge by accurately capturing or representing the nature of the social world.
All ethnographic accounts are constructions and the whole issue of which account represents social reality more is meaningless. This debate is termed the crisis of representation. In as much as ethnographic accounts are biased, selective, even to some extent autobiographical in that they are fixed to specific ethnographers and the events under which the data were collected. Examples of such conflicting ethnographic accounts demonstrating researcher subjectivity is that of Freeman’s
(1983 cited in Lewis 1999:120) categorical condemnation of Mead’s (1928 cited in Lewis 1999:120) idyllic image of the teenage Samoan culture. The uninhibited adolescent sex, which Mead found so delightful and attractive, is, according to Freeman, a complete myth. The real Samoan culture, he claims is ‘rigidly hierarchical, punitive and generally violent’.
The traditional criterion for evaluating ethnography becomes problematic, as terms like ‘validity’, ‘reliability’ and ‘generalisability’ are deconstructed. This is termed the crisis of legitimation. Reliability and validity are by no means symmetrical. According to Kirk et al (1986: 20), it is easy to obtain perfect reliability with no validity at all. However perfect validity would ensure 100% reliability, for every observation would produce the complete and exact truth.
As a means to the truth, ethnographies have relied entirely on techniques for assuring reliability, as ‘perfect validity’ is not even theoretically attainable.
When conducting my own ethnographic case study within a religious sect I found this to be the case. Reliance on key informants was essential to finding out what the various ceremonies were about. From the onset, the need to be concerned with whether descriptions from the key informants agreed with my own descriptions or to some extent with those of the leaders was totally irrelevant. At that stage it was important to just merely record information the way it was given, taking note of any discrepancies, which were to be checked at a later date. Regular participation in the services provided the opportunity to get to know the activities really well and established my presence with most members of the congregation. At this stage, I was able to begin the process of checking the discrepancies of description.
The problem of validity and reliability boils down to the fact that no ethnography can be perfectly controlled, and no measuring instrument (the ethnographer) can be perfectly standardised. All measurement, therefore is to some degree is questionable.
Both crises (the crisis of legitimation and the crisis of representation.) have deep effects on ethnography as a whole. The crisis of representation, for example, has implications for how we should understand ethnographic accounts: they do not ‘neutrally or impartially represent the social world’. Arguably there are implications for the claims ethnographers are able to make about their account, which in some ethnographers eyes, is no longer a privileged, ‘thick’ description of the social world from the emic perspective. Along with this is the implications regarding the written text, which attempts to represent the reality of the ‘field’ in writing. Ethnographers should no longer make irrational authority claims such as “I was there and knows what happens: you were not.” Ethnographers’ to validate their accounts as an accurate representation of reality frequently use such claims.
According to van Maanen (1988 cited in Hammersley 1992:25), ethnographers should produce ‘tales of the field’, rather than attempt false realist accounts of the ‘field’.
Some post-modern ethnographers have attempted this and produced a kind of post post-modern ethnography, which takes into account theses criticisms but responds in ways that reassert some of the certainties and realism of earlier types of ethnography. This is not the extreme form of post-modern ethnography, where the method takes up the form of fiction or journalism, but instead a criterion aimed at encouraging more systematic and reliable data.
The post post-modern ethnography criteria consists of ‘subtle realism’, ‘analytical realism’, ‘critical realism or ‘ethnographic imagination’ all of which are a combination of naturalist-like realism and post-modernism.
Subtle realism is based on the notion that no knowledge is certain, but there are phenomena that exist independent of us as researchers and readers, and knowledge claims about them can be judged ‘reasonably accurately’ in terms of their ‘likely’ truth. It shares with naïve realism the idea that research investigates independently knowable phenomena but breaks with it in denying that we have direct access to these phenomena (Hammersley 1992:52).
Analytical realism is based on the view that the social world is an interpreted world, not a literal one, always under symbolic construction and reconstruction by people and by the ethnographers who study them. Analytical realism recognises that most fields have multiple perspectives and voices, which means that the ethnographer must faithfully report this multivocality and show where his voice his/her voice is located in relation to these.
Critical realism is an attempt to explain the relationship of social structure and social action and is grounded in the work of Roy Bhasker. Bhasker (1989:3-4 cited in Brewer 2000:50) explains that ‘social reality is not created by people (the error of naturalism), yet the structures that pre-exist us do not occur independent of human agency (the error of structuralism) but are reproduced and transformed by our action and everyday activities’. Ethnographers such as Porter (1993, 1995) have used ethnography to explore the elements of critical theory, and have appropriated critical realism to defend ethnography from its post-modern critics. He suggests this critique as four important requirements to be imposed on aspiring ethnographers. These are: to make apparent the assumptions and values that underlie the investigation: particularly to identify its methodological basis; to make explicit the theoretical issues which the research is designed to highlight; and to make explicit ‘ontological status’ that social structures are given. He contends that critical realism answers all four requirements.
The ethnographic imagination, according to Atkinson (1990) is the term used to describe ‘the artful and creative rhetorical abilities of ethnographers’. Contrastingly Brewer (2000) uses the same term to describe the ‘imaginative leap necessary to recognise the authority of ethnographic data’. He went on to argue it as being ‘ a call to openness in people’s attitudes towards ethnographic data’, and insisted that it had three dimensions: the belief that extracts from field notes, bits of recorded talks and reports of observed actions can reliably represent a social world, just as long as the ethnographer is ‘reflexive’, thereby establishing his/her ‘integrity’ and the authority of the data; the belief that events in everyday life have common features with the broader social world and can illustrate broader social processes, just as long the ethnographer sets out the grounds on which empirical generalisations are made; and the belief that people make sense of their everyday lives, and offer descriptions and accounts which must be analysed if that social world is to be understood, although members accounts should not be taken at ‘face value’.
Retrospectively ethnography still has an undecided status within all the social science disciplines. It has become widely accepted as a legitimate approach to modern day social research (the proportion of anthropologists and other social researchers who use this qualitative method has increased considerably in recent years). Criticisms that it is unscientific have declined ‘sharply in many quarters’. Even many quantitative researchers now accept that qualitative research has its own logic and criteria of validity. It had even been accorded a role as a sensitising tool for collecting the primary data necessary to pursue the topic quantitatively. At the same time, criticism of ethnographic practice has arisen from new directions. Indeed from among the ethnographers themselves. They established a kind of post-modern ethnography, which abandoned both the claim that ‘reality’ could be accurately represented ethnographically and the so-called criteria by which ethnography’s truth claims could be assessed. However, post post-modern ethnography, unquestionably rescues it from the uncertainty of post-modernism and seeks to ground good practice of the method in a positive methodological foundation. The post post-modern ethnography criteria consists of ‘subtle realism’, ‘analytical realism’, ‘critical realism or ‘ethnographic imagination’ all of which are a combination of naturalist-like realism and post-modernism. The post post-modern type of ethnography supports the possibility and desirability of systematic ethnography.
References:
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Qualitative Research Methods PS2023S