Lecture 7: Ethnography

Fairness and subjectivity: auto ethnography of a first time rugby referee - Baldwin

• create social change by revealing rhetorical limitations of community sports organization and advocating for improved policies and practices in community-based rugby

• one sided games, violence, pressure

• mercy rule - implementation of 50-point spread mercy rule for the following seasons

• code of conduct

• professional judgement - groups accepted that referees retain autonomy to officiate based on context of the game

Crossfit reading - Crockett and Butryn

• crossfit is not just a trend

• represents dramatic shift in social function of recreational fitness

• moves way from curate/managed fitness model of commercial gyms toward a communal, intense and more inclusive model

ethnography

• study of social interactions behavior, and perceptions that occur within cultures organizations or groups

• document the culture from the perspective of the insiders - those who are inside the culture

• observe and explain interactions in ordinary settings, in a way that does not interrupt or alter those interactions

ETHNOS

people

GRAPHING

writing

ethnography - greek meaning

writing about a people - portrait of a people

written description of particular culture, custom, belief, or behavior based on information collected through fieldwork

Bronislaw Malinowski

• invented ethnography

• spent three years on the Trobriand Islands

• invented modern form of fieldwork and ethnography as its analytic component

Malinowski 3 types of data

• detailed description of daily activities

• documented all the stories, myths, narratives norms, expectations he came across

• created synoptic charts

why do ethnography

• things aren’t always what they seem

• sometimes insiders (natives) are too close to the culture to see it clearly - lack insight, discover as an asset

purpose of ethnography

• gain deep understanding of people and their culture

• put behaviors/beliefs/interactions into context

typical ethnography

months or years of observation

mini ethnogrpahy

days or weeks of observation

ethnography characteristics

• exploratory

• conducted in a natural setting (go where the people are)

• aimed at discovering a local’s point of view (insider’s POV)

• data gathered from a wide range of sources, mainly observation and information conversations

• unstructured data collection (but not necessary)

examples of when to use ethnography

• understand social roles of families or institutions

• examine social interactions

• observe impacts of new policies

• explore new cultures (different from your own)

• search for meaning in cultural norms and views

macroethnography

study of broadly defined cultural groupings - “torontonians”im

microethnography

study of narrowly defined cultural grouping such as “undergraduate students at UofT”

Emic perspective

goal of research is to understand the way the members of a given culture perceive their world

Etic Perspective

the goal of the research is to understand how non-members (outsiders) perceive and interpret the behaviors and phenomena of a given culture

skills required for ethnography

• interpretative agility

• familiarity with social settings

• respect for culture

• good interactional and interpersonal skills

• sensitivity toward the culture, values, and norms

• open mind

• focus (ability to stick with it for a long time)

• patience

• ability to put people at ease

advantages of ethnography

• in depth findings

• possibility to uncover new information (not just answer a question, but to find new questions)

• share cultural understandings and build empathy

• experiential - immersed in culture

disadvantages of ethnography

• researcher bias

• a lot of writing - qualitative

• requires time (many visits, long study time)

• nonreplicable

• nongeneralizable

Documentary cinema

cinamtic genre that broadly includes nonfiction films

• ethnographic cinema makes up a subgenera

• all ethnographic films are documentaries, but not vice versa

Ethnographic cinema

• use camera as a tool to collect ethnographic data

• anthropological rigor - spend a long time in field before beginning to shoot (at least a year), intimate understanding of communities - mastering essential “film and sound recording skills”