Ten Lies Of Ethnography
GARY ALAN FINE
UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA
Keynote Address
That master sociologist Everett Hughes often trenchantly
noted to his many apprentices that there is an "underside"
associated with all work. Each job has techniques of doing
things -- standard operating procedures -- of which it would be
impolitic for those outside of the guild to know. Illusions are
essential to maintain an occupational reputation. Such actions
are typically hidden in the backstage regions to which outsiders
do not gain access. As has been said, "no one should without a
strong stomach should watch sausage or laws being made." The
production of good things may not be a pretty sight. The reality
of life in an operating room, in a kitchen, or in a judge's
chambers is not always the stuff of heroic public images.
Illusions are necessary for occupational survival. Indeed, as
professional baseball umpire Hank Soar remarked in response to
former professional pitcher Jim Bouton's (1970) "expose" of
professional baseball: "If we all wrote about what we know about
other people, there'd be no baseball" (Bouton 1971). No baseball
-- not in the physical sense, but on the moral plane. The world
is secured on secrets. Yet, illusions have a way of growing,
of laying down roots, of becoming taken for granted. This begins
to be problematic when practitioners take their illusions for
real. It is not that practitioners operate out of cynical
knowledge, but rather they should operate with the recognition
that they must make choices, which impel them to behave in ways
that differ from how they would like "the general public" to
assume that they behave. This is the reality of life in a
division of labor in which work lives are enacted behind gauzy
curtains.
I wish to examine the underside of qualitative methodology
-- thus, the provocative title. In a methodology that is
increasingly becoming self-critical, questioning, and unwilling
to take for granted the assumptions that had always been assumed,
such a perspective is legitimate. I use the word "lies" rather
than "myths," because the former captures better the assertion
that we should be aware of the reality that we are shading in our
assumptions about the world -- and being provocative is sometimes
a virtue.
My underlying thesis is that qualitative research -- like
all life -- is both more and less than its public image. We
indulge in claims and assumptions about the method and the
analysis behind it that cannot withstand close and cold scrutiny.
Determining the reality of any instance of qualitative research
is hard because so much of the process is hidden and backstage.
Researchers work as lone rangers -- as cowboys -- as
individualists. Analysis is private, field notes are not to be
made available for secondary analysis, and much ethnographic
writing is accepted on faith. We even assure ourselves that
there are good and sufficient ethical rationales for this
secrecy. Opportunities for deception are great. While
researchers are fundamentally honest -- as lawyers, clergymen,
doctors, and car salesmen are fundamentally honest, everyone's
goal is to get by, and permit one's life to run tolerable
smoothly -- to engage in impression management.
In discussing the ten lies of ethnography I do no more that
to put flesh on the truism that all workers are caught in a set
of demands that compel them to deviate from the formal and
idealistic rules of their profession. Borrowing from Howard
Becker and his colleagues (1961) in Boys in White, idealism may
sometimes be a luxury in a pressured circumstance. These
illusions are a necessary component of how work is structured and
of our needs for presentation of self. I discern a number of
images of ethnographers -- mental images and images for public
consumption -- based on partial truths or even self-deceptions.
Consider: 1) The Kindly Ethnographer, 2) The Friendly
Ethnographer, 3) The Honest Ethnographer, 4) The Fair
Ethnographer, 5) The Candid Ethnographer, 6) The Precise
Ethnographer, 7) The Observant Ethnographer, 8) The Unobtrusive
Ethnographer, 9) The Chaste Ethnographer, and 10) The Literary
Ethnographer.
The Kindly Ethnographer
Most -- if not all -- ethnographers make a play for their
subjects, suggesting that they are intensely sympathetic
chroniclers. When this is true -- as I shall discuss later --
it involves lies, but, it is equally applicable when it is not.
Most ethnographers are quite taken by the lives of those they
examine, but this is not inevitably so. Sometimes we examine
unpleasant lives, groups, and organizations -- and may choose to
do this with malice aforethought. The examination of disparaged
groups -- groups that one begins the research expecting to
dislike -- does occur in the social sciences. This phenomenon is
well-explored by Jack Douglas in his provocative Investigative
Social Research. Douglas, more that most ethnographers, is
explicit about the reality of disparaging informants, and of
being suspicious of the information that one receives. His
powerful metaphor of the investigatory paradigm of research stems
from this stance. Douglas assumes that subjects may provide
misinformation, may evade, may lie, and may put up fronts
(Douglas 1976, p. 57). Recognizing this, Douglas suggests that
similar interactional tools might be legitimate for the
sociologist as well -- turnabout is fair play. For a
politically committed researcher investigative research has a
considerable appeal. Yet, such a stance presupposes that
informed consent will be limited, in that what is being informed
is less that what the subjects would wish to know in retrospect.
It is also less that what the researcher recognizes that she or
he should report in fairness. Such a research strategy is not
grounded in justice to the observed group. Research must be
amenable to studying "the bad guys" as well as "the good guys."
Put this way, the only way in which such research can be carried
out effectively is if the bad guys are unaware that this is how
the ethnographer conceives of them. It assumes that we can
categorize good guys and bad guys. Ethnographers must confront
these groups secretly, only later, facing justifiably harsh
feelings from the target, revealing their hidden intentions.
The researcher appears to be a kindly soul, but turns out to
be a spy, an undercover agent, operating against the interests of
the observed group. Even though this approach might be justified
in terms of its overall benefit, it is based upon a lie -- a
lack of kindly intentions, a hidden secret.
The Friendly Ethnographer
Will Rogers once said, and many since then have mocked, that
he never met a man he didn't like. This is the assumption of the
qualitative researcher: Will Rogers in academic tweed. The
researcher supposedly -- read the texts -- doesn't dislike
everyone. It is the rare ethnographer who is willing to admit
publicly that this is not the case. I believe (and confess) that
most researchers discover that their are individuals with whom
they are incompatible. We do not like everyone that we meet --
certainly not everyone that we meet in the workplace,
particularly when goals and motivations may be contrary.
This claim covers a range of emotions and types of relationships.
We must examine the emotional fibre of the multi-dimensional
range of relations, not only the ecstatically fulfilling or the
brutal horrid. The reality is that there are many individuals
with whom we are not compatible, but with whom we can maintain
cordial, if somewhat distant, relationships, when there is no
tension in the system and when we are not aiming for incompatible
goals. Many of our relations are "temporarily friendly." Then
there are others with whom we feel acutely uncomfortable, and
from whom we generally attempt to keep our distance. Even in
ethnographic research we may create elaborate rationales, whereby
we place ourselves in other spaces. Finally we must honor those
sacred few -- those few individuals of whom we can say with some
confidence that we really do not like -- those who we hate. Many
ethnographers uncover an occasional person of that sort -- a
target of our dislike. Hopefully not too many or this style of
research, which is after all based on pleasantries, would be
impossible. Hated individuals are to be found within our
ethnographic world, but in the narrative representation of that
world, they often vanish. We crop them from the picture. The
illusion is that we have managed our affairs sweetly and well.
This raises a problem under those circumstances in which our
dislike may stem from something that relates to the research
question -- in other words, when the personal dislike is not
merely idiosyncratic, but is connected to our orientation to the
research scene. For observers who are driven to attempt to like
everyone within their purview, this dislike may develop when
their friendly face is not accepted by some of those to whom it
is offered. A spurned ethnographer can be a dangerous foe. This
spurning may not be idiosyncratic, but may emerge directly from
the nature of the on- going research. The dislike that emerges
can be seen as emanating from the research, although it has
tended to be described as an embarrassing nodule, hidden from
prying eyes of the ethnographic reader.
In my own research I must confess to several instances in
which bad feelings developed between me and my subjects. I touch
upon one instance in which the methodological appendix describing
my seasons studying Little League baseball in With the Boys:
Preadolescent Culture and Little League Baseball. One of the
coaches, not of a team that I had singled out for particular
attention, felt that I was collaborating with his rivals in the
league and refused to permit me to collect questionnaires from
his boys, questionnaires that he had previously willingly
distributed. At various times during the season, he attempted to
humiliate me, as, for instance, not accepting a lineup card that
another manager had asked me to deliver. As a consequence, I
took private pleasure writing about this man and his son in my
book, although I was careful to be "ethical" in that I never
mentioned his name and excluded identifying features. Perhaps if
he read the book he might recognize himself, perhaps his
colleagues would. This reminds us that those of us with access
to "the media" have power that others cannot match. Taunt us if
you dare.
The Honest Ethnographer
The grail of informed consent is at the end of the twisted
road of most ethical discussions. Research subjects, it is said,
have the right to know what they are getting themselves into.1
Sounds good. The problem is that this advice flies int he face
of much that has been written by ethnographers (and other
methodologists) who are concerned about "reactivity." They argue
that knowing the research goals will surely and inevitably skew
the results. This is complicated by the ethnographic truism,
gleaned from Glaser and Strauss's (1967) The Discovery of
Grounded Theory, that good ethnographers do not know what they
are looking for until they have already found it. How can we
detail our topics to our informants, when we don't know them
ourselves. Many qualitative researchers have had the experience
of filling out a Human Subjects Committee document or a grant
application, only to be asked to explain the hypotheses and
explain how they will be conveyed to subjects. The only honest
response is that what we are studying is: Them.
By honest, I do not mean that ethnographers lie about their
justification for research -- although they may, but rather that
they do not tell the truth as they know it, and have constructed
a web of justifications for this choice. In this sense,
ethnographers use the same arguments as do those who select
laboratory experimentation, claiming that the truth will
systematically compromise the findings.
This absence of honesty perhaps reached its apex in the
controversy that developed over Laud Humphreys' Tearoom Trade, in
which he interviewed informants who had participated unknowingly
in his ethnography of impersonal sex in public places, but did so
under the guise that they were selected through a random
selection process. He tracked these individuals through their
license plate numbers. In his enlarged edition, Humphreys (1975,
p. 230) regrets that decision. Clearly these individuals were
interviewed under false pretenses, even though there is no
evidence that they suffered any harm in the process. Throughout
the course of life we mislead others for goals that seem to be
worthy -- or if not worthy, at least convenient. Indeed, one
might ask why honesty should in practice, as opposed to in
theory, be seen as so virtuous -- particularly if one avoids
causing harm.
The vigorous and heated debate in the 1960s about the
legitimacy of disguised, covert observation directly concerns
this. Kai Erikson (1967) pointedly criticized his colleagues who
chose to enter scenes in which they had no legitimate right to
be, professing claims to belonging that were bogus. He argued
that this methodology did not adequately respect the moral
stature of the profession., He singled out for criticism
research by John Lofland and Robert Lejeune (1960) in which this
researchers and their colleagues attempted to explore the
reaction of members of Alcoholics Anonymous to new members of
varying social classes. The researchers "played" recovering
alcoholics, and dressed according to social class norms,
presumably misleading members of these groups. Critics of this
style of hidden research feel that disguised observation places
the researcher in the same position as the espionage agent,
perhaps reflecting a lack of proper concern with the "human
rights" of informants not to be deceived, particularly in those
situations in which the clearest beneficiary is the deceptive
researcher. How much and what kinds of explanations we
provide are choices that we make from our position of power and
information control. In a previous analysis (Fine 1980), I
distinguished among three strategies of information control.
Borrowing a metaphor from the espionage community, I label these:
Deep Cover, Shallow Cover, and Explicit Cover. In the first of
these, Deep Cover, the researcher does not announce that he or
she is a researcher. Rather, the researcher participates in the
life of the group as a full members. Operating under Explicit
Cover, the researcher makes as complete an announcement of the
goals and hypotheses of the research as possible, not worrying if
this explanation will have a reactive effect. The third
technique, Shallow Cover, is a compromise. The researcher
announces the existence of the ethnography, but is vague about
the goals. Thus, many researchers attempt to avoid reactivity by
claiming to wish "to study people like you, what you think and
what you do." Often such an explanation suffices. The
researcher is announced but the research foci are not
compromised. Such is either the best of all worlds or the worst,
depending on one's orientation. The Fair Ethnographer
What does it mean to be fair? Is fairness possible? The
label "fair" can consist of two alternative meanings -- that of
objectivity or that of balance. Each is problematic in its own
way, and each is far from universal in qualitative research
reports. Some would suggest that they should not even be goals.
Certainly qualitative researchers need not be warned about
the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of striving for
objectivity. Objectivity was an illusion -- an illusion grounded
in the comforting acceptance of positivism -- that the world was
ultimately knowable. However, the world is always known from a
perspective, even though we might be able to agree that often
perspectives do not vary dramatically. The new ethnographic
movement, found most notably in anthropology through the writings
of James Clifford and his colleagues has steadily spread outside
of that orbit into other arenas of ethnographic work -- for
instance, education and sociology. Few ethnographers believe in
a single objective reality, but perhaps in realist ethnographies
(Van Maanen 1988) such a doubt was not explicitly stated. Indeed
the illusion was, in important respects, quite the reverse.
The ethnographer typically has depicted him or herself as
being an "honest broker" -- an individual with nothing to hide
and with everything to share. She or he is the person who can
parse the facts. However, we now believe that this belief is
illusory and accept that an image of fairness in the name of
objectivity is misguided. However, there is a sense in which
this response may also be misguided. Once again one can't win,
but such is the reality of occupational backstages. By admitting
one's perspective and/or by seeing the world in terms of ideology
and narrative we put on the mask of being open, but still without
doing justice to all the ways in which a setting might be
understood. We have not presented the diversity of world views,
because we are by nature an "interested party." My point is not
that this can be avoided, but rather that we should come out more
forcefully and admit the paradox. There are no honest brokers.
This perspective becomes particularly salient for that group
of ethnographers who are engaged in "policy-relevant" research or
qualitative applied research -- a branch of qualitative research
that has grown remarkably in the 1980s. However, if my argument
is correct, qualitative evaluation research, like all evaluation
research, is "contaminated" by the perspective that the
researcher brings to the question. While this is inevitable, and
part of the problem of evaluation in general (that one's answers
depend on one's questions), the researcher must admit the lack of
"fairness" of the account. The Candid Ethnographer
Ethnographers differ little from Erving Goffman's social
actors; they depend upon impression management skills. No one
wishes to look "bad," and, as a consequence, much information --
unknown to the reader -- is censored by a self-concerned
ethnographer. One frequently encountered technique for this
defense of the self is the fly-on-the-wall model -- an
ethnography without ethnographer. This technique has perhaps
been most dramatically been perfected by The New Yorker magazine
-- a New Yorker ethnography, such as Stephen King's (1990)
description of Little League baseball, has no observer. Indeed,
much journalism operates on this claim, not just of objectivity,
but on the more radical belief that in Edward R. Murrow's terms,
You Are There. The illusion is that everything that is reported
has actually happened, because you have been exposed to it. This
illusion can be seen for what it is when the writer relies on the
passive voice, indicating that someone "was asked," attempting to
elide the reality that the asker was the writer. The literary
claim is that the asking just happened "naturally," from within
the system.
The question ultimately becomes who is the "who" in the
system? How many imperfections is one going to choose to report?
How much is relevant for public consumption, particularly as it
relates to the sometimes embarrassing actions of the researcher?
The issue of what and how much to report does not have any
"right" or eternal answers. Answers are always grounded in
choices, wherein the cynic can claim, as I do here, that the
researcher is either not being candid, or, on the other hand, is
overglorifying the self in a report that none but one's relatives
might choose voluntarily to read. My charge is that whatever
choice is made is not made entirely on theoretical grounds. It
is impossible to disentangle the personal demands of presentation
of self -- how one is going to appear to others -- from the
question of what one should do "in the name of science." Being
candid, thus, becomes a situated choice that is forever linked
with how the candor is likely to affect one's reputation as a
scholar. One hopes that one does good by doing well.
The recent experimental attempts to make oneself the center
of one's own ethnography can no more escape the dilemmas of
exposing one's candor than can attempts to pretend that one
wasn't there and that all one is doing is passing on what
occurred in "actual fact." New techniques of ethnographic
description demand the same bracketing of candor as does the
claim of the absent ethnographer. There is no way to escape the
reality that one's presentation of one's own role is inevitably
an exercise in tact. There always is a reader looking over a
writer's shoulder.
The Precise Ethnographer
An assumption exists that is dearly held that data provided
in field notes reflect what has "really" happened. More
specifically we assume that quotation marks reveal words that
have been truly spoken. This is often an illusion, a lie -- a
deception of which we should be aware. It is the opposite of
plagiarism, where we give credit to someone who does not deserve
it, at least not for those precise words. To recall the exact
words of a conversation, especially if one has not been trained
in shorthand or as a court report (and not even then, as
stenographers and court reporters can attest), is impossible.
This is particularly applicable to those observers who wish to
maintain the illusion of true participation by not taking notes
within the limits of the public situation itself. We remember
the old joke about the participant observer noted for having a
small bladder, because of frequent excuses to use the nearest
restroom. There the researcher furtively and rapidly inscribes
the immediate observations. He or she maintains the illusion of
omniscience by recreating a situation with attendant bits of talk
after having left the event -- skating on even thinner ice.
In such situations we become playwrights, reconstructing a
scene for the insight of our readers, imagining ongoing events in
our minds (Bartlett 1932). We claim that the scene really
happened, but it clearly didn't happen in precisely the form that
we are announcing. We are like that band of popular biographers
who in order to make a scene compelling and "real," create
dialogue that is "likely" to occur, and that, in the process,
support the arguments and morals that the writer wishes us to
understand. The dialogue is not fully accurate in that requiring
an attestation that these "precise" words were said is futile.
One would need a gifted, encyclopedic ear -- an ear never seen.
When conscientiously compiled, the quotations are both true and
false. They are true in that with ethical researchers they
represent something "along the lines" of what was said --
transformed into our own words that we place -- in a most
unsanitary way -- in the mouths of others.
When I teach qualitative methods I assign my graduate
students an in-class exercise which I have two of them converse
informally for a minute or two. Immediately once the
conversation has been completed, I ask that all students write
the exact words of the conversation to the best of their ability.
When the tape of the brief conversation is played, students
discover to their chagrin that although they may have captured
the "gist" of the conversation, which after all had ended only
moments before, they have not captured the words themselves.
Obviously some students have better recall than do others, but
none are close to perfect. This underlines my point that the
details of those quotations and even the descriptions of
behaviors should at best be treated as approximations, as
signposts, and more likely should be treated as mini-docudramas.
I most of my observational research, I have depended on having
my field notebook in plain view, which perhaps decreases the rate
of errors, even though it may also distract me and my informants.
Yet, even then I recognize that the materials I present are not
exact quotations, particularly in light of the weakness of my
stenographic skills.
The illusion of verisimilitude is crucial for the grounding
of qualitative research: its rich precision. The belief that
this is "real life," not fiction and not approximation, provides
a charter for participant observation. This depiction of reality
gives ethnography a leg up over survey research, experimentation,
and the like, but it is, I suggest, a belief that is at best only
approximately true. The Observant Ethnographer
We assume that the report of a scene will be a "complete"
picture -- that there exists a reasonably precise correspondence
between what is said to have occurred, and what "actually"
happened. There is a related belief that -- at least during the
period that the ethnographer was present -- not much of
importance was missed. But suppose that this comforting belief
is not accurate, suppose the picture painted is missing critical
information -- that the ethnographer was simply not sufficiently
observant. The ethnographic picture will always lack detail and
shading -- sometimes these absences are material in that other
ethnographers would have arrived at sharply different conclusions
from highlighting different material.
On the surface this criticism is one that primarily targets
"bad ethnography" -- most of us would agree that ethnography and
ethnographers differ in skills just as degrees of quality are
found everywhere. Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon
allegedly noted in response to claims that most science fiction
is of poor quality, "Yes, 90% of science fiction is crap, but
then 90% of everything is crap." And, following Sturgeon's Law,
90% of all ethnography is crap. While we might dispute the
numbers, and while we should be wary of turning quality into the
dichotomous variable of "crap/not crap," the point is still
valid. However, we must transcend this cold assertion of
scholarly incompetence to recognize that the ability to be
totally aware is an imperfect skill. We do mishear, we do not
recognize what we see, and we are positioned wrong to make sense
of the happenings around us. We are well-aware of the amusing
anecdotes told on our children of when they misheard some common
adult phrase and transform it in humorous ways, such as the child
who (mis)hears the first line of the national anthem as "Jose,
Can you see." We ethnographers, particularly when newly
observing novel scenes, are all too like that amusing five year
old. Everything is capable of multiple interpretations, and
these misunderstandings stem not from our incompetence, but
rather from our competencies in other domains. Some things we do
not see because we simply are not trained or situationally
knowledgeable to look for them. Paul Stoller's (1989) excellent
ethnography of the Songhay of Niger, The Taste of Ethnographic
Things, reminds us that we rely on our visual and auditory
senses, to the neglect of touch, smell, and taste. Thus, we are
not observant -- the very skill that competent participant
observation is supposedly -- and actually -- based on. Yet, this
weakness is inescapable. A further cause to being
unobservant is a consequence of personal, temporal, and
situational pressures. We all know how difficult participant
observation is, and how much of a strain it can be even in the
best of circumstances. There are hours and hours of
observations, followed by hours and hours of composing one's
field notes. When I was conducting my research with fantasy role
play gamers (Fine 1983) -- those who played Dungeons & Dragons --
I would occasionally spend the lengthening hours from seven in
the evening until four the following morning with these young
men. It would have required a very dramatic event to capture my
analytic attention in the wee hours of a long night. Perhaps I
should admit, more honestly, that for much of the time I was
simply present, barely monitoring what transpired among these
gamers. My level of observation was substantially decreased.
When I drank or puffed marijuana with my research subjects my
powers of concentration were altered for the worse and better.
When I had a stressful day at the university or a dispute with my
wife, my level of concentration diminished. How could it be
otherwise? The things that I noticed, and my ability to notice
and take note varied. As we all know from straining to decipher
our scribbled field notes (for those of us who do not rely upon
our very fragile memory), sometimes we will simply not type all
of the things we have noted, or, worse, we will not be able to
read our own writing. Some ethnographers, in fact, do not write
field notes, assuming that their memories will suffice. As one
claims, memorably, "I am a fieldnote!" (Jackson 1990, p. 21).
My underlying claim that is that the ability to be observant
is variable, and that we should not be so accepting as to assume
that what is depicted in the ethnography is the whole picture.
Obviously for reasons of space things are excluded, but more than
that, much is excluded because it passed right under our nose and
through our ears, and because our hands were too tired to note
the happening.
The Unobtrusive Observer
Most "textbooks" on how to conduct qualitative research
emphasize that the proper role of the observer is to influence
the scene as little as possible. Once again, we hear the
resonances of the "fly on the wall" model. Underlying this
attitude is the principle that the researcher should not truly
become a "participant" observer. Obviously this desire is
legitimate. What would we learn if researchers burst into a
social scene and immediately took charge -- pushing the events in
directions in which they would not otherwise have gone? While
this would still be a social environment, it might not be the
type of environment that one had planned to examine. Too great
an involvement in a social scene can transform an ethnography
into a field experiment. Yet, recognizing the demand that
the researcher should not determine the direction of an observed
scene, one might also wonder whether competent, active observers
do not and should not influence the scene. Ultimately the
methodological goal is to become a full member of the scene. How
is this possible when one is just to be a piece of furniture?
Over time I have chosen -- perhaps only to make life easy,
perhaps not -- to recognize my participatory desires. While I
still attempt not to put too fast a spin on a setting, I add
myself to the mix, and I attempt to understand how I feel as a
participant. The degree to which one is a "full participant"
affects the extent to which this sympathetic understanding is
possible: I had far more success in being a co-member as a
fantasy role-play gamer and as a mushroom collector than as a
Little League baseball player or a professional cook. In my
observation of high school debaters I was able to recall through
sympathetic introspection what these young men and women were
experiencing, using emotion to my own end.
In these observations, I did not attempt to be a non-entity,
a cipher. Every group is a collection of personalities and
styles, and this mix affects meanings, actions, and impacts. As
a consequence, the idiosyncratic presence of an observer should
not be too worrisome, as long as the impact is not excessively
directive or substantive.
The problem, of course, does not only involve the impact of
the researcher, but the report of the impact. Given the
generally-held belief that one's impact should be modest, it is
certainly understandable that many researchers attempt in their
narrative to paint themselves that way. I discussed this general
issue when describing the myth of the candid ethnographer.
Again, I note that one way in which researchers are not fully
candid is by erasing some of their rough edges and some of the
impact that their presence has on the scene.
The Chaste Ethnographer
One of the dirty little secrets of ethnography, so hidden
and so dirty that it is hard to know how much credence to give,
are tales about lurid assignations, couplings, trysts, and other
linkages between ethnographers and those they "observe." Perhaps
the closest that we come to this is the examination of the
opposite side of the mirror, those cases in which female
ethnographers are harassed by male subjects (e.g., Easterday,
Papademas, Schorr, and Valentine 1977; Hunt 1984; Wax 1979;
Conaway 1986). These happenings -- obnoxious and brazen attempts
at sexual acquaintanceship -- are part of the territory in a
sexist world. Why should the female ethnographer be treated
differently from any other female? One wonders, therefore, about
male ethnographers and their female informants -- are academics
more moral than other social groupings?
We have all heard whispers about ethnographers --
particularly anthropologists observing distant realms -- who went
native. The ethnographer was so take by the community being
studied that he or she decided to remain in that scene. This
decision was often linked to love or marriage, and
anthropologists are specifically warned about this possibility
(Conaway 1986, p. 53). Indeed, marriage may have represented the
validated, intense commitment to that scene that the ethnographer
desired. Just as there are long-term relationships, there
are brief encounters -- equally or more passionate, if limited in
time and space. Humans are attracted to each other in various
domains. They look, they leer, they flirt, and they fantasize.
If one examines the written record, little of this rough and hot
humanity appears. Admittedly such relations do not always
transpire. It might be better if I could admit to more than a
few looks and thoughts, but I can not personally speak beyond
this. Occasionally one finds an honest, if careful,
anthropological account written about a distant outpost. Paul
Rabinow's account of his intimacy with a Berber woman in Morocco
is among the best known:
Ali took me into the next room and asked me if I wanted to
sleep with one of the girls. Yes, I would go with the third
woman who had joined us for dinner. Before we left the
house, Ali took me aside, and shuffling, said that he had
promised to pay her but he didn't have any money. Everyone
wished everyone a fine night, and we left. We did not say more
than a few words to each other. My few Arabic expressions
became garbled and confused in my mind. So, silently and
with an affectionate air, she indicated that I should sit on
a low pillow while she made the bed. . . . The warmth and
non-verbal communication of the afternoon were fast
disappearing. This woman was not impersonal, but she was not
that affectionate or open either. (Rabinow 1977, pp. 68-69)
One must admire the tact with which the passage is written.
Rabinow only implies that he agreed to sleep with this woman,
never writes that they had intercourse, and suggests that this
woman was a prostitute provided by his real informant, not an
informant herself. His data was not defiled. Further, he does
not address whether Berber sexual activity differed from his
experiences in Chicago. For him, this evening was not data.
Similarly careful is Colin Turnbull (1986, pp. 24-25), whose
sexual liaison with a Mbuti woman, sent to him by her father, the
tribal chief, is described obliquely and presented to explain how
he carved out his society identity. Dona Davis (1986, p.
253-254), studying menopause in a Newfoundland fishing village,
is coy about her sexual relationship with another stranger in the
community, an engineer working on the water system. She
discussed how this man fulfilled her "private needs," and
discusses in some depth the reactions from villagers, but their
interaction is not data. Ethnographers value and demand
their privacy. This privacy is surely understandable and from
the ethnographer's perspective, no doubt it is quite desirable
and defensible. Sexual contact stigmatizes the writer --
particularly female writers (Whitehead and Price 1986, p. 302).
Malinowski's (1967) diaries were only published posthumously and
a rare book about a female anthropologist having relations with a
local male appears under a pseudonym (Cesara 1982, pp. 55-56).
This taboo on including these data misleads a naive reader about
the emotional and personal qualities of this methodology.
Participants observation is ostensibly and gloriously a
methodology in which the personal equation is crucial, and yet
this equation is often hidden from view. The question is whether
we can preserve our own privacy at the same time that we reveal
the larger dimensions of behavior -- private and public -- in the
community being studied. Where is the balance?
The Literary Ethnographer
Ethnography is nothing until inscribed -- when sensory
experiences become text. The particular, idiosyncratic skills of
the ethnographer are always in evidence, and nowhere is this
clearer than in the literary production of the ethnography.
There are dangers in inscription for all kinds of writers --
those that are "bad" and those are "good." For the bad writer,
the problem is in keeping the interest of one's readers, assuming
that one is able to get published. One must insure that the
writing is not so muddled that the intentions of the author gets
lost or that the author becomes so verbose that the reader gets
lost (Richardson 1990). Bad writing, assuming that we can define
it, is a rather simple problem. Teaching social scientists to
write, while not easy, is at least on its surface something that
we know how to do.
But what about writers who do not have this burden of
literary incompetence. Some writers write well, but write in a
language that is not easily translatable for those who are
outside of the community. Some post-modernists express
themselves fluently, but not enough of their readers have
acquired an easy sense of what things mean in their texts. These
authors belong to a different universe of discourse. Other
writers may write so well, in conventional terms, that the reader
is more taken by the writing than by the substance. The writing
can hide a lack of evidence, as it sometimes does in quasi-
popular works. One of my favorite and one of the most
influential ethnographies of the past decade is Arlie
Hochschild's (1983) estimable The Managed Heart. It is surely
effective prose. Yet, it is too richly ethnographic, and limited
for that reason. She has not provided quite enough data for us
to make the judgements that we might wish about the lives of the
stewardesses from whom she generalizes. She writes too well, and
shares too little.
Then there are those who write ethnography as poetry -- Dan
Rose's study Black American Street Life (1987, see also Rose
1990) comes to mind. The problem confronting Rose's reader is to
determine through the web of the literary text what he means --
or least what we are learning. Using this technique Rose means
for us to confront his images, but sometimes, as readers, our
minds can become heavily confused. The writing carries with it
meaning, and inevitably meaning gets shuffled and is imprecise.
Conclusion
All trades create a body of conceits that they wish to hide
from those outside the boundaries of their domain, and so it is
with ethnographers. I do not wish to denigrate our common
enterprise, but rather have specified what we can and what we
cannot claim for ourselves. We must ask: in which cloaks can we
wrap ourselves? Limits remain to what we do -- obdurate limits,
and it is our responsibility not to be blind to these limits.
Perfection is professionally unobtainable. These lies are not
lies that we can choose, for the most part, not to tell; they are
not claims that we can avoid entirely; we must suffer the reality
that they are part of the methodology by which we prepare a
reality for a transformed presentation. Ethnography is
ultimately about transformation, and transformation is about
hiding, about magic, about change. This is the dilemma that
we face and is the reality that we must embrace. We
ethnographers cannot help to lie, but in lying reveal truths that
escape those who are not so bold.
Notes
1. The notion of a "right" to informed consent represents
another in the long series of expansions of rights in modern
society about which many have written (McIntyre 1984). Are
there truly any rights to be told the truth in the
sociopolitical sense of natural rights?
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