Reading Response- Ethnography in Everyday Life

Reading Response

Week 5 - Ethnography in Everyday Life

Thérèse Dugan

This week’s readings were really interesting. I really like that we are finally seeing how ethnographic work can be used in many different settings, and how it is very important to do ethnographic work in these settings to get rich results and better understandings. It was also beneficial to see how this work can be used across research disciplines.

An overall theme, which was also present in the Nespor book, is that to set up a good ethnography you need to spend a considerable amount of time trying to understand what is going on around you because you are an outsider and unfamiliar with the territory. You have to dedicate a lot of energy and time to this endeavor if you want to produce solid ethnographic data.

This issue was exemplified in the Saxe and Esmonde (2005) study in their investigation of the definition and meaning of the word fu to the Oksapmin Valley peoples of New Guinea. They found two very different meanings for the word from one visit to the next, and the meaning depended on who they talked to as well. As Nespor says, when we do ethnography we can only comment on what we see in the time we interact with our subjects, but they are constantly continuing to live their lives after we leave them. The Saxe article really brought this home as so many aspects of the culture had been changing from the researchers’ initial study in the 1970s to their return in 2001, and so in their article they needed to take a substantial amount of time to show the reader the timeline of social, political, and cultural changes to the region, and how the meaning of the word fu evolved.

Furthermore, I think the point Corsaro (1996) stated at the beginning of his article was the most profound and significant argument for why we should do ethnographic work: “…ethnographic studies have made important contributions to fill in the sketchy pictures that emerge from more large-scale quantitative research” (p. 421). I certainly find this apparent in my own work with students’ images of science and scientists: Many researches have found that students understand scientists as stereotypical gendered figures, yet when you use ethnographic methods to talk to the students, their perspectives are much more complex. In fact, their perceptions and understandings of science and images of scientists are much richer than can be quickly captured in a survey.

What does everyone else think of these issues?