Emerson Review Week 2 - Members' Meanings

Summary of Main Points and Key Concepts:

• Ethnographers May Impose Exogenous Meanings:
• Ethnographers often fail to attend consistently to members’ meanings, instead importing outside or exogenous categories and meanings
• Ethnographers may use a term, category, or evaluation that is recognized, used and honored by one group in a particular social world to describe features or behaviors of another group in that world.
• Field researchers may adopt a dismissive attitude toward members’ meanings, treating such meanings as flawed, hypocritical, contradictory, or fallacious.
• Descriptions and memos may be framed in terms of a standard of what is “supposed to be” that derives from official rules or understandings that are held to govern action in some specific setting.
• The researcher may invoke a priori theoretical categories, often those sacred to the core of a particular discipline, to characterize events and settings
• Describing local settings or actions in terms of dichotomized variables may involve an imposition of exogenous categories
• Ethnographers begin to construct members’ meanings by looking closely at what members say and do during distinct moments in group life:
• Members terms of address and greetings – can point out a familiarity or a formality in a group setting
• Everyday questions and answers – what questions are asked in everyday settings can lead to more important underlying information.  Knowing these questions and when to ask them helps the ethnographer elicit more information
• Naturally occurring members’ descriptions – members frequently provide naturally occurring descriptions of their setting when they introduce or orient outsiders, or during the ongoing talk about significant events in the setting
• Members’ Stories:  People may present extended descriptions of events they witnessed or directly experienced, or of the reported doings of others, organized by means of some narrative strategy into a personal story.  Such members’ stories may provide insight into the people and events they describe.
• Such stories are always partial, being told for many different reasons and adjusted to fit different relationships and situations.
• Ethnographers should also look out for and record different stories told about the same events.  Diverse versions provide insights into the ways different members construct and make meaning of the same event.
• Member’s Terms, Types, and Typologies:  Ethnographers give close attention to the terms or phrases that members regularly use to characterize people and events.  They are drawn to everyday, colloquial, and often evocative terms and terms that may be graphic or earthy.
• Members’ Explanations and Theories:  Ethnographers should look for and seek to convey members’ more complex explanations for when, why, or how particular things happen. 
• The ethnographer puts aside his own inclinations to explain when and why particular events occur in order to highlight members’ accounts of them.
• In this way the ethnographer seeks to elicit or distill members’ theories of the causes of particular happenings.
• Ethnographers must recognize that as social identity, situation, or language shifts, human beings readily adjust their explanations.  Ethnographers should carefully document in field notes when, how, and to whom people explain their crises.
• Members’ Categories in Use:  Processes and Problems
• Members’ descriptions, stories, types, and theories, no matter how rich and evocative, provide only a starting point for the ethnographer.
• “Storytelling” as “Doing”:  What stories are “about” must consider the kind of speech, to whom the teller is speaking, the stated or implicit purposes, as well as other contextual influences.
• Members’ Terms in Everyday Interactions:  Ethnographers must discern local knowledge not simply on the basis of people’s talk but rather through their “talk-in-interaction,” that is, they must notice what people do in relation to others in order to produce specific, situated meanings.
• Race, Gender, Class, and Members’ Meanings
• First step:  pay close attention to any occasion upon which people explicitly talk about and/or act toward each other on the basis of race, gender, and/or class.
• Second step:  push beyond explicit use of relevant terms to make more systematic observations to identify patterns of activities that reflect the relevance of gender, ethnicity, or class.
• Ethnographers must not ignore the importance of observing people and settings as they change over time.

Ideas and Terminology Used:

• Exogenous:  originating from outside; derived externally
• Indigenous Contrasts:  occasions when members themselves use characterizations where they describe events in terms of what the event is NOT rather than what IS.
• Contradictory Explanations:  when people offer more than one explanation for an occurrence, particularly in multicultural and multilingual communities where people frequently shift between languages, cultural expectations, and differing frameworks for perceiving and assessing behavior.
• Local Knowledge:  the intricate underlying behavior and everyday interaction which underlines any competent use of members’ terms in specific situations.
• Experience-Near:  valuing the local and specific—looking in a focused way at daily life rather than in a broad and sweeping manner at general patterns (which is considered “experience-far”).

Linkages to other class readings:

I found it interesting that what I loved about this chapter (its practicality in methodology) was somewhat eschewed by the other readings.

The Jessor chapter started out talking about how methodology in ethnography is not necessarily considered important.  I can only assume that, based on the Emerson reading, this thinking is changing in the industry.  I understand the notion that in ethnography there can’t necessarily be any hard and fast rules due to the nature of the work—namely working with different people in varied situations on a constant basis.  However some general guidelines are appropriate, even if not strictly adhered to.  The Jessor chapter, like the Emerson chapter, outlined some good techniques to try to extract meaning from research.

The Frake article likewise did not seem to initially support methodology, although then the author seemed to slip it in via a non-invasive way during the talk.  I thought the examples he used were relevant and understandable, much like the Emerson chapter.  However the Frake examples seemed to be more relatable to me.

Possible class discussion questions or topics:

• Can you think of a time either in your research, or even in your life, where you imposed your own meanings into a situation where you should have remained objective?  What could you/should you have done differently to remove that bias?
• What are some methods you can use to elicit truthful responses from subjects on a sensitive topic without offending the subjects?  (Sleeping arrangement example)

Response

I enjoyed this chapter because of its practical nature.  I’m a very practical, pragmatic person and I appreciate having this chapter laid out in a way that gives suggestions in a clear, understandable manner.  I know I need to understand the underlying theories to be able to fully participate in the practical application.  But I am usually better able to comprehend the theories when I have a good guide for the practical use to complement the theoretical portion.  I liked the layout of this chapter as well.  It was easy to read and understand.  The sections were divided well—they worked well in sequence.

Having never done ethnographic research, I am glad there is a companion guide available to take a new researcher through the steps.  This chapter gave good suggestions for working to control bias, and thereby learning to recognize what is truly happening in the events being observed.

This chapter made me think about the ethnographic process in general.  The goal, of course, is to submit a completely unbiased presentation of the events.  However this can never be the case because every person who either witnesses or participates in an event will have a different interpretation.  Whether biased or not, however, this is the best way we have to ensure our history and research is recorded.