I stumbled upon the sideways issue in some of the readings I will discuss below. Initially, I read laterality and sideways discussions to be the equivalent of the keystone anthropological activity of cutting across social spheres. It is only after hearing about the Sideways conference this past Fall at UC-Irvine that I decided to take a second look and try to think it through a bit more. And, this is a wonderful venue to hopefully hear back from many of you who have been thinking about this issue in more depth and at greater length than I have at this point.

Last year Julian discussed projects of studying up or sideways as hinging on how “ethnographers relate to their interlocutors, as well as different degrees of “identity overlap” between ethnographer and subject.” In another post, Dorien Zandbergen took issue with such “identity overlap,” by claiming that the sideways concept “suggests that there is some kind of plane that is shared by particular kinds of people, who can move ‘sideways’ to have a peek into each other’s affairs.” It is thus by paying careful attention to similarities that Dorien was able to identify issues where “such similarities appeared only superficial,” as differences emerged. However, Julian addressed the issue, as well, by looking at how such research is “differentiated on several axes: of political sympathy, of shared knowledge, of power relations, of informants’ reflexivity, and of socio-cultural belonging, to name a few.” Within these posts the matter of studying sideways, or up, involved drawing a connection between self/other (i.e. who) and similarity/difference (i.e. what).

On a different note, Kerim analyzed Tim Ingold’s articulation of the “sideways glance” as an “anthropological attitude.” This attitude consisted of the “constant awareness of alternative ways of being, and of the ever-present possibility of ‘flipping’ from one to another.” This formulation shares a concern with the axes of self/other and similarity/difference, but intimates the “how” by conceiving of “flipping” as shifting subject positions within anthropological “participatory dialog.” It is for this reason that Kerim contended that Ingold’s title “should have read: Anthropological reasoning is not inductive, but dialectical.” This approach served to “challenge the dichotomy which places ethnographic description on the one side and anthropological theorizing on the other.” What we will encounter below continues along this trajectory.

While there are many insightful sources for thinking about how to conduct sideways research, I have found the work of Tom Boellstorff (2003), Bill Maurer (2005), and Diane Nelson (2009) to be particularly instructive. There are some differences of emphasis in their projects, but for my purposes here (and for the sake of brevity) I will focus on the commonalities between them. Tom Boellstorff was concerned with how a “space for subjectivity appears” through the “holding together of two ostensibly incompatible cultural logics without conflating them” (2003:237). He argued that thinking about culture in terms of dubbing, “sets two elements side by side, blurred yet distinct” (237). The reason they are distinct is that “[t]he authoritative voice is at odds with the visual representation” (237). A “disjuncture” is therefore crucial to the “performative act” of subject formation based on “collage,” in that “there is no “real” version underneath, where everything fits” (237).

Bill Maurer explained this conception of setting “side by side,” or “alongside” in his terminology, as opposing “any synthetic or absorptive metatheoretical rubric to bring them under one sign of law” (2005:19). Instead of attempting to fix meaning, information, money, subjectivity, translation, etc. into a stable set of relations, Maurer is concerned with the “oscillation (alternare) between adequation and other modes of praxis” (17). By adequation, he meant the conjoining of representation and reality. So, he sought to understand how alternative banking and currency practices utilized various “analogies…homologies…analytical moves” that both critiqued and utilized adequation as modes of “conjunction” that are “impossibly linked” (19-20). It is helpful here to think of Maurer’s conjunction as an exmaple of Boellstorff’s “performative act” in which each link is always incomplete, capable of change, as well as maintaining simultaneous differences.

In the work of Diane Nelson (2009) we find an attempt to trace a genealogy of a sideways approach. She noted Russian constructivists (Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov), Surrealists,  Situationists, as well as Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig as contributing predecessors to sideways work (73). While Boellstorff (2003:237) and Maurer (2005:17) cited Gilles Deleuze in connection with their lateral and sideways approaches, Nelson drew more from Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Levi-Strauss (2009:xxxi). Nonetheless, they all share inspiration from Marcel Mauss’ (1924) usage of similar phrasing and methodological positioning (Maurer, personal communication). Nelson depicted her “methodology of dialectical montage” as “[l]aying two unlikely things like two faces beside each other” (73). Again, note the beside, alongside, and side by side correspondences between these three works. Like Boellstorff, Nelson identified a gap, what she called a “cut” taken from film theory, as the space in which the subject constitutes herself (73). Much like Ingold’s “flipping,” Nelson attempted to “play them against each other” by interpreting “one with the help of the other” (xxxi).

It is this interplay between disjunctive/conjunctive practices and processes that seems to be one of the most crucial dimensions of sideways projects. As such, it enables us to identify and track the spaces and crossings where the maintenance and construction of much of that stuff called culture occurs. Boellstorff summed the approach up well in the following passage: “the more-than-juxtaposition and less-than-unification of pasts, presents, and futures” (2003:239).

Perhaps in my next post or two I will outline some examples from these works, and/or attempt to identify some of the stakes involved in sideways projects. In the meantime, what aspects of lateral/sideways projects have resonated with you? Are there some worthwhile distinctions awaiting articulation since I have merely sketched some similarities? Do you perceive other modalities at work? I look forward to reading about your considerations of the topic.

(I want to thank Adam Fish for the invite to guest blog here on SM. I am also very appreciative of the engaging conversations with Bill Maurer and my fellow students at UCI on this subject.)

Works Cited
Boellstorff, Tom
2003 Dubbing Culture: Indonesian Gay and Lesbi Subjectivities and Ethnography in
an Already Globalized World. American Ethnologist 30(2):225–242.
Maurer, Bill
2005 Mutual Life, Limited. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mauss, Marcel
1967 [1924] The Gift. New York: W.W. Norton.
Nelson, Diane
2009 Reckoning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

(AF) What is New Edge and how did you conduct your fieldwork?

(DZ) The term New Edge fuses the notions ‘New Age’ and ‘edgy’, as in ‘edgy technologies’. In the late 1980s, founder of the ‘cyberpunk’ magazine Mondo 2000, Ken Goffman, used the term to refer both to the overlaps and the incompatibilities between the spiritual worldview of ‘New Agers’ and the ‘geeky’ worldview of the scientists and hackers of the San Francisco Bay Area. Such interactions were articulated in the overlapping scenes of Virtual Reality development, electronic dance, computer hacking and cyberpunk fiction. I borrowed the term New Edge to study the genealogy of cultural cross-overs between – simply put – the ‘hippies’ and the ‘hackers’ of the Bay Area, beginning with the 1960s and tracing it to the current (2008) moment.

The overlaps that I traced are related to one general idea popular within New Age as well as within hacker circles and relating to current transhumanist notions. This is the idea that humanity is involved in a process of ‘self-evolution’, leading to a future moment when all ‘intelligence’ in the world fuses into one holistic entity. Among others, this notion translates into practices whereby people seek to sensitize their bodies, making it ‘all-sensing’ and ‘all-knowing’ by means of high-tech and/or by practices such as meditation or ecstatic-dance. This idea is also married to a neoliberal image of the autonomous, individual self, who needs to ‘realize’ its true natural self by escaping social conditioning.

There are quite a few moments and places constituted both by hippies and hackers, where they celebrate a kind of common adherence to these ideas and practices. Examples are Virtual Worlds conferences, the Mondo 2000 magazine, the electronic dance scene of the late 1980s/early 1990s, psychedelic events such as the Mindstates conferences and the contemporary Burning Man festival. These ‘New Edge environments’ are perfect places where it can be studied how secular thinking is both a modern ideology as well as a social fact: here we can see how the secularist idea that technology and science are inherently incompatible with spirituality, mysticism or magic is contested. At the same time we can witness here how notions of secularization are still informing modes of distinction-making: the very ways in which hippies and hackers identify themselves to be different from each other, occurs in large part in reference to the alleged incompatibility between the spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘technoscience’. While enchanted by the open-ended ways of thinking of New Age, geeks here are just as much distancing themselves from the “wishy-washyness”, the alleged vagueness of New Age. Similarly, those identifying with the New Age discourse, distance themselves from the images of disembodiment, celebration of technological superiority and over-rationality attached to geek-hood.

In my dissertation, I explore such kinds of compatibilities and tensions at various levels. My research for this comprised a period of 12 months, spent in between 2005 and 2008, in the San Francisco Bay Area, while going from scene to scene, place to place and tracing overlaps in people, metaphors, ideas, practices, objects and styles in between the ‘hippie’ and the ‘hacker’ spheres that I here identified.

So, why is New Edge so prevalent in California?

This is a kind of question that has bugged me for a long time and I am open to all kinds of suggestions into the answer. What I am finding the most plausible answer at the moment – and this turns your question a bit on its head – is that New Edge may in fact be a celebration of California.

I can only say this granting that what makes New Edge unique is not necessarily the fact that it allies the ‘rational’ world of science and technology development with the mystical spheres of spirituality and religion. Such alliances can be found all over the globe. Instead, what is characteristic about New Edge, I believe, is the way that it manifests this alliance through its radical performative style and this may be what makes New Edge characteristically Californian. If you have been to Burning Man, and if we take Burning Man as one of the homelands of New Edge, you probably understand what I mean. The clothes, the art-cars, the music, the buildings, the rituals at Burning Man are all aspects of a performance of a way of being that is ‘authentic’, ‘flexible’, deliberately confusing and unconcerned with hegemonic cultural norms. In a larger sense, we can here see the performance of a radical notion of ‘open-endedness’ in terms of what we can do with our bodies, with our minds, with other people, with our material environment and with technology. In my dissertation there are some examples of this celebration of ‘multiplicit style’. Ironic language; the deliberate contrasting of colors, ideas and ways of being; and the celebration of confusion and chaos are all part of it.

In terms of ideas, this performance associates with neoliberalism, which is prevalent in many other places of the world. Yet, in terms of style, it self-consciously identifies, I believe, with (the image of) California. This observation is partially informed by the fact that my New Edge interviewees were manifesting a strong self-consciousness about being Californian, or being located in California, and particularly about knowing what this means in terms of lifestyle, aesthetics and ‘ways of being’ – cacophonous, optimistic, stylistically ‘loose’ – which was often juxtaposed against ways of being in other parts of the world and of the USA in particular. For instance, Jane Metcalfe, co-founder of Wired Magazine, when she arrived in California in the early 1990s, read the alleged open-mindedness of Californians into the colorful, bright, and crazy style of the buildings and the clothes of the people. And so did Mitch Kapor – developer of Lotus 1-2-3 and associated with many other organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation – explain to me the difference between the corporate worlds on the East and the West Coast by pointing to people in Californian offices wearing Hawaiian shirts. I believe that New Edge culture is firmly rooting itself in, and celebrating as such, California by exploiting this association between California and stylistic cacophony to its extremes. Just as the 1960s hippies of California used a particular style of being, of building, of dressing and talking to distinguish themselves from their notion of mainstream America, so are New Edge Californians embracing this style still to distinguish themselves from the ‘conditioned rest of the world’. Of course, this style is also strongly global in its aspirations and has gone global in many ways, which complicates your question yet again.

Your anthropological project is about the confluence of technological and spiritual imaginations. There is little discussion of political and economic power as part of the equation. Why is that and what would your theory look like if you had included power?

I see New Edge as a discourse that travels through and across different kinds of socio-economic and political niches. And being a discourse, New Edge is not something that defines, in any fixed sense, someone’s identity. Just bringing this back to Burning Man, for instance, people go there from different kinds of backgrounds. This is so in economic sense: some participants are millionaires and are funding for entire camps while others save up all year to be able to “come home”. For one camp leader that I met, going to Burning Man was a tremendous financial sacrifice – that she was more than happy to make – since she was in such debt that she had started living in a shed in her backyard while renting out her own house. Within the larger New Edge sphere, there is also relative diversity in terms of political philosophy. Some of my interviewees were quite outspokenly libertarians, others were very much opposed to libertarianism and celebrating social democratic values. The New Edge discourse has the capacity to unite such differences. It does so in its explicit rejection of political debate and its outward refusal to validate formal status roles and in its emphasis on the body, on style and on human consciousness. As such – just as the 1960s hippies did – New Edge quite deliberately manifests itself in non-political terms.

Perhaps because the core of my dissertation is concerned with a discussion of New Edge contested understandings of consciousness, nature, evolution, style, and the body, it may seem not to involve a discussion of politics and socio-economics. It would be good to make this more explicit in further work, but there is quite a lot of implicit attention in my work for the power-politics underneath this New Edge negation of politics. For instance, I give the a-historical self-imaginary of New Edge a history; I root the transcendental aspirations of New Edge in actual physical bodies; I show the material conditions that enable a place like Burning Man to be experienced in non-political, naturalistic ways and I am critical of self-narratives that are explicitly dismissing discussions of socio-economics. For instance, in a newspaper article published after Burning Man 2005, when Hurricane Katrina had hit and some burners had set off to the East Coast to help clear up the mess, the writer was arguing that burners were specifically predisposed to being able to do this work, where official government failed. This was so, he wrote, because burners had understood the “bedrock value of water, diesel, and serviceable tools.” He argued that Burning Man was all about learning such values and becoming self-reliant beings, making burners predisposed to “lead” when the larger socio-economic system collapses. Of course, “water, diesel and serviceable tools” are not values but material goods. Along with the free time that these burners had at their disposal to go to the disaster area, and with the technologies and kinds of jobs that allowed them to work from a distance, these material goods are quite characteristic of the privileged position that these burners are having within the socio-economic system they seek to replace. I have been similarly critical towards the New Edge ideology of radical open-endedness, its celebration of fluidity and of boundary-crossing, arguing how these notions of flexibility are quite gendered and exclusive of people who are socio-economically ‘stuck’ in the bodies and in their material circumstances.

So, in these ways I did bring in discussions of power into the equation, yet, I didn’t feel the need to extend this into a critique of New Edge. This is so in the first place because I have been mainly concerned with understanding New Edge living, and secondly because there is much of this type of self-criticism within New Edge circles as well. To draw a parallel, there is much critique, both from the political right and the left, regarding the alleged ‘hypocrisy’ of Occupy protesters since the system they are trying to transcend is simultaneously giving them the resources to protest. Occupiers are often aware of this paradox themselves, yet it is not stopping them to try and change the system. Similarly, there is a lot of such ‘double-consciousness’ going on within New Edge circles and rather than critique it, I see it as something that is so characteristic of reflexive societies today that it is extremely worth-while to study it ethnographically – in non-normative ways.

Some of your key interviewees are cultural writers just like you. Some anthropologists have discussed the lateral, horizontal, or interface ethnography when the anthropologist and informant share an equal power-field, discursive community, and skill set. What do your methods or research tell us about the ethnographic project not studying up or down but sideways?

Yes, all my interviewees were in fact habitually thinking with me, interested in meta-perspectives, in connections between different kinds of ideas, and some of them – Erik Davis and Ken Goffman most notably – are, indeed professional writers. Furthermore, most of my interviewees had also formally studied, read or been implicitly informed by anthropological literature and anthropological concepts. This was testified by the off-hand way in which the notion of ‘liminality’, or the concept of the ‘homo ludens’ was used to describe the nature of the Burning Man festival and of how people were here behaving. Also, documentaries and books were constantly produced within this cultural environment that dealt with the exact same convergences that I was seeking to study. At one point, I began to take photographs of the many impressively filled bookshelves of my interviewees as a way of visualizing this self-reflexivity.

One of the ways that I dealt with my ‘schizophrenic position’ being a researcher in a highly self-reflexive field, was by becoming alert to the differences in the ways that we handled theoretic, reflexive concepts. I saw it as one of my tasks to make these distinctions explicit. For instance, I noticed that when using the idea of liminality when talking about a place like Burning Man, my interviewees did not so much use it in the Turnerian sense of going through a period of chaos to become part of the structures of society afterwards. Instead, they were striving for a sense of permanent liminality, for a permanent detachment from structure. Anthropology, in this way, in fact became a kind of ‘New Age science’ (Hanegraaff 1996) – i.e. a scientific legitimation for quite mystical ideas.

In general, what my research tells me about the ethnographic project of ‘studying sideways’, first, is that the types of questions one asks as an ethnographer, as well as the types of relationships one builds and the type of insights one gains are quite different from what ‘classical anthropology’ is generally considered to be. Secondly, I believe that there is by far not enough attention to this in the larger academic anthropological sphere, nor for the ethnographic phenomenon of self-reflexivity in general. Most anthropological studies still take for granted that it is the anthropologist who is reflective and that the ‘respondents’ are not at all aware of what they do. This implicit notion, for instance, has led some ethnographers to conceptualize Burning Man as a religious space, where people experience true authenticity – through dance for instance – and where they are genuinely free from the consumer-oriented, artificial, rationalistic larger western society. Yet, what is not accounted for in such studies is not only that there is much consumption, artificiality and rationalistic ideology going on in and around Burning Man, but also that many burners are quite self-conscious about this. For instance, burners generally realize quite well that Burning Man is an artificial environment that may quite well enable the experience of extraordinary things that have a mystical, natural feel to it. This ‘double consciousness’, I believe, requires not so much a “willing suspense of disbelief”, but as Michael Saler (2004) recently wrote about the ironic imagination, a habit of mind that allows people to “willingly believe with the double-minded awareness that they are engaging in pretence.” When, as a researcher, you take into account also such kinds of reflexivity, and the ironic imagination in particular, you ask different – and in my opinion more interesting – questions about the cultural complexity of today’s post-industrial societies – about how people negotiate different kinds of frameworks and perspectives that are logically and knowingly incompatible.

A final comment I would like to make about ‘studying sideways’ is that this notion runs the risk of covering up the cultural complexity of today’s world. The notion suggests that there is some kind of plane that is shared by particular kinds of people, who can move ‘sideways’ to have a peek into each other’s affairs. Yet, much of my research in reflexive communities – both in California as well as in the hacker scenes of the Netherlands – still felt like treading on unfamiliar territory. At times it was clear that I shared much socio-economic and intellectual background with my interviewees. At other moments such similarities appeared only superficial and much interpretative and translative work needed to be done to bridge the many subtle ways in which we experienced and conceptualized the world differently.

A number of anthropologists studying digital culture, Biella Coleman and Chris Kelty among them, argue that many manifestations of computer culture can be traced back to classical liberal theory and an emphasis on individuality, freedom of expression, etc. Can you square your research with this ontogenesis?

Yes certainly. In fact, I believe it is this liberal aspect through which computer culture and New Age are related. The emphasis on ‘freedom’ and particularly on ‘liberation’, as well as on the expressive self and the self-evolving and self-realizing human individual, are themes that account in large part for the sympathies between the ‘hippies’ and ‘hackers’ of the Bay Area. These notions translate, for instance, into the celebration of technology as art, of technology creators as artists and into rituals that seek to ‘decondition’ human beings (as well as technology).

Yet, this understanding that New Edge has liberal grounding is only anthropologically meaningful if we understand liberalism here in a broad sense, as similarly understood also by Coleman (and no doubt also by Kelty). Whereas Steven Levy’s notion of the Hacker Ethic, as defined in his 1984 book Hackers, suggests for instance that hacker culture is liberal, this ethic rarely translates into one uniform mode of behavior or political attitude among hackers. As I learned from my research, and as Peter Samson, one of the hackers that Levy wrote about, told me, some hackers translate the notion of freedom into a radical libertarian ideology, whereas for others their engagement with computer technology ties in with their sense of social responsibility. This may be related to the experience of being the creator of a system that users don’t understand the technicalities of. Or it may come from having to agree, socially, on a set of ethics and rules of conduct within computer systems. I think ‘computer culture’, if there is such a thing, is characterized by an interesting tension between these two aspects – a sense of individual freedom and expression and of social responsibility. Such tensions most certainly characterize debates within this New Edge cultural sphere.

One of my observations, for instance, regarded the implementation of the ideal of Doing It Yourself at Burning Man. In self-reflective narratives, Burning Man seems to be all about Doing It Yourself, about creating your own reality ‘from scratch’, quite independent from the cultural notions and social constraints of the larger society. Yet, alongside this fantasy of individual autonomy, both in hacker culture and in New Age scenes, there is also a kind of opposite longing – a longing to fuse, to become one with some kind of larger environment. To put it bluntly, for hackers this is the intelligence of computer networks and for New Agers this is the wisdom of the universe. Yet, this longing for self-transcendence and fusion is often frustrated in the context of everyday life: the people I studied don’t generally find themselves living in systems that they trust. This may be due to the understanding that computer networks are controlled by (opaque) corporations and government agencies and that corporate and ideological hegemonic interests conspire with contemporary media technologies to ‘distort’ people’s ideas about reality and about who is to be trusted. This is why and how an environment such as Burning Man is important for my interviewees. It offers an environment of trust. Here one can give oneself over to a larger environment – to the hallucinogenic substances, the artworks, the food offered, the dances, the light-shows – that is created by people that are known or that can be known potentially. A sense of paranoia, experienced in the context of everyday life, is here transformed into a sense of ‘pronoia’. This term was first coined in the context of raves and refers to the notion that the universe conspires to give you exactly that what you need. Both paranoia and pronoia are rooted in the awareness of being part of and controlled by a larger system, yet, paranoia comes from having to depend on a system that cannot be trusted and pronoia comes from giving oneself over to a system that is trusted. This divide informs much of the social embeddedness of the liberal belief in individual autonomy. This is the case at least in the context of New Edge but I think also in the context of hacker culture more generally.

Your work is mainly about a period of time between 2005-2008. This culture moves fast. If you were to continue this specific project where would you go and what would you do?

While you are right in the sense that technocultural development moves fast, I am quite interested in studying certain continuities within the technocultural landscape of post-industrial societies since the 1960s. What I’d love to continue doing, for instance, is to focus on the historically developed cultural tensions that I observed in this New Edge environment, and to see how these tensions intersect with the kind of technocultural negotiations that are taking place in the Netherlands today – and probably in other places as well.

For instance, one tension that I find characteristic of the New Edge environment is what I just discussed: on the one hand, there is a lot of commentary and experiential testimony of the notion that people today are becoming more and more part of opaque, complex, incomprehensible corporate and technological networks. At the same time, what remains firmly standing in this environment is the ideal of the autonomous self-possessed human individual – expressed in the ideologies of Doing It Yourself, Creating Your Own Reality and the notion that it is possible to use these otherwise complex technologies to have some kind of transparent access to Reality. I think you could say that two different notions of what technology is, are here converging: on the one hand technology is conceived of as an enveloping system. On the other hand it is seen as a tool that one can use to realize one’s individual desires.

This is one tension that I am now seeking to study in the context of technocultural negotiations in the Netherlands today: within New Edge, as well as in the larger context of technology innovation in the Netherlands, the artistic sphere has played a large role in fostering the notion of technology being inherently and ultimately flexible, complex and unexpected in its outcomes. Various tech-art institutions in the Netherlands have been wedded to this notion, and have co-operated with hackers and artists to study the flexibility of technology, to push it to its limits and to solicit unexpected results – the ideals of multiplicity, open-endedness and emergence, are quite important here, and wedded also to the idea that, ultimately, what it means to be human is open-ended. Some of these artistic institutions have received government subsidies for their explorations, sometimes in combination with corporate or private investment. Yet, recently in the Netherlands, a cultural atmosphere has emerged that is extremely hostile towards art, and towards any kind of practice that does not straightforwardly produce a tangible profit-making product. This negative atmosphere is intensified by parties now in parliament that have successfully pushed for extreme budget-cuts, targeting specifically art institutions. So, currently, only institutions that are capable of producing concrete, profit-making products as part of their technological explorations, paradoxically, remain eligible for subsidy.

In this context, the institutions that I am seeking to study are having to intensify their negotiation of two technological frameworks that are different and conflicting in the ontological sense: on the one hand, the notion that technology is open-ended, and on the other hand, the notion that technology is a tool, used to solve identifiable problems, catering to the demands of the markets and able, in this way, to generate profit and to justify its own existence. An overarching question that I have, while seeking to study these ontological and institutional negotiations between different understandings of technology, is regarding the political, material and socio-economic bases for the neoliberal ideal of the autonomous, DIY individual – since I believe it is this ideal that is present in both ontological frameworks and that may reveal their common basis – and that may reveal what both accounts leave out of the equation.

And yes, this research does not involve a study of Virtual Reality software but addresses any kind of technology that is now attracting the attention of artists, hackers and corporations – most significantly being new forms of energy-generation tools, new kinds of sensor-based mobile technologies, and bio-nanotechnologies.

In December 2010 Zandbergen finished her PhD dissertation, “New Edge: Technology and Spirituality in the San Francisco Bay Area,” on the dynamic relationship between new forms of spirituality and politics on the one hand, and digital technologies on the other, as shaped in the past 30 years in Silicon Valley, California. A book chapter was recently published, “Silicon Valley New Age: the co-constitution of the digital and the sacred” in Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital. She elaborated on her dissertation in a recent post, “Combining Extreme Distrust and Spastic Bursts of Blind Faith… What New Edge Culture has to say about Today’s Schizophrenic Information Society.” Previously she has taught the course “Anthropology of the Information Society” at the University of Leiden. She is presently a Postdoctoral scholar at the University of Leiden in “The Future is Elsewhere” program. 

First a brief backstory: from 1998-2000, I attended urban planning graduate school. Halfway through, I realized I was far more interested in analyzing cities than planning them, especially because (at that point anyway) in NYC “planning” often meant little more than manufacturing windfall profits for developers. So I headed off to the CUNY Graduate Center to work with their flock of urbanists.

Flashing forward to 2003: my dissertation research begins. The idea is for me to investigate the process by which the “business agenda” comes to be. Basically, what I am trying to do here is use ethnography to explore what happens in the gap between the functional requirements of capitalist urbanization (as laid out by Harvey, Castells, Molotch and Logan, etc. etc.) and the construction of an actual elite agenda in a specific historical, cultural, and geographical context. My focus is on the public spaces of development policy formation, such as conferences and other professional meetings, city council hearings, etc., but also on more informal mechanisms. For the latter, I draw on the network of contacts I began developing in graduate school, and I soon find out that the development policy world in NYC is pretty small and interlinked (I had an excel spreadsheet with just a couple of hundred names on it). I begin talking to people, attending those conferences, interviewing, and so on.

As I do so, I quickly realize three things. First, the Bloomberg administration is up to something different than I expect, given the standard shape of neoliberal urban governance in NYC or elsewhere. The administration is engaging in citywide urban planning, moving away from the use of indiscriminate tax subsidies, and perhaps most interestingly pulling a lot of new people into City Hall. Not surprisingly, given the new Mayor’s background in business, this includes several people from finance and other private sector industries. Less expected is the hiring of a number of very well-respected planning and policy professionals to staff the top levels of the Bloomberg administration’s development and planning agencies. Such people had largely been excluded from previous administration in favor of folks drawn from the real estate industry or from the murky world of NYC’s public-private development agencies (which basically amounts to the same thing). Bloomberg’s City Hall is becoming a hotbed corporate and professional technocracy.

Second, the Mayor’s business background (along with that of the other private sector people he was bringing into government) actually seems to matter in substantive ways. Economic development officials are telling the city council about the thorough rebranding campaign underway; city officials are referring to companies as “clients”; City Hall was being physically remodeled along the lines the Mayor had used in his private company, Bloomberg LLP; and perhaps most remarkably, the Mayor is referring to NYC as a “luxury product.” Importing private-sector logic into government is nothing new, in NYC or elsewhere, but now it is being done by people who can (and do!) credibly claim to be running the city like a private company.

Third, everybody in the development and policy world is focused on the far west side of Manhattan. Everybody. Nobody wants to talk about the business agenda formation; they want to talk about the Hudson Yards (the plan proposed for the area). The Bloomberg administration is joining NYC2012 (the city’s private Olympic bid organization), the Group of 35 (an elite commission charged with stimulating office development in NYC), the New York Jets, and a number of other planning and development groups in targeting the area to the west of Times Square and Penn Station for redevelopment. And as it turned out, graduate school classmates of mine are involved in the growing conflict over far west side redevelopment in a number of ways–some working for city agencies, others working for community organizations that oppose the plan as currently formulated.

This was a key point in my research; suddenly focusing on the process of business agenda formulation seemed a bit boring, especially since I had a full-scale development battle emerging in front of me! I also had this interesting phenomenon of the ex-CEO mayor actually running the city as a business (rather than just for business), which seemed to have some unpredictable consequences (like a willingness to raise taxes and hire egghead professors and policy professionals and respect their expertise). Finally, I had all these professionals–city planners, professors, public health experts, markets, educational experts, former management consultants, etc.–talking about the new spirit of professionalism and competence in City Hall, and the new excitement about public service that they and their peers were feeling.

Realizing all this, I began to split my research onto two tracks. First, I began investigating the early years of the Bloomberg administration, i.e. late 2001 to mid-2003, using interviews with officials, government documents, transcripts of administration testimony to the city council, and various secondary sources. Second, I threw myself into the conflict over the far west side of Manhattan, attending every community meeting, rally, city council hearing, conference, and official planning meeting I could find, and redirecting my interviewing towards those engaged in the conflict. I’ll write a bit more about the second, more ethnographic of these two tracks next time.

But recently I reviewed a paper that employed QDA to try to make a point. In my estimation it added exactly nothing to the paper. Conceptual distinctions were fuzzy, terms were assumed to refer to concepts when they may only have been co-occurent in different samples, the distinctions apparently provided by the software were fuzzy at best, at worst totally indistinct, and most annoying of all, the authors could not say what their methodology consisted in, only that they had used software to do something.

Now I could rail against the misplaced scientism and ideological blindness of QDA here, but I do not (want to) think this article was in any way exemplary. Rather, what I want to know is: what are the best articles where QDA has really made a difference? What are the canonical articles? Is there a review article of the best of the best of QDA results? When Atlas.ti costs $1800 a pop, and Nvivo costs $600, doesn’t it seem like there should be a really clear list of all the super advances we have made because of it? Really, shouldn’t the “greatest hits of QDA” be something all anthropologists can easily recount?

For many years the gold standard for those of us living and working in the Pacific has been Linda Tuhawai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies. Smith’s book has been trailblazing, but it is also in many ways a first step — like Lassiter’s volume on collaborative anthropology, a lot of the book is taken up not so much with a discussion of methods per se as groundclearing: building a genealogy for your study (Lassiter) or thinking through what it means to decolonize one’s self (Smith) (although more recently she has hooked up with the Denzin/Lincoln crowd to produce a Handbook on Critical and Indigenous Methodologies I’d like to read if ever appears at a non-ridiculous price).

In comparison, Research Is Ceremony seems focused on how, concretely, one could do ethnographic research with a distinctive indigenous twist. At times, this sort of thing can become too New Agey for my taste, but as far as I can tell (having not read the whole thing yet) Wilson does a good job of wearing his heart on his sleeve and providing good insights on how to do research.

The other volume — which Tad is promoting heavily — is Living Proof: The Essential Data Collection Guide for Use-And-Occupancy Map Surveys. This volume, published by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, basically outlines a method for people map their land and make their claims to it ‘legible’ on their own terms. Again, I haven’t had a chance to look at it, but it looks really interesting and useful.

Even though most anthropologists are not indigenous, I think it is really important that we keep up date with work being done on indigenous methods for several reasons: to make sure our discipline is a place indigenous people want to come study, to make sure we understand what is going on with other people who are committed to ethnographic and qualitative methods, and finally (of course) to learn something new. It would be great if in the future anthropologists working in indigenous communities (or pretty much anywhere) could learn to use and spread these methods, not as yet another case of appropriating indigenous culture for our own ends, but as a way of learning from people who are our equals and perhaps even, methodologically, our superiors.

First off, the title is somewhat misleading. Ingold’s purpose is not to distinguish anthropology from ethnography, but to criticize the “the idea of a one-way progression from ethnography to anthropology” in which methodological rigor precedes theoretical generalization. The title really should read: “Anthropological reasoning is not inductive, but dialectical.” He wants to challenge the dichotomy which places ethnographic description on the one side and anthropological theorizing on the other.

We can still recognise today the figure of the ‘social theorist’, sunk in his armchair or more likely peering from behind his computer screen, who presumes to be qualified, by virtue of his standing as an intellectual, to pronounce upon the ways of a world with which he involves himself as little as possible, preferring to interrogate the works of others of his kind. At the other extreme is the lowly ‘ethnographic researcher’, tasked with undertaking structured and semi-structured interviews with a selected sample of informants and analysing their contents with an appropriate software package, who is convinced that the data he collects are ethnographic simply because they are qualitative. These figures are the fossils of an outmoded distinction between empirical data collection and abstract theoretical speculation, and I hope we can all agree that there is no room for either in anthropology.

Against this he juxtaposes a view of anthropology as a craft (a view which Rex has elaborated in a series of posts on this blog).

For it is characteristic of craft that both the practitioner’s knowledge of things, and what he does to them, are grounded in intensive, respectful and intimate relations with the tools and materials of his trade. Indeed, anthropologists have long liked to see themselves as craftsmen among social scientists, priding themselves on the quality of their handiwork by contrast to the mass-produced goods of industrial data-processing turned out by sociologists and others.

As I understand it, the emphasis on craftsmanship is an effort to shift the focus from the tools of the trade — qualitative data collection techniques — to the ethnographer herself. The ethnographer is a researcher who has cultivated in herself an “anthropological attitude”:

The endeavour is essentially comparative, but what it compares are not bounded objects or entities but ways of being. It is the constant awareness of alternative ways of being, and of the ever-present possibility of ‘flipping’ from one to another, that defines the anthropological attitude. It lies in what I would call the ‘sideways glance’.

He defines this “sideways glance” as “a practice of observation grounded in participatory dialog.” Through the course of this dialog anthropologists swing back and forth like a pendulum between anthropological theorizing and ethnographic description.

But I have started this discussion at the conclusion, and Ingold’s own process of getting there is as important as where he ends up. Much of the essay is, in fact, a dialog with Radcliffe-Brown, and the kind of anthropology he proposed. It both seeks to defend R-B from his critics, as well as to correct some of his contradictions and excesses. I am not particularly concerned about defending or attacking R-B’s place in the anthropological cannon, but I do find the shifting framework of Ingold’s discussion to be quite fascinating. He starts with Kroeber’s critique of R-B’s approach as a form of ahistorical classification, to which Kroeber opposed a form of “descriptive integration.” Just as the artist does not see a landscape as a “multitude of particulars” so too does Kroeber’s anthropologist seek to render the particulars into a coherent whole rather than viewing them as an incoherent jigsaw puzzle of unconnected parts.

This integrative approach leads to an interesting question: “the anthropologist describes the social world as the artist paints a landscape, then what becomes of time?”

Kroeber came to the conclusion that time, in the chronological sense, is inessential to history. Presented as a kind of ‘descriptive cross-section’ or as the characterisation of a moment,a historical account can just as well be synchronic as diachronic.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard was to take up Kroeber’s view of time, juxtaposing it to that of R-B “for whom history was nothing more than ‘a record of a succession of unique events’ and social anthropology nothing less than ‘a set of general propositions.’”

It was left to Edmund Leach to defend R-B, although his defense was at best a backhanded one. Leach complained that his colleagues had “given up in the attempt to make comparative generalizations” for “butterfly collecting” (by which he meant “impeccably detailed historical ethnographies of particular peoples”). However, he felt that R-B’s approach to comparative generalization overemphasized the “generalization” part rather than the “comparison” part which Leach felt was more important.

A generalisation, then, would take the form not of a typological specification that would enable us to distinguish societies of one kind from those of another, but of a statement of the relationships between variables that may operate in societies of any kind.

It is here that Ingold leaps to R-B’s defense, arguing that R-B did not see social life as a collection of static, ahistorical taxonomic specimens, but rather as “a process.” Ingold argues that Leach’s criticism could much better be applied to his beloved Levi-Strauss than R-B. But Ingold is nonetheless critical of R-B’s view of “social life” as being dichotomous with the internal (psychological) life of the mind. Such an approach “implies the closure and completion of a system of relations that has been fully joined up” as opposed to a processual view of social life as “open ended and never complete.” It is here that Ingolds discussion of R-B and his view of anthropology as a craft dovetail, for:

It follows that any endeavour of so-called descriptive integration, if it is to do justice to the implicate order of social life, can be neither descriptive nor theoretical in the specific senses constituted by their opposition. It must rather do away with the opposition itself.

If social life is a process, then our method for investigating it must itself eschew the opposition between lived experience and theoretical generalization, and must emphasize instead the shared experience of the anthropologist and her subjects with whom knowledge is collaboratively generated through dialog.

Having concluded my summary of Ingold’s argument, I have some questions:

• Does our epistemology necessarily need to reflect our ontology? I’m not convinced it does… In any case, it seems that the case for this needs to be made rather than simply assumed.
• How much of this is boundary maintenance? Real anthropologists are those who have an undefinable savoir faire, as opposed to those pesky applied folks, or ethnographers in other disciplines, who have only learned our methodological tools.
• What is left, after this discussion, of generalizing theory? I’m not really clear. My sense is that Ingold ends up collapsing theory into ethnography, undermining his own argument. But I’m not sure about that. I have the feeling I need to read Ingold’s other work to get a better grip on where he is coming from.
• I think one of the things I like most here is the critique of the postmodern “assemblage” view which revels in complexity. It seems that Ingold is staking out a middle ground, but again, I’m left a little uncertain where this might be?

I look forward to hearing what our readers have to say!

My goal in this course is really to focus on methods — on what, specifically, you do during fieldwork. I want to give students some tools so that they do not feel lost at sea when they arrive in the field. I want the tools to be hands-on, and not too specialized, since they will have to work in a variety of research conditions. Finally, while I don’t want to force students into a scientistic conception of fieldwork and methods if they have a more humanistic sense of what they are about, I at least want to give them the skills to Go There if they want to.

So, here is what I’ve ordered from the bookstore.

*Analyzing Social Settings* (Lofland, et al): I’ve mentioned this one before. It’s a symbolic-interactiony textbook. Frankly I think it is too expensive for its slender volume, but as a one-volume overview of the research process its the least of all possible evils. First, the bibliography is extensive and full of interesting case studies — so its a good place for students to start to explore their own ideas about fieldwork. It also has an opening chapter on how your own personal life leads you on to your research topic, which is a really important (and often undiscussed) thing to bring up. Finally, a major part of research as the authors describe it is ‘focusing’ research — moving beyond being ‘in’ the field and formulating some concrete ways to ‘do’ fieldwork. So yeah, a small light piece to take into the field.

*Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes* (Emerson, et al): Another ethnographic sociology book (notice the pattern here?). This is an industry-standard book that is very hands-on in describing how to write fieldnotes. It is also inexpensive, which is nice for students. Again, the focus is not critiquing the theory of fieldnotes, or discussions by people about how they feel on the inside about their fieldnotes. The issue is how to take them.

*Learning From Strangers* (Weiss): I think this has got to be the most common book on interviewing out there, and is used by a bintillion different disciplines and professions. Inexpensive, very hands on, includes examples of consent forms, interview guides, and even coded interviews. It has a lot of stuff that is not so central for anthropology (or the type I do anyway) or reflection on the complex dynamic of intersubejctivity when you interview but… screw it. It gives you a basic overview. And using this book means that students will be able to discuss interviewing intelligbly with people in other disciplines.

*Doing Qualitative Research On Your Computer* (Hahn): Ok. Coding fieldnotes is the area where anthropologists have Issues. Coding is often described as a special technique with special software, etc. This turns off anthropologists who are skeptical of the Power of Science, and even those who might be interested in gaining some coding chops get the sense that it requires special (read: expensive) software and extra training. A lot of the Anselm-Strauss inspired approaches feature textbooks that are in there 39th edition, have been over-edited, and can be vague and mystical.

I am betting on this book because 1) it teaches students that coding is a simple technical act, not a comple and intimidating methodological one 2) anything that will get people to read and parse their fieldnotes is a good thing 3) I forget that not all students can just figure out computers the way I can 4) the book come with templates for access and excel that will work for any office software, and tells you how to use them.

This is a new and pretty unusual book (there are a lot of instructions like “left click and choose’add table’”) but I am hoping it will help get students past issues of software choice, etc. etc. and get them to read their fieldnotes.

There are some usual books I’m skipping here — the ginormous Bernard volume on anthropological research methods (which now costs US$100!), Briggs’s excellent _Learning How To Ask_ (which we will read), and some others. So it is an experiment, and I’d be interested in getting some feedback.

I’m finding the process of trying to squeeze my round pegged ethnographic methods into the unwieldy square holes of the IRB form both frustrating and demoralizing … Partly because it can’t account for uncertainty, for instance by wanting a script of interview questions and to know already how many subjects I’ll have – both things I can’t know ahead of time. But then, its also the problem of the nature of participant observation itself. … where do we (and the IRB) draw the line between “observations” that require consent and those that don’t? It seems clear cut for people I might formally interview with a tape recorder in hand. But what about the people we interact with who may or may not “formally” become part of the research, the gray areas of interaction that might have a huge impact on our thinking – the people we meet in the street, at the local store, the friends of friends who drop by, the secretary or colleague or mother of the official “informant” who we hear about but never meet in person…?

I wrote back to her and tried to offer some advice (and she consented to let me reproduce her email here), mostly to emphasize that one of the problems she might be having with the IRB was that they wanted her to be doing something in the field that was demonstrably different from just living there:

…do you _really_ not have _any_ clue about what sorts of questions you want to ask people while you are there? Do you _really_ not have _any_ sense of how many people you will have to talk to before you get a sense that you know what is going on? I bet you do — even if only have a rough idea right now, you can at least tell the IRB that you will iterate over your research, refining your questions and the people you talk to through different stages of research as you figure out what you’re about… The same stands for everyday interactions — are you planning on pulling a notebook out at the dinner table with a host family? Or with total strangers? If you stratify your lifeworld out in even this very rough way you’ll not only have a better sense of what you’ll do in the field, you’ll be able to turn your confusion and anxiety into righteous indignation when the IRB keeps bugging you about venipuncture forms!

This student had a problem that a lot of cultural anthropologists have: a real lack of training in field methods.

There are lots of reasons anthropologists are notoriously lax in learning field methods. We value fieldwork as a transformative experience which makes the anthropologist not just more informed, but wiser — and this means we may sometimes find pile sorts and sampling procedures stifling. We do work in a staggering variety of places and in lots of ways, and this makes field-wide consensus about what to do in the field difficult. But what resources are there for students who want to learn more about methods?

The obvious book here is the ‘bible’ — “Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches”:http://www.altamirapress.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0759108684 which is part of the massive H. Russell Bernard empire in anthropological methods. But, to be honest, I’ve never really cottoned to the book. First, at US$100 it is ridiculously expensive and, to be honest, the smorgasboard “and now 5 pages on Lickert scales” approach is just too scattered for me. Plus, the sections on technology have still never recovered from DOS.

I can’t claim to have waded through the welter of books on qualitative research, but I do have to say that I sort of like the Lofland’s “Analyzing Social Settings”:http://academic.cengage.com/cengage/instructor.do?totalresults.do?page=null&keyfor=allsite&keyitem=all&keytype=null&resultfor=higheredu&resulttype=instructor&keyword_all=lofland&pagefrom=search&disciplinenumber=3&product_isbn=9780534528614&contextelement=http://academic.cengage.com/cengage which is unapologetic about the idea that you can do ethnographic fieldwork which is rigorous and qualitative.

One other meta-resource: I’m not sure who these people are, but “This collection of well-chosen and high quality links on methods”:http://gsociology.icaap.org/methods/ is superb. Lickert scales FTW!

Michèle Lamont’s Qualitative Research Methods syllabus
This is a more ‘sciencey’ take from ethnographic sociology

Loïc Wacquant and Nancy Shepher-Hughes Ethnography Inside Out syllabus
More ‘touchy-feely’ and reflexive take.

Does anyone have any additional syllabi they like or want to share?

As a way of understanding the interconnection of the history of this concept with the epistemological, political, and ethical values analysts bring to the table this is an interesting idea. The problem is that it doesn’t seem to have too much to do with Rheinberger’s concept of ‘experimental system’. Rheinberger uses this term to foreground the practice of science, the actual artifactual nature of a laboratory’s set up and its influence in experimental practice. In doing so Rheinberger tries to move away from histories of science which document, on the one hand, intellectualist unfoldings of scientific ideas or problematics through time and, on the other, approaches which relegate the world to background ‘conditions’ or ‘contexts’ out of which scientific practice emerges. Rheinberger wants to talk about what happens when you get a new, more powerful centrifuge, or when you move the refrigerator slightly to the left. Fischer, on the other hand, seems to be using their term in a much more old fashioned (although stylistically more adventurous) way.

Now you may ask: Since when did the quality of a scholar’s work hinge crucially on how closely they hew to The One True Word Of Hans-Jorg Rheinberger? And of course this is a good point — rip mix and burn baby. But this did get me thinking, what _is_ anthropology’s equivalent of an experimental system?

Its an interesting question, because what really makes scientists ‘scientists’ is the distinct form of knowledge and practice that crystallizes around a lab, which creates a sort of sandbox for experimentation for some variables. At first I thought the anthropological equivalent would be our fieldnotes, since these are purified, recontextualized bits of life that can be manipulated, sorted, and searched through in a way that creates an ‘archive’ whose affordances have a scarily large effect on what sort of research results we produce.

Then it struck me — maybe it seems stupid to you that it took me this long — that the equivalent for anthropologists really is the field site. A lot of doing fieldwork means transforming your situation in your fieldsite from just ‘being in the field’ to ‘doing fieldwork’ which means creating routines, instruments, methods, and relationships which allow you to do things (like census, interviews, transcription, etc.) which are more or less like embryonic experimental systems.

If this is true, then it seems to me that anthropologists differ from bench scientists in two important ways. First, we do a lot more ‘being in the field’ and a lot less ‘fieldwork’ than most of us would care to admit — and that includes the people who see ‘fieldwork’ as alienatingly objectivistic, scientistic, obsessed with a false standards of neutrality and objectivity etc. etc. I have the idea — totally unbased on any actual evidence — that through the past couple of decades the ratio of being to doing has grown greatly. This has implications.

Second, anthropologists rarely spend much time in the field. Even ones at ‘research universities’ like me are really paid to teach, and must show tremendous amounts of hustle to get the funding together for major time in the field. This has to do with lots of things (and of course bench science in unis involves juggling teaching duties too) but key among them is that for most of us the field is just not that easy to get to, and it takes time to get things set up when you arrive.

There are, of course, people for whom The Field is right next door. And indeed, often people so situated and so inclined do have the ability to produce short research notes on findings which are similar to the sort of stream of publications that come out of labs, including collaboration with ‘locals’ and grad student etc. This really is quite a different pattern than the usual ‘three years ago I spent two months in my field site and here is _another_ article culled from the experience’ pattern you often see in some anthropological work.

Now, aspirations (and realizations) of nomothetic, experimentalist inclinations require more than just propinquity. You’ve got to ‘want to be scientific’ as well. But it would be interesting to examine more the way that abstract debates about anthropology’s status ‘as a science’ and what ‘science’ is were examined through the lens of our concrete research arrangements rather than abstract analyses of ‘what we do’ or biographical scrutiny of particular anthropologists in their particular fieldsites.

In 1995, when I moved my family to rural China, I took a desktop computer (Gateway) and a Kodak DC-50 – with its 640 x 480 resolution and its $1,000 price, it was top of the line back then! The desktop was also a mistake, and made our move difficult – I remember watching my monitor (in its original packaging) bounce down a long escalator in the new Guangzhou rail station (but it still worked!). Anyway, this is what is in my contemporary fieldkit:

• Lowepro Compu Day Pack (for transporting equipment; for everyday use, I use a messenger bag with equipment kept safe using photography wraps)
• Canon D60 digital SLR, with extra batteries and SD cards
• Canon SD 550 (digital point and shoot)
• Canon GL-1 videorecorder (with extra batteries, shotgun and wireless mics, tapes; smaller than a GL-2 or XL-1)
• Tripod (for use with any of the above)
• Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet PC
• USB hard drives (the kind that don’t need power cords; my latest is a Seagate FreeAgentPro, 160 GB; I bought a couple of smaller USB hard drives when I was last in Shanghai)
• Thumb drive (USB)
• Plug adapters (for China, two different styles; I also bring a Hong Kong type adapter – looks like a UK one)
• Hand counter (the click kind, like the ones ticket takers at cinemas use; I’ve had it since my dissertation fieldwork, and it’s kind of a good luck charm now)
• Chinese Cell phone (cheapest Nokia I could buy, with local SIM card)
• Passport photos (printed off my deskjet, always useful for extending visas, etc.)
• Treo 700 (or older versions in the past; I bring a lot of e-books to keep me sane, and use Mobipocket Reader to read them; mostly bad sci-fi from fiction books and Baen; also my MP3 player)
• Leatherman utility tool
• Portable office kit (with minature stapler, paper clips, etc.)
• Name cards (double-sided, English and Chinese characters)
• Medical kit (first aid supplies, antibiotics and other medicines to treat everything from gout to a heart attack; my parents are physicians, and loaded me up with what they think is necessary)

I usually buy a lot of other supplies locally, since they are too bulky or I can never remember to bring some essentials (like poster tubes,notebooks and pens, surge suppressors, etc.)
***

From Rachel Newcomb (Rollins College)
From 2000-04, I conducted dissertation and post-dissertation fieldwork in Fes, Morocco, examining women’s changing roles in the Moroccan middle class, particularly in non-profits, the family, and new urban spaces such as exercise clubs and cyber cafes. I’m an assistant professor of anthropology at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Currently I’m doing a smaller collaborative fieldwork project here in Florida with one of my students concerning former migrant workers and their exposures to pesticides, but I plan to go back to Morocco and begin new research within the next six months. Technology changes so rapidly that what I took to the field in 2000 would no longer be current now: a Nikon N-65 35 mm camera, a laptop computer, and a small Sony microcassette recorder that I’m still using. I switched over to a Canon PowerShot digital camera, which takes great pictures and is less obtrusive, and I’m coveting Roland’s Edirol R-9 MP3 recorder, which I plan to get my hands on before my next venture into the field in Morocco… So, next time around, I hope to take the Edirol MP3 recorder, my MacBook laptop, and the trusty Canon PowerShot. I’d also like to add that “pen and paper” ARE essential to my toolkit, but I’m excited to learn more about the new note-taking software.
***

From Thomas Malaby, (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
I study those who produce online virtual worlds; in 2005 I did field and online research at Linden Lab of San Francisco, the makers of Second Life. My fieldwork bag is a medium-sized messenger bag, and here’s what I take with me for that kind of ethnographic research (whether in person or online):

• High-end laptop that can run beta or public release versions of virtual world client software (MacBook Pro, Dell XPS, or similar)
• Logitech MX 610 USB wireless mouse (8-button programmable, excellent for online games and virtual worlds)
• SteerMouse software for Mac OS X (to make PC USB mice like the Logitech MX 610 Mac-compatible)
• Olympus WS-100 Digital Voice Recorder (USB-integrated)
• Canon Powershot A550 Digital Camera
• Cell phone
• Two 2GB flashdrives for daily backup of all files (kept in different locations)
• Ethernet cable (for extra performance vs wireless during remote online research)
• Cables and extra batteries for laptop, cell phone, recorder, camera, and mouse
• Moleskine Large Ruled Notebook & pen (pen & paper is always a nice break from the digital)

***

From Melissa Caldwell (UC Santa Cruz): I study religious charity and philanthropy in Russia.

• Nikon Cool Pix 4100 Digital Camera
• Olympus WS-100 Digital Voice Recorder
• 6 AA and 4 AAA rechargeable batteries and charger
• Dynex All-in-1 Memory Card Reader/Writer
• Dell D610 Latitude Laptop
• 3-prong to 2-prong adaptor plug (this now stays in my computer bag after the one time I forgot it and FedEx lost the package my husband sent me; FedEx only “found” it and attempted to deliver two days after I had returned home)
• Ethernet cable and retractable phone cord
• App. 6×8 inch spiral bound notebook (buy first day in the field)
• Schneider Topliner 934 0-4 pens, blue and black (buy first day in the field; these pens are more like markers but with a tiny nib – they write beautifully on any surface and last forever)
• Box of Papermate Sharpwriter #2 mechanical pencils
• Ancient Nokia mobile phone with GSM and unlocked for pay-as-you-go foreign SIM card
• Moscow City Atlas
• Calendar
• Mini Solar calculator
• Package of post-it notes
• 3-4 File folders
• Scotch tape
• Pocket knife
• Corkscrew/bottle opener
• Extra passport pictures; copies of passport, visa application and visa, and credit cards

***

Allison Alexy (PhD candidate, Yale). My dissertation is about experiences of divorce in contemporary Japan. I spent a good amount of my fieldwork time in Tokyo and the surrounding suburbs, but also did research in a city on Shikoku island.
What I carried:
Early in my fieldwork, I bought an enormous thin canvas bag that, I thought, looked descent and presentable, but would stretch to hold a lot and wasn’t particularly heavy. I lugged around a lot of stuff most days, and made frequent use of the lockers in Tokyo train stations. The most important thing in my bag was a small spiral notebook with a particular muji brand pen stuck in the spiral. The notebook was about 3 by 5 inches, and the pens fit perfectly in the spiral, so I bought both by the bushel. The notebooks were entirely chronological, and anything I needed to write down went in there. In addition, I usually carried an Olympus DM-20 digital voice recorder and the small microphone it came with. It took me a few months to figure out, but I started carrying around a little bit of makeup (mascara, etc.). I had finally realized that wearing makeup is something that marks women as “adult” in Japan — it wasn’t until an informant told me a story about how her mother had sat her down and demanded that she wear makeup that I realized I probably should be wearing some, too. I also always carried a stack of my business cards (with Japanese on one side and English on the other), that listed my names, affiliations, email, homepage, cell phone number, and home address (in Japan). One of my close male friends always yelled at me for including my home address, but nothing bad ever came of it, and I thought he was being overprotective. I also always carried my ipod, onto which I frequently dropped digital copies of my fieldnotes. I was very afraid that an earthquake would destroy the two back-up hard drives that I’d left at home, so it made me feel better to have a copy in my bag. (I was also backing up off-site, to my mother’s computer, in the US.) I kept my digital camera (Canon elph, small and flat) in my bag at all times and really couldn’t leave home without my cell phone (which was some sort of AU brand phone). Unfortunately, the phone’s camera wasn’t good, so I had to carry to carry my camera as well.
Throughout the course of my fieldwork, some of which occurred in support groups, I realized that it’s a good idea to carry tissues. If people were upset and crying, or if I was upset, I could share tissues. Many days, I’d also have printed pages giving a summary of my research (in Japanese), so I could hand them off if anyone seemed interested. However, similar materials were on my website, and I usually found it less pushy to point people there. The website, which included a Japanese-language introduction to me and my research, in addition to pictures of me with family and friends, was probably one of the most helpful things I had in the field. I was surprised by how many people really looked at it and would say, months into our relationship, “Oh yeah, I know what your mom looks like because I saw that picture!” It also helped me contextualize myself, and introduce some of my personal life to people who I’d met during moments of their personal explanation. Although I was always willing to talk about my personal life when people asked, I was also happy to have pictures up, giving different perspectives.
When I went to Japan, I brought two hard drives with me — 250 gig, LaCie, externals — and a Fujitsu scansnap scanner. The scansnap was one of the most useful things I had in the field — everything I found, got immediately scanned, and though I kept the hard copies, it made me feel better to have a digital back-up. It’s about the size of a loaf of bread, so I never carried it around. I also had a small digital video camera, but I didn’t use it nearly as much as I thought I would.
***

What’s in your fieldkit?

Old School.

First, there is the method that no one (including me) on the EASIANTH listserve brought up – pen and notebooks. While I recommend digitized note-taking to my students, I still tell them that they should always carry around a pen and notebook, for those impromptu jottings and diagrams; old school still works!

Good old MS Word was also recommended by a number of anthropologists, largely because of its wide compatibility. Word documents can always be imported into other analytical software packages, and as David Slater from Sophia University Tokyo pointed out, has a “fields” command that can be used to code fieldnotes.

Fieldnotes 1.0 programs

One up on old school, these programs were made specifically to help organize and analyze qualitative data. I think all these programs (except for Filemaker Pro) can only be run on PC’s.

Anthropac
Atlas ti
Ethnograph
Filemaker Pro. From John McCreery.
Easy to get started with, dead simple to use, available for both Macs and Windows PCs, and now an extraordinary powerful relational database. You can literally start as simple as creating a new database (just like opening a new file in a world processor), adding the fields you want, and start inputting data. Discover that you need a new field, no problem; just add it to the existing fields.
Then, moreover, the sky’s the limit. The program has been evolving since its introduction about the same time as MSWord on Macs, has tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of users worldwide, and highly robust and helpful user community.
QSR’s nVivo: From Joe Bosco, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
There are many ways to use a program like NVivo, but for me, the main advantage is help in organizing the mass of data we can now collect electronically, and then structuring my work with the texts. The program helps you sort and keep track of files and information, and helps you organize your thoughts and ideas.
The files. NVivo now allows you to import documents in Microsoft Word, RTF, or TXT formats. You can also write note or transcribe interviews directly into NVivo, and it can handle photos and video and websites as external data, with a hyperlink in your NVivo data.
Organizing the data. NVivo allows you to give “attributes” to each case. For example, you can define the attributes of interviewees as male or female, or specify their age, and then later retrieve data based on these attributes (are there any old men who talked about using hair conditioner?). You can think of this as coding the entire case according to attributes of the speaker, if they are interviews.
Coding, or Working With the Data. NVivo offers many ways to code. It is designed primarily to allow you to code as you read along. Ideas come to you, and you can create a code. You can make it a “free code”, which stands alone, or a “tree code” which has relationships to other codes (such as a code for “buys shampoo” under which might be “buys name brands” and “buys cheap brands” as two branches off the trunk.) The program allows you to see all the possible codes in a box off to the side, and you can also see “coding stripes” next to your text, to see how text is coded (though you cannot see all the stripes at once–you probably would not want to since you are likely to have a lot of codes). It is very easy to rename, merge and move codes around. The program can autocode if your data is structured with common headings (e.g. if you asked everyone the same question). It cannot autocode for specific words, though it can easily search for certain words or combinations.
The program has a query function that allows you to search for patterns and test ideas through text searches, word frequency, and “matrix coding”, i.e. comparing results across several groups. All query results can be stored. The program can also produce “reports” which can be as simple as all the text coded for a particular code, or the code that comes from informants with certain attributes. It also gives a “coding summary” which lists the files and codes used, showing your progress in coding.
Each project is saved as one file, making it easy to back up or to move from one computer to another. The program comes with training materials and videos, but I found an introductory class quite helpful in getting jump-started in using the program, though the class was relatively expensive. The program is also not cheap, but it is quite robust and the company does give a lot of support. They even helped upgrade a project file when I could not get it to work with the new version. NVivo 7 works well with Chinese; earlier versions were hit and go, but now you can also enter data in Chinese.

askSam From me.
I myself use this program. AskSam is a free-form database that you can use to organize, code, and search fieldnotes. Although you can import Word documents into askSam, I usually type fieldnotes directly into askSam. I first learned of askSam (and received a free copy) as a participant in a NSF summer methods camp, and have upgraded it each time since then. What makes askSam a good way to manage fieldnotes is that you can both code as you type fieldnotes, or you can later do pretty powerful searches on a large set of material. I also use askSam to manage news clippings – when combined with Surfsaver (a sister program, made by the same company), it is an easy way to save webpages while using Internet Explorer. If I was not already accustomed to askSam, I would consider starting with something like nVivo instead.

Fieldnotes 2.0 programs
These programs are newer programs not really built as analytical tools for social science research, but as general note-taking programs that have the ability to combine different kinds of materials. They have great flexibility (in terms of data input and searching) and can be used to keep track of everything from web clippings to recipes. They also have cool and hip names like Voodoo Pad and Evernote! One very useful compilation of these newer software packages can be found on a website by Allison Alexy; she lists software for both Mac and PC users. The following summaries and links are shamefully (but with her permission) lifted from her website. Do yourself a service, though, and check out her full entry on fieldnoting software.

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From Allison Alexy:
Voodoo Pad, by Flying Meat, looks really interesting and if I wasn’t already in the middle of my own system, I think I could be convinced to switch. What I like about it is that it is based on a wiki model — similar to the way that Wikipedia enables users to change it while it keeps a record of what changes were made when and by whom. Down side: it’s only available for macs. Up side: if you’re using a mac, then Voodoo Pad can link very easily with your other programs (address book, iCal, etc.).
This idea — making fieldnotes into the form of an editable website — reminds me a lot of Joseph Hill’s website. Joe is an anthropology grad student who had done fieldwork on religion in Senegal (that’s the short version). As you can see from his website, he used the site as a way to organize his fieldnotes. It’s not just that he posted his notes on a website, but that his notes are the website. His homepage is here, and his page about his dissertation research is here.

For macs there are also:
AquaMind’s NoteTaker — here is a review from MacWorld about version 1.9.4
Hog Bay’s Notebook — I couldn’t stand the layout of this program, but maybe you’ll like it better. I don’t like typing notes on computer screens that are made to look like legal pads.
Circus Ponies NoteBook – a review is here
PersonalWiki – another, less refined, Wiki option

For PC people:
WhizFolders — comes highly recommended.
Scribe — created by the Center for History and New Media.
EverNote — free, which is nice; a review is here

Other favorites or most hated programs?

One final thought — one of the reasons I decided to contiue using Word was I don’t want to be stuck with a mess of a unopenable files if the little software company that designed my program goes belly up. As evil as Microsoft is, the good news about MS programs is that you will probably always be able to open the files.

UPDATE: Sara wrote me saying that a friend uses a program called Soho Notes but she hasn’t yet tried it.

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What do you use? Talk among yourselves.

Because participant observation is a necessarily non-methodical method in the preceding paragraph’s sense, IRBs’ mandated insistence on prospective reviews of research designs set anthropologists up to fudge, circumlocute, and fake their descriptions of project “design”, “subject selection”, “informed consent”, and the rest.

That is, so long as structures of ethical accountability are only imaginable in the form of managerial auditing (using unitary compliance criteria external to the historically elaborated disciplinary standards of good practice), practitioners will be forced to simulate consilience with the regulatory ideal so as to appear compliant, cooperative, and transparent—therefore ethical—to their local IRBs.

This is a prescription for cynicism and disengagement as Chris Kelty made clear in his post last year and others have confirmed. That would be bad enough, if there weren’t also the sense that our efforts to satisfy our local IRBs have begun to take up so much intellectual space that it is crowding out conversations about “real” field ethics that we ought to be having with one another and our students.

In a perfect world, we would devote all our energies to elaborating and innovating peer discussion and collaborative review of our research plans and their emergent enactments. Indeed with forums like Savage Minds, one can imagine fresh and flexible ways of putting such things in practice. These days, internet connections and cell phones enable active mentoring and peer discussions of the ethics and politics of field relationships during fieldwork itself; while this isn’t possible everywhere we work yet, it’s is a major improvement over the isolation fieldworkers used to experience.

All of this needs to go on before, during and long, long after IRB applications, which have very little to offer in the way of substantively improving the human quality of field relationships. What also needs to go on is that we need to find ways to change the IRB system at the national level so that it ‘does no harm’ either to the ethical conduct of fieldwork or to the quality and range of projects we do. This may ultimately mean a constitutional challenge to the concept of prospective reviews of research: a firm recognition of the need to protect critical social research against censorship. Meanwhile we also need to find ways of coping with our respective local circumstances.

I think we have alternatives to cynical simulations and sneaking around.

The alternative I have in mind does double duty as a device not only
(1) for getting our research proposals approved by local IRBs, but also
(2) for educating colleagues in other disciplines who serve on our IRBs and IRB administrators (whatever their backgrounds) about anthropological field research.

2. Fieldwork boilerplate?

At Princeton, we are developing “boilerplate” responses to certain standard IRB questions. ‘Fieldwork boilerplate?!?’ you splutter, ‘that’s preposterous: if fieldwork is so improvisational and uncontrolled, how can there possibly be a way of standardizing our descriptions of what we’re aiming to do? Isn’t this just another cynical simulation?’

I believe it can be done and I don’t think that it involves lying, on the contrary. Perhaps the key problem for ethnographers is the IRB mandated demand for a prospective review of research. This causes no major problems for disciplines in which there is a very precise research plan (experiments, surveys); and it’s no problem for us when we ourselves plan formal interviewing. Our challenge is to find ways of effectively communicating the rationale for improvisational open-endedness in informal interviewing and participant observation. Success in this regard obviates the need for dishonest, contrived simulations of research “protocols” (e.g., lists of questions, a sampling strategy). It enables us to be honest about what fieldwork involves.

Boilerplate—standardized responses to standardized questions—can be an effective strategy for educating IRB members concerning unfamiliar kinds of research (that is, research with which most board members do not have personal experience).

At Princeton, the educational value of boilerplate was made clear to me—ironically enough—by the experience of cognitive neuroscientists with respect to research using their recently acquired fMRI machine (which images brain activity). This work initially made IRB members very, very nervous. The folks who supervise this work developed a standard set of very detailed responses to the IRB questionnaire (e.g., about what subjects will experience, the safety risks they will face, and the measures that will be taken to minimize those risks). The only parts of the questionnaire that are individualized—apart from the researchers’ names, ranks, and contact information—are the brief project descriptions (what they are looking for this time and what they hope to learn from the data). Generally, since the basic responses are all, by now, familiar to our IRB, the main ethical dilemma faced in discussing fMRI protocols concerns the possibility that a pathology might show up in a brain scan and the consequent question of whether and how the researchers ought to inform subjects.

The point here is that IRB members feel that they’ve been educated about fMRIs sufficiently that they feel comfortable with the basics and can think about the things that fMRI researchers themselves worry about. This is exactly the educational effect I’d want standardized descriptions of anthropological research to have.

We need the same level of practical cross-disciplinary education concerning fieldwork. We need that education to be routinized sufficiently—and in a form—that obviates the need to go through the lengthy, frustrating reeducation campaigns that, as Chris Kelty powerfully described, we face every time seasoned IRB administrative staff or academic and community members leave and new members join.

3. An example
Ok, what would boilerplate about fieldwork look like? I’ll provide an example; this example will also address the dreaded consent form issue. This example was developed by myself and a graduate student advisee of mine, whose project was approved on its first submission and involves labor migrants who move back and forth across a national border and historically politicized attitudes about national identities.

The wording we came up with is based on an understanding about the kinds of questions and confusions that usually come up around ethnographic projects on our particular IRB. The point here is that you need to do some good fieldwork on your own IRB. If you want to make this work for your own local conditions, you need to join your board and to listen carefully to how they read ethnographic proposals (rather than leaping into argument before you’ve gotten to the bottom of their interpretive frames). For example, our board handles only social and behavioral research proposals; if your IRB reviews medical research, for example, then I’d bet you’d need a somewhat different emphasis. As you’ll see below, the phrasing we have adopted takes into account that, for our board, “participant observation” needed to be clearly distinguished from “interviewing” (a problem to which Tom Strong referred in an earlier comment on this site).

Our IRB application http://www.princeton.edu/~orpa1/irp.htm has 18 questions. The first substantive questions (#5-7) request a brief project statement, a description of “procedures that will be used to achieve the objectives”, and a space for “the method of subject selection” and “everything the subject will be told about the study in advance and during the research”. Our strategy with regard to all of this is to keep our descriptions brief, non-technical (no theory jargon), and positive. That is, we don’t say things like “I have no method of subject selection and I have no so-called subjects” or “I cannot possibly tell my ‘subjects’ about the study accurately in advance since anthropologists don’t plan their fieldwork in advance”; instead, we do our best to say what we will be doing. After all that, the next questions concern consent forms, deception and debriefing, risks and benefits, and various other items.

My boilerplate example concerns the consent form response, but it also illustrates how we clarify references to ethnographic research method in our preceding responses:

The question:

Do you plan to obtain signed consent from all study participants? If not, please explain why. If you plan to use a consent form, please attach a copy…

The advice we give members of our department:

Signed consent is not a mandated requirement according to the federal regulatory code, and is not necessary for ethnographic projects particularly if your main method is “participant-observation” (rather than “interviewing”). Here a basic response, which you ought to adapt to your own project (which may involve other approaches):

My ethnographic fieldwork will involve conversational participant-observation. This method is driven by the interests of the respondents and relies on the development of an open-ended, informal relationship between researcher and respondent. The aim of this research method is to understand issues and relationships as a respondent understands them.

In order for this approach to be effective, researchers need to treat their consultants as experts from whom they are learning. Introducing a consent form inhibits this process by giving the researcher a false appearance of authority and expertise, and by giving the research a false appearance of narrow precision. In this kind of research, consent forms have a tendency to undermine respondents’ ability to direct conversation by positioning them as subjects to be studied rather than experts who are contributing to scholarship.

For these same reasons, introducing consent forms also tends to undermine the mutual trust which must be present in participant-observation. This approach is premised on the idea that respondents are empowered to determine their level of comfort in revealing information and that they may cease to participate at any time. Clearly communicating this basic premise, I will make certain that each respondent is fully aware of their right to discontinue participation in my research at any time.

Finally, confidentiality is an important value in this research. Consequently, I will be using pseudonyms in my field-notes and all other documentation; if consent forms were to be collected in this research, these forms would be the only documents linking named individuals to my study. While I will not intentionally record illegal behavior in my notes, not having consent forms would provide an additional assurance both to my respondents and myself concerning preservation of confidentiality.

I have found that seeing this language repeated across IRB applications has had the helpful effect on our panel of familiarizing them with this logic. Over the period that we’ve been using this rubric, two new members have joined the IRB; when anthropology proposals came before us, other members clued the newbies in—I didn’t have to say a word. I recognize that this example will not work for everyone and—with just this example—I certainly haven’t addressed all the important issues with which we’re all concerned. My point here to promote the idea that, with a little local IRB-centered fieldwork of your own, you might come up with rubrics relevant to your own circumstances, that work to routinize IRB education about fieldwork.

       Complementing all that, for the immediate short term we also need to build up a stock of creative coping strategies.  I suspect that it would be useful to share what we’ve come up with rather than keeping our innovations local. 

       I am most definitely not suggesting that we devote our attention solely to coping: the November American Ethnologist Forum as a whole – and Katz’s contribution in particular — ought to make that clear.  I’m suggesting that institutional isolation makes everyone weak, whereas cross-institutional sharing of productive interventions enables both students and practitioners of field research, oral history interviewing, and other marginalized research styles to continue doing ethical, critical research even as other efforts are under way to protect and expand those possibilities. 

       Some examples of the creative coping were offered in the November American Ethnologist Forum in Dan Bradburd’s article (on an individual level) and Rick Shweder’s (on an institutional level).  Please write in with your local achievements: whether individual, departmental, or college/university-wide.  In my next post, I’ll describe a local experiment  in what — following my last post — I think of as cross-disciplinary “translation”.