After reading Moss’s essay on literacy and the process through which ethnography is conducted, I finished knowing more about how ethnography and the subject of fieldworking should be approached. Although the church and community Moss studied is one of an emic perspective initially, she laid out a generally good and constructive understanding of her task. She indicates that a fieldworker is not one who already goes into a culture with a preconceived notion of how things should be or are. Regardless of the contacts that a person within a community has, one must temporarily put thoughts and feelings out of one’s mind to validate both the research and to enhance the opportunities for learning and thesises that arise out of looking at subjects a different way. As various quotes from movies and scholars point out, everything is dependent on the point of view of the observer. For me, I will probably struggle the most with this area. Being a freshman in college, I am still adapting to an environment in which people need to let go of what they learned in high school and how they learned it. Going from institution to an even higher level of an institution, one must work oneself up all over again. Dealing with the possibility of economics and the social stereotypes of students within the Commerce community, I need to stop orienting my research on what I think I know or the way I want the paper to turn out in the end. As Moss said, a good fieldworker and ethnographer will probably have new questions and concerns come up, as well as old questions being reformatted.
When dealing with approaching the community, one must become a benevolent, curious, honest, but nonetheless inquiring outsider. I constantly think about people who are in your face and want to know everything about everything that a person does. And when questions are asked, it is the observer/asker who decides what information is relevant. A fieldworker gains his or her information through the actual process. Respect is key if one wants to be treated with respect. Only through respect can dialogue and conversation start. People need to voluntarily give answers, and isn’t that what ethnography is all about? Mutual agreements within all aspects of the process (non-verbal observation, voluntary cooperation in surveys, and verbal agreements in interviews) must be met. Like a behaved child to a parent, one must ask permission and treat the offerer with respect in order to be likewised treated. If permission is granted, it is a success. If not, the fieldworker will have to find a way to get around it that does not resort to dishonesty and slander.
As for the story Mama’s Boy within the book Fieldworking, the college ethnographer is a perfect example of how not to do a research project. He came in to a culture, that although he was a part of, already knowing the direction and questions he wanted out of the experience. His college experience served as a hamper because it was through his pens, recorders, and papers that he chose to view a community that he once was a part of. Although there is validity in this, the story does not suggest that looking at a culture from how he used to view it from an emic perspective woould have been any better. Whatever ideas he had going in to it, he needed to forget them and let the community and the individuals that made it up speak for him. Ethnography was not about him, and it is not about me. Ethnography is always about other people. If he had just ‘known how to ask’, he might have known how to listen. I hope that, whatever the process or outcome of my final paper is, it will not be a walking parody like Mama’s Boy.
Leave a comment