“...a patient attempt to impose a highly specific grid on the common perception of delinquents: to present them as close by, everywhere present and everywhere to be feared” (Foucault, 1977, p. 286).
“Ethnography is not about observing, but about understanding” (Berg & Lune, 2012, p. 205). The question reaches toward the unraveling of what the ethnographer believes he understands. Berg and Lune (2012) go on to state that reflexive knowledge provides not only critical perceptions of the observed but also understanding on how the observation was formed and where the knowledge came from.
I chose to observe a street corner in downtown Victoria with the intent of gaining some understanding of how people interacted with the myriad of stimuli that contended for their attention. The corner was rich with diverse and constant interactions, some overt and some obtained by subreption. There was a busy bus stop, a homeless man playing a harmonica, two people operating a religious booth, vehicles, and a constant flow of shoppers. I came away with a deeper understanding of my own assumptions and preconceived ideas of language use, facial expressions, body language, and people’s intentions; I came away with an autoethnography, “a research approach that combines elements of ethnography and elements of the personal narrative” (Lichtman, 2013, p. 107). I came away with a deeper understanding of my own story.
I came straight from Costco where I was subjected to a cacophony of capitalism and an angry parking lot akin to a seething wasp nest. Jittery, tangled, buzzing, I settled in, an invisible observer, (harried) ethnographer.
To me, he is an eclectic work of art, an unappreciated masterpiece.
He appears homeless.
He is sitting on a ledge that surrounds a very large concrete planter.
I am sitting on the other side of the planter facing away from him,
casually watching over my shoulder
as a constant flow of people silently interact with him.
He is wearing a thick jacket,
his hair is disheveled,
and he has a bulging backpack leaning against his feet.
He is playing a harmonica; his haunting melodies carry down the street like a loons cry across an idyllic lake at sunrise.
But there is very little nature here; it is a city in a sterile embrace, it is a concrete corner. At first I write frenetically, desperately, my pen mercilessly scratching words, remnants of Costco, but soon I feel my spirit settling down, I’m finding peace on a street corner in downtown Victoria. My notes became meditative, contemplative, poetic; my pen moves more easily, it caresses, dances; it becomes a barometer for the state of my spirit and my capacity for reflexivity.
Observations are inescapably subjective (Berg & Lune, 2012). We are formed by the multitude of interactions that affect every moment of every day. We are a realization of established construction mechanisms. Banister et al. (2011) says that “we are always forming hypotheses, making inferences and trying to impose meaning on our social world, based on our observations” (p. 63). But this is too trite and simple. We are instead identifying meaning by what we already know; our observations only reveal things about our paradigmatic lens. It is novelty, the fragmentation of our expectations, that shifts our thinking and ushers vicissitude. So perhaps autoethnography, adding personal narratives to perceived observations (Lichtman, 2013), is investigating our own truth, admitting our ignorance, and confessing we cannot ever truly know the other; we can only describe who they are by describing what we are.
Most cars float by but an occasional enlarged muffler roars privilege and money, insisting on being noticed, dominating the senses, conversations pause, eyes flicker and gaze, giving the driver the attention he craves, pouring into his bottomless need to be noticed. The car disappears to wait at another red light. It will sit, coiled like a tigress, eyes narrowed in anticipation, ready to unfurl, leaping to life with a thunderous snarl. See me!
A camera brand, Canon, is currently running a campaign with the slogan “A photograph is shaped more by the person behind the camera than by what is in front of it.” To demonstrate this, they recruit 6 photographers to do a solo shoot with one man. The twist is that they tell each photographer a different story about the man. To one he is a fisherman, to another, a former alcoholic, he a hero, an ex-inmate, a self-made millionaire, and a psychic. Each photographer reveals something about their perspective in their respective photograph and the photos are vastly different (Canon Australia, 2015).
There must be, however, some value in observation rather than mere reflexivity. The collective story is made up partly by me and partly by a thousand other voices. My description of my observations becomes a drop of water that joins other drops to eventually become a raging river, one that shapes a landscape and the resultant lens of interpretation. It is an inescapable reality that “all humans residing in and among social groups are the products of those social groups” (Berg & Lune, 2012, p. 209). Thus, it is our collective voices, made from our collective story that articulates interpretation.
A collective understanding becomes “possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision” (Law, 2004, p. 3). “We will need to rethink how far whatever it is that we know travels and whether it still makes sense in other locations... this would be knowing as situated inquiry” (Law, 2004, p. 3). My contribution, my little drop of water, will weave as much as I can know of my personal narrative, projected from what I know to believe from what I interpreted from my past, into my ethnography. Neuman states that “it distrusts abstract explanation and holds that research can never do more than describe, with all descriptions equally valid . . . [any] researcher can do no more than describe his or her personal experiences” (as cited in Wall, 2006, p. 2).
I’m aware of my clothes, hairspray, and the ease with which I was able to obtain a bathroom key in a mall with shiny marbled floors and tall glass doors. Sitting on the corner, no one knows that I have been through the process of education, but my appearance suggests that I have access to it if I so desire. I’m aware of the coldness of the concrete seeping through my pants, I cast a furtive glance at the low-hanging clouds heavy with precipitation, and watch the birds fly silently and aimlessly about. Privilege affords me the luxury of returning to my car or ducking into a café to escape the rain, a luxury not shared my homeless friend, only he doesn’t know I think of him as a friend; brother. A quick glance up reveals a nearby overhang, a place where the sidewalk will be dry if the laden clouds burst open. But there’s a booth set up under the overhang, ‘Good News from God!,’ pamphlets, two smiling beautiful people, smart haircuts, expensive clothes, sharing laughter, safe from the rain. They appear to be flirting. The missionaries ignore the homeless man, it’s probably mutual but their claim implies kindness and hope and I expect more from them. There is an odd hypocrisy afoot, a dissonance between the message and the action, I feel disappointment.
Locating myself in this space requires personal vulnerability, rugged honesty, and an acknowledgement of privilege. I am not who I am because of the choices I have made. I am who I am because of the input from my circle of influence. I am able to forgive because I have been forgiven, I am able to be in school because of sacrifices made by others, I can trust because people have trusted me, and I can hold down a job because people encouraged me to conform to expectations of authority. These are not points to brag about but rather points to consider that shed light on how I observe and make meaning.
“We can map encounters and intra-actions that appear to be lasting ones and we can also be on the alert for and possibly produce encounters that change how we know and what there is to know” (McCoy, 2012, p. 765). The question becomes how we can reproduce encounters that are fraught with complexity and inherently reject reproduction. The reproduction ends up being the reliving of an experience I once had that is now shrouded in the haze of distance and time from when it actually happened. In reality, “mapping these encounters forces us to engage with mess and multiplicity” (McCoy, 2012, p. 765). My autoethnography becomes a map of my experiences and interpretations of those experiences projected onto my hapless surroundings.
“The project of making experience visible precludes analysis of the workings of this system and it’s historicity; instead it reproduces its terms” (Scott, 1991, p. 779). I am revealed in this process but what becomes evident is that I cannot know what is not known to me. My own observations are mere reflections of my own story. There is no telling what the homeless man is thinking or perceiving about his surroundings. There is no story shared by the guy in the roaring car, there is only my painfully thin recollection of a memory of me wanting to be noticed because I owned a car that others envied. Imposition of my narrative becomes the only lens of interpretation and reveals the hypocrisy of my judgment of historical ethnographers who used their ‘normal’ to put people and interactions into neat little boxes. I am become the thing I snidely passed off as feeble science. I press on, though, because what else do I have but to understand my own story so I can share it and add to the drops that make up the river.
Flush. It suddenly occurs to me that the bus stop is like a giant toilet. It slowly fills up, people trickling in, a small crowd gathering, then larger and louder. The bus arrives, doors yawn open, the crowd swirls in. Flush. Quietness, the trickling resumes, slowly filling the bowl.
This corner,
with trees growing out of concrete,
flowers planted in neat rows but removed from the environment where they belong,
surrounded by cigarette butts and refuse,
unwilling prisoners, helpless, enslaved,
just like the homeless man,
just like all of us,
just like me.
Three teen boys stand close to the homeless man and close together. Excitedly loud conversations, wild and unsubstantiated claims, staring intensely at each to dare disagreement. Furtive glances at pretty girls, calculating their chances, pursed lips but no smiles.
Families wait for the walk sign, children look around with sparkly eyed enthusiasm and curiousity. Stiff parents counting the numbers down together with the sign, avoiding eye contact; a white man in a tiny box attached to the pole appears to signal it’s safe to cross; the parents are visibly relieved, shoulders relax, conversation starts up again, no money spent, no interactions, no explaining to their kids.
What was it exactly?
The homeless man and his haunting melodies?
The growing crowd at the bus stop?
The teen boys and their wild claims?
The pamphlet wielding couple with hidden motives and benign smiles?
Maybe it was the concrete corner, maybe it was all of it.
My observations and concurrently created meaning are all reflections of foggy memories retrieved from a limitless database of memories. This is autoethnography, it is the telling of my story so you can make sense of how I created the meaning I observed and understood. My meaning comes from a time where I avoided eye contact so I could go on with my day without feeling guilt from not leaving money for a homeless man who clearly needed it more than me. It came from memories of furtively glancing at girls, hoping my conversation, loud and full of bravado, would catch their attention and spark a conversation. It came from wanting to own things that people coveted so I could be valuable. It came trying to sell something to people who did not want it. It came from sitting alone, desperately wanting to be noticed yet feeling isolated and surrounded by people, surrounded by concrete, and feeling inescapably enslaved. In the end, I saw me, and in me I saw others.
I must conclude that the exercise of ethnographic field reporting became an exercise of self-knowledge. The concrete corner reveals a multiplicity of interactions between people, between people and nature, between worldviews, and between the objects we interrelate with everyday. It was in the subtleties that I found meaning. I gazed intently to read expressions and body language to understand a tiny little about what people believe about one another and the environment they live in. The meaning made ended up revealing much about me. I saw myself in everyone, it was the only way I was able to interpret what was going on. In the children I saw my own curiousity, in the elderly I projected how I would think and feel, in the homeless man I imagined it was my life, in the flowers, I saw my own entanglement with the slavery of the city. All of this I projected and tried desperately to acknowledge as I strove to convey the meaning of this interpretation in this autoethnography. The meaning you make of what I have written here adds to the complexity and richness of what was observed, but mostly it reveals your understanding of your experiences. This is autoethnography; this is our story.
References
Banister, Peter (2011). Qualitative methods in psychology (2nd ed).
Berkshire, McGraw-Hill House.
Berg, B., & Lune, H. (2012). Qualitative research methods for the
social sciences (8th ed.). Boston:
Pearson.
Canon Australia. (2015, November 3). The lab: Decoy – A portrait
session with a twist [Video
File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-
TyPfYMDK8
Copenhagen Street Photographer. (2010). Silent harmonica man
[online image]. Retrieved from
https://www.flickr.com/photos/15156420@N05/5092465805/
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison.
New York: Vintage Books.
Lichtman, Marilyn (2013). Chapter 5, Designing Your Research. Qualitative Research in
Education, A User’s Guide (3rd ed). Los Angeles, Sage
Publishers.
McCoy, K. (2012). Toward a methodology of encounters opening to
complexity in qualitative
research. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(9), 762-772.
Scott, J. W. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry,
17(4), 773-797.
Wall, S. (2006). An autoethnography on learning about
autoethnography. International Journal of
Qualitative Methods, 5(2), 146-160.
I chose to observe a street corner in downtown Victoria with the intent of gaining some understanding of how people interacted with the myriad of stimuli that contended for their attention. The corner was rich with diverse and constant interactions, some overt and some obtained by subreption. There was a busy bus stop, a homeless man playing a harmonica, two people operating a religious booth, vehicles, and a constant flow of shoppers. I came away with a deeper understanding of my own assumptions and preconceived ideas of language use, facial expressions, body language, and people’s intentions; I came away with an autoethnography, “a research approach that combines elements of ethnography and elements of the personal narrative” (Lichtman, 2013, p. 107). I came away with a deeper understanding of my own story.
I came straight from Costco where I was subjected to a cacophony of capitalism and an angry parking lot akin to a seething wasp nest. Jittery, tangled, buzzing, I settled in, an invisible observer, (harried) ethnographer.
To me, he is an eclectic work of art, an unappreciated masterpiece.
He appears homeless.
He is sitting on a ledge that surrounds a very large concrete planter.
I am sitting on the other side of the planter facing away from him,
casually watching over my shoulder
as a constant flow of people silently interact with him.
He is wearing a thick jacket,
his hair is disheveled,
and he has a bulging backpack leaning against his feet.
He is playing a harmonica; his haunting melodies carry down the street like a loons cry across an idyllic lake at sunrise.
But there is very little nature here; it is a city in a sterile embrace, it is a concrete corner. At first I write frenetically, desperately, my pen mercilessly scratching words, remnants of Costco, but soon I feel my spirit settling down, I’m finding peace on a street corner in downtown Victoria. My notes became meditative, contemplative, poetic; my pen moves more easily, it caresses, dances; it becomes a barometer for the state of my spirit and my capacity for reflexivity.
Observations are inescapably subjective (Berg & Lune, 2012). We are formed by the multitude of interactions that affect every moment of every day. We are a realization of established construction mechanisms. Banister et al. (2011) says that “we are always forming hypotheses, making inferences and trying to impose meaning on our social world, based on our observations” (p. 63). But this is too trite and simple. We are instead identifying meaning by what we already know; our observations only reveal things about our paradigmatic lens. It is novelty, the fragmentation of our expectations, that shifts our thinking and ushers vicissitude. So perhaps autoethnography, adding personal narratives to perceived observations (Lichtman, 2013), is investigating our own truth, admitting our ignorance, and confessing we cannot ever truly know the other; we can only describe who they are by describing what we are.
Most cars float by but an occasional enlarged muffler roars privilege and money, insisting on being noticed, dominating the senses, conversations pause, eyes flicker and gaze, giving the driver the attention he craves, pouring into his bottomless need to be noticed. The car disappears to wait at another red light. It will sit, coiled like a tigress, eyes narrowed in anticipation, ready to unfurl, leaping to life with a thunderous snarl. See me!
A camera brand, Canon, is currently running a campaign with the slogan “A photograph is shaped more by the person behind the camera than by what is in front of it.” To demonstrate this, they recruit 6 photographers to do a solo shoot with one man. The twist is that they tell each photographer a different story about the man. To one he is a fisherman, to another, a former alcoholic, he a hero, an ex-inmate, a self-made millionaire, and a psychic. Each photographer reveals something about their perspective in their respective photograph and the photos are vastly different (Canon Australia, 2015).
There must be, however, some value in observation rather than mere reflexivity. The collective story is made up partly by me and partly by a thousand other voices. My description of my observations becomes a drop of water that joins other drops to eventually become a raging river, one that shapes a landscape and the resultant lens of interpretation. It is an inescapable reality that “all humans residing in and among social groups are the products of those social groups” (Berg & Lune, 2012, p. 209). Thus, it is our collective voices, made from our collective story that articulates interpretation.
A collective understanding becomes “possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision” (Law, 2004, p. 3). “We will need to rethink how far whatever it is that we know travels and whether it still makes sense in other locations... this would be knowing as situated inquiry” (Law, 2004, p. 3). My contribution, my little drop of water, will weave as much as I can know of my personal narrative, projected from what I know to believe from what I interpreted from my past, into my ethnography. Neuman states that “it distrusts abstract explanation and holds that research can never do more than describe, with all descriptions equally valid . . . [any] researcher can do no more than describe his or her personal experiences” (as cited in Wall, 2006, p. 2).
I’m aware of my clothes, hairspray, and the ease with which I was able to obtain a bathroom key in a mall with shiny marbled floors and tall glass doors. Sitting on the corner, no one knows that I have been through the process of education, but my appearance suggests that I have access to it if I so desire. I’m aware of the coldness of the concrete seeping through my pants, I cast a furtive glance at the low-hanging clouds heavy with precipitation, and watch the birds fly silently and aimlessly about. Privilege affords me the luxury of returning to my car or ducking into a café to escape the rain, a luxury not shared my homeless friend, only he doesn’t know I think of him as a friend; brother. A quick glance up reveals a nearby overhang, a place where the sidewalk will be dry if the laden clouds burst open. But there’s a booth set up under the overhang, ‘Good News from God!,’ pamphlets, two smiling beautiful people, smart haircuts, expensive clothes, sharing laughter, safe from the rain. They appear to be flirting. The missionaries ignore the homeless man, it’s probably mutual but their claim implies kindness and hope and I expect more from them. There is an odd hypocrisy afoot, a dissonance between the message and the action, I feel disappointment.
Locating myself in this space requires personal vulnerability, rugged honesty, and an acknowledgement of privilege. I am not who I am because of the choices I have made. I am who I am because of the input from my circle of influence. I am able to forgive because I have been forgiven, I am able to be in school because of sacrifices made by others, I can trust because people have trusted me, and I can hold down a job because people encouraged me to conform to expectations of authority. These are not points to brag about but rather points to consider that shed light on how I observe and make meaning.
“We can map encounters and intra-actions that appear to be lasting ones and we can also be on the alert for and possibly produce encounters that change how we know and what there is to know” (McCoy, 2012, p. 765). The question becomes how we can reproduce encounters that are fraught with complexity and inherently reject reproduction. The reproduction ends up being the reliving of an experience I once had that is now shrouded in the haze of distance and time from when it actually happened. In reality, “mapping these encounters forces us to engage with mess and multiplicity” (McCoy, 2012, p. 765). My autoethnography becomes a map of my experiences and interpretations of those experiences projected onto my hapless surroundings.
“The project of making experience visible precludes analysis of the workings of this system and it’s historicity; instead it reproduces its terms” (Scott, 1991, p. 779). I am revealed in this process but what becomes evident is that I cannot know what is not known to me. My own observations are mere reflections of my own story. There is no telling what the homeless man is thinking or perceiving about his surroundings. There is no story shared by the guy in the roaring car, there is only my painfully thin recollection of a memory of me wanting to be noticed because I owned a car that others envied. Imposition of my narrative becomes the only lens of interpretation and reveals the hypocrisy of my judgment of historical ethnographers who used their ‘normal’ to put people and interactions into neat little boxes. I am become the thing I snidely passed off as feeble science. I press on, though, because what else do I have but to understand my own story so I can share it and add to the drops that make up the river.
Flush. It suddenly occurs to me that the bus stop is like a giant toilet. It slowly fills up, people trickling in, a small crowd gathering, then larger and louder. The bus arrives, doors yawn open, the crowd swirls in. Flush. Quietness, the trickling resumes, slowly filling the bowl.
This corner,
with trees growing out of concrete,
flowers planted in neat rows but removed from the environment where they belong,
surrounded by cigarette butts and refuse,
unwilling prisoners, helpless, enslaved,
just like the homeless man,
just like all of us,
just like me.
Three teen boys stand close to the homeless man and close together. Excitedly loud conversations, wild and unsubstantiated claims, staring intensely at each to dare disagreement. Furtive glances at pretty girls, calculating their chances, pursed lips but no smiles.
Families wait for the walk sign, children look around with sparkly eyed enthusiasm and curiousity. Stiff parents counting the numbers down together with the sign, avoiding eye contact; a white man in a tiny box attached to the pole appears to signal it’s safe to cross; the parents are visibly relieved, shoulders relax, conversation starts up again, no money spent, no interactions, no explaining to their kids.
What was it exactly?
The homeless man and his haunting melodies?
The growing crowd at the bus stop?
The teen boys and their wild claims?
The pamphlet wielding couple with hidden motives and benign smiles?
Maybe it was the concrete corner, maybe it was all of it.
My observations and concurrently created meaning are all reflections of foggy memories retrieved from a limitless database of memories. This is autoethnography, it is the telling of my story so you can make sense of how I created the meaning I observed and understood. My meaning comes from a time where I avoided eye contact so I could go on with my day without feeling guilt from not leaving money for a homeless man who clearly needed it more than me. It came from memories of furtively glancing at girls, hoping my conversation, loud and full of bravado, would catch their attention and spark a conversation. It came from wanting to own things that people coveted so I could be valuable. It came trying to sell something to people who did not want it. It came from sitting alone, desperately wanting to be noticed yet feeling isolated and surrounded by people, surrounded by concrete, and feeling inescapably enslaved. In the end, I saw me, and in me I saw others.
I must conclude that the exercise of ethnographic field reporting became an exercise of self-knowledge. The concrete corner reveals a multiplicity of interactions between people, between people and nature, between worldviews, and between the objects we interrelate with everyday. It was in the subtleties that I found meaning. I gazed intently to read expressions and body language to understand a tiny little about what people believe about one another and the environment they live in. The meaning made ended up revealing much about me. I saw myself in everyone, it was the only way I was able to interpret what was going on. In the children I saw my own curiousity, in the elderly I projected how I would think and feel, in the homeless man I imagined it was my life, in the flowers, I saw my own entanglement with the slavery of the city. All of this I projected and tried desperately to acknowledge as I strove to convey the meaning of this interpretation in this autoethnography. The meaning you make of what I have written here adds to the complexity and richness of what was observed, but mostly it reveals your understanding of your experiences. This is autoethnography; this is our story.
References
Banister, Peter (2011). Qualitative methods in psychology (2nd ed).
Berkshire, McGraw-Hill House.
Berg, B., & Lune, H. (2012). Qualitative research methods for the
social sciences (8th ed.). Boston:
Pearson.
Canon Australia. (2015, November 3). The lab: Decoy – A portrait
session with a twist [Video
File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-
TyPfYMDK8
Copenhagen Street Photographer. (2010). Silent harmonica man
[online image]. Retrieved from
https://www.flickr.com/photos/15156420@N05/5092465805/
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison.
New York: Vintage Books.
Lichtman, Marilyn (2013). Chapter 5, Designing Your Research. Qualitative Research in
Education, A User’s Guide (3rd ed). Los Angeles, Sage
Publishers.
McCoy, K. (2012). Toward a methodology of encounters opening to
complexity in qualitative
research. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(9), 762-772.
Scott, J. W. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry,
17(4), 773-797.
Wall, S. (2006). An autoethnography on learning about
autoethnography. International Journal of
Qualitative Methods, 5(2), 146-160.