****************

Carole: What constitutes the field always differs by scholar. Who we are in dialogue with, where, and why depends on one’s research project. However, no matter where we are or who we are, explaining our research topic and method is critical. In your research, with whom are you discussing ethnography as method, and how do you explain it?

Pasang: In my research, I discuss ethnography as method with village residents, diaspora communities, government officials, NGO officials, scientists, youth leaders, students, policy makers, technocrats, and conservation practitioners. These categories often overlap.

My research focuses on human dimensions of climate change, Indigeneity, and development in the Himalayas. I see these topics as intersecting themes that reveal contemporary contexts in the Himalayas. My ethnographic fieldwork thus involves multiple sets of questions, different sets of tools, and ways of explaining. My methodology also evolves, as it should, while conducting fieldwork.

For me, the field constitutes physical location, and virtual space. So far, I have conducted fieldwork among the Sherpas of Nepal, and people living in parts of Uttarkhand in India, and northwest Nepal. In order to study about peoples from these places, I often find myself interviewing in Queens, Boulder, or Kathmandu, outside their mountain villages. I also interact with my ‘informants’ using Facebook, and Apps like Viber and WeChat. The people I study direct my ethnographic approach.

Carole: This is so true. The people with whom we interact in the field are from a range of backgrounds and subject positions. Their thoughts on and responses to the research are situated in these different categories (and experiences), usually multiple and plural rather than some sort of singular “local’ or “villager” or “official” or “refugee” or “activist” perspective. Individuals have varied ways of interpreting our research, and of sharing and participating in it.

Pasang: I once interviewed a middle-aged monk in my village in the Everest region, who had lived in Queens for several years working as a sales person, and who had also actively participated in NGO-organized activities to conserve community forests. As an interviewee, he was formal, and forthcoming. I was able to explain my research project, and inform him about the voluntary participation step-by-step as outlined in the Institutional Review Board (IRB) guidelines. Another time, I tried to interview a young monk in his early 20s at the village monastery. He just smiled and smiled as I sat there describing the project to him. Once I was done, he ran away. My aunt explained to me (something I was suspecting) that the young monk was too shy to participate in an interview.

Carole: Not everyone is able to engage in this way, whether due to interest, personality, education, or societal prohibitions. I write about this in the context of who gets to narrate their own life history (“Narrative Dispossession”). Scholars tend to take things such as telling one’s story, or sharing one’s thoughts about events and ideas, for granted. IRBs do as well. But it doesn’t always work this way, no matter where one’s fieldwork is located.

Pasang: I agree. I recently turned my ethnographic gaze inward on myself to understand what it means to be a ‘Sherpa,’ ‘Nepali,’ ‘Himalayan,’ ‘South Asian,’ and ‘Asian.’ This process revealed to me how I as an individual, and a member of the society influence, and am influenced by what happens around me. I am fascinated by the uncovered cultural moments from my memory of growing up in Kathmandu in the 1990s that brought light to the many identities I have today. I remember reading about the Sherpas, depicted as people with flat nose and small eyes in our social studies textbook. I also remember how the term ‘backward people’ was used commonly to refer to groups that lived in rural parts of Nepal. For a young girl attending an English medium school in the capital city, it was confusing to hear that by definition I am a member of a backward group with flat nose and small eyes because I did not think I was backward nor did I have flat nose and small eyes.

In your research, how do you go about discussing ethnography as method, and with whom? Where is the field for you?

Carole: It depends on where I’m doing research—with whom and on what topic. Early in my career, in 1992, I did research in the village of Tirkhu in the Chaudabise Khola region east of Jumla. This was in conjunction with Dor Bahadur Bista’s Karnali Institute. Dor was the first Nepali anthropologist, the founder of the Department of Anthropology at Tribhuvan University, and was my first mentor in 1989 when I did anthropological research in Jhapa. His goal with the Karnali Institute was in part to use the methods of anthropology to encourage development, mostly in the form of education and small-scale economic projects. My role was an ethnographic study with women and girls. What were women’s ideas about what was needed in their community? I explained ethnography as method as having two components: (1) living in the community to learn what life was like there, and (2) talking with the women about what they thought about things. Open-ended. Learning. Listening.

If you asked the women why I was there, I think what they would’ve said is that I wanted to learn the work needed to live in the village (e.g., how to plant rice, how to mill buckwheat or pound corn, etc.), and I asked a lot of questions, and wrote lots of things down. Apart from being an outsider, one from a different country, literacy was a big difference between us. No woman in the village was literate, and in 1992, only one girl from the village attended the local school. She was the first girl to ever do so. My research “findings” were that the women primarily wanted things for their children, especially chances at education and other things that might improve their lives in the future. But, for themselves? They wanted to learn how to write their names. My main contribution was to teach a small group of mothers and grandmothers how to hold a pencil and write their names in Nepali.

I mention literacy because my next research project, which started in 1994 and that continues on today, was very different. It was with Tibetan resistance army veterans, almost all of whom were literate, and if not familiar with anthropology, were often very familiar with historical scholarship and cultures of documentation.

My research was both anthropological and historical, and I usually explained it when first meeting someone, as some version of the following: “The Chushi Gangdrug Army fought against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to defend Tibet and the Dalai Lama. But, histories of the Chushi Gangdrug resistance army aren’t included in Tibetan history. People don’t know these histories. What are they, and why don’t people know them?” I would explain my methodology as reading any and all written sources about the resistance, and also talking to people. Especially talking with people—with important leaders, but also with ordinary people to learn their experiences and thoughts. I would share that I lived with a Tibetan veteran and his family in Kathmandu, and that my research involved traveling to different Tibetan settlements in Nepal and India, and returning again and again to each place. This research-in-motion was very distinctly grounded in the Tibetan community in ways that were obvious and appreciated by the men from whom I learned.

But this was just the ‘first meeting’ sort of explanation of my topic and method I would give. Some of the people with whom I met, I didn’t encounter again, but that was rare. Most of the men (and some of their families) were individuals I came to know, sometimes well, over the course of multiple visits and conversations over the five-year course of my PhD research, as well as the two decades since. So in that sense, peoples’ idea of how I did my research, or of how I learned what I knew, was something that unfolded over time. And, I add: was something I was constantly tested on by some individuals. What did I know and how did I know it?

One thing that comes to mind is that in both of these settings, my research was valued and the methods weren’t questioned. People didn’t debate ethnography with me, and certainly didn’t devalue it. But you’ve had some different experiences, right?

Pasang: I’ve had interesting experiences mainly because of who I am, and where I study.

When working with my fellow villagers, people are happy to welcome me, and even take pride in the work I do. They share what they know with me. They are very supportive in that sense. It helps that I am careful about how I present my research and myself. I am also careful about the cultural etiquettes, and sensibilities. I think this comes naturally for me, and helps in making our conversations comfortable.

However, there have been times, when I’ve had difficulty reaching people and conducting interviews. I think it was largely because of my limited social connections in Kathmandu. Being a young-looking Sherpa woman also did not help. It seemed like every time I met someone new I had to explain not just what I was doing but my qualifications too. I had to prove that I am a professional to avoid getting dismissed, and I wasn’t always successful at that.

Exactly a year ago, I was presenting my climate change perception research findings in Kathmandu to a mixed audience (academic and nonacademic). I was a postdoctoral fellow at the New School at the time. Following my presentation, an environmental science professional from the audience shared that all social science presentations on climate change have the same conclusion: Development organizations are exploiting climate change for their own agenda. He was not interested in listening to another talk with the same conclusion. He said the reason he came to my talk was because of my institutional affiliation. He had expected ‘more’ from a New School person’s presentation, something that would challenge the idea of anthropogenic climate change. Instead, I was sharing my ethnographic findings of how people and institutions perceived climate change. [I gently introduced myself as a proud alumna of Washington State University.]

I recently watched your interview for WORLD101x, where you talk about the need to think of ethnographic stories as useful data for problem solving. Can you expand on that?

Carole: Sure. This is a question of what kind of data is ethnography. It is a truly unique form of knowledge. Ethnographic research generates fine-grained, detailed data that gives needed context to big questions or problems. In contrast with “big data,” ethnography is a type of ‘thick data” as Tricia Wang convincingly argues: ethnographic or thick data focuses on what is valuable rather than solely what is measurable.

For me, ethnography (and anthropology more broadly) is a form of theoretical storytelling. We use stories to make conceptual points and theoretical arguments. Professionally, the domain where I most do this outside of academia is in court. I use ethnographic data to make arguments to immigration officials and judges for them to use in decision-making. There is an element of translation involved as well, in terms of presenting ethnographic data as clear and coherent even with all of the contradictions and complications of actual human experiences. The key is in understanding how ethnography might be useful in new domains, whether it is in court, the corporate world (Nokia, in Wang’s case above), or in discussions with forestry or climate change scientists in Nepal. How can ethnography appear as recognizable, useful data in domains outside of anthropology? The conceptual work of translating and presenting ethnography to folks expecting numbers or other sorts of data is our responsibility, especially in this moment that feels so driven by “big data” in many ways. Stories are always needed.

Pasang: I agree. Stories are always needed. Stories are valuable because they help us understand everyday lives of people. Ethnography may involve extraordinary people, and their spectacular stories. They may also involve the ordinary people, and their routine lives. Each is powerful in its own way. Thank you for sharing your stories, and inviting me to share mine.

****************

Carole McGranahan is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  Pasang Yangjee Sherpa is an anthropologist and co-director of the Nepal Studies Initiative at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Lisa Cliggett: How can we archive all this data? 

Two years ago, I worked with Lisa Cliggett on an NSF-sponsored project to curate 60 years of anthropology projects in the Gwembe Tonga region of Zambia, a complex pilot project that involved anthropologists, campus IT, librarians, and a gullible library school student then-willing to work for free (me!). We experimented with ways to curate Lisa’s field records in a digital library using Greenstone and Drupal. Our goal was a small teaching archive that undergraduates could use to better understand the processes involved in fieldwork–something that could be built into a larger archive over time.

This comes from Cliggett’s long-standing interest in preserving qualitative research. As she’s covered, there is a profound risk of data loss if we don’t find ways to share anthropological data and archive our fieldnotes as anthropologists. As she explains, thinking carefully through our archiving practices is important:

“As early as 1999, a colleague and I experimented with digitizing. . . a portion of Elizabeth Colson’s field notes in order to explore possibilities for creating a fully digital qualitative database. . . We saved files in an OCR format, storing them on “the standard” of the time – a 3.5 inch floppy disk. . . Now, 13 years later, we have a shoebox of 3.5 inch disks with files saved in 1990s proprietary software. Surely we could find technicians to free those files from their fossilized form, but it would require determination, time, and funding” (Cliggett 2013, p. 6).

So there’s a tension running throughout these last few posts: Dr. Bernson’s paper documentation could easily be lost, and Kristin Ghodsee’s sensitive research materials shouldn’t yet be openly shared—yet Lisa Cliggett’s earliest attempts to preserve historic field records also didn’t result in secure and accessible digital files.

Tips on preserving and sharing ethnographic source materials

This final set of tips, then, relates to how—and what—we can to do best document and share our field materials with other researchers, including the limits we might place on sensitive information and how we could later make that accessible to other scholars or to the descendants of original participants. Some suggestions:

Choose durable formats. Save your digital records in “open” file formats that are not owned by any particular corporation. This ensure that your files can be accessed by future scholars. For instance, storing in rich text (.rtf) instead of Word files (.doc) makes documents easier to analyze in Atlas.ti or NVIVO, as well as accessible to future researchers even if Microsoft goes out of business.

Use coding software with care. Most commercial qualitative coding software, such as MaxQDA, NVIVO or Atlas.ti, does not let you export your coding system into an open format that can be archived or imported into other programs. This is a huge concern, because if we can’t share our coding with future researchers, our perceptions and context for our notes may not be available. Before licensing any of this software, I recommend that you talk with vendors and ask that they allow the ability to fully export your codes in an open format like XML, one that can be imported to another program or stored in a long-term archive.

Code in open formats. Given that commercial coding software does not yet support data sharing, your easiest open may be to code within a text, using #hashtags or other in-text notations that could be read in any software or printout.

Get informed consent for archiving. If doing formal interviews, you can include language on an IRB consent form that lets participants indicate if they are willing to have anonymized versions of their interview stored in a secure data archive like Michigan’s ICPSR. Click here for a sample informed consent sheet that has participants choose whether to have their interview anonymized and shared with future researchers. Such consent is best given for clear records like one-off interviews or surveys.

Remove direct identifiers. If you are archiving a subset of your research to be accessed by other scholars or students, remove “direct identifiers” (name, location, family ties) from the text. Michigan’s ICPSR data archive is the best developed social science digital archive, and it requires that you strip identifying data from interviews before depositing them. Microsoft Word’s “find and replace” may be your friend here; have a student or colleague look over the materials as well.

Store identifying data in a restricted archive. If you have historical or contextual reasons for wanting to keep ‘direct identifiers’ within a set of field documents, you may be able to archive ‘restricted data‘ with ICPSR. This would require that later researchers get IRB approval before accessing and using your field data.

Embargo sensitive data. Are the above two points making you nervous? Me too, and that’s why I’m working in this area. Qualitative data archives are still very experimental; we can’t always share current videos, images, or texts. Our records, being deeply implicated in community and people’s lives, have enough details to easily identify others, even with changed names or places. Many ethnographic source notes should be embargoed, limiting access for 50 or 100 years. This balances the usefulness of our records to future scholars against the risks of current exposure.

Document your field documents. Because funders like the NSF are often the ones asking us to manage qualitative records, their grants should cover the costs of ‘documenting’ any project data that you plan to share. Student assistants can be tasked to add ‘metadata’ (tags, codes, context) to each document. Use of standard labels (a “controlled vocabulary”) for place, language, or authors can help make your project easier to find in a larger database or archive.

Create finding aids. Let others know what’s out there. In libraries and archives, a finding aid is a sort of abstract for a set of records, listing their topics, regions, persons, or content. For instance, I’ve collected notes and interviews on topics like:

• Multi-level marketing in Central Asia
• Kazakh and Kyrgyz names and naming practices
• Democratic elections in Mongolia
• Missionaries in Central Asia

Finding ways to share when we have more information on both published and unpublished topics could let other ethnographers know what prior projects might have aspects that could be available or reused.

Consider data reuse contracts. Much as non-disclosure contracts can make it clear that field assistants shouldn’t write up results without you, a reuse contract can clarify the terms under which you share your notes with other researchers. This could include your right to check results for identifying information, or the need for other researchers to abide by certain ethical standards before building on your work.

Support the AAA data registry. The AAA is already working with archivists and librarians to build an Anthropological Data Registry, which currently hosts information about 52 anthropological datasets and archival collections. This is based on an older CoPAR list of where physical fieldnotes are archived. If you know of any other physical or online archives of prior anthropological research materials, share that in the data registry!

Talk to a research librarian.If this is overwhelming or threatening, don’t despair! These are complicated issues that librarians and anthropologists are working together on. Send a quick note to your librarian or archivist now, while you’re thinking about it. Ask to talk about archiving or data sharing options at your institution.  Librarians are attuned to these kinds of concerns, and can help you or find someone else who can.

All in all, I hope this is inspiring you to look at some of your field documents and see how you could archive or share them. And once again, if you’ve experimented in any of these areas, do share your experiences or interests in the comments.