Fact and fiction at the debrief

Finally, the area of ethnographic writing has been subjected to intense criticism over the last 20 years, in what has been called ‘the literary turn’ in anthropology (Back 1998). In classic ethnographic monographs, research findings were written up in an objective, quasi-scientific fashion. The focus was on the structure of society and culture, and they were often in the present tense, suggesting an eternal truth rather than mere snapshot.

These reports followed a linear logic and had a single authorial voice, the omniscient researcher guiding the reader through the alien culture. There was little reference to the researcher’s personal experience or indeed to the actual process of doing the research, and methodology chapters often conveyed a feeling of orderly planning rather than chaotic reality. This picture will probably be recognised by most commercial researchers, as it is pretty much the model that is always used for commercial research reports. We don’t sit down and tell our clients what really went on during the research - they don’t want to know, we tell ourselves.

This style of ethnographic writing has been subjected to illuminating analysis from the field of literary criticism. Analysing ethnographic reports as if they were works of fiction, critics have demonstrated that the conventions of this literary genre are just as strong as those of the romantic novel or the pastoral poem.

The most important text in this field is Writing Culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography (1986), edited by James Clifford and George Marcus. By applying the techniques of literary analysis to ethnographic writing, Clifford suggests that at best ethnographers offer ‘partial truths’ or ‘true fictions’. He means that the conventions of ethnographic writing allow certain truths to emerge but hide others, and that these processes are not fully within the writer’s control - the genre applies its own constraints.

There is, for example, little space within conventional ethnography to mention the boredom and loneliness that characterise much overseas fieldwork. Neither is it the done thing to admit to disliking one’s participants. But might these not have some bearing on the research findings? Why are we not allowed to mention them?

Since Clifford and Marcus’ book, many anthropologists have experimented with different ways of writing up and presenting research findings. Some have included ‘multiple voices’ within their texts, allowing conflicting points of view expressed by participants to stand side by side, forcing the reader to confront the complex reality. Others have tried to develop an ‘experiential’ style of writing, attempting to convey the complete and complex nature of cultural life without breaking it down into categories such as ‘kinship’, ‘ritual’, or ‘religion’.

Ethnographers have also attempted to tackle the criticism head on and have attempted consciously to place their personal experience, attitudes and opinions at the heart of the research process.

They refer to their own views on the subject, admit their prejudices and potential biases, and outline the ways in which they have attempted to deal with these. This is known as ‘reflexivity’, where the researcher him or herself is as much a topic of analysis as the research participants.

Les Back, for example, is an ethnographer who has worked on racism among young men in South East London. Writing as a white man from this background himself, in his work (1993) he includes discussions about his own feelings on researching this controversial issue, and the emotional difficulties it sometimes caused him.

Another approach is to include an explicit account of how the analytical ideas were developed, which ones were rejected and why, and how researchers arrived at their final conclusions rather than presenting them as a fait accompli.

I can already hear you thinking that your clients don’t want a confusing, contradictory presentation with a report emphasising how tired you were at the end of the evening. But there are other ways these ideas could be used. We could explain how the research was conducted in a more realistic fashion, rather than providing the usual cursory sample structure in the appendix. We could certainly include a wider range of points of view in our reporting, highlighting those that we ended up prioritising and saying why. Maybe our clients might even respect us more if they formed a credible picture of how, in reality, we arrive at our conclusions.

With clients regularly complaining about how boring research reports and debriefs can be, this alternative approach might be more inspiring, memorable, compelling, challenging... and even more truthful.
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 NEXT >>