It's about Hammersly Time!: Ain't Yo Mama's Ethnography
The readings about anthropological ethnography this week are
some of the most useful readings I have encountered as a student in English
Studies to date. Thank you, Dr. Seloni, for helping me find other voices that
help me articulate and understand my resistance to the twenty-first century
educational ethnographies that I have been reading.
To explain, my undergraduate degree is in anthropology with
a writing minor. Because I am an older student, the gap between when I received
my degrees in anthropology (90s) and visual culture (two years ago) is
considerable. The articles we read for
this week articulate all of the intuitive irritations I have been having as I read
contemporary educational case studies, interviews, and “ethnographies.” I felt like
a dinosaur because I thought what I was seeing happening in recent literature
about emplaced learning situations was somehow inadequate or, to my mind,
McScholarship—too fast, too greasy, and too easy—scholarship that routinely left
me ill at ease, but I could not identify quite why. Now I know why I have been
having that reaction. It is because I have a fundamentally different
perspective on what “ethnography” can be and should do. Of course, these are
value judgments based in my historical and ideological understandings of
cultural anthropology and cultural geography that I learned from my dad and my
professors many years ago.
Hammersly’s article addressed some
of the particulars that have been troubling me. He writes:
[W]hat I am suggesting is that we
need to bear in mind the consequences of moving from the older anthropological
model of ethnographic fieldwork to its more recent forms, in which we study
only parts of people’s lives over relatively short time periods, perhaps only
being in the field a few days each week. There are problems of sampling and
generalization here, and a danger of failing to recognize both cyclical
variability and fundamental patterns of change. (6)
Granted, Hammersly points out the economic whys and
wherefores of the move to expedient forms of methodological research practices
that draw from anthropological ethnography, but he also points out what is
omitted in such a move—observation of cyclical patterns and deep
contextualizing. I fear I seem
nostalgic, but there is something to be gained from “living among ‘em” that
builds a two-way bridge across difference, a bridge we need to foster deep
social justice.
Hammersly’s query into how ethnographic research methods may
be deployed in online communities is at the forefront of my mind. That we have
a different relationship based in different kinds of sensory exposures to each
other online makes for an interesting shift in research practices. Because I am
interested in how different ratios of sensory perception may impact how we feel
about each other in different environmental contexts, Hammersly’s essay may draw
attention to what is omitted in online discourse. I don’t believe you can know
whether the person on the other side of the screen is “real” or not. This
Baudrillardian sense of hyperreality transforms ordinary human interaction. Put
differently, one does not have the same kind of sensory engagement one does
with another real-live human being or other creature. Sociological studies—Sherry
Turkle’s Alone Together comes to mind—begin
to examine the disconnect between face-to-face human interactions with online
or robotic machine interactions. How does one do ethnographic research of
robotic interactions? If so, how does one shift analytic components to reflect
the non-human aspects of communication across this two-way bridge?
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