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July 2009
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Poetics and Politics Doing Ethnography: the Poetics and Politics of Qualitative Research is a summer course offered by the Institute of Gender and Development Studies beginning on August 6.“Ethnography?” I was delighted to hear the word ethnography used recently in a global television news report. On the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., a reporter used the word to explain how well King understood his community and how his observations, participation and involvement in his community were essential ingredients in the development of his ideas and actions. What then, is ethnography? In a sense, people from a very young age have some instinct towards the process of ethnography. A baby bird hopping along the walkway caught the attention of a young boy, and then myself. The boy ran after the bird, studying it. Apparently, he had spent the week observing the bird, feeding it, studying its nest, observing its habits, the food it ate, the number of siblings it had, and so on. The child then got a camera and began to photograph the bird, its actions and its environment. Without any formal training, we see these types of actions in ourselves when we travel, go to the market, need to solve a problem, design a space or even purchase an item for our homes. This intuition and investment in a topic in a holistic approach can be developed and transformed to enable us to apply methodologies and skills to projects at work, in business, in community and in the greater society. “Human beings are by their very nature amateur ethnographers. We observe others and our surroundings. The skills taught in this course enable students to fine tune natural human capacities and to learn to observe while simultaneously participating and withholding immediate and ethnocentric judgment. These multiple abilities transform the amateur into a skilled qualitative researcher,” explains Dr Diana Fox, the cultural anthropologist who will teach the course. Today, ethnographic studies inform many of the services and facilities in numerous areas of work and life such as in agriculture, arts, business, culture, design, economics, education, film, health care, life sciences, religion, science, sports and even theology. In recent times, it has become key to the development of solutions and to the design and creation of strategies, and has been used in both governmental and non-governmental organizations and in the private sector. Seminar themes for the three-week course Doing Ethnography: the Poetics and Politics of Qualitative Research include: The crisis in representation: how to ‘represent?’; Position Self; Writing power?; Writing ethnography; Writing women’s stories; Diachronic vs synchronic analysis of observer and observed: the indigenous anthropologist; New Theoretical Frontiers: Black Feminist Anthropology; Visual Anthropology: Photography, Film and the ethnographic gaze; Ethnography as a tool for policy making? Dr Fox, Associate Staff of the IGDS, created this course during her first Fulbright scholarship in Trinidad. She is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, at Bridgewater State College, Massachusetts, USA. |
