Theory is like underwear. It should be worn inside, not outside.
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| — | Richard Madsen (Background: Him and I were discussing where I put the theory section in my chapter outline.) |
A Comedic & Educational Film Poking Fun At Ethnography
I am now assigning Walter Wippersberg’s 1994 Film, Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich - Dark, Mysterious Austria, to all my students! If you teach qualitative methods, consider including this in your syllabus.
Produced for Austria’s SBS-TV, this films poks fun at old-school ethnography from anthropologists and the National Geographic-esque like exposes on the exotic Africans and South American natives.
“A team of the All African Television network wanders into the darkest regions of the Eastern Alps. They observe the habits and rituals of the natives and make not one, but two ethnological major break-through discoveries.” IMDB
badethnography tell us that at
“At 5:40, we learn that the team has disproved the theory that Europeans are monogamous; starting at about 7:50, they describe the elaborate costumes and militaristic symbolism of clans of the Tyrol region of Austria; and at 15:00, there’s a great discussion of the curious obsession with “patently useless activities,” such as biking for no other purpose than biking itself.
Aside from the humorous commentary, it’s a great way of illustrating the sociological imagination, which requires us to step out of our own culture and try to look at it through the eyes of an outsider — and, as C. Wright Mills put it, to recapture the ability to be astonished by what we normally take for granted.”
Often times ethnography can feel so heavy and serious power and culture, power and culture, power and culture. But what does power and culture look like? How do you explain exoticism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism? Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich is a wonderful video to start those conversations because it’s silly! Part of why I love ethnography so much is that it is so fun and I think this is a great reminder for ethnographers to laugh a bit at ourselves. In all of our musing over the practice and theory of ethnography, we’ve got to remember that we live in a wonderfully silly world and how lovely it is that we live in a period where we get to play all day in collecting knowledge of “man,” a la Foucault.
I don’t think i could ever visit the Alps of Austria without constantly thinking of this video.
UPDATE: Also check out Kitchen Stories, a Swedish film about an ethnographic study on kitchens. It’s a comedy. You can buy the DVD on amazon and watch 2 clips here. Thanks Leila Takayama for the tip!
I am delighted to read this quote below from Angell & Demetis, 2010, Science’s First Mistake: Misinterpreting Observation, Delusion and Paradox. (thanks webisteme for posting this!)
We cannot even know if reality is consistent with sense data, because we only perceive what is already consistent.
After all, under hypnosis we can be jabbed with a needle and yet feel no pain, or smell disgusting imaginary odors, or consider ourselves nailed to the spot unable to move, or a million and one other sensory sensations impressed upon us by the hypnotist.
So what if our society is the hypnotist, and we experience everything in a way we have been pre-programmed and disposed to expect? What if there are other dimensions, available only to senses we do not have? That possibility is of no consequence. It is our blessing, and our curse, to be trapped in three dimensions with the senses we do have, or rather with the senses we have been deluded into having.
But damn my brain hurts to think about this quote in the context of reflexive ethnography.
I’ve been writing for 2 weeks straight so I can’t produce anything comprehensible. So I’m going to out-source the thinking to Mike Lynch - another wonderful recommendation from Barry Brown. Take some time to read Lynch (2000) Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge. Lynch starts off by telling us what he’s pretty much going to rip other forms of reflexivity to shreds - he doesn’t even spare the anthropologists!
Although reflexivity often is associated with radical epistemologies, social scientists with more conventional leanings often speak of reflexivity as a methodological tool, substantive property of social systems, or source of individual enlightenment. Radical and conventional social scientists alike tend to stress the importance of being reflexive, as opposed to being unreflexive, but they do not share a coherent conception of what `being reflexive’ means or entails. As an alternative to reflexive self-privileging, I recommend an ethnomethodological conception of reflexivity as an ordinary, unremarkable and unavoidable feature of action. The ethnomethodological conception does not support a particular theoretical or methodological standpoint by contrasting it to an `unreflexive’ counterpart. It has little value as a critical weapon or source of epistemological advantage, which, in the present context, can have advantages of its own for promoting peace and epistemic democracy.
I love Lynch’s piece so much that I’ve put it online for anyone to download. This should not be stuck in the gallows of academic journals. The section that is most useful starts on page 28 where he outlines 6 different version of reflexivity, and then outline an reflexive ethnomethodology.
Lynch just kills it in this piece. He really does. He pretty much demystifies the typical anthropological or sociolgical excercise of being reflexive about her/his fieldwork.
Ya I know this is straight up ethnomethodology - but Mike Lynch’s work is excellent and super revelevant (unlike many other grumpy old ethnomethodology pieces).
After reading another suggestion from Barry, Mike Lynch’s Silence in Context: Ethnomethodology and Social Theory (1999), i’ve decided that i need to keep that one near my intellectual heart so that my work remains ethnographically driven, not theory driven. It’s a subtle distinction, but important to the work that I do. Hmmm I think it’s Barry’s secret mission to brainwash me with ethnomethodology.
Well I really want to read Angell’s & Demetis’s Science’s First Mistake- but when will I have the time before I move to China!
Another reason why I’m interested in reading this book is because it comes out of Information Systems Analysis.
And this quote makes me of Ghost in The Shell, Denoi Coil, Fringe, and Tron.
ahhhh maybe watching Tron will be a temporary solution.
Ethnography’s tremendous potential for initiating contradictory dialogues that violate cross-class and interracial taboos in our home environments remains mostly untapped.
Academics of all ethnic background usually remain trapped in white public space; they flee the personal vulnerability and hideous, emotionally confusing brutality that engaging addicts, dealers, and petty criminals on their own turf requires.
In this attempt to convey through my conversations with drug dealers the cacophony of victims who victimize on the street, I worry about the inherent pornography of violence that automatically engulfs any presentation of the details of extreme social suffering in the United States.
Someone like Caesar does not need to be apologized for; he does not represent the Puerto Rican or Nuyorican communities; and his existence does not cast aspersions upon the “worthiness” of the poor in the inner city more broadly.
Caesar does, however, embody the social injustice of a nation that systemically chews up its most vulnerable citizens and spots them out onto inner-city streets where their desperate celebration of suffering terrorizes themselves, their neighbors, and their love ones. Worse yet, the agency of their internalized self-destructive rage convinces society to blame individual victims for social problems.
Understanding and representing these problems offers more than an intellectual exercise for ethnography: It is an urgent political challenge.
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| — |
(via anthropophagous) (via fuckyeahanthropology) |
I was not prepared for the elementary fact that an anthropologist is at work from the moment he opens [her] his eyes in the morning until [s]he closes them at night.
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| — | pg xviii, James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press, 1987. |
I just discovered this whole field called “DESIGN THINKING.” It’s a process for designing practical and creative resolutions for an end action/product/program that brings about improvement for a group of people. What I like about this process is that it defines itself against ANALYTICAL THINKING - because design thinking is a “creative process based around the ‘building up’ of ideas. There are no judgments early on in design thinking. This eliminates the fear of failure and encourages maximum input and participation in the ideation and prototype phases.”
NO JUDGEMENTS!!! This is big! So much of “analytical thinking” is about coming up with ideas that don’t look or sound stupid and ideas with minimum chances of failure. But that prevents people from thinking creatively and working as a team because everyone is too invested in their ego or their discipline or their theory.
EVERYDAY KNOWLEDGE! What I like about this philosophy is that it mirrors how people think about solutions in everyday life before they are socialized into institutionalized forms of thinking that require theoretical considerations or busines models. All around the world people are engaging in design thinking! India has been really good at tracking innovations by ordinary people who don’t have “design degrees” or have elite business social networks. Check out the National Innovation Foundation and Honeybee Network.
MULTIDISCIPLINARY THINKING!!! Yah I love things that promote multidisciplinary in a genuine way that values the role of professionals who work on understaning human values - so lookie I know where I fit in! There’s me - ethnographer/sociologist/anthopologist! I have a place in this world - this is so exciting :) I love learning about new business models and technologies - but at the end of the day i’m not a technologist or a hard-core business person - but my entry into both of those worlds is from the perspective of understanding the cultural practices and beliefs of new users who are consuming new technologies. Companies, like Google and P&G, are using this process to understand new markets. This makes me excited that I am employable in non-academic sectors! (thanks Tania Menendez! for the link)
IT’s ABOUT PEOPLE! Design thinking brings it all back to the humans - humans are the ones who use and interface with products - so this process is all about putting humans in all their capacities in the center. So much of design in the past focused on creating “sexy” products - I think that’s why people associate design with “aesthetic” - while I appreciate that aspect for I am just as enamored in beautiful packaging as anyone else - design thinking as a process beings the process back to the people and the people who use the products. GOOD DESIGN THINKING around a product CREATES SEXY PRODUCTS - designing for aesthetics only gets you so far - designing for people takes you a lot farther.
The three approaches to Design Thinking are (cited from here):
1. Proactively understand customer needs and cultural norms unique to each country.
2. Use those insights to run low-fidelity, strategic experiments.
3. Use the resulting assumptions to drive the development of local business models, including product development, marketing and branding, sales and distribution, and manufacturing.
Stanford has a whole institute dedicated to Design Thinking- The Hasso Plattner School of Design at STandford, started by David Kelly, the founder of IDEO. The whole philosophy at IDEO is Design Thinking:
Because design is messy and non-linear, each project we do is bespoke. We customize it for the challenge at hand. The scoping of the project plan is when our approach starts to take shape, and where our partnership with you begins…An inherently shared approach, design thinking brings together people from different disciplines to effectively explore new ideas—ideas that are more human-centered, that are better able to be executed, and that generate valuable new outcomes.
And I love Tom Brown’s (CEO of IDEO) blog on Design Thinking.
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I would like to think through the Design Thinking process for my work in Mexico with Barry Brown, Gloria Mark, Jesus Favela and Tanya Mendendez. We are working with a village in Oaxaca on designing appropriate technology for the people of this village. All along we’ve approached it from the circle that would be called “Human Values” according to DEsign Thinking. After two years of ethnography fieldwork in Oaxaca, we are finally in the phase where we are bringing in the technologists of CICESE and the people of the village to brainstorm ideas that would be useful for THEIR lives - not ours! We are hosting the design workshop in 2 weeks so I will post about that later.
Thanks Al Abut for pointing out some critiques of DEsign Thinking here and here - that essentially say this process nurtures the designer’s ego instead of removing it. Perhaps I am not clear about this process since my entry point isn’t as a designer nor as a corporation - but I would think that a more genuine implementation of Design Thinking requires an equal level of respect given to all the team-members that come from the all the other disciplines and the users. For me Design Thinking is exciting because it’s discusses a formal way to equally valorize the role of ethnographers/sociologists/anthropologists alongside the technologists and business heads. For too long psychologists were the only “people”-centered research folks allowed at the table.
