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#ethnobookclub The role of the ethnographic Self in the field: “Death Without Weeping”


Yesterday I settled down with a cup of coffee at Blackwell’s book shop in Oxford to re-read the highlights that I’d made of the Kindle edition of our book club book of the month, Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ “Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil“. But, once again, I was drawn so completely into her really lucid, powerful writing about her role in the field of the alto that I found myself re-reading the chapter and thinking about how I might apply her approach in my own ethnographic work (or alternatively as where I might be a little more tenuous). I’m kicking off what we hope you might continue: picking a single paragraph that stood out for you the most and talking about what it means to you and your practice. Feel free to post in the comments section below or come on over to the mailing list where the team will be discussing the book with the incredible group of ethnographers who inhabit it. Also feel free to blog, Tweet and/or talk about the book in other places by using the tag #ethnobookclub as you come across interesting stuff! 

Situating my own work and the act of “witnessing” the experience of many Wikipedians in terms that Nancy Scheper-Hughes uses

“The field” in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s book is the hillside favela above the plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata in Northeastern Brazil. Scheper-Hughes returns to the village that she had worked in as a 20-year-old activist to try to understand why mothers do not treat the death of so many of their infants as a tragedy. During a period of 25 years, returning on and off to the village, Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women in their struggles against starvation, sickness and death.

Scheper-Hughes says that her writing departs from traditional or classical ethnography in the way that the self, other, and scientific objectivity are handled, as well as how her own values and sympathies are made explicit, rather than “invisible” or hidden. She describes the role of the ethnographer as follows (my highlights):

The ethnographer, like the artist, is engaged in a special kind of vision quest through which a specific interpretation of the human condition, an entire sensibility, is forged. Our medium, our canvas, is “the field”, a place both proximate and intimate (because we have lived some part of our lives there) as well as forever distant and unknowably “other” (because our own destinies lie elsewhere). In the act of “writing culture,” what emerges is always a highly subjective, partial, and fragmentary – but also deeply felt and personal – record of human lives based on eyewitness and testimony. The act of witnessing is what lends our work its moral (at times its almost theological) character. So-called participant observation has a way of drawing the ethnographer into spaces of human life where she or he might really prefer not to go at all and once there doesn’t know how to go about getting out except through writing, which draws others there as well, making them party to the act of witnessing.

I love this paragraph for so many reasons, but the glimpse of answers to three important questions stand out for me:Read More… #ethnobookclub The role of the ethnographic Self in the field: “Death Without Weeping”

#ethnobookclub launches the first book: Death Without Weeping


Jenna’s post on ethnographic monographs inspired us to start an ethnography reading group. (You can join our Ethnographic Monograph group on Mendeley here.)

For our first experiment in reading together, we’ve picked Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

Death Without Weeping is based on Scheper-Hughes’ fieldwork in a rural village in Northeastern Brazil in the 1980s, and her decades of contact with the community there.  The book centers on maternal love in a context where scarcity and child death are the norm. Along the way, Scheper-Hughes explores conflicts between academic reflection and activism, and what it means to be an ethnographer:

The ethnographer, like the artist, is engaged in a special kind of vision quest through which a specific interpretation of the human condition, an entire sensibility, is forged. Our medium, our canvas, is “the field,” a place both proximate and intimate (because we have lived some part of our lives there) as well as forever distant and unknowably “other” (because our own destinies lie elsewhere). In the act of “writing culture,” what emerges is always a highly subjective, partial, and fragmentary — but also deeply felt and personal — record of human lives based on eyewitness and testimony. The act of witnessing is what lends our work its moral (at times its almost theological) character. So-called participant observation has a way of drawing the ethnographer into spaces of human life where she or he might really prefer not to go at all and once there doesn’t know how to go about getting out except through writing, which draws others there as well, making them party to the act of witnessing.

It’s gorgeous. Go get it! We would love to hear what you think of it. You can share your thoughts, your favorite quotes, your blog posts, etc. on twitter with the hashtag #ethnobookclub, or send us an email at ethnographymatters[at]gmail.  We’re still experimenting with formats, but our current plan is to post thoughts on the book every week or so starting in November.

Ethnographic Monographs Reading Group on Mendeley!


While there are many outputs to ethnographic work from talks to user insights and papers, a very traditional output of ethnographic field work is the ethnographic monograph. Some ethnographers have gone to great lengths to bring their field site to life in this form.
We thought that compiling a list of ethnographic monographs would be of valuable to the community. We have created a public Mendeley Ethnographic Monograph group that we invite all readers to join. Anyone can add ethnographic monographs to the list as long as it’s in book format (see Jenna’s post for a definition if you’re unsure or Carole McGranahan from Savage Minds).
Another idea that we have for the Mendeley group is to turn it into small reading groups. These groups will read 1 monograph in 1 month and discuss questions together. The group’s answers will be shared as a blog post.
Several of the contributors will experiment this summer with a reading group model where we have 1 person lead a small reading group of 3 to 4 people. The organizer will help set the schedule for 1 book a month and pose several questions for the group to answer via email every week. Then the organizer will compile all the answers into a blog post to share with the community.  We will try this out during the summer and report back in the fall on how others can join also!
In the meantime, we would love to see you on our Mendeley group!
Also we are on our 9th edition of our monthly Ethnozine newsletter, here is the June issue. And as always, we welcome contributions and any other ideas you may have! Or just email us to say hi!
–The Ethnography Matters Team
Featured image: “books” by phil on Flickr CC BY NC-SA

The Demise of the Ethnographic Monograph?


As ethnographic practice has spilled out into the broader world of design and policy-making, business strategy and marketing, the monograph has not remained the singular format for presenting ethnographic work. In the spaces I’m most familiar with, the design community and high-tech industry, it is the conference paper (see EPIC, DIS, CSCW, and CHI, etc), the technology demo, and within corporate walls, the PowerPoint slideset or edited video that have become established formats for delivering ethnographic outputs. There is great pressure in some subfields to offer clearly outlined implications and propose practices alongside (or instead of) the theory and holistic description of the more conventional format.

In light of the publication this week of my own ethnographic monograph titled Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana, I thought it worth considering the question: why should someone outside of the Academy read my book or any other of this genre?
Read More… The Demise of the Ethnographic Monograph?

Review of Divining a Digital Future


cover of Divining a Digital FutureDivining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell is a thoughtful reflection on the aims and conventions of a particular research field as well as its limitations and blindspots. On a hopeful note it suggests how this field of computing research could become something more expansive as well as more grounded in human experience. Ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp) in its original vision advocated for the design of embedded and context-sensitive computing systems and environments. Work in this field saw the future of computing as a move toward the seamless integration of computing capabilities into environments in a way that is invisible or intuitive to human inhabitants.

This book turns the critical eye back onto the field itself in an effort at researcher reflexivity, something that is highly unusual for a field of computing research. The critical eye focuses especially on the efforts by ubicomp researchers to assert what it is that we will find in the ‘proximate future.’ This book points to the narrowness of scope in the idea and design space of ubicomp as tied to its often implicit assumptions about human behavior and practice and desirable ways of living and working. By situating itself with reference to a “proximate future” the field of ubicomp refers always to a not-yet-realized future removing responsibility for delivering on such a vision. This book points out, alternately, that some version of ubicomp has already arrived and sets about considering how the ubicomp present looks different than what was envisioned 10-20 years back. In fact, the ubicomp present is multiple in a global context. The authors offer alternate visions and realities of ubicomp in Singapore and Korea as examples. The approach of the book is a useful counterpoint to the evergrowing genre of books that offer futurist accounts of technology. A most specific case in point in the ubicomp domain is Greenfield’s Everywhere: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing.

Part I of Divining a Digital Future considers the original vision of ubicomp (of invisible, seamless computing embedded in the environment) and how it has evolved and changed. In chapter 2, the authors offer some conceptual and disciplinary ground work in preparation for the social critique of the discipline that is carried out through the substantive chapters of the book. This chapter asks, how might we think about culture? What distinction is there to draw between the ‘social’ and the ‘cultural’? In that chapter, I found the distinction between taxonomic and generative notions of culture to be helpful and aptly explained to the intended mixed-disciplinary audience of readers. Yet, there’s certainly a lot more to say about ‘culture’ and how various conceptions might be related to design work. Hofstede’s work on culture (labeled taxonomic here) warrants a much sharper critique than Dourish and Bell offer. Furthermore, on definitions of culture, an additional matter not addressed in this section is the difficulty of reconciling the apparent turn towards immateriality (or maybe material agnosticism)in theorizing about culture (ala Geertz and his symbolic anthropology) with the especially and self-consciously material work of design. The final chapter of this section on ethnography, recaps much of what Dourish argued in his famous CHI conference paper on, “Implications for Design.”

At any rate, the ordering and scene-setting accomplished by part I (through the review of ubicomp as a field and research endeavor, review of relevant social scientific concepts, discussion of methodology) covered enormous ground without oversimplifying much of anything which is a major accomplishment. The book on the whole is a remarkably slim text given the ground it covers.

Part II handles several special topics – infrastructure, mobility and urbanism, privacy, and domesticity. This is a diverse selection covering some of popular areas in ubicomp research. Characteristic of the book, each chapter offers wholly unexpected examples (space and morality among the Western Apache, paroled sex offenders and secrecy, the shed in relation to the home in Australia) that challenge the normative approach in handling these topics. It accomplishes this through its global range of cases that often delve into and draw from the canons of mainstream (and not-so-mainstream) anthropological research. To give one example, pointing to the incredible diversity of homes worldwide –in terms of their layouts, functions, practices of inhabiting and ways of relating to connected spaces – the authors highlight the assumptions in the standard template for the home in ubicomp contexts. Such a home is, as the authors point out, “unrealistically large, frequently freestanding, connected to the rest of the world only for the provisioning of services, and newly constructed—without legacy hardware, infrastructure or quirks…” In the other essays of part II, the way institutional relations and forms of power become crystallized in the infrastructures ubicomp apps rely on and more broadly matters of regulation are brought forward. This is not a separate matter of politics (as apart from computing) but emphasizes the way that computing is either purposefully or inadvertently political.

These essays are fabulous as independent readings and I expect they will be used in this way. A question left unanswered though is from what fringes we might discover (or construct) whole new directions in ubicomp? Beyond these widely recognized ubicomp topics, how do we find ways to stumble into the fresh soil of potential new research areas for ubicomp? Perhaps this is a question to be taken up by other researchers as an extension of this book’s argument.

Part III offers a kind of framework as a conclusion to the book’s major points. Specifically some broader “concerns” are presented: legibility, literacy, and legitimacy. These three areas are explored in relation to rich and diverse literatures – Massey’s power-geometry and James Scott’s consideration of competing legibilities, Walter Ong on oral and written cultures, Marilyn Strathern on ‘audit cultures’ and Daniel Miller’s writing on virtualism – but in keeping with the books expansive openness, the concluding discussion doesn’t tie things up neatly. Wisely, the authors reassert the importance of bringing the discussion up to an analytical level so that it is not limited to the specific functions and features (and limitations) of present day computing devices or systems. In the end, they do offer a few concrete references to areas of work that appear likely to shape ubicomp future – “cloud computing,” the participatory design movement (due for a renewed consideration of relevance), and practices that deal with the “digital afterlife” of technologies including their secondhand circulation. The authors also suggest the possibility and desirability of moving towards hybrid practices that bring “social science and ubicomp design practice” together into new forms of “social and cultural investigation.”

It will be extremely interesting to see how this idiosyncratic work is taken up by researchers and in what disciplines or areas of research practice. Luckily with Google Scholar we can track the gradually accumulating citations. My hope is that this book will inspire other efforts at reflexivity in computing research.