What does it all mean?

The question of who should conduct ethnographic research leads us to the vexed issue of how to analyse and explain other cultures, whether we are discussing the Trobriand Islanders or the shoppers at our local supermarket.

There is a school of thought within anthropology, deriving from linguistics, that cultures can only be analysed and explained in their own terms. This is sometimes called 'cultural relativism', the belief that cultural systems make sense internally and that trying to analyse or criticise them in other terms will always distort and create a biased image. This is the logical conclusion of the argument of the linguist Peter Winch (1970), who suggests that we are all constrained by our own cultures and languages, condemned never to understand each other.

Anthropologists, however, have tried to find practical solutions to this dilemma. Like commercial ethnographers, they first try to understand a culture in its own terms, but then need to place this understanding in a wider context, perhaps using analytical categories from outside that culture. The question is how to do this without distorting the original cultural phenomena under analysis.

Various anthropologists have engaged with this question, perhaps most usefully Clifford Geertz (1973; 1983) and George Marcus (1994). Geertz suggests that anthropologists can pay more useful attention to ‘the quality of the space between us’, i.e., the differences between the perspectives of our research participants and our own or our clients’ analytical categories. George Marcus even suggests a solution might lie in ‘redesigning the observer’, i.e., scrutinising our own analytical concepts with as much rigour as those of our participants.

In commercial practical terms, these ideas perhaps describe a process for bridging the gap between how clients understand a market or category, and how it’s understood by consumers. We don’t need to privilege one account over the other; rather, both are analysed and some third position developed, taking account of client and consumer perceptions.

Beyond this, how many times do we feel, when we have analysed our data and presented it to our clients, that we have lost touch with the reality of consumer experience? Maybe we should present our interpretations back to research participants as well as to clients? Perhaps we should involve consumers in our analysis and interpretation, to see if they recognise the picture we have painted of them - if they can’t see themselves in the mirror, we must have lost something important along the way!

New Style Reporting

• Include yourself explicitly in the narrative
• Describe your feelings during the research
• Allow different viewpoints in the text
• Show how you drew your conclusions
• Explain which interpretations you rejected and the reasons why