Kristin Ghodsee similarly writes of the difficulties she encountered as she researched post-Socialist Muslims in Bulgaria—research that caught the interest of both local and American officials. After being detained and interrogated by Bulgarian officials, she decided to drop almost all of the ethnography from her forthcoming work. She describes her encounter with the state in this way:

He then asked me: “Are you responsible for this?”
“Excuse me?” I said, not quite understanding his implication.
“Is your purpose in Bulgaria to encourage these girls to assert their human rights?”
“No,” I stammered, “I’ve been doing this research since 2004, long before this summer.”
“But you know the girls?”
“Some of them.”
“And the people who are teaching them?”
“They are all the subject of my ongoing research. An academic research project.”
“Good,” he said. He nodded and jotted something down on his clipboard. He finally asked me if I had any questions for him.
“Is this interview a normal procedure for Americans applying for long-term residency?”
“No,” he said, matter-of-factly, “It is only for you.”
“Why me?”
“Your topic is interesting to us.” (Ghodsee 2011, p. 180).

As Ghodsee goes on to suggest, sharing the results of our research in any form, published or unpublished, can attract unwanted attention and present unexpected ethical dilemmas. This is a challenge: how can we ensure the safety and privacy of the people we share life with, and yet convey what we’ve learned. How could we share some raw materials in a way that might inform future scholars–or at least those who agree to keep the ethical norms of our profession?

Or, as the American Anthropological Association’s 2012 code of ethics puts it, how can we “do no harm” and yet “make your results accessible” and “preserve your records“?

Security for ethnographic data

We’ll talk more about sharing research in the next post, but let’s start with how we can secure our records. Below is a sketch of ways to begin securing the ethnographic data you currently gather, and to manage how it is passed along to other researchers when you can no longer care for it. Once again, you’re encouraged to share your experiences in the comments.

Consider what you gather. This is obvious to many of us, but there are times not to gather—or not to record—stories that could be used to harm the people we work with, especially if they’re outside of the scope of our research.

Lock it up. If you need to encrypt sensitive data, do so—but keep a record of passwords and security keys on paper, as well as in a PGP-encrypted digital file (more details here or here). You can look up how to create encrypted volumes on your computer, or talk with campus IT about how you might transmit data directly to secure servers in your home country. Health researchers such as Caroline Kuo are way ahead of us in securely storing and transmitting sensitive stories from vulnerable and remote communities worldwide.

Back it up. Store any important files in multiple formats and locations, both print and digital. The 3-2-1 Rule is a common way to remember this:

Keep 3 copies of any important files
on 2 different types of media (print, digital, CD, computer, flash drive)
with 1 copy being stored in another location and/or offline.

For instance, you could print out digital fieldnotes and lock the papers up. Or, you could scan/snap photos of your paper diaries, storing the scans on a secure computer drive. This multiple formats-multiple locations principle helps to protect your notes in case of theft, fire, decay, and computer or network failures. Backup hard drives should also be locked up and password-protected (but give the password to someone you trust!).

Beware the Cloud. There’s a tradeoff here: storing in more formats and places means you are less likely to lose irreplaceable records, but also increases the chance of hacking or leaked notes. Notes on sensitive topics may not belong in the Cloud, Dropbox, email, or even local computers in the field, as your notes can easily be accessed and personal connections traced.

Write a fieldnotes will. Even before you reach the end of your career, it would be wise to document and share your expectations of who will care (a “fieldnotes will”?) for your documents if you can no longer care for them. Campus archives may be prepared to advise on this, at least for physical materials. ‘Data’ librarians attempt to advise on digital materials. As above, giving passwords to a deeply-trusted person or arranging their access to your future archives will help ensure that your records won’t be lost or inaccessible when it comes time to pass them on.

Talk to a librarian or archivist. Seriously. These people are the campus experts on long-term storage of paper–and increasingly digital–research records, and campus IT may also be able to help in securing your digital files. See also Andrew Asher & Lori M. Jahnke‘s readable exploration of qualitative archiving — if your librarian isn’t familiar with the particularly challenges of safeguarding ethnography, this is a good primer.

I almost never know in advance which parts of the field notes will go into the text, because it takes me some time, and a lot of writing, to figure out what it is exactly that I am going to argue! With interviews, it’s different. There are some turns of phrase that seem to leap off the page, and these are usually those that capture experience in a fresh or complex way. I also tend to notice when a turn of phase, or a metaphor emerges more than once. When I heard a third person compare their everyday life with living on a volcano, I knew it was going to be in the book in a major way. But it also got me thinking about what this metaphor accomplished, which sent me right back to the field notes. When I can’t find a place in the text for an evocative image or turn of phrase that I hear from a respondent, this causes me great torments!

Like Olga, I now spend a lot of time reading my fieldnotes and deciding what material I want to include before I figure out my core argument, a process sometimes called “grounded theory,” a way of incorporating theoretical insights that emerge organically from the fieldwork. I also search for great quotes or turns of phrase that capture something about the everyday experience of my informants.

Anthropologist Julie Hemment allows recollections of fieldwork to guide her writing:

My first step is to recall a rich incident. Often it’s an interaction or an event that that played out in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time – something that snagged my attention and caused me to linger, and maybe something that I continue to puzzle.  I then return to my fieldnotes for more texture (and these places, incidents, moments are often places where I did write thickly to begin with).  The ethnographic writing I ultimately produce is an amalgam of all this.  I rarely incorporate my fieldnotes directly, or quote from them; rather, I write from them.

If you are the kind of ethnographer that starts with the stories and writes her way into a theoretical insight, write out your thick descriptions first, and then take care not to overload the reader with a wall of theoretical analysis at the end of the dissertation, article, or book. Once you’ve completed your first draft, work back into the manuscript and foreshadow your theoretical argument throughout the body of your text. If done with a light hand, these insertions won’t break the flow of your narrative, but will gently guide the reader toward your ultimate conclusions.

Other anthropologists know their conclusions before they begin. When I wrote The Red Riviera, theoretical interventions guided my writing from page one. I knew I wanted to explore how cultural capital operated in a postsocialist context. If you’re starting with a clear argument, examine your fieldnotes. Identify the ethnographic material that best substantiates your claims. Then, state your overall theoretical intervention in the introduction. Make this a brief statement without too many rhetorical flourishes and without the exhaustive literature review.

As you write up the examples from your fieldwork, occasionally stop and return to your argument and theoretical framework, inserting bits of relevant theoretical background among the ethnographic examples. You can sprinkle these theoretical asides throughout your text, ensuring they arise naturally from the anecdotes you have chosen.

Anthropologist Doug Rogers combines these two writing strategies:

Whatever balance I’m aiming for with a particular piece of writing, I’m generally sorting secondary literature right along with the fieldnotes and other sources. So I might have a section of my bookshelves labeled “Chapter 2,” a folder of academic articles on the computer named “Chapter 2,” and another folder of fieldnotes and other sources (newspapers, archival materials, whatever) also labeled chapter 2. When I’m working on chapter 2, I’m trying to keep all of these things in play, and the “theory” stuff gets sorted and resorted right along with the fieldnotes as I write and reclassify, write and reclassify. For this last book, one way I did this was by covering my wall with sticky notes that indicated chapter sections and subsections and the bits of ethnography and/or theory that would go in each … that way I could move things around easily. I would write and keep looking back and forth between the sticky notes and the other things labeled chapter 2 — notes, articles, books, etc.

So you can write up your data, and then add in your arguments, or you can start with your arguments and slip in your data, or if you’re like Doug and can manage it, try to do both at the same time. Whatever your method, avoid separate sections or chapters devoted solely to literature review and theoretical analysis at the beginning or end of your text. Of course there will be exceptions – some journals may require a separate literature review section, others may be only interested in publishing theoretical analysis lightly seasoned with ethnographic examples. Every situation will be unique, but in general, a readable ethnography will be one that blends thick ethnographic detail with theoretical analysis, integrating that theory naturally into the narrative flow of the text.

Every ethnographer must find a balance between theory and data. Our fieldwork and our specific case studies render our work original, but this work fails to be scholarly if it lacks dialogue with larger theoretical concerns. When writing the dissertation the literature review section remains de rigueur, but most acquisitions editors demand that this section be exorcised from the eventual book manuscript. This means that the theoretical insights inspired by your participant observation must somehow be woven into the final text so as to elucidate your original ideas without burying the reader under an avalanche of information about what other scholars, studying other cases, have said before you.

The task of integrating theory proves difficult for even the most experienced ethnographers, and different scholars maintain varying opinions on its importance. In a 1999 article, anthropologist Ruth Behar argues that theory for theory’s sake undermines the potential vibrancy of ethnographic writing:

What I do find tiresome is the habit of using whatever theory happens to be fashionable…as a substitute for really engaging the tough questions posed by those whom we encounter on our journeys as ethnographers. When ethnographers working in far corners of the globe are all citing the same two pages from the work of the latest trendy theorist, without reflecting on the politics of how that theory travels, you can be sure they have killed the life in their ethnography.

In my own books and articles, theoretical concerns dominated my early writing, but my more recent work places greater emphasis on the experience of everyday life. I continue to struggle with the question of how much theory to (explicitly) include, and I wonder how other ethnographers integrate theoretical questions into their writing. How do they decide the balance between theory and ethnographic data? I decided to do a little research.

At Princeton University, I contacted the anthropologists John Borneman and Amy Borovoy. Borneman, the author of five ethnographic monographs, including Political Crime and the Memory of Loss, uses theory to guide his research questions, but does not privilege it over direct experience in the field. He explains that:

Theory always determines what I might write down, therefore preselects the data. But the theory of ethnography I hold to admonishes me to be open to encounters with the unexpected, to experience as much as possible, to allow myself to be subject to other people’s desires and wishes as much as possible. But I go to the field with questions of larger social significance. What is the sacred? What is the political? What does it mean to be such and such a person at this time in such and such a place? I write down as much as I can in notes. I do not apply theory to this data but try to think through the data to refine, or even refute and displace, the questions I entered with.

Borneman places a heavy emphasis on the lived experience of participant observation, using his own experiences to question or subvert preconceived theoretical frameworks.

Amy Borovoy, author of The Too-Good Wife, sees a dialectic relationship between data and theory in her own work:

I’m tempted to say the data are more important, but that’s not right, because one needs ideas to interpret and organize the data. However if one simply demonstrates the same ideas (Foucault’s ideas about biopolitics [for instance]) in many different field settings, it’s no longer interesting. [Theory and data] shape each other in a fluid way. One starts with theoretical ideas or questions that come from theoretical readings, historical data, or other ethnographies. Then one’s ethnographic findings shape those questions.

Like Borneman, Borovoy values theory as part of the road map that guides the initial fieldwork. But once again, theory is a necessary, but not sufficient, ingredient for her ethnography. The data from the field leads the analysis and eventual writing of ethnographic texts, and one has to be careful not to reproduce studies that have already been conducted in other contexts providing just one more data point for an already well-established theory.

Anthropologist Julie Hemment, the author of Empowering Women in Russia, also believes that theory determines the questions that shape her fieldwork. But when it comes to writing, she prefers the richness of ethnographic detail:

I’d say [theory and data] are equally important, and totally shot through with one another. While I consider myself to be led by my ethnographic data, it’s theory that has shaped its collection. And in analyzing, I tack back and forth between them continually. As far as what makes it onto the page –my personal preference as a reader and writer is for theoretically informed ethnographically rich texts and so I try to avoid theory-laden digressions. And nothing grabs a reader like a good story…

I checked in with a few ethnographers trained as sociologists, and they also tend to place a heavier emphasis on their ethnographic data in their finished writing. Olga Shevchenko, author of Crisis and the Everyday in Postosocialist Moscow, explains that, “I love theory as much as the next gal, but in the end, its role for me is to illuminate life, and so for me, ethnographic details come first.”

David Redmon, a sociologist and filmmaker, explained that when considering the balance between theory and ethnographic detail in his book Beads, Bodies, and Trash, he took his cues from his editor, who encouraged him to write the book “in filmic ways.” Redmon also relied on friendly readers, sending rough drafts of his manuscript to friends and colleagues. “Every person responded to the experiential material more so than the theoretical analysis,” Redmon told me. In the end, he let the stories lead the narrative, and only added in brief theoretical discussions at the end of each chapter.

Perhaps the key to writing an accessible ethnography lies with the ability to interweave the necessary theory into the ethnographic article, dissertation, or book without overloading the reader with extraneous verbiage. But what’s the best way to do this? I’ll consider this question in Part II.