Fieldwork, Culture, and Ethnography

If ethnography produces cultural interpretations through intense research experience, how is such unruly experience transformed into an authoritative written account? How, precisely, is a garrulous, overdetermined, cross-cultural encounter, shot through with power relations and personal cross purposes circumscribed as an adequate version of a more-or-less discrete "otherworld," composed by an individual author? James Clifford

An ethnography is written representation of a culture (or selected aspects of a culture). It carries quite serious intellectual and moral responsibilities, for the images of others inscribed in writing are most assuredly not neutral. Ethnographic writings can and do inform human conduct and judgment in innumerable ways by pointing to the choices and restrictions that reside at the very heart of social life. My intention in this monograph is to organize and bring to light some often overlooked narrative conventions of ethnography so that different modes of cultural portraiture can be identified, appreciated, compared, and perhaps improved.

This is not a book, therefore, about the method of ethnography (fieldwork) or about its subject (culture). Both are vital notions, of course, because when married in an ethnography they form something of a conceptual union. To be sure, ethnography has a long history, and its techniques, goals, and representational styles mean different things, not always complementary, to its many curious readers. These matters will be covered in due course. But let us first consider what ethnography ties together—fieldwork and culture—as well as the knot itself.

Scribes and Tribes Together

Fieldwork is one answer—some say the best—to the question of how the understanding of others, close or distant, is achieved. Fieldwork usually means living with and living like those who are studied. In its broadest, most conventional sense, fieldwork demands the full-time involvement of a researcher over a lengthy period of time (typically unspecified) and consists mostly of ongoing interaction with the human targets of study on their home ground. In print, the research is presented as occasionally boring, sometimes exciting, but virtually always self-transforming as the fieldworker comes to regard an initially strange and unfamiliar place and people in increasingly familiar and confident ways.

Fieldworkers represent themselves as "marginal natives" (Freilich, 1970) or "professional strangers" (Agar, 1980) who, as "self-reliant loners" (Lofland, 1974) or "self-denying emissaries" (Boon, 1982) bring forth a cultural account, an ethnography, from the social setting studied. While there are undoubtedly cases where fieldworkers fail to achieve a status among the studied better than "dull visitors," "meddlesome busybodies," "hopeless dummies," "social creeps," "anthrofoologists," "management spies," or "government dupes," fieldworkers themselves, by reference to the massive amounts of experience they accumulate in the field and the attention they pay to the role relations that emerge, are sure to present their stay as highly instructive.

To do fieldwork apparently requires some of the instincts of an exile, for the fieldworker typically arrives at the place of study without much of an introduction and knowing few people, if any. Fieldworkers, it seems, learn to move among strangers while holding themselves in readiness for episodes of embarrassment, affection, misfortune, partial or vague revelation, deceit, confusion, isolation, warmth, adventure, fear, concealment, pleasure, surprise, insult, and always possible deportation. Accident and happenstance shapes fieldworkers' studies as much as planning or foresight; numbing routine as much as living theatre; impulse as much as rational choice; mistaken judgments as much as accurate ones. This may not be the way fieldwork is reported, but it is the way it is done.

What I mean by fieldwork is the stiff, precise, probably too visual, but nonetheless double-edged notion of participant-observation. This is less a definition for a method than it is an amorphous representation of the researcher's situation during a study. Whether or not the fieldworker ever really does "get away" in a conceptual sense is becoming increasingly problematic, but physical displacement is a requirement. The method reflects a bedrock assumption held historically by fieldworkers that "experience" underlies all understanding of social life (Penniman, 1974; Rock, 1979; Georges and Jones, 1980). Fieldwork asks the researcher, as far as possible, to share firsthand the environment, problems, background, language, rituals, and social relations of a more-or-less bounded and specified group of people. The belief is that by means of such sharing, a rich, concrete, complex, and hence truthful account of the social world being studied is possible. Fieldwork is then a means to an end.

The ends of fieldwork involve the catchall idea of culture; a concept as stimulating, productive, yet fuzzy to fieldworkers and their readers as the notion of life is for biologists and their readers. Culture is akin to a black hole that allows no light to escape. The observer knows of culture's presence not by looking, but only by conjecture, inference, and a great deal of faith (Wagner, 1981; Sperber, 1974). Culture, while certainly a cosmic idea, is nonetheless expressed in some down-to-earth ways. In currently fashionable form, culture refers to the knowledge members ("natives") of a given group are thought to more or less share; knowledge of the sort that is said to inform, embed, shape, and account for the routine and not-so-routine activities of the members of the culture (Conklin, 1968; Becker, 1980; Swidler, 1986). It is necessarily a loose, slippery concept, since it is anything but unchanging. Culture is neither prison nor monolith. Nor, of course, is it tangible. A culture is expressed (or constituted) only by the actions and words of its members and must be interpreted by, not given to, a fieldworker. To portray culture requires the fieldworker to hear, to see, and, most important for our purposes, to write of what was presumably witnessed and understood during a stay in the field. Culture is not itself visible, but is made visible only through its representation.

This is what makes the study of culture so sticky. Human culture is not something to be caged for display, put on a slide for inspection, read from an instrument, or hung on a wall for viewing. The fieldworker must display culture in a narrative, a written report of the fieldwork experience in self-consciously selected words. Ethnography is the result of fieldwork, but it is the written report that must represent the culture, not the fieldwork itself. Ethnography as a written product, then, has a degree of independence (how culture is portrayed) from the fieldwork on which it is based (how culture is known). Writing an ethnography is office-work or deskwork, not fieldwork (Marcus, 1980).

The Limits of...