Abstract
The article is concerned with the everyday activities of sociology, focusing on ethnography. It argues that empirical study of the ethnomethods of ethnography allows for a deeper insight into the dynamics and procedures of this research practice. Based on empirical data from two ethnographic studies (in a martial arts club and in a flamenco class), I suggest to observe how such an investigation is conducted in various situations: in the field, on the ethnographer’s desk, in data sessions, in conferences and in written papers. This serves to gather and produce empirical traces from the field. These are de- and re-contextualized while they are taken into the sociological field(s). This process can be analyzed drawing on Goffman’s notion of Frame Analysis, particularly drawing on his notion of keyings. Ethnography can thus be described as a trans-situational practice that systematically couples situations and communications in order to understand and reconstruct other social practices for sociological reasons.
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Notes
Also, reflexivity keeps being a topic in discussing methods. Recently a Special Issue of “Qualitative Inquiry” (Kuehner et al. 2016) has dealt at some length with reflexivity in different methodical approaches.
In empirical studies, not only the constituent reflexivity of the researched practice, but also that of the researching practice becomes evident. Müller (2016) discusses how both types of reflexivity come up in a research process and convincingly suggests reflecting sociologically the researcher’s own cultural practices instead of her person (2016: 713). Lichterman (2017) makes a similar point.
On a side note, martial arts courses can differ very much from each other. Not all of them teach actual combat or self-defense skills, though this was the case at my center—as can be discerned by references made to external potential combat situations by members of the course. One instructor commented on a movement as follows: “And the T-shirt is going to rip, I guess, but the head will follow anyway”. It is clear to the participants that this phrase refers to an external situation because the sentence is in future tense and because all the T-shirts in the room are in order.
This section is meant to give some small insights into my ethnography on learning (and teaching) martial arts. Given the frame of this paper, however, it can only be a brief overview—the whole study can be found in Schindler (2011a), a detailed discussion of “haptic communication” in Schindler (2017). Having said that, it is, of course, one ethnography that could be developed in this field—a different theoretical approach would have produced a different ethnography.
Transcripts of the talk during a demonstration make it clear that knowledge is not primarily conveyed through verbal communication, as it is mostly indexical and fragmented: “Okay. Next move. Some more about this. So (2) Ah, now I don’t know what went wrong (1) Exactly. We’re now on his back. He makes the same mistake again. (2) (Undiscernible) (3) Okay. So. We are still primarily interested in the actual movement. (2) That means: move up from this point. (1) And now secure him”.
Additionally, social practices are in general not open to everyone, but often require a particularly skilled body from the very beginning, as Delamont (2005) convincingly argues for Capoeira. Neither do practices attract everybody to the same extent as Alkemeyer (2008: 99 and 103) mentions with regard to soccer games. However, this should not ignore that learning and teaching are situated activities that are accomplished in concerted actions by different situation members. What comes out, then, is more than the sum of the individual contributions and situational dynamics come up. Within Practice Theories this ambiguity has not yet been comprehensively solved, but there are promising approaches (e.g., Alkemeyer et al. 2015).
The necessity of learning how to see properly is explicitly acknowledged in the field. Other students gave me hints on how to acquire this particular gaze, including the point that one has to learn how to see things that cannot be demonstrated.
I deem it necessary to reflect on this phenomenon in relation to other aspects of communication, i.e., the effect of bodies and objects in communication. Following this logic, a written text like this paper would be a mixture of verbal and visual communication (e.g., Knox 2007) even if it did not contain illustrations. The text materializes in a physical object; it can only be written and read through and with a body. In some cases, visual and verbal communication can contradict each other—for example, if a person blushes while lying. Some phenomena can only be displayed in a contradictory manner; e.g., if one wants to show that a bodily movement displayed at normal speed is hard to discern.
Just as the practice of learning (and teaching) martial arts comes with difficulties and frictions for the participants, so does the practice of ethnography (and social research in general).
Here, I refer to the conception of observant participation to denote the specific activity at the dance lesson. The commonly used term participant observation refers not as much to the activity than to an analytic attitude and thus includes at the same time more and less than my concept of visual communication: participant observation is “more inclusive” as it is not restricted to visual communication but also includes verbal communication (talk, interviews, letters, etc.); it is more restricted because—as it is also visual communication—it is only one variant of this type of communication.
Reading and writing are particularly important practices in this context; see Engert and Krey (2013) for an ethnographic investigation of these practices and their entanglement.
Goffman (1974: 79–81) notes the tendency of keyings to be rekeyed. In his approach, the assertion of “primary” frames, or keying, is eventually made to be a product of the description.
In reference to fn. 3: while the instructor says “We’re now on his back,” he is on nobody’s back but refers to upcoming movements. He instructs his sparring partner while describing the specifics of the movement to the audience (Schindler 2011a: 97–103).
This endeavor however, fails every now and then. If the ethnographer does not comment sufficiently on the presented data, the auditory will simply not be able to follow his or her analysis.
Note that images do not keep to themselves but evoke the idea of an event in the viewer. Goffman (1979: 25) takes this as a starting point for his analysis of photographs in advertisement.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tobias Boll, Stefan Hirschauer, Sophie Müller and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, David Waldecker for translating and Fiona Ambrosi for the hand drawings.
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Schindler, L. The Ethnomethods of Ethnography: A Trans-situational Approach to the Epistemology of Qualitative Research. Hum Stud 41, 103–120 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-017-9449-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-017-9449-1