Abstract
In traditional ethnographies, it is customarily assumed that the field researcher is an outsider who seeks to acquire an insider’s understanding of the social world being investigated. While conducting field research projects on education and tourism in Trinidad (West Indies) we found that the standard distinction between insider and outsider became problematic for us. Our experiences can be understood in terms of two competing conceptions of fieldwork. One, rooted in classical ethnography, views fieldwork as a process whereby the researcher learns to translate the cultural practices of a little-known or misunderstood group into terms understandable to the ethnographic audience. The other, growing out of the institutional ethnography approach pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, views fieldwork as a process of mapping the relations that govern an institutional complex. In the latter approach, local experiences provide the point of departure for exploring a wider set of social arrangements. In this article, we treat our own fieldwork experiences as points of departure for a reflexive examination of this alternative ethnographic strategy.
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Notes
We made subsequent field visits in 2002 and 2005. Additional field visits are anticipated.
This figure was cited to me by government officials and others associated with the tourism sector. While clearly a rough estimate, it suggests that tourism is a much smaller part of the country’s economy than is the case with many other Caribbean island tourism destinations.
For a conception of social relations that parallels Smith in some respects, see Anthony Giddens’ conception of disembedding and reembedding in The Consequences of Modernity 1990. Dorothy Smith’s conception differs in at least two respects: (1) she is committed to a radical conception of experience grounded in everyday, embodied practices and discoverable through ethnographic exploration, and (2) she insists, along with Michel Foucault, that the extralocal relations of greatest interest are relations of power/knowledge in which issues of marginalization and subordination loom large. By contrast, Giddens’ conception of social relations under conditions of "radicalized" modernity seems less concerned with the everyday world as a point of departure and geared more towards developing a general and systematic framework for analyzing institutional dimensions of globalization (see Smith 2005, pp. 53–54).
This history of resistance is explored in Grahame (2004).
In addition to participant observation, I conducted interviews with tour guides and organizers, visitors, nature center staff, government officials, and villagers. I also collected textual materials including promotional brochures, government publications, travel journalism, travel guidebooks, field guides, academic studies of tourism, etc. The present account focuses on what was observed through participation, but also draws on these other sources of information.
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Grahame, P.R., Grahame, K.M. Points of Departure: Insiders, Outsiders, and Social Relations in Caribbean Field Research. Hum Stud 32, 291–312 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-009-9121-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-009-9121-5