NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
The Dynamics of Power in Ethnographies Ethnography is an anthropological research method that relies on first-hand observations made by a researcher immersed over an extended period of time in a culture, with which he / she is unfamiliar. The ethnographic method requires the researcher to closely observe, record, and engage in the daily life of another culture, and then write about it in descriptive detail. Confronted with situations and ways of life foreign to them, ethnographers assume a sense making and learning role rather than a scientist hypothesis-testing one. Adopting a flexible and frequently unstructured research design, they attempt to suspend their own frames of reference and allow them to be led by the social setting to new and unexpected insights.
Agar describes the research process as a movement from breakdowns of established understandings and taken-for-granted assumptions, through a resolution of such breakdowns, to the construction of a coherent narrative. (Agar, 1986). Ethnographers' reliance on challenges to their own assumptions for the generation of new insights implies that the researcher acts as his / her own research instrument. Ethnographic research is thus highly dependent on the individual's unique knowledge and experience, and his / her actions as a thinking agent who brings his / her subjectivity to bear on the construction of information and knowledge. Nevertheless, like all scientific research, ethnographies are expected to meet standards of objectivity, albeit an epistemological rather than an ontological objectivity. (Agar, 1986).
Ethnographers as knowledge workers are thus confronted with potentially conflicting demands. In their role as instrument they rely on their personal experience and subjective engagement with phenomena in the field to generate insights, whereas in their role as scientist they need to convince the scientific community of the trans-situational and reliable nature of these very phenomena. This suggests that ethnographers need to find ways of balancing subjectivity and objectivity. (Clifford, 1986). In traditional ethnography, a knowing subject experiences an unmediated confrontation between self and object, the latter including both the "primitive" other and the constellation of "social facts. " The anthropologist produces this confrontation and knowledge of other cultures. Thus the epistemological foundation of ethnographic texts rests upon the imputed ability to represent some aspect of the social field. This formula, however, fails to resolve the aforementioned methodological snare.
Indeed, the problems associated with textual ization as a means of representation are well documented in anthropological literature. Ultimately, the theoretical ground upon which empiricist ethnography rests is unstable in the postmodern world. Since the 1950 s, anthropologists have gradually abandoned the idea of "objective" fieldwork and increasingly focused on the "subjective" nature of the scientist's research into other cultures. Concerns are now raised about the researcher's power relation to his or her subjects; there has developed an awareness that descriptions of other cultures partly reflect the researcher's own prejudices or desires; and more attention is given to the researcher's personal relationship with those being observed. (Stehr, 1992). No longer merely an "observer, " the ethnographer becomes a "participant" and his informants "collaborators. " As James Clifford notes, the question of "power" is now seen as central in ethnographic work: Ethnographic work has indeed been enmeshed in a world of enduring and changing power inequalities, and it continues to be implicated. It enacts power relations.
But its function within those relations is complex, often ambivalent, potentially counter-hegemonic. (La Farge, notes). As a hidden bonus, however, "you acquire a form of power as you achieve a fair degree of knowledge while retaining a perception which is impossible for the people themselves. " Knowledge equals power, and such power could make a shambles of any "shield, " as La Farge himself demonstrated by impersonating a soothsayer and frightening some Central American Indians into revealing cultural secrets. (Stehr, 1992). Since the mid-eighties, the postmodern turn in anthropology has facilitated the publication of several anthologies and texts which examine the literary motifs underlying ethnographic composition and use anthropological tools to interpret literary texts. Karen McCarthy Brown has juxtaposed fiction with ethnography to point to the vagaries of history, She investigate the manner in which the flux and shadows of memories traced through female lines reflect individual and cultural transformations through fields that range from Africa and the Caribbean to the metropolitan jungles of Brooklyn. A confessional or vulnerable account of ethnographic research highlights the ethnographer's experience of doing fieldwork by giving a self-reflexive and self-revealing account of the research process. By observations ethnographers reveal their power.
This power is further represented in the ethnographer's role as a research instrument and exposes the ethnographer rendering his / her actions, failings, motivations, and assumptions open to public scrutiny and critique. By revealing themselves in their confessional writings, ethnographers put themselves on a par with their "subjects" who typically feel exposed and criticized by ethnographic texts (Miles, 1979). The criticism that "confessional ethnographers" level against themselves also reflects on their community. By juxtaposing their assumptions and practices with those of the "foreign" culture, ethnographers prompt their readers to do the same. Thus cultural critique, using the research to reflect on the world of the researcher and reader, is achieved. (Stehr, 1992). Mama Lola, better known as Alourdes, earns a living by conducting Haitian vodka healing work in her Brooklyn home.
In 1978, Brown, professor of sociology and the anthropology of religion at Drew University in New Jersey, met Alourdes while doing an ethnographic survey of the local Haitian immigrant community. Intrigued by the priestess and by the misunderstood, oft-maligned practices of vodka and the religion's loyal but secretive followers, Brown gradually won Alourdes's friendship and enthusiastically participated in ceremonies such as "birthday parties" for important spirits (lwa). The lwa, which are said to possess celebrants during rituals and to relay messages through dreams, are as likely to punish as to reward believers. In this commendable, illuminating study, replete with magical tales of past and present in Haiti and America, Alourdes reveals enduring faith and respect for her religion despite hardship. (Jeffery, 1994). These contextualized, contingent, and inventive compositions are significant both as experimental works arid as theoretical interventions that work against generalized assumptions of the scientific study of culture.
Even as experimental ways of writing ethnography have pushed the frontiers of anthropology. Writers like Narayan warn that there are significant differences between ethnography and fiction and that "to do away with a border and altogether blur ethnography and fiction would entail a loss for both sorts of writing. " For Narayan, disparities in ideals of accountability, disclosure of process, and representations of subjects delineate boundaries between ethnography and fiction. It is equally necessary, however, to stress the connections that persist between them without reveling in the fantasy that there exists a free market of discourse exchange. Homework, after all, is not politically free. Kesang and I, thrown together in one context, our gender marked by the words of an English man, can unload our lives to each other, bound by a moment of camaraderie, united by the tribulations of our travels. Yet, we also carry the weight of class and race histories that distinguish us and affect the choices that are a valuable to us in moments of crisis and social struggles.
As Ruth Behar has argued, the nomadic state of anthropologists cannot be collapsed into that of laboring refugees and travelers who belong to marginalized classes. (Marcus, 1998). Located at the confluence of ethnography, travelogue, and fiction, my story can serve as a social commentary, which speaks to a set of issues about fieldwork, interpersonal relations, travel, and cultural representation that lie at the core of anthropology. The events in the tale are fashioned around actual experiences during my travels on this route and especially around a struggle that transpired after a canceled flight to Leh during the summer of 1994. I have conflated a series of different events that I have participated in and conversations I have heard in a form that is fictional, but fictional in an ethnographic sense, because it throws into relief established and conventional ethnographic truths and allows for them to be read in an alternative way. Ethnographic monographs are generally derived from residence in specific regions. (Jeffery, 1994). Friends, Brothers, and Informants: Fieldwork Memoirs of Banaras by Nita Kumar gives a complex dimension in ethnographies.
The books interest lies in its being a candid record of the problems of doing fieldwork, in a setting that has not been traditional for anthropologists, a large city rather than a village, and in being written by a national of the society being studied, rather than a foreigner. (Smith, 2001). The writer arrived in an mysterious, and in some ways intimidating city, and came to know it, steadily overcoming the obstacles in her way, most of which were in herself, in her wariness and in her lack of understanding. The early chapters cover the problems of starting fieldwork, dealing with the mundane difficulties of finding a house to live in, locating household help, and establishing a daily routine, as well as of commencing the fieldwork itself. The later chapters concentrate on the fieldwork. The strengths and weaknesses of the book are that it is purely a fieldwork memoir; it comprises an entertaining account of the day-to-day difficulties of conducting fieldwork.
It raises but does not explore many issues fundamental to the role of the researcher in social investigation and the nature of the information being gathered. (Kumar, 1992). A significant subject here is the subjectiveness of the venture and in particular the association of the researcher to those being researched. Kumar states: ethnography is the aim, of course, but when so much of what comprises this ultimate product is directly related to the situation of the investigator, it should no longer be regarded as narcissism... to dwell on that aspect of the discipline more directly. Kumar implies that the indigene will unavoidably have a diverse conception of what he or she is studying than will the stranger. This is so in the level to which the indigene will recognize what she is studying but it is also correct in that people are prone to see foreign societies in undifferentiated and a historical terms, a mistake they would not make about their own societies.
Indigene's, especially in a complex and ancient culture such as India, are necessarily aware of the complexity of their societies and of many of the factors in this complexity over time. (Kumar, 1992). This very complication of society meant, though, that in some ways Kumar also was an foreigner. She was a daughter of the ruling classes with good connections, high status and much education; her father was the Inspector-General of the police of Uttar Pradesh, the state in which Banaras is set. Consequently, it was some time before she fully comprehended much of what she was investigating, as noted above with reference to indigenous categories. For a Hindu, this was especially true with regard to the Muslims. Nevertheless, she was in a stronger position than a foreigner, in her knowledge of what was being referred to, and in her rapid acceptance by the people she was researching.
Words: 1, 811. Bibliography: Agar, M. H. Speaking of Ethnography, Sage, Beverly Hills, CA, 1986. Clifford, J. Introduction to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed.
James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986). Jeffery, R. 1994. "Killing my hearth's desire: Education and female autonomy in rural North India. " In Women as Subjects. South Asian Histories. Ed.
Nita Kumar. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Pp. 125 - 171. Kumar, N.
Friends, Brothers and Informants: Fieldwork Memoirs of Banaras. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. La Farge, Raw Material, 153, 172 - 75. Marcus GE. 1998. Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ.
Press Miles, M. "Qualitative Data as an Attractive Nuisance: The Problem of Analysis, " Administrative Science Quarterly (24), 1979, pp. 590 - 601. Smith, V. 2001. Ethnographies of work and the work of ethnographers. In Handbook on Ethnography, ed. P Atkinson, A Coffey, S De lamont, L Lofland, J Lofland, pp. 220 - 33.
Los Angeles: Sage. Stehr, N. "Experts, Counselors and Advisers, " in The Culture and Power of Knowledge: Inquiries into Contemporary Societies, N. Stehr and R. V. Ericson (eds. ), de Gruyter, Berlin, 1992, pp. 107 - 155.
Free research essays on topics related to: researcher, ethnographic, research process, 1986, ethnography
Research essay sample on Informants Fieldwork Memoirs Brothers And Informants Fieldwork Memoirs Ethnography
