Prof. Gregory Thaler, co-director of BNRGI, in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2007.
Ethnography was the topic of conversation for our BNRGI Lab Meeting on October 28th. Larissa Lourenço, Letícia Moraes, and Pedro Paulo Soares from UFPA co-organized the discussion with Raul Basílio and Gregory Thaler from UGA. Co-organizers shared reflections on how they think about and use ethnography in their research, and in the subsequent discussion participants drew connections between the presentations and shared additional insights. In this post, Prof. Thaler highlights some key themes and questions from the meeting.
Ethnography can be a totalizing methodology – it can encompass a perspective, a methodology, and a mode of analysis and writing. For some of us, ethnography is central to our identities as researchers, but ethnography can also be integrated with other methodologies.
Paradoxically, although ethnography can be a ‘total’ methodology, the contemporary ethnographic research field is explicitly understood as a fragment of social reality. We could say that ethnographers immerse themselves ‘totally’ in a fragment from which they hope to learn about a social ‘totality,’ to achieve a more holistic understanding of social phenomena. This dialectic between the fragment and the whole is central to ethnographic methodology, since a core precept of ethnographic practice is to critique or deconstruct prevailing (holistic) paradigms of knowledge and interpretation and to propose new understandings based on ethnographic experience.
In this process, the unique experience and standpoint of the ethnographer is fundamental, and is the ground for validating the ethnographic product. In other words, every research experience may be unique and valid insofar as the researcher utilizes an ethnographic perspective of reflexive participant-observation.
This ethnographic perspective seems to be one of the essential elements for defining a body of research as ‘ethnography,’ at least within the socio-cultural tradition in which most of us are working, but are other elements also indispensable?
In our own work, we find a great degree of plasticity or flexibility in both ethnographic practice and the modes of representation of ethnographic findings. How essential is ‘time in the field’ to ethnographic research, and how might we practice ethnography as an ‘immersive’ methodology under the constraints of a global pandemic?
Lastly, in a reflexive turn: this discussion sketches some of what ethnography means to us as practitioners, but what does ethnography mean to the participants in our research? And how do they perceive us as ‘ethnographers’? We hope to continue exploring these questions together.
Further reading:
Günel, Gökçe, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe. “A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography.” Fieldsights, June 9, 2020. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography.