Reflexivity: Blurring the insider/outsider binary
Week 8
↬ Overview
➢ Reminder that ethics reflection is due Friday, 3/19
- What, in a word, is the relationship between the ultimate objectivity of an ethnography and how it was both conducted and written?
- Prompt duplicate here
➢ Guiding question: What is the best or most objective "mix" of methods?
↪︎ between emic and etic?
↪︎ between induction and deduction?
↪︎ between reflexive or unreflexive?
↪︎ between insider and outsider ethnographer?
Narayan 1993 (pp. 671-672)
Today's readings
➢ Discussion leadership
↬ Zora Neale Hurston's chapters
☞ Mr. Lewis was kidnapped from his hometown in present-day Benin, and then shipped on an illegal slave ship ("The Clotilde") to Alabama, in 1860
☞ Zora Neale Hurston interviewed him in the 1920s, when he was in his 90s, but her book ("Barracoon, The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo') wasn't published until 2018
☞ The non-standard, mixed form of English in which he spoke (likely with influence from Yoruba), surely reflect his life trajectory and struggles; he was the last surviving witness to/victim of the trans-Atlantic slave trade
☞ These chapters, along with the short selections from Don Kulick's ethnography and that of Jenny Davis, form part of our exploration of how, by being reflexive about our methodology and positionality, we can keep ethnocentrism at bay and increase internal validity
↬ Davis excerpt on positionality
☞ Methodology excerpt from their 2018 book Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance
☞ Highlights the complexity of being an insider anthropologist—as a citizen of Chickasaw Nation (Ada, Oklahoma)— particularly given the multi-faceted interests and differences within a single community
↬ Kulick excerpt on methods and positionality
☞ Methodology excerpt from his 1998 book Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes
☞ Speaks to how, by dint of identities being intersectional, as a gay man he and the transgendered prostitutes he did research with (who identify with the female gender and also desire men) found much common ground and rapport
Formulating your research questions
- Research proposal due Sunday, 3/28
- Obtaining consent from people with whom you intend to work
- Beginning to write fieldnotes, collect anecdotes for your proposal
- Writing a strong research question:
↪︎ Is it open-ended? (allowing your research direction to change based on what you learn)?
↪︎ Is it ethnographically circumscribed to a particular group of people?
↪︎ Are you able to explain its research significance?
↪︎ Is it inductively built up from some key examples and anecdotes?
↬ Preview of the next two weeks
➢ Readings for Thursday:
◦ How might other modalities for story-telling, such as journalism, differ from ethnographic accounts of people's lives? What's missing from some of these journalistic accounts, which is likewise missing from Pullum's account as a linguist?
◦ How can we begin to deconstruct stereotypical portrayals of Inuit communities?
☞ *skimo vs. Inuit, inter alia
- The etymology of the former label is thought to arise from the Innu-aimun phrase ayassimew, 'one who laces snow-shoes,' though it was taken up as an exonym by French sailors and traders in the late 16th century and later the Danish and Russians, in the 18th century
- Members of of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (founded 1977)—"a major international non-government organization representing approximately 180,000 Inuit of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Chukotka (Russia)" (ICC website)—have their own emic labels, though they broadly refer to themselves as Inuit (plural of inuk)
Members of the Inuit Circumpolar Council
☞ The upshot: Inuit peoples, while interconnected, are diverse in geography, custom, language, etc. It's best to use their emic labels for themselves.
➢ Films for next week
◦ Nanook of the North: A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic (Flaherty 1922)
- Hailed as the first documentary film, as well as a piece of salvage ethnography
☞ Is ethnographic film emic and objective by its very subject matter? By its visual medium?
◦ Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Kunuk [Isuma Igloolik Productions] 2001)
- Ethnographic, epic film produced and written by Inuit artists
