Ethnography Matters

EM: Can you tell me a little bit about your book?

NDS: I was in the first cohort of the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar postdoctoral program. I was definitely an outlier as a cultural anthropologist, but the pitch I made to them at the time was that research angles on addiction should include more qualitative work, and should also attend to the addictive effects of consumer interfaces and technology, not just drugs, as a public health issue.

I think any good addiction researcher would recognize that addiction is in a large part a question of the timing of rewards or reinforcements, or the so-called event frequency. So it makes sense that if digitally-mediated forms of gambling like slot machines are able to intensify the event frequency to a point where you’re playing 1,200 hands an hour, then they’re more addictive. Waiting for your turn at a poker game, by contrast, isn’t as fast – there are lots of pauses and lots of socializing in-between hands. Slot machines are solitary, continuous, and rapid. Uncertainty is opened up and then it’s closed — so quickly that it creates a sense of merging with the machine.

If you accept that gambling can be an addiction, you can then broaden the conversation to include other less obviously addictive contemporary experiences, whether it’s an eBay auction or Facebook photo clicking or even just checking email, and certainly texting. It’s so compelling to take your fingertip and just keep clicking, clicking to get that response.

EM: That’s fascinating. Or this word game on my phone — it’s become really, really addictive for me. I’m curious if you’ve had interactions also with people in game design? There’s a certain point of view that seems really prevalent right now about game design and play.

NDS: People in the general world of game and app design don’t see themselves as in the business of producing addiction but they have reached out to me. Often they want to hear about how to avoid creating addiction.

I was recently invited out to the Habit Summit, an event in Silicon Valley held at Stanford, with lots of local tech people who are all there to figure out how to design habit, how to retain attention. In my presentation to them, I talked about the increasing prevalence of little ludic loops in design, as ways to retain attention. With Candy Crush and so many phone apps, if you ride a subway in the morning there are people sitting there zoning out on these little devices. I think the reason they’re so able to retain attention and form habits is that they are affect modulators. They’re helping people to modulate and manage their moods. It’s addictive because it’s right there at your fingertips, and you’re able to reach out and just start clicking this thing to create a stimulus response loop.There are more and more moments of zoning out – to use a phrase from the slot machine gamblers – moments that are configured very much like a slot machine in terms of the continuous, rapid little loop where something is opened up and then it’s closed… open it up and then it’s kill the monster; kill the monster again; kill the monster again.

Read More… The Addiction Algorithm: An interview with Natasha Dow Schüll

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

All My Apps by alf eaton +
Anatomical Position by Connexions

I have been thinking and writing about mobile apps recently and how they are used for medical and health purposes. Millions of apps designed for smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices have been developed since their first appearance in 2008. Many of these are health and medical apps. In mid-2014 there were over 100,000 health and medical apps listed in the two major app stores, Apple App Store and Google Play, and new ones are being issued every day.

Several health and medical apps feature on Apple’s lists of popular apps, and download figures provided by Google Play show that some health and medical apps on their store have been downloaded hundreds of thousands or even millions of times. In late 2012 a Pew Research Center survey found that 85 per cent of American adults owned a mobile phone. Fifty-three per cent of these were smartphones, and one fifth of smartphone users had used their phone to download a health-related app. The most popular of these apps were related to monitoring exercise, diet and weight. A more recent market research study found that almost one-third of American smartphone users (equivalent to 46 million people) had used apps from the health and fitness category in January 2014Public health researchers have sought to evaluate their use in health promotion campaigns and gathering data on health-related practices. But few researchers have investigated the broader social, cultural, political and ethical dimensions of medical and health apps.

Healthcare practitioners and administrators are also increasingly using apps as part of their professional practice. Hundreds of apps have been developed by hospitals and other healthcare providers. A growing number of medical schools are now offering at least part of their education via apps and require their students to own a tablet computer. In one study that surveyed American doctors, more than two thirds said that they used apps as part of their work. Another survey of medical students and junior doctors in a UK healthcare region found that over half of both students and junior doctors had medical-related apps on smartphones, with apps for medical education purposes the most popular. The medical literature now often refers to ‘prescribing’ apps to patients.

Despite the ever-increasing popularity of apps, very little academic research focused on these devices has been carried out in the social sciences and humanities. Numerous market research reports and medical journal articles have been published that provide some quantitative data on their content, accuracy and use, but these are largely instrumental and descriptive rather than critical.

In recent years I have been interested in developing a research agenda in critical digital health studies, including research into medical and health-related apps. I adopt a sociomaterial perspective drawn from science and technology studies to investigate the digital health phenomenon. From this perspective, mobile apps, like all technologies, assume certain kinds of capacities, desires and embodiments; they also construct and configure them. Apps are new digital technology tools but they are also active participants that shape human bodies and selves as part of heterogeneous networks, creating new practices. Indeed apps may be viewed as sociocultural artefacts, the products of human decision-making, underpinned by tacit assumptions, norms and discourses already circulating in the social and cultural contexts in which they are generated, marketed and used. As they not only present information and health and medicine but also often invite users to generate and share digital data about themselves, apps participate as actors in the digital knowledge economy.Read More… App-ography: A critical perspective on medical and health apps

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Michael Agar

Rachelle Annechino invited me to write something about the concept of “public health” as I experienced it in my decades-long and checkered past in the drug field. That past is described in unbearable detail in a book called Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs. The bottom line of my memory (if memories can have a bottom line) is that the phrase “public health” was a severe case of metaphor abuse. I only got clear on this slowly over the decades. This is the first time that I’ve tried to box it up in a summary, courtesy of ten years of hindsight after leaving the field.

The history of policy and practice around psychoactive substances in the 20th century U.S. has been a long slow-dance between docs and cops. Consider opioids as an example – opium and morphine and laudanum, and later heroin, and later methadone, and later buprenorphine, and now oxycontin — all opioid drugs that range from the organic to the synthetic. The docs first celebrated them for their medical use, then got upset when users broke the compliance rules and used them on their own, at which point the cops stepped in. In their different historical contexts they went through the same cycle, from legit (more or less) medication to popular use to crime. To those of us working in what the bureaucrats called the “demand” side of the drug field, attention to public health made a lot more sense than what the better funded “supply” side lusted after, namely, toss the addicted into jail.

Like most U.S. presidential elections, “public health” was only the better of two bad choices. “Public health” has its uses. Boas studied with Virchow, a founder of social epidemiology, after all. It isn’t the right framework to describe and understand people in their social worlds and how chemicals they ingest do and don’t fit into the flow. But, if you want to join policy conversations about “substance abuse” in most countries I’ve worked in, you have to translate your arguments into a doc/cop creole to make sense to the other participants. It’s the old problem of naïve realism, as the social cognition types say, or doxa, if you’re a Bourdieu fan. Do you push from the outside or talk on the inside? I chose the latter. So the question was, how could anthropologists, among others, use and subvert the public health discourse in useful ways?

Here’s a pretty easy example of one way we did that. Historically, public health arose out of successes at finding and then controlling the biological mechanisms that caused a disease. Public health found those mechanisms using epidemiology and then attempted to control them with biology. Epidemiologists built a database of “case records.” A good case record consists of clinical criteria for diagnosis, severity, time and place of onset, and demographics. (See, for example, this introduction to epidemiology [pdf].)

In the drug field, “ diagnosis” and “severity” were corrupted by war on drugs ideology. The insanity reached a peak in the 1980s with the official definition of “drug abuse” as “any illicit use of a substance” — any at all — including “illicit use” of a legal substance as well. This madness occurred at about the same time as the famous “library purge” of 1984, in which the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) expunged a set of its own titles from its archives and encouraged librarians to remove them from card catalogs. With time, as the DSM molted during its travels along its Roman numeral marked trail, diagnostic criteria have become more subtle and more reasonable, but that official definition of “abuse” remains on NIDA’s web page today. By this definition, it’s hard to imagine anyone who hasn’t been, at least at one point in their life, a drug abuser. The “diagnostic” part of a case record lost any useful meaning for research or intervention.Read More… Public Health on Drugs

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Phoenix Jackson is a researcher at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, a Cornelius Hopper Diversity Fellow with UCSF, and a Somatic Counseling Psychotherapy graduate student at John F. Kennedy University.
.
This post is re-blogged from the Center for Critical Public Health.

Editor’s note: My colleague Phoenix Jackson wrote these poignant field notes after we went out to recruit focus group participants for a study on health inequities among African American youth.

While following the #dangerousblackkids tag (started by @thewayoftheid and Mikki Kendall @karnythia) over the past few days, we were struck by parallels between Twitter users’ pushback against perceptions of Black youth as “dangerous” and the lived experiences of study participants evoked in these notes. 

Like #dangerousblackkids, this post highlights what’s omitted from dominant narratives about who is afraid and who is dangerous. Perhaps Michael Dunn was afraid of a group of teenagers in a car playing loud music. So afraid, in fact, that he took the life of a 17 year old child.

Who’s dangerous again?

(Rachelle)

[Slider image via @taciturnitis]

…

Street-level recruiting, downtown Oakland, Broadway 13th to 16th, Oscar Grant Plaza (formerly but officially known as Frank Ogawa Plaza). We’ve been talking to all kinds of people – students, workers, merchants, customers, pimps, players, hustlers, dealers, addicts, sex workers and eyeballing the BART police roust a youth for nothing that I saw. I’m standing in clouds of cannabis smoke exhaled from the people we’re talking to, and no longer feel how cold my head is. We’ve finally got our posse of people walking back to the office, and I’m struck by how secure one feels in a mass of people traditionally feared. People walking in the opposite direction make wide berth around us, and some look at me disapprovingly, and I wonder about what microaggressions these young men deal with as they move through their lives. And then the hardest and loudest of the bunch paces Rachelle and I talking strategy.

“Hey, y’all got to understand – y’all prolly scared of us… we scared of y’all too!”

There’s a smile, but it’s pointed, and I know they are checking my reaction. I smile at him as if to say, “I hear you,” but then gesture to my colleague known for being even more quiet than I am, saying with a chuckle, “You know, I’m not sure she and I can take all six of you in a head to head.”

Drawing by focus group participant

Brother with the neck tattoo has been inside before. Jail. I know it without knowing it. We’re on the tail end of the three quarter mile walk back from street-level recruiting. One of the little hoppers (young hustlers) has already very pointedly asked if we’re FBI or with any kind of police. “Where? That building that got FBI in it?” He might as well not ask – my reassurances that they will leave our company unmolested are met with a tough-generous smirk and posture that lets me know he thinks the whole thing smells no matter what I say, but the steady footfalls and banter of the bigger, older muscle along with the joint being passed back and forth between them placates them enough for me to drawl, “They gone. They moved out of the building.”

“Where?”

“Dunno, and don’t want to. Ugh. We don’t get off into all that. Don’t nobody want to talk to the police more than they have to.”

Their thoughtful silent assent keeps us walking. Read More… “Hey, y’all got to understand – y’all prolly scared of us… we scared of y’all too!”

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

 Editor’s note: This is the final post in Wendy Hsu‘s 4-part series, On Digital Ethnography. Wendy asks what does an ethnography beyond text and print look like? To answer this question, she calls on us to reconsider what counts as “ethnographic knowledge.” Wendy provides examples of collaborative multimedia projects that are just as “ethnographic” in nature as a traditional ethnographic monograph. The first post in the On Digital Ethnography series called for ethnographers to use computer software, the second post introduced readers to her methods of deploying computer programs to collect quantitative data, and the third post urged ethnographers to pay more attention to the sounds, sights, and other material aspects of our field research.  Wendy @WendyFHsu  is an ACLS Public Fellow working with the City of LA Department of Cultural Affair. She recently finished her term as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center of Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College and completed her dissertation on the spread of independent rock music.

Yea, as a fellow with the City of LA Department of Cultural Affairs, I have a mission to innovate and technologize the department. I’m spearheading the department’s web redesign project — thinking about how to better articulate our work, outreach to constituents, and digitize some of our services. I’m still wearing my ethnographer’s hat, thinking about how to cull through the vast amount of data related to arts and culture here at the city, and leveraging social media and other mobile/digital data to better understand the impact of our work. I’m also working with the City’s Information Technology Agency to join efforts in their Open Data initiative with the goal to augment civic participation through innovation projects like civic hacking.

Ethnography means fieldwork or field research – a set of research practices applied for the purpose of acquiring data; but the term also refers to the descriptive representation of one’s fieldwork. In my series on digital ethnography so far, I have discussed how digital and computational methods could enhance how we as ethnographers acquire, process, explore, and re-scale field data. In this last post, I will shift my focus away from field research to discuss the process of “writing up” field findings. I ask: How might the digital transform the way we communicate ethnographic information and knowledge?

I pick up from where Jenna Burrell left off in her recent post “Persuasive Formats” to interrogate the medium of writing as a privileged mode of expression of academic ethnographic practices. Early in graduate school, I learned that the eventual outcome of doing ethnographic research is the publication of a monograph. People around me use the word “monograph” to refer to a book-length treatment of research of a single subject published by an academic press [they looks something like what’s shown in Figure 1]. This is, however, one of many definitions of monograph (apparently humanists have a definition stricter than scientists and librarians). Burrell attributes the scarcity of academic publication to economic reasons, and suggests online publishing as a potential solution to remedy the cost of print-based publishing and to enable the integration of visual materials in publications.

Figure 1: Ethnographic monographs in the stacks in the Occidental library

Ethnography, based on the Greek root of “graph,” means the representation of field experience, findings, and analysis through the medium of writing. But writing, denoted by the word “graph,” may have always been used to refer to textual means of representation (i.e. what we think of as writing), but there are instances of this root referring to non-textual means such as photograph, lithograph, phonograph, heliograph, etc. The ambiguity of writing as a medium that can be either textual or nontextual has been with us since the invention of these words.

I’m not advocating for abolishing academic book publishing. Others have and have discussed the economic and ideological structure that supports academic publishing and valorizes the monograph.) Instead, I want to make room for a serious consideration of ethnographic expressions that are not strictly based in text, either in the form of a book or a journal article, but are dynamically articulated in interactive and multimediated systems afforded by digital technology. Some of you might find this claim to be professionally irrelevant to you, if your preoccupation with ethnography falls outside of the academy. But the concerns and techniques that I will talk about may pique your interest as you consider the ways to communicate findings and analysis to clients, collaborators, and stakeholders.

If we open up the definition of ethnography beyond text and print, then we can start to envision a media-enriched, performative, and collaborative space for ethnographers to convey what they have encountered, experienced, and postulated. Utilizing the affordances of digital media, ethnographic knowledge can be stored, expressed, and shared in ways beyond a single medium, direction, and user. In what follows, I will outline a few computational practices, platforms, and projects to illustrate these points.Read More… Ethnography Beyond Text and Print: How the digital can transform ethnographic expressions

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Editor’s note: This report is the final post in the Innovation in Asthma Research series. It shares with readers how anyone can contribute to The Asthma Files’s research. Catch up on the first post in this series that explained the project history and the second post that took us into the project’s knowledge platform. In our ongoing efforts at Ethnography Matters to highlight innovative ethnographic research, we believe The Asthma Files is a great example of how ethnographers are tying insights to action. In this case, The Asthma Files is collecting data to advance asthma research and environmental public health work.

In our previous posts, we’ve talked about why we chose to study asthma ethnographically, and how working with the platform helps us rethink the way we do ethnography. In this concluding post, we’ll talk more about how other researchers and citizens can become involved with The Asthma Files.

Participating in The Asthma Files can take on many forms. Whether a researcher, student, or member of the non-academic public, it is possible to take part in the research project. Since its onset, the project was designed to draw in many kinds of participants.

The first kind of participant consists of ethnographers and other cultural analysts who want to work with materials archived in The Asthma Files, contribute new materials or create new asthma files.

For example, one researcher recently uploaded a series of photographs and images from Compton, CA, to document the heavy historical presence of chemical and petroleum refineries around an area heavily populated historical disadvantaged groups.

A smog cloud over south Los Angeles, near the city of Compton. A historically African-American and Latino community, Compton is surrounded on all four sides by major highways, and one of its elementary schools sits between a cement plant and a major oil refinery.

Our repository is publicly accessible, and contains sections to archives such things as primary material, grey matter, and media files. We’ve provided step-by-step instructions on how to upload material to the site once you’ve created an account. This will allow your material to be easily available to anyone wishing to use it for research or informational purposes.

Read More… Innovation in Asthma Research: Using Ethnography to Study a Global Health Problem (3 of 3)

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Editor’s note: In the final installment of Whitney Phillip‘s @wphillips49 series on ethnography of trolling, she shares with us how she navigates academic territories when her own work and academic background–she has three degrees from three different fields–does not fit neatly within pre-existing boundaries. While some people fear border jumping in academia, we see this as a strength and as a sign of a fearless learner. Now that Whitney is on the job market, we invited her to discuss how she is managing her identity as “Dr. Whitney Phillips” and to share some tips she has picked up along the way. 

___________________________________________________________

Often I am asked about my research focus, and when that happens I never quite know what to say. My PhD is in English, I have a Folklore structured emphasis (the PhD equivalent of a major), and my dissertation is on trolling. Although this combination makes perfect sense to me, it tends to raise more questions than it answers (“English, really?” being the most common response, followed closely behind by “Oh you mean like Norse mythology?”). To simplify things, and especially early in my research project, I would usually just say that I studied internet trolls and leave it at that.

But as I came to realize, the claim that “I study trolls” was misleading, since that sort of framing implied that I somehow received training in trolling (…lol?), or at least narrowed my field of interest/expertise to that one behavioral practice. And I don’t just study trolls, not even in the dissertation. Throughout my project I also address digital culture more broadly (specifically meme culture and the steady mainstreaming of similar), and devote a great deal of space to the discussion and critique of sensationalist corporate media. I even have a chapter on trolls’ relationship to the Western philosophical canon (Socrates, come on down!). In a lot of ways, the dissertation project—now revised book manuscript—is as much about the wider cultural context as it is about trolls themselves, complicating the so-called “elevator pitch” (20 second research synopses) all academics are expected to perform at conferences and other professional gatherings.

That I don’t have a concise elevator pitch doesn’t bother me. In fact, given my  academic background, it’s entirely appropriate—I have a B.A. in philosophy (2004, Humboldt State University), and/but whenever I could would apply specific philosophical approaches to pop culture, primarily television (television is my absolute favorite medium). I also have an M.F.A. in fiction (2007, Emerson College), and/but throughout my program mostly wrote non-fiction, avoided writing workshops (the backbone of all M.F.A. programs), and took as many lit classes as possible. I’ve never fully fit into any one field or department, and have always been perfectly comfortable—happy, even—playing hopscotch with disciplinary borders. Because why not, and anyway they’re just chalk marks.

Regardless of how I might feel about clear-cut borders, I do have to navigate the academic waters, and have had to learn to take things like elevator pitches seriously (well seriously-ish). And not just elevator pitches, but academic taglines—the one or two word signal phrases journalists and other academics use to designate your research area (i.e. “anthropologist Jan McTenure”; “social scientist Bill O’Jobby”). This has proven to be even more difficult than distilling my research focus into a 20 second soundbite. Because what am I, really? In 1-3 words, anyway.Read More… Ethnography of Trolling: Workarounds, Discipline-Jumping & Ethical Pitfalls (3 of 3)

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Editor’s note: In this final post for February’s ‘Openness Edition‘, Rachelle Annechino takes us on a journey with her to the homes of her research participants and asks some really important questions about the wild “foreign languages” (legalese/medical-ese) that supposedly produce “informed consent” and the genesis of our understanding and practice of informed consent, and challenges us to think about how we might redesign informed consent in our own projects. 

________________________________________________________________________

One open window (Chris Downer) / CC BY-SA 2.0

Today I’m interviewing a couple of people who participate in a free program offered through a local hospital. The program mainly serves older adults who are dealing with a range of health issues, like diabetes, cancer, and arthritis. Many of the participants belong to groups that are affected by health disparities (or “preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations” as defined by the US CDC [1]).

After hanging out at the hospital for a bit to check out the program, I go to the home of a woman in her 60s who couldn’t come to the hospital today. We talk about the study, its risks and benefits. It’s a small exploratory study, some semi-structured interviews; the hospital IRB gave it an expedited review.

The benefits, I explain, are that this might help improve the program or keep the program going. There aren’t really any direct benefits to you though. We wish we had something to give you to thank you for participating. Basically what we’ll do is just sit here and talk. A risk is that some of the questions could be uncomfortable, but we can skip anything you want. If it’s okay with you, I will record the interview. We won’t put your name on the recording or use your name in reports on the interviews.

We have this standard consent form that the hospital uses, I say. It’s kind of long. We can go over what’s in it together, and please feel free to take as much time as you want to look it over…

Et cetera. As I’m saying this stuff, I’m cautiously drawing out the consent form.

Which is eight pages long.

And crazy.

Read More… The ethics of openness: How informed is “informed consent”?

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Editor’s note: While ethnographers sometimes encounter resistance from their research subjects, it’s not everyday that these subjects threaten to harm or otherwise humiliate the researcher. In her second guest post,Whitney Phillips @wphillips49  tells us how she responded to threats from the community she was studying. Whitney also shares with us how she adjusted her everyday life to her research, how she handled professors’ concerns, and how her analysis evolved over time.  

Whitney also reflects on earlier criticisms of her work, giving us an intimate sense of how she negotiated her position within her fieldwork. 

 Her second post is a fantastic follow up to her riveting post from last month about her ethnographic work on an anonymous community, internet trolls.

Check out past posts from guest bloggers. 

________________________________________________________________________

As promised in my last post, this post will discuss my role as a participant observer in the 2008-2012 troll space. It was weird, I hinted, which really is the only way to describe it. Because space is limited, I’m going to focus on three points of overlapping weirdness, namely troll blindness, real and perceived apologia, and ethnographic vampirism. There are other stories I could tell, and other points of weirdness I could discuss, but these are moments that taught me the most, for better and for worse.

It’s Just a Death Threat, Don’t Worry About It

For the first few years of my research project, I kept the lowest public profile possible. I had published a short thought piece on trolls’ relationship to 2009’s Obama/Joker poster, but otherwise was conducting my research in stealth mode. My friends knew what I was working on, sort of, and whenever I could I angled seminar papers towards my dissertation project (an especially neat trick in the Piers Plowman class I took during my third year of coursework). So my work wasn’t top secret, but it wasn’t something you could easily find just by Googling my name — which was exactly how I wanted it.

This changed after I started working on Facebook memorial page trolling (RIP trolling for short), which could run the gamut from harassing so-called “grief tourists,” people who post condolence messages onto the Facebook RIP pages of dead strangers, all the way to attacking the friends and family of murdered teenagers. By 2010, and spurred by that year’s series of gay teen suicides (the coverage of which trolls were more than happy to exploit), memorial page trolling was shaping into a pretty major news story. Because my University of Oregon student bio had recently been updated to include information about my research on the subject, media outlets began reaching out. I did one newspaper interview, which lead to another, which resulted in my name and information being posted onto 4chan’s /b/ board, one of the internet’s most notorious trolling hotspots (my article on /b/ can be found here).Read More… Ethnography of Trolling: Workarounds, Discipline-Jumping & Ethical Pitfalls (2 of 3)

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Editor’s Note: A few weeks ago Fulbright Fellow Zach Hyman @SqInchAnthro introduced readers to the world of low-resource creativity in China. In this post he takes us into a day in the life of a 3-Wheeled Vehicle-based Fruit Vendor. Below is a rich ethnographic description, giving deep glimpses into the detailed financial exchanges and intricate processes that unfold in just one day. Zach concludes his post with several reflections on the social interactions that hold a day like this together.

Check out past posts from guest bloggers. 

__________________________________________

Introduction: My preferred method for researching  how owners use and modify their vehicles is engaging in participant observation by riding along and working with them. Once I am able to break through the barrier of convincing vehicle owners that I am not afraid of “getting my hands dirty” and am eager to help them work, the stage is set for a day filled with insights as I work side by side with users in context and see firsthand the role their vehicle plays in their lives. This particular ride-along came relatively early on in my research, where I had the privilege of riding along with a fruit vendors who uses their three-wheeled vehicle 1) to transport fruit from the market to the point of sale, 2) as a means of displaying the fruit to customers, and 3) a storage solution for the fruit when the vehicle is parked at his home at the end of the day. In this post, I explore the first of these uses.

Click for larger version

6:50 AM: I am standing at the junction of the ShiQiao Bridge, in Chongqing, China. The sun is trying to pierce through the heavy morning mist. It is early October, I can barely see my breath, and the smell of diesel and exhaust begins to intensify with each passing minute I spend standing at this intersection of a tunnel and the 4-lane road that feeds into it. I am surprised at the lack of guidance provided to the lanes of merging drivers, and I stop keeping track after witnessing a dozen near misses. Surprisingly, there is not much honking, just labored, steady merging. I am not alone here – there are other people who have congregated at this natural pick-up point. Unlike myself, they are dressed for office jobs – two girls in matching formal uniforms and sporting gold plastic nametags. Another man wearing a loose-fitting suit, resting his black leather briefcase on the concrete divider as he leans against it on a piece of newspaper, eats dumplings held in a plastic bag. At 7:00 AM, a late-model Volkswagen Passat pulls up and the women jump in. The man continues to eat his dumplings.

Read More… A Day in the Life: 3-wheeled Vehicle-based Fruit Vendor

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!