Saturday, June 13, 2009
Culture as a Verb - On Ethnography
The idea of culture as a verb continues to reverberate with me. On page 8, heath and street outlien what it means for culture to be seen in this new way. Basically, I get that culture is dynamic, and it allows ethnographers to view culture as everchanging. I'd like to look more at how culture as a verb influences the ethnographic process. In a longitudinal study, this concept could actually make results difficult to report, as things may change drastically over the period of study. Of course, this could be an interesting phenomenon, but challenging at the same time.
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Your comment about the effect of long-term studies on the ethnographic process is very interesting to me, mainly because (I think) I had the opposite response. I would think that reporting drastic changes in a long-term study would be much easier to report as opposed to being able to report subtle changes that would be difficult to detect if the "insider" status took precedence over the "observer" status. I wonder too about revisions that would come to major ethnographic works with the "culture as a verb" ethos (not sure if I'm using "ethos" correctly there). While ethnographic works (ethnographies, I suppose), especially book-length ones... using Heath's as the only token here... seem to place great emphasis on describing things as they are, there seems to be less emphasis on explaining the rationale for why those things are the way they are. Perhaps that delves into too much judgment? I am not suggesting that the outsider-researcher attempt to analyze why their informants' do the things they do, but rather to add to the data/follow-up interviews accounts of why those participants think they do particular things. For example, asking the people of Trackton why they gather in the plaza (or why they think they do... or what they have heard historically about when it began, etc.) might be of interest. I guess the primary focus of ethnography is not to determine why people do things or why things are the way they are, but that does seem to be a prime motivator in a "culture (v)" research approach.
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