spacesof[aesthetic]experimentation

Ethnographic research: a workshop with Georgina Born, Oxford

On Friday 16 May there was a half-day workshop on ethnographic research in my department run by Prof. Georgina Born:

Ethnographic research is one of the most fashionable, and perhaps most misunderstood, methods in the social sciences today. What does it mean to carry out ethnographic research, and how can it be defended against accusations that it is utterly unrigorous, or an entirely subjective engagement with the object of research, whatever that is? Is reflexivity a panacea for such criticisms? In this workshop, we look at a number of central issues in ethnographic research, from theoretical and epistemological questions to very practical challenges to do with how to go about ethnographic fieldwork.¹

I had attended the same workshop two years earlier, while I was studying for my MSc. This time around, with some experience of ethnographic attempts, it was even more interesting. Drawing on her own ethnographies of major cultural institutions (such as IRCAM and the BBC, to name but two), she held to two methodological (Foucauldian and Bourdieuian) injunctions: (1) attend to the historical specificity of each field and its coherence and differentiation; and (2) in analysing causality, trace the multiplicity of causes and the contingency of their conjunction. Put differently, the second is a counter-reductive injunction where you have to multiply the causes, to keep adding to the richness of a case. Georgina argued that ethnography is an analysis of the disjunctures, contradictions and discrepancies between discourse (what is said) and practice (what is done). Ethnography, she contended, can be both rigorous and robust and can approach (or aspire to) objectivity. Interpretation does not mean merely subjective. The workshop (perhaps more of a lecture than a workshop?) was fantastic and I found myself taking a lot of notes. Comments on: preparing and doing fieldwork, the concept of problematisation, post-positivist empiricism, Tarde and (neo-)Spinozist ontologies, difference as a methodological principle and operationalising multi-site ethnography, were all thought-provoking. Although I would normally like to work against having some sort of list, I think that these themes are really important and would like to explore them further here (there is however, no order).

Preparing and doing fieldwork is closely related to choosing a site; this quite literally situates the whole research, focusing or condensing a research problem and framing it in terms of a larger question which it can speak to. Ethnography is neither purely, nor primarily, inductive, yet neither is the ‘empirical’ subsumed by the ‘theoretical’. There are two kinds of background knowledge pre-fieldwork: substantive (about the object) and theoretical / conceptual (kinds of analysis and questions). Thus ethnography is both deductive, using background theoretical and substantive knowledge) and inductive (deriving concepts and analysis from empirical fieldwork): an oscillation between the two which is productive, making it possible for empirical research to amend and/or develop theory.

The concept of problematisation was considered through:

Rabinow’s idea of ethnography as a response to Foucault’s ‘problematisation’; and as a way of implementing what, after Deleuze, might be called a ‘post-positivist empiricism’ – an empiricism with inventive conceptual effects.

For Foucault, problematisation is an introduction of uncertainty, or a loss of familiarity, a rendering difficult of a previous way of understanding. For Rabinow, this is a particular style of inquiry, a shift from unseeing a situation not only as a given but as question. Georgina explained that her driving motive for her ethnographies was emphatically historical: to respond to, and problematise, a critical cultural historical moment (e.g. crisis in the musical avant-garde). She also asserted that instead of a ‘master-slave’ model of social theory in which theory (abstraction and reduction) presides over the empirical (complexity, subtlety, mess…), empirical research can have theoretical effects and serves a basis for conceptual invention. She quoted Deleuze, himself drawing on Whitehead’s notion of empiricism, to argue that the abstract does not explain but must itself be explained. Here, ethnography works towards a post-positivist empiricism.

Counterposing the work of Gabriel Tarde and Spinoza to that of Emile Durkheim and his explanatory tropes – a re-thinking of the Durkheimina settlement – Georgina argued against employing reified and deterministic notions of society, culture, area or region. This questioning of common-sense notions (and the superior truth associated with it) was challenged by her productive provocation: how could ontological hierarchies be possible, if you assume that the cause does not precede its effects; the whole, its parts; or unity, division? Ethnography, she argued, can suspend these judgements, or ontological hierarchies / assumptions, and be concerned with precisely the articulation of the relationship between the collective and individual.²

Drawing on Foucault’s ‘Questions of method’³, Georgina teased out three modalities of difference as a methodological principle: synchronic (differentiation of formation, coherence, dispersion), diachonic (dynamics, different temporalities) and analytical (a multiplication or pluralization of causes). She also drew attention to a part of the text which I rather liked:

Clearly, viewed from the standpoint of this style of analysis, what I am proposing is at once too much and too little. There are too many diverse kinds of relations, too many lines of analysis, yet at the same time there is too little necessary unity. A plethora of intelligibilities, a deficit of necessities. But for me this is precisely the point at issue, both in historical analysis and in political critique.

Later on in the afternoon, we discussed recent developments in ethnography, and in particular multi-site ethnography. Whilst highlighting some of the advantages of this approach, there was  a sense that it was onerous in terms of access, a trade off for depth in one site and thus might lose some of the benefits of ethnography (such as trust, empathy in relations, perhaps unable to build a subtle or complex picture). She suggested that multi-site ethnography might be worthwhile if you were hoping to: (1) follow the object, (2) explore abstract connections, (3) develop a comparativist study, capturing heterogeneity / multiplicity, (4) study difference over time, or (5) engage with non-linear, cross-scalar relations. When asked where my work would fall, I’m not sure it fits easily within any of the categories. Whilst it is comparative, it is not strictly a comparison of ‘experimental space A’ with ‘experimental space B’ and I would not hope to capture heterogeneity but perhaps evoke it, or provide glimpses of it. In another sense, I am following an object, although this would require an expanded notion of object which would include not only the space but also the materials, people and ideas: an enriched ethnographic object. I shall have to think more about this and why I have chosen particular sites to explore the relationship between geography, art and method.

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This post is tagged born, empiricism, ethnography, method, problematisation, writing