This blog will comprise a collection of ephemera, mess and miscellaneous artifacts reflecting on the writer's life.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Ethnography


is very hard.
Here is Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead typing up their fieldnotes, which I am madly doing at the moment ALL THE TIME.
When I carried out an ethnography of three homes, I became very involved in the lives of the people I visited, and six years on, I am still visiting one home, and my informants have become my friends.
This is why on Saturday we are going to be doing a presentation for the BAAL Linguistic Ethnography Forum on positionality and reflexivity in ethnography and I will be doing mine on friendship as method.
I have decided to try and write about this as well but it is very hard.
So I consult my favourite ethnographies:
Local Literacies
Ways with Words
and a new book, I read on the train yesterday
Navigating Numeracies, which, while not a full ethnography has an ethnographic perspective (Green and Bloome 1996) and is full of wonderful thick description.
I might also re-read my old favourites:
The Interpretation of Cultures
and
Fieldnotes

So I can get messy and complicated and full of thick description.
I have also just found a new book on ethnography which looks amazing as it is about artists and site-specific ethnography which I am also planning to write about with this lot.
More things to think about.

2 comments:

Joolz said...

Wow. Am sure your presentation will go well (did go well.)
And also that new book looks really good, but there are too many good books.

Kate said...

The book is very very good Dr Joolz and is making my head spin.
I am going to carry it around as an artefact of identity from now on and show it to people at seminars.
Strangely the same people were there on Saturday as were there on Modnay and I got confused as to what seminar I was at.