Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing

Writing Ethnographies That Everyone Can Read

Kristen Ghodsee

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226257693
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

Ethnography centers on the culture of everyday life. So it is ironic that most scholars who do research on the intimate experiences of ordinary people write their books in a style that those people cannot understand. In recent years, the ethnographic method has spread from its original home in cultural anthropology to fields such as sociology, marketing, media studies, law, criminology, education, cultural studies, history, geography, and political science.  Yet, while more and more students and practitioners are learning how to write ethnographies, there is little or no training on how to write ethnographies well.   From Notes to Narrative picks up where methodological training leaves off.  Kristen Ghodsee, an award-winning ethnographer, addresses common issues that arise in ethnographic writing. Ghodsee works through sentence-level details, such as word choice and structure. She also tackles bigger-picture elements, such as how to incorporate theory and ethnographic details, how to effectively deploy dialogue, and how to avoid distracting elements such as long block quotations and in-text citations. She includes excerpts and examples from model ethnographies. The book concludes with a bibliography of other useful writing guides and nearly one hundred examples of eminently readable ethnographic books.

CHAPTER 1

Choose a Subject You Love

Finding a topic that will sustain your passion and commitment through the research and writing process should be Step One of any long-term project. Although a wide variety of factors influence the process of choosing a research topic (e.g., your discipline, your university, or the stage of your career), some basic parameters and considerations apply to all scholars embarking on an ethnographic research project. If you’ve already completed your research and you’re still madly in love with it, this chapter might not apply to you, but it can help you reflect on your methodology and position as a researcher in the field. If you’ve completed your ethnographic research and you’re stuck having to write about a topic that induces snoring, I include a specific section where I discuss how to infuse passion into your writing even when your subject matter is duller than a decorative scimitar. For those of you in the nascent stages of your next big intellectual endeavor, choosing a topic you love provides one key to writing an ethnography that everyone can read.

If you’re lucky to be reading this before you head out into the field to start your ethnographic research, the first thing to ask yourself is whether you want to spend the next several years of your life thinking about this topic. A mentor may be pushing you towards a subject because it serves her own research agenda, or you may be attracted to a certain set of issues because you think they sound more important and/or relevant to the real world. In some cases, you might feel completely overwhelmed by the choice of what to study and may jump at the first topic that sounds plausible. But be careful here. Writing about ethnic cleansing sounds more serious than writing about amateur folk dancing, but both topics can provide a valuable window onto the formation of national identities. Yes, the ethnic cleansing dissertation will attract more funding, but the folk dancing thesis promises to be less depressing. You will live and breathe your topic for a long time.

Behind most well-written ethnographies lives an author who writes both knowledgeably and passionately about her subject. The thesis and dissertation are credentialing exercises. Your first book is something you have to get done before the tenure clock stops ticking. If you are an adjunct instructor or a postdoc, the book may be the ticket to a tenure-track job. For recently tenured scholars looking for a new project, the second book may be the necessary requirement for a future promotion to full professor. In all of these cases, the obvious temptation will be to choose a fashionable topic, something au courant, and something that you can get done in a timely manner. But the topics of your major research projects define your career. You must find something that you love to write about. Intellectual excitement vibrates through a text.

When I studied at Berkeley in the mid-1990s, the hot topic in sociology, anthropology, and political science was “civil society.” After the collapse of communism in 1989, swarms of so-called democracy experts descended on the countries of Eastern Europe to teach the newly liberated citizens how to build proper civic organizations as they witnessed the total implosion of their welfare state. Western governments hurled billions of dollars in foreign assistance through the tattered remains of the Iron Curtain to encourage the development of local nongovernmental organizations. Experts lauded nonprofit activism and social entrepreneurship as silver bullets to the problems caused by the economic transition from centrally planned state socialism to free market liberal capitalism.

The political and scholarly interest around the growth of civil societies in post-totalitarian countries spawned countless opportunities for external funding to support dissertation research. In the United States, the federal government poured money into major research universities to encourage language study and fieldwork in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Almost every lecture, seminar, symposium, or conference I attended between 1996 and 2000 focused on some aspect of civil society, and as a young scholar hoping to do research in Bulgaria, I believed that the subject of my dissertation had already been chosen for me.

But civil society never excited me. It was not only that I objected to the Americocentric zeal inherent in much of the scholarship lauding the superiority of societies with robust “third sectors,” or that I doubted the messianic certainty of the political theorists who foretold a new world of “open societies”; it was that the relevant background literature put me to sleep. Structural determinism infused the whole project. Its broad generalizations ignored the thoughts and feelings of the millions of men and women caught up in the maelstrom of history. Macropolitics left me cold; I wanted to study ordinary people’s lives.

When I delivered this pronouncement to my professors and graduate student colleagues, I confronted a mixture of pity and derision. They deemed my academic career prematurely handicapped by my desire to pursue an interest outside of the funding mainstream (or “maintorrent” as the case was then). Intimidated, I spent the better part of two years pondering the export potential of American 501(c) legislation to former communist countries. I wrote a Fulbright application, and my acquired ability to speak “civil societese” won me a fellowship to pay for a year’s fieldwork in the Balkans. I played the game as my mentors advised.

Once I got into the field, however, my ambivalence about third sector politics overwhelmed me. Eastern Europe crawled with researchers asking questions informed by Western theories of civil society. I realized that my thesis on Bulgaria would be one of many projects grappling with similar problems. My ethnographic study would become a data point to support some abstract model constructed by political scientists. So I turned my scholarly attention to women working in the tourism sector and never looked back. My advisors and peers questioned my decision, but they disapproved from over 5,000 miles away. A few years later, when I ventured out onto the job market, I was one of the few East Europeanists not delivering a talk about civil society. Perhaps more importantly, I was told that my obvious passion and commitment toward my research swayed the decision to offer me a tenure-track position before I had even filed my dissertation.

Choosing the right topic, therefore, can make or break an ethnographer’s career. In the pages that follow, I outline three major considerations that, together with passion, should guide your decision when choosing an ethnographic research project: originality; whether you stay close to home or go abroad, and whether you have ethnographic insider or outsider status.

Originality

There existed a time in social and cultural anthropology when ethnographic fieldwork meant going abroad to a supposedly primitive culture to make sense of the “natives.” Thankfully, those imperialistic days are (mostly) behind us. The ethnographic method has migrated well beyond the protective boundaries of anthropology, and aspiring ethnographers can do fieldwork in any community they deem suitable for their academic interests. With the possibilities proliferating, many would-be researchers become paralyzed.

While passion proves a necessary ingredient for writing an accessible ethnography, originality is paramount. Reproducing knowledge that has already been published serves little purpose and will undermine your efforts to establish your own scholarly authority. Before diving into your participant observation, read broadly in your field of interest to get a sense of what other scholars have already done. You aren’t expected to read every book in your discipline, but you must at least peruse the reviews of all the major books in your subfield for the last twenty years. A daunting task to be sure, but an essential one if it prevents your embarkation on a project that someone has already done. With Google Books and Amazon.com providing electronic access to even the most obscure academic titles, there is no excuse for not doing your homework before you set out into the field.

Reading about your topic also tests the depths of your interest and the durability of your passion. If you remain inspired to do research after reading thousands of pages about the topic, your intended project qualifies as a keeper. If, however, you find yourself tempted to clean the bathroom rather than endure another afternoon delving into the scholarly literature, you might reconsider. Finally, exploring one potential research topic might inspire you to pursue another related but more interesting project. Your command of the background literature establishes your authority and underpins all successful ethnographies.

Originality comes in two forms: 1) writing something new about a subject that people have been studying for decades (if not centuries); or 2) writing about a completely new subject or phenomenon that no one has ever written about. Some topics and/or communities attract more scholarly attention than others. If a particular society or community enjoyed extended ethnographic attention in the past, this doesn’t automatically mean that you should avoid it. It does require that you think carefully about what interests you and how you might make an original contribution to the wider literature on that society/community. This requires reading outside of your immediate field and diving into the relevant literature in other disciplines as well.

You can contribute to an established field or you can trail blaze an entirely new one, but either way make sure that your work does something that has not been done before. For instance, if you want to do fieldwork among the Kalahari San people or study the sexuality of adolescent women in Samoa, you will be walking in the large (and controversial) footsteps of Marjorie Shostak and Margaret Mead. You will not only have to read their original work, but all subsequent scholarship and criticism that followed. If, on the other hand, you are Tom Boellstorff doing an ethnography of the virtual world of Second Life, you will have few shoulders to stand on. Boellstorff helped to pioneer a new subfield of digital ethnography. The production of original knowledge provides the rationale for any thesis, dissertation, or academic book.

Staying Close to Home or Going Abroad?

Ethnographies once focused almost exclusively on the so-called “other,” but domestic ethnographies have become more common in recent decades. In the United States, there are plenty of excellent ethnographic studies done by Americans. There are the classics, among them Carol Stack’s All Our Kin and Call to Home, Esther Newton’s Mother Camp, and Philippe Bourgois’s In Search of Respect. More recently, books by Michael Goldman and Karen Ho examine the inner workings of the World Bank in Washington, DC (Imperial Nature) and investment bankers on Wall Street (Liquidated). Other domestic ethnographies, such as David Valentine’s Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category and Ruth Gomberg-Munoz’s Labor and Legality: An Ethnography of a Mexican Immigrant Network, grew out of fieldwork conducted by graduate students in the urban communities surrounding their doctoral institutions. Valentine earned his PhD at New York University after crisscrossing Manhattan on his bicycle to study transgender communities. Gomberg-Munoz wrote her dissertation on the illegal Mexican immigrant network in Chicago while earning her doctorate at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The ethnic diversity in the United States provides many opportunities for ethnographers to find research projects close to home, for instance among female impersonators in the Midwest (Newton), Puerto Rican crack dealers in Manhattan (Bourgois), and investment bankers on Wall Street (Ho). In Europe, there is a long tradition of folklore studies whereby ethnographers study local indigenous populations with significantly different worldviews—ethnic and religious minorities. This was particularly true in the communist countries of Eastern Europe where travel restrictions prevented ethnographers from living abroad for any extended period of time. Doing ethnography at home, therefore, has a long history. Of course, “home” and “abroad” are relative terms, and in this era of globalization many foreign nationals study for their PhDs at universities in countries far from where they attended secondary school. For the purposes of this book, “home” refers to the country where you grew up—the culture within which you were raised.

In terms of finding a topic that inspires passion, doing ethnographic research in the country of your birth provides certain advantages. You may already possess a clear sense of the population that you want to study, perhaps because you were once a member of (or aspired to be a member of) that population. Heather Paxson, an anthropologist at MIT, conducted a fascinating study of artisanal cheese production in the United States. Her personal passion for cheese and cheese making led her across the country from Vermont to Wisconsin to California, and her 2012 book, The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America, hums with intellectual excitement. Paxson studied something she loved and her scholarly curiosity is infectious. Similarly, for her 2013 book, Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream, Sherry Ortner watched 650 movies and did countless interviews with writers, directors, producers, and actors, as well as attended major US film festivals. Ortner’s passion for independent cinema infuses her writing. Studying a certain artistic community provides a wonderful opportunity to become involved with that community.

A second benefit of studying closer to home is that you probably won’t have to learn a foreign language. If you are dealing with an ethnic minority within your own culture, this may not hold true, but in many cases, your native tongue serves just fine. Learning a new language requires time, and ethnographic research demands near fluency and a reasonable command of local jargon. If you are not already bilingual or particularly talented in language acquisition, then operating in your mother tongue may be the way to go. Research close to home allows you to go directly to the field without spending the months (or years) necessary to master a foreign tongue, a definite advantage for those desiring not to drag out their time in graduate school or nervous about a ticking tenure clock.

Another advantage of doing a more local ethnography involves logistics. It is much easier to sort out access, accommodation, finances, and travel when you stay home. You may already have an “in” with the particular community you want to study. Most important, you don’t need to arrange for a visa or a special residency permit to stay in the country for an extended period of time. In my experience from doing two long-term fieldwork projects in Bulgaria, gaining legal residency for more than ninety days involved a massive, time-consuming hassle. My colleagues who do research in Russia complain endlessly about the visa procedure, and you can’t even imagine the challenges of trying to do work in countries like China or North Korea. Furthermore, getting money out of the bank at home requires a trip to the nearest ATM. When you work abroad, transferring sufficient funds and currency conversions can produce dramatic scenes worthy of the ancient Greeks.

Staying close to home may allow you to study a pressing contemporary phenomenon. If your goals include progressive social change, your chances of making a real impact increase when you challenge a familiar political system and know the rules of engagement for social activism. Many ethnographers come to care deeply about the people they study, and opportunities for Participatory Action Research (PAR) in the United States exceed those in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, or Iran. If finding your passion means doing something socially meaningful, then working domestically may be the best option.

Despite all of these advantages, I always knew that I wanted to do my participant observation in a foreign country. A combination of both personal and professional reasons led me to choose Bulgaria (I haven’t a drop of Bulgarian blood in my half–Puerto Rican and half-Persian body), and I’ve been doing ethnographic fieldwork in that country for almost nineteen years. Yes, I needed extra time to learn the language and I faced endless bureaucratic delays in acquiring long-term residency permits. But it was worth it. I love traveling to southeastern Europe twice a year, and Sofia, the capital city, has become like a second home to me. I revel in Bulgarian culture and food, and I have dearer friends in Bulgaria than in Maine.

If you don’t possess a preexisting infatuation with another country, what are some of the other advantages of going abroad? Depending on the nation you choose, you may increase your chances of doing original research. Precisely because there are so many hassles associated with moving abroad for extended fieldwork, fewer ethnographers pursue this course. The more remote and inaccessible the population you study, the more likely that you will have something original to say. Furthermore, working abroad means you are in a position to popularize the work of local scholars, bringing much needed attention to intellectual work produced outside of the major research institutions in the West. Forging these kinds of linkages can be gratifying. The career of anthropologist Michael Herzfeld provides an excellent example of transnational collaborative scholarship in Greece, Italy, and most recently Thailand.1

There are too many examples of both classic and contemporary ethnographies based on extended international fieldwork. Some of my favorites include Paul Stoller’s early work on the practices of magic, sorcery, and spirit possession among the Songhay people in the Republics of Niger and Mali. Ruth Behar’s feminist classic Translated Woman was based on ten years of fieldwork conducted in rural Mexico and focused on the experiences of one remarkable woman who was rumored to be a witch. In Japan Amy Borovoy worked among housewives with alcoholic husbands (The Too-Good Wife), in Poland Elizabeth Dunn worked in a factory producing baby food to explore the social politics of privatization (Privatizing Poland), and in Lebanon Lara Deeb explored cultures of piety among Shi’i women (An Enchanted Modern). Each of these ethnographers is rooted in a specific academic discipline, but their work is also informed by geographic imaginaries c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Why Write Clearly?
• 1. Choose a Subject You Love
• 2. Put Yourself into the Data
• 3. Incorporate Ethnographic Detail
• 4. Describe Places and Events
• 5. Integrate Your Theory
• 6. Embrace Dialogue
• 7. Include Images
• 8. Minimize Scientism
• 9. Unclutter Your Prose
• 10. Master Good Grammar and Syntax
• 11. Revise!
• 12. Find Your Process
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Suggested Reading and Bibliography
• Index