Week 7: Ethnography on the Move: From Field to Net to Internet

Wittel (2000)

Ethnography is a qualitative research design aimed at exploring cultural phenomena. The resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group. An ethnography is a means to represent graphically, and in writing, the culture of a people.

According to Clifford Geertz (1973) the concept of cultural anthropology in the late 50s and early 60s has been very straightforward: "they have a culture out there and your job is to come back and tell us what it is". Today the idea of "a culture out there" is problematic due to the reality that societies have modernised and differentiated and so have cultures.

The contacts between societies and between cultures have been intensified through media, telecommunications, economy, migration, travelling etc. The dominant position within ethnography is now that the apparent boundedness of a culture is something constructed rather than found, and there is broad agreement that even the tiniest geographical places have cultures rather than one single culture.

• "What would once have appeared as a logical impossibility - ethnography without the ethnos - has come to appear, to many, perfectly sensible, even necessary" (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997a: 2)

Two strategies to modernise ethnography beyond the tradition of fieldwork in a geographically defined locality with clear borders and boundaries:

1. Reposition ethnography as "research self-consciously embedded in a world system" that "moves out from single sites and local situations...to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects and identities in diffuse time-space (Marcus, 1998: 79)

Related to this are suggestions to redefine and de-centre the notion of 'the field'. Instead of referring to locality - "the here" and "the elsewhere" - the field should instead be conceptualised as a "political location". This might bring about a move from the field in an 'among the so-and-so' sense towards a mode of study that cares about, and pays attention to, the interlocking of multiple socio-political sites and locations (Appadurai in Gupta & Ferguson, 1997b: 37). Such a reconstruction of fieldwork would reposition the role of participant observation: it would continue to be a major part of anthropological methodologies, but cease to be fetishised.

Ethnography could also move away from studying 'fields' and towards and ethnography of networks, 
in line with the idea of a "Network Society" (Castells, 1996):

• like a field, networks are still strongly related to geographical space
• unlike a field a network is an open structure, able to expand without limits and highly dynamic
• a network does not merely consist of a set of nodes, but also a set of connections between the nodes

An ethnography of networks would contain the examination of the nodes of a net and the examination of the connections and flows (money, objects, people, ideas etc) between these nodes.

2. Shift from material spaces to so-called cyberspace

The growth of the internet is one of the greatest cultural phenomena of our time, impacting almost all areas of life. So it is not surprising there is a rapidly increasing body of ethnographic work that studies online communication and interaction, but also related spaces that are highly mediated and interactive - e.g. virtual cities / universities / marketplaces etc.

Both strategies...suggest that ethnography is on the move.

1. Ethnographic practice is attendance, is a co-presence of ethnographer and the observes social situation. Whether this co-presence requires one single shared space is a problem worth discussing, particularly in the context of online ethnographies.
2. Ethnography is about revealing context and thus complexity 

A century ago, ethnographers like Haddon, Boas and Malinowski revolutionised anthropology by not merely studying decontextualised objects...but rather by studying people in the natural environment. To them the key to gaining an understanding of communities/tribes and their cultures, rituals and patterns of interaction was a long-term immersion in another way of life (understood as an increase in complexity). What made perfect sense at the turn of the last century now becomes the centre of debate: long-term participant observation in a locally limited area privileges face-to-face relationships and tends to overlook movement. It priviliges boundaries and thus difference and tends to overlook connections and connectivity.

From the field to the 'net'...

• Ethnographic research in and on a network requires careful consideration about which areas of the network to include
• As networks are infinite, by drawing boundaries the ethnographer actively and consciously participates in the construction of spaces and in the spatialisation of difference. Therefore, the framing of the network pre-structures the findings and conclusions of any ethnographic enquiry and also becomes a political practice
• Raises implications for 'fieldwork', e.g. how to allocate available time. The more multi-sited an ethnography is, the less time is available for the individual nodes or the individual connections between the nodes
• Culture is created in the area of the 'in-between', it is a dynamic process, it is about becoming and fading away
• Mitigates the role of the 'gate-keeper' common to traditional ethnographic studies. The researcher may need as many gate-keepers as there are relevant nodes
• Will change the relationship between the ethnographer and the observed in such a way that the boundaries between home and the remote 'field' become less clear
• Will reduce the time that can be spent with one single site, which will negatively affect the search for hidden and deep layers of meaning and the pursuit of a "thick description"

...to the Internet

An ethnography of purely virtual spaces stretches ethnographic practice into an unknown area, moving is so far beyond tradition that it has to deal with a set of serious difficulties:

1. The validity of data on the internet users e.g. accuracy of age, gender, nationality etc cannot be checked. This uncertainty is particularly problematic in a space that has become famous for its 'playful' possibilities - i.e. a person's online identity can differ greatly from their offline identity.
2. The relationship between participant observation and ethnographic practice. The ethnographer cannot observe 'real people' - i.e. it is possible to see the growth of a discussion list or words in a chat area, but not observe the actual person creating them. Gupta and Ferguson (1997b: 37) admit that "participant observation continues to be a major part of positioned anthropological methodologies". 
3. A "thick description" of networks requires a thick description of connections and connectivity. The connectivity in virtual spaces is represented by hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are an impoverished and one-dimensional way to represent and express social ties. N.B. This article was written pre-blogging, let alone pre social networking.
4. The displacement between ethnographer and the 'field' results in a lack of a common and mutual perception of the physical context, preventing the ethnographer from observing factors such as dress codes. Interaction patterns are also affected, for example a f-2-f dialogue includes gestures, the sound of a voice, the smell of someone etc. An online communication is limited to the written word and a handful of so called emoticons.

If one of the core objectives of ethnographic work is to reveal complexity, then virtual spaces encounter a similar problem to physical spaces because they DON'T INTEGRATE CONTEXT. The lack of context, which is in this case the context of the offline or physical environment, does not reveal complexity, but rather creates a reduction of complexity. If the research conducted is single-sited, that is to say from the researcher's office computer, it might be more appropriate to dispense with the term ethnography and talk about conversation analysis, text analysis or discourse analysis.

Rather than arguing for a 'real reality' and a 'virtual reality', rather than emphasising the difference between material and digital spaces, we should introduce a more relational perspective and concentrate on the similarities, connections and overlappings.

So ethnography faces a dilemma: on the one hand the attempts to overcome the notion of 'field as geographically limited area are overdue. On the other hand these attempts clearly show that it is hard to escape from the notions of 'field' and 'fieldwork.