Ethnographic Engagements: Encounters with the Familiar and the Strange 9780367174477, 9780367174484, 9780429056840

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction: Why fighting familiarity matters
Strategies for fighting familiarity
The familiarity problem
Our intellectual standpoints
The empirical examples
The structure of the book
Chapter 1: Core themes
Ethnography
Key themes
Two powerful concepts
The gradient of unfamiliarity
The epistemology of ignorance
Strategies for better ethnography
Revisiting insightful ethnographies from the past
Studying the empirical topic in other cultures
Focusing on ‘different’ actors
Studying the topic in an unfamiliar setting
Being self-consciously alert for sexism or racism or ageism or heteronormativity in the setting
Adopting standpoints
Middle-range concepts
Permanent recordings
Phenomenology and ethnomethodology
Conclusion
Chapter 2: Good questions and good designs
Not empty but open
Foreshadowed problems
Implementing the research questions
Research ‘questions’ and research ‘design’
Conclusions
Chapter 3: Access, openings and encounters
Access
Initial encounters
Initial encounters
Conclusion: Finding one’s feet
Chapter 4: Initial analysis and focusing strategies
Inductive and deductive reasoning
Abductive reasoning
Initial data analysis
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Revisiting data collection
Fresh strategies
Sound
Looking
Absences
Practical activities
Ignorance(s) and non-knowledge
Multiple mobilities: Embodiment in the ‘world on the move’
Moving bodies
Transfer points and liminal places
Virtual movements
Studying moving informants by moving with them
Imagined and anticipated movements
Memories of past movements
The study of places that do and do not move
Objects that can be followed
Time-space diaries
Fieldnotes in the main phase of fieldwork
Fieldnotes and boundary objects
Liminality
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Organising and analysing
Coding
Accounts
Standpoints, positionality and reflective practice
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Reading and reflecting
Ethnographic genres
Fieldwork ‘confessions’
The academic autobiography or life study
The autoethnography
Reading these three genres
Conclusions
Chapter 8: Writing the unfamiliar
The doctoral thesis
Journal articles and book chapters
The monograph
New forms of output and of text
Poems
A play for three voices
Fiction
Conclusion
Chapter 9: Leaving the field
Those who never had a separate ‘field’
The study, the re-study and the much-studied ssite
Leaving
‘Deciding’ to leave
The careful review
Organising and communicating the exit
Documenting the exit
Challenging the accumulated familiarity
Recordings and documents
Middle-range concepts
Taking race and ethnicity seriously
Gender
Other actors
Three ‘reading’ strategies
Conclusion
Chapter 10: Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ETHNOGRAPHIC ENGAGEMENTS

In Ethnographic Engagements: Encounters with the Familiar and the Strange Delamont and Atkinson, each with over 40 years of experience as ethnographers, present strategies for designing, conducting and publishing research that contributes original insights. Ethnography is a core qualitative research method, widely used across the social sciences. However, producing good, interesting and thought-provoking ethnography is never easy. This book provides effective research strategies for combatting familiarity in the context of empirical fieldwork. The authors rehearse ways that challenge the ethnographer to avoid taken-for-granted ideas and to make the familiar strange. The book covers the cycle of research from research questions to publication and leaving the field and brings together the central themes of their life’s work in one clearly written volume. This book is aimed at researchers at postgraduate level and beyond, their supervisors and principal investigators, and at experienced investigators who want to improve their thinking. Any ethnographer will find ideas and proposals to help them reflect self-critically and creatively about their research practice. Sara Delamont is Reader Emerita in Sociology at Cardiff University. Her recent books include: Embodying Brazil: An Ethnography of Disaporic Capoeira (Routledge 2017) and Fieldwork in Educational Settings, 3rd edition (Routledge 2016). Paul Atkinson is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at Cardiff University. His recent books include Thinking Ethnographically (Sage 2017) and Writing Ethnographically (Sage 2020). Ethnographic Encounters, with Emilie Whitaker, will be published by Routledge (2021). He and Sara Delamont were the founding editors of the journal Qualitative Research.

ETHNOGRAPHIC ENGAGEMENTS Encounters with the Familiar and the Strange

Sara Delamont and Paul Atkinson

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Sara Delamont and Paul Atkinson The right of Sara Delamont and Paul Atkinson to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Delamont, Sara, 1947- author. | Atkinson, Paul, 1947- author. Title: Ethnographic engagements : encounters with the familiar and the strange / Sara Delamont and Paul Atkinson. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020042889 (print) | LCCN 2020042890 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367174477 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780367174484 (Paperback) | ISBN 9780429056840 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Ethnology–Research–Methodology. Classification: LCC GN345 .D445 2021 (print) | LCC GN345 (ebook) | DDC 305.80072/1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042889 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042890 ISBN: 978-0-367-17447-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-17448-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05684-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by SPi Global, India

We dedicate this book to the memory of Anselm Strauss who was always an inspiring scholar for us both.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements viii Preface ix Introduction:Why Fighting Familiarity Matters xi 1. Core Themes

1

2. Good Questions and Good Designs

18

3. Access, Openings and Encounters

33

4. Initial Analysis and Focusing Strategies

49

5. Revisiting Data Collection

68

6. Organising and Analysing

86

7. Reading and Reflecting

104

8. Writing the Unfamiliar

120

9. Leaving the Field

137

10. Epilogue

154

Bibliography

158

Index

176

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Over our long academic careers, we have been lucky enough to have had great teachers, supportive colleagues, and inspiring graduate students, as well as creative and thought-provoking co-authors. Most of those people have been credited in the acknowledgements to our previous books, and in this volume, we have only named those we have co-authored with and been proud to have as colleagues since 2010. Tia de Nora, Des Fitzgerald, Martyn Hammersley, William Housley, Jamie Lewis, Ann Ryen, Susie Scott, Robin James Smith, Neil Stephens, Michael Ward, Emile Whitaker are all that and more. At Routledge, we are grateful to Hannah Shakespeare, our editor, for her forbearance and encouragement.

PREFACE

We have known each other since 1966 and lived together since 1969. For the first 35 years of our relationship, we carefully avoided publishing together, aiming at one co-authored paper per five-year period. In 1995, we published a collection of our peer-reviewed journal articles in the USA that addressed the core theme of fighting familiarity. Since 2004, we have stopped bothering about the possibility that if we published together people will either assume that Paul wrote ‘for’ Sara or vice versa. We have both been lucky enough to have had special issues of the journal Qualitative Research edited for us as our separate Festschriften. Beck Dimond and Jamie Lewis (2017) edited one for Paul, and Amanda Coffey, Bella Dicks, Sophie Hallet and David James (2018) edited one for Sara. Both contained papers written about important themes raised in our work, many of which are cited in this volume, not about us personally. We have also written academic autobiographies (Atkinson, 2012; Delamont, 2012b) and Sara’s was turned into a poem by Norman Denzin (2018). Anyone curious about us as people can turn to those.

INTRODUCTION Why fighting familiarity matters

We have, together and separately, called on ethnographers, especially sociological ethnographers, to fight familiarity for 40 years and offered strategies to achieve that desirable outcome: making the familiar strange. These exhortations have not had much success, in that current publications show little sign of serious attempts on the part of the ethnographers to force themselves to make the phenomena they studied in their known culture strange. If our exhortations have had little impact, we are no more ignored than the original statements of the familiarity problem made by Blanche Geer (1964) and Howard Becker (1971) have been. We decided that our exhortations would repay a more detailed set of implementation strategies: that is advice about how ethnographers can actually do things at every stage of the project that will help them, and their readers, make the familiar strange. This is not a book for the novice or inexperienced ethnographer. We have already published (Delamont, 1992, 2002, 2016a; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983, 1995, 2007, 2019) the advice we can offer to newcomers.This is a book that assumes some knowledge and experience and reflects on ways to produce more intellectually exciting and challenging ethnography, that strives to disrupt what ‘everybody knows’. As long ago as 1964, Blanche Geer wrote eloquently about the need for ethnographers ‘at home’ – studying in their own society, their own culture or subculture – to develop strategies to make themselves ‘strangers’. Geer argued for strenuous efforts at every stage of the research, from devising the foreshadowed problems through to the ‘writing up’ to make the familiar strange. Her colleague Howard Becker made the same point in 1971, writing that when ethnographic novices were observing in school classrooms it was like ‘pulling teeth’ to get American researchers to ‘see’ anything sociologically interesting because the settings were ‘all too familiar’. The familiarity problem has been potentially on the agenda of every ethnographer studying aspects of her or his society since 1964, yet it is routinely ignored in methods texts and in publications reporting empirical work. There have been

xii  Introduction

spasmodic re-statements and rediscoveries of the familiarity problem ever since, but there is no coherent presentation of strategies for fighting familiarity.This book will provide that coherent account of the most effective research strategies in combatting familiarity in the context of empirical fieldwork. Unpublished field research by the authors will be used to illustrate and reinforce the advice to fellow ethnographers, especially students and early-career researchers. Following the spirit of our advice will help them to produce ethnographic research that is original and that stands out from the run-of-the-mill publications.

Strategies for fighting familiarity There are no simple protocols for fighting familiarity, but there are some basic strategies that can be worked with, and that we recommend here and throughout the book. We summarise them in broad terms here and then exemplify them as we develop our arguments in this and the next chapter. Taking comparative perspectives. Ethnographic research is always comparative in principle, but in practice, it is too easy to overlook that. So rather than being fixated on one’s own research site and chosen topic (metaphorically looking down), one should work more with one’s head up and think about some key comparisons. Such comparisons do not depend on conducting fresh fieldwork in different, contrasting sites. It can be pursued by the strategic uses of relevant literature. The most obvious type of comparison is cross-cultural or international. It is all too easy to be ethnocentric, and to take for granted features of national or local cultures, systems or institutions. That in turn means that authors can appear to universalise what are in fact very particular features. Such a tendency is readily apparent in fields such as education or healthcare, where national systems can impinge on virtually every aspect of everyday work and interaction. A similar – but different – strategy is to make explicit comparisons between the present (of the fieldwork) and the past (as represented in older ethnographies). This can be a fruitful way of pinpointing what is changeable and what is more durable, and how changing circumstances might have impinged on current arrangements. These strategies do not mean that you have to conduct the analysis or write up the ethnography in terms of a constant stream of comparisons. These and the further strategies are heuristic approaches, intended to help ethnographers think about their chosen research sites in fresh ways. In more precisely systematic ways, during the course of the fieldwork and the analysis of data that accompanies it, it can be fruitful to shift one’s standpoint. Again, this is an exercise in ethnographic imagination. So, for a given research site, we might want to ask ourselves: what might this look like from a feminist standpoint? Or from the perspective of queer theory? Or considered in terms of critical race theory? Or indeed – assuming one is already sensitised to such standpoints – how does it look from a heteronormative perspective? Again, the implication here is not that we need constantly to shift positions, but such mental, imaginative work can bring different things into focus, and not just gender, race or sexuality. Destabilising

Introduction  xiii

taken-for-granted aspects of identity can have far-reaching analytic benefits. This can sound rather ponderous, but in reality it should not be so. On the contrary, it should encourage a certain nimbleness, in alerting one to alternative ideas, to otherwise taken-for-granted phenomena. The same is true for another strategy: seeking out unusual, ‘different’ or otherwise non-obvious settings in which a phenomenon can be observed. ‘Education’ in the widest sense does not have to be studied in schools and colleges. Teaching and learning take place in many other settings such as driving instruction, music and ballet classes, or evening classes in craft and cookery. One can throw some things into sharper relief by paying attention to categories of social actors that are often overlooked: in hospitals, porters, chaplains, catering and laundry staff. In performance studies, the categories might include members of props departments, lighting technicians, sound engineers, or workers in wardrobe departments. We can ask ourselves how a social world functions from their point of view. We ask, rhetorically, how many laboratory ethnographies take technicians or even the doctoral students in the settings they study sufficiently into account. ‘Analytic mobility’ can be enhanced by examining a range of concepts from different substantive fields. Studies of education might be enhanced by a reading of studies of work and industry; studies of medicine could be illuminated by analyses of performing arts; we might use ideas from deviance studies to illuminate the sociology of art. Sometimes ‘strangeness’ can be helped by paying particularly close attention to phenomena, by asking ourselves the deceptively simple question: just how do they do that? Intellectually speaking, that can mean taking a perspective derived from phenomenology and ethnomethodology. It means foregrounding ordinary, mundane practices and subjecting them to close analysis. It means deliberately and self-consciously not assuming that we know what is actually going on in any given social setting. Such a perspective can lead us to pay fresh attention to things, how people use them, make them and interact with them. This in turn can be facilitated by the use of permanent recordings, which allow the analyst to undertake repeated (sometimes obsessive) analysis of the most basic, elementary social practices and activities. These can all contribute to making aspects of everyday life ‘strange’. Likewise, one can gain analytic purchase by treating ‘things’ as if they too had a perspective on events, as if they too – like human actors – had agency. We do not argue that they do, but treating them metaphorically can have analytic pay-off. The use of permanent recordings is not the only methodological strategy that we recommend. In order to promote alternative perspectives on social worlds and social actors, it is worth thinking what benefits different research methods might generate: how would life-history methods look in this setting? What might I learn from a semiotic analysis, or a documentary analysis? This is not in itself a recommendation for using the ‘triangulation’ of methods, nor indeed of ‘mixed methods’. Rather, like contrasting standpoints, different methods could yield different analyses and help to destabilise cherished ethnographic perspectives.

xiv  Introduction

As we have already acknowledged, what we have just written might seem daunting, and we know that any ethnographic fieldwork is time-consuming enough and sometimes exhausting enough without any more complications. But this is not intended to be a catechism of methodological imperatives that all have to be pursued in each and every ethnographic project. Equally, this is not an exhaustive check-list. These strategies are some of the key ways we identify to encourage an ethnographic approach that promotes fresh thinking. We shall be exploring these and related ideas throughout the book. Again, this will be aimed at fostering ‘strangeness’, in the interests of promoting a distinctive ethnographic imagination. The important thing is to find intellectual, imaginative ways to de-familiarise the everyday world.That is a valuable exercise even when the chosen strategy is not easy to deploy or seems too unproductive. This chapter now explains what the familiarity problem is and outlines the negative consequences for ethnography. We contextualise this book’s central themes in our own intellectual biographies, and we outline the research projects we have done that are used throughout the book. Finally, the structure of the book will be set out, showing how self-consciously fighting familiarity improves ethnography at every stage of a project. As we explore and reflect on how an ethnographer can set out to follow a core precept of Becker (1971) and Geer (1964), we are clear that doing so can lead to the researcher encountering difficulties. The aim of the book is to explore solutions to those difficulties. When we use our own ethnographic research experiences, we refer to ourselves as ‘SD’ or ‘PA’ for convenience. General advice and experiences are not linked to either of us specifically, but some examples are unique to one or other of us. In one case, for example, when SD tried to achieve the goal of making the familiar strange, by observing in a carefully chosen contrastive fieldwork setting, a new set of pitfalls around ethics, confidentiality and pseudonyms was exposed. In other words, we do not pretend that doing ethnography that fights familiarity is easy and straightforward.

The familiarity problem In 1964 Blanche Geer set out the importance of using the early period of fieldwork to ensure that the researcher’s preconceptions and familiarities do not predetermine, and over-determine, the project. In that paper she described her preliminary work among liberal arts freshmen at the University of Kansas, and how she forced herself to develop good foreshadowed problems for the full ethnography which was eventually published as Becker, Geer and Hughes (1968). She was particularly concerned that all researchers needed to ensure they did not come out of the field without data because they could not see beyond, or behind, what ‘everybody knows’ (p. 34). Howard Becker (1971) extended the argument to research in schools, in what may well be the most famous footnote in educational research. He argued that for both higher education and school settings, it was ‘like pulling teeth’ (p. 10) to get novice researchers to ‘see’ anything interesting, or even to ‘find’ anything to write down because American schools were:

Introduction  xv

so familiar it becomes impossible to single out events that occur in the classroom as things that have occurred, even when they happen right in front of you. (p. 10) Becker went on it takes a tremendous effort of will and imagination to stop seeing only the things that are conventionally ‘there’ to be seen (p. 10) We first read those diagnoses as doctoral students and young post docs in the 1970s, while we did ethnographic fieldwork in medical settings and in schools. Few texts of advice on fieldwork published since have impressed us as so fundamentally important. The diagnosis (the familiarity problem) and the task (to fight familiarity, or make the familiar strange) became recurrent motifs in our teaching, our ethnographies and our critical frame for reviewing papers, books and research proposals for the next 40 years.

Our intellectual standpoints The reader needs to understand a little about our intellectual standpoints, if only to empower their search for our failures to defamiliarise our own work. Our framework for fighting familiarity is grounded in our shared undergraduate degrees in social anthropology, and a feature of our schooling in the period 1956–1966. That, as we explain briefly, gives us a very long timescape about relevant European scholarship. Both of us came through an education system in England that offered classics (Latin and Greek) to clever pupils. Because English state schools no longer do that, most social scientists under 65, especially the ethnographers we meet in the UK, like those from the USA, do not have that longue durée and do not know they do not have it. This is an example of ignorance, a theme we return to in Chapter 1. They have many other kinds of cultural capital and knowledge of things we know nothing about of course. Even educational researchers in Britain will not necessarily know that a ‘general’ knowledge of Latin and Greek ever existed for the majority of those who reached university, as it is not a feature of the research on the academic (grammar) schools of the 1945–1970 era. So in Colin Lacey’s (1970) famous school ethnography Hightown Grammar and Jackson and Marsden’s (1962) Education and the Working Class the opportunity for lower middle class, working class and poor pupils to learn Latin and Greek – the great upper class European cultural heritage – is entirely ignored. It was so familiar a part of the grammar school education in the 1950s and 1960s that it was barely mentioned in the research. It then vanished from state schooling and because it was too familiar then, its absence from the heads of the majority of social scientists is not remarkable today.We wish to emphasise its importance from our standpoint. PA was a proper classicist – he went to University to ‘read’ classics (before switching to anthropology). SD’s girls’ school offered only Latin and three of her year

xvi  Introduction

group had to fight to get an O level Greek course put on specially for them. As a result, our ‘world’ includes some acquaintance with the authors discussed in Woolf (2011) and Kaldellis (2013), two authors who have explored ethnographic writing in Rome and Byzantium – or rather in Roman and Byzantine literature.The world of Parthenios and Agathias (two authors no one reading this book is likely to have heard of) may seem very distant from that of Blanche Geer, Howard Becker and Harry Wolcott, but in fact to understand what is meant by strangeness and familiarity today those ancient authors as discussed by Woolf and Kaldellis are useful to think with.We draw on them occasionally in this book because they challenge what ethnography and ethnographic writing can be. Alongside a classical schooling, we were both originally social anthropologists. We were both trained as social anthropologists at Cambridge in the 1960s. In itself that was an excellent introduction to the discipline’s modes of thought, and to the importance of fieldwork. But Cambridge anthropology in those days – like most departments – paid relatively little heed to the niceties of ethnographic research methods. There was some intensely practical advice (such as how to conduct a survey of a village), but next to nothing that could be called methodological. So for us, ethnographic fieldwork was a ‘natural’ way to think about doing research, but it entailed rather little by way of methodological lessons. Like generations before us, we were largely self-taught. We see ourselves as scholars who blend structuralist theory with fieldwork focused on the traditional concerns of symbolic interactionist ethnography, with everything suffused by an intellectual feminism. Our own perspectives on the conduct of ethnographic research derive from multiple sources and inspirations. Our approach owes much to our own academic biographies, and also to our joint and individual resistances to some of those influences. We have the benefit of 50 years each, teaching researching and publishing in the social sciences. Anthropology gave us a lifelong commitment to ethnography. We have analysed historical documents and contemporary texts, issued questionnaires and conducted interviews, but always because someone else had designed the project, or no other method was possible for some reason. The enthusiasm many qualitative researchers have for interviewing leaves us cold: what people do seems so much more important than anything they can, or do, say. While retaining our anthropological orientations, our work migrated more towards educational (SD) and medical (PA) settings. The conduct of fieldwork drew us much more closely towards various strands in sociology, most notably the interactionist tradition that passes through the Second Chicago School, and the empirical work of Everett Hughes and his circle. Indeed, over the years we have spent time with and worked with key figures in that lineage: Anselm Strauss,Virginia Olesen, Adele Clarke, and Norman Denzin among them. PA’s PhD was an ethnography of a medical school, SD’s an ethnography of an elite girls’ private school, and because there was then, and is now, no tradition of educational anthropology in the UK (see Delamont, 2012c), we searched for sociological ethnographies of educational settings and found Becker, Geer, Hughes and Strauss (1961), Becker, Geer and Hughes (1968) and Olesen and Whittaker (1968). For 40 years, we have

Introduction  xvii

tried to use traditional ethnographic methods: those now described by Fine (2003) and Brown-Saracino, Thurk and Fine (2008) as ‘peopled’ ethnography: and sometimes used anthropological structuralism to interpret the data. We therefore have a number of overlapping strands to our ethnographic credentials, spanning disciplines and generations. Our years of experience have led us from a time when ‘methods’ were a minority interest, and fieldwork was just something you got on and did, to recent years when the methods of ethnography – and ‘qualitative research’ more widely – have become topics of intense and highly diverse attention. Consequently, our own orientations derive from those various sources, informed by our own fieldwork in a range of different settings.

The empirical examples One further piece of scene-setting is necessary: the empirical examples on which we draw to illustrate each stage of the research from foreshadowed problems to writing and publishing. Some of these examples are from the research of others, from publications such as Karen McCarthy Brown’s (1991) Mama Lola a study of a Haitian Voudou priestess in Brooklyn and Fine’s (1996) ethnography in restaurant kitchens. Most of our empirical examples are from our own research in seven settings: (1) an ethnography with audio recordings of haematologists (specialists in blood) in the USA and the UK and ethnographies of (2) an opera company (PA), (3) an academy for training young opera singers (PA), (4) classes in the Brazilian martial art capoeira, and (5) French kickboxing, Savate (SD) and (6) in the Argentinean dance tango (PA). Additionally, there is a series of craft activities: ceramics, glassblowing, life drawing, silversmithing, digital photography and woodworking, grouped here as the seventh project (Atkinson, 2021). All seven share a concern with bodies, performance and a pedagogy of improvement. Also, and fundamental to this book, they are all settings in which not only can bodily and performative acts be observed, but also there is an endless stream of oral commentary, of many types, about past, present and future bodily and performative acts. Narratives, and other speech performances such as direction, instruction, lectures and invocations of the mystical and invisible, are all central to the every life of these settings, so that the ethnographer routinely encounters them. Methodologically these seven projects allow us to focus on the relations between observational data and narrative data. We outline the research projects giving enough detail to make their use in subsequent chapters comprehensible. In reporting on these projects, we have used pseudonyms for places and people if that is how they appeared in previous publications, and real location and names if that is what has previously appeared. It would not have been possible to disguise the Welsh National Opera company but is possible to use pseudonyms for capoeira teachers and students who have not chosen to be named. Project One. PA conducted fieldwork in two teaching hospitals, one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. Working with haematologists, he focused on how physicians present and discuss their cases; how diagnoses are shared, debated and decided upon; how professional status confers differential

xviii  Introduction

rights for physicians to relate their clinical experience and enunciate their professional opinion (Atkinson, 1995). Project Two. The opera project, an ethnography of a UK opera company, Welsh National Opera, began in 1995 and was ‘completed’ in 2006 with the publication of a monograph (Atkinson, 2006a). It focused on the everyday working realities of such a company, not just the polished public performances. Project Three begun in 2007, was done jointly, with support from two colleagues, Richard Watermeyer and Rachel Hurdley, by PA (Atkinson, Delamont and Watermeyer, 2013; Atkinson, 2013a). It was a qualitative study of an advanced conservatoire for opera singers, founded by Denis O’Neil, to prepare future soloists in the bel canto tradition.This project involved observation of the public teaching, master classes conducted in front of an audience, and interviews with the young singers. Project Four: the capoeira research began in 2003 and is still ongoing. It is an ethnography of how African-Brazilian capoeira – often called the dance-fightgame – is learnt and taught in the UK. SD began the ethnography of capoeira classes from an interest in Brazil, rather than in martial arts. For six years, the project was conducted in a partnership with a capoeira player Neil Stephens who is a sociologist of science and technology (Stephens and Delamont, 2006a), and learnt capoeira seriously for five years (Stephens and Delamont, 2010). A monograph (Delamont, Stephens and Campos, 2017) has been published on this study. Project Five: the contrastive ethnography of Savate, begun in 2009, is less advanced, and the sociological understanding is embryonic. There are a couple of journal articles from this research, written with James Vincent Southwood, a Savate teacher (Southwood and Delamont, 2018a, 2018b) and George Jennings, a martial arts scholar (Jennings and Delamont, 2020). Project Six: It began in 2007 and is being done spasmodically by PA. It is an ethnography of Argentinean tango classes and performances in the UK, based on taking the former to experience the teachers’ aim of changing their students’ embodied performance of the dance. Project Seven: Since 2010, PA has been doing short ethnographies of craft activities (Atkinson, 2021) focused on close observation of skilled professionals at work, and intense individual tuition from the same experts. Those seven projects may seem to have little in common except for the method, but they share a number of common features, and a focus on the body and performativity. In fact there are several overlaps and shared features that allow us to draw selectively upon all seven to illustrate our arguments. For instance, two of these seven projects are focused on Latin American activities which began in urban underclass slums, as pastimes among ‘undesirable’ men. Although tango is a dance, and capoeira a martial art, both depend on embodied movements to music that are not normally part of British bodily repertoires. Both tango and capoeira share an exoticism and a glamour. Skilled male practitioners of both are performers, and comfortable in their bodies, in ways unusual in the UK. Denniston (2007) and Luker (2016) have discussed this for tango, Browning (1995) is a classic statement of the phenomenon for capoeira. In contrast, the two opera projects about ‘high’ culture (see Delamont

Introduction  xix

and Atkinson, 2019) seem to be quite detached from a team of haematologists in hospitals, or a lone craft-worker in a studio. While the ‘high culture’ world of the international opera house – in Rio, Buenos Aries, Berlin or Paris – where works composed by Wagner or Mozart are performed for knowledgeable, literate, ‘cultured’ audiences by highly trained experts may seem very different from that of a martial art grounded in the culture of African-Brazilian slaves or illiterate immigrant men in Argentina, in this book it is the similarities that we emphasise. Savate has no musical or dance element, but demands an embodied flexibility, and a high degree of bodily and emotional self-discipline (Jennings and Delamont, 2020). In addition to drawing on these research projects to explore ethnographic methods, these investigations allow us to stress the importance of a simultaneous focus on embodiment and performativity as observable, taught phenomena, and, as narratively rhetorically constructed phenomena. The focused craft ethnographies all involve intense thought about embodiment and performance in these activities. So, this book is not only about research methods, it also contributes to the debates around how research can and should be conducted on performance, on embodied activities, and equally importantly on the endless talk about performance and embodiment that is central to fieldwork both in the settings where we are currently engaged, and one where past ethnographies were conducted.

The structure of the book While the book can be read from here to the conclusion, its structure is designed to accompany an ethnographer as a project progresses, so that the chapter on writing is consulted when the researcher is planning the outputs for the investigation. The book starts with a chapter that sets out the intellectual framework of the argument. Chapter 2 then explains what good research questions look like. Chapter 3 covers access and the initial stages of the fieldwork. Chapter 4 covers the thinking that accompanies the early stages of an ethnography, so that the data do not pile up unexamined and unanalysed. The Chapter 5 is focused on the main data collection phase once the initial encounters are over. Chapter 6 is centred on data organisation and analysis. In the Chapter 7, the focus is on reading: not the reading done before the fieldwork, but how texts need to be rediscovered and analysed in the light of the fieldwork. The emphasis is on understanding the various genres of text, and reading for the work needed to challenge familiarity. Writing is central to Chapter 8, where it is demystified and explored as a way to defamiliarise social worlds and processes. Exits from the field are addressed in Chapter 9 and then our conclusions are briefly outlined in Chapter 10.

1 CORE THEMES

This chapter sets out the intellectual foundations of the book. We present our conception of ethnography, outline the key themes, present two important concepts that are not central to most accounts of ethnography and expand on our strategies. We focus specifically on ethnographic fieldwork and its implications, not ‘qualitative’ research. The latter term covers a wide variety of research strategies but usually means an interview study.

Ethnography By ‘ethnography’ we mean sociological, anthropological or cognate research that depends on fieldwork. That is, some degree of participant observation in a chosen research setting, often – but not exclusively – based on long-term engagement with the research hosts. It is, therefore, not based exclusively on interviews, however lengthy and intimate they may be. Fieldwork will often involve interviews and conversations, together with yet other sources of data. Ethnographic fieldwork is inevitably based on ‘mixed methods’, as they are fashionably called, insofar as ethnographers will draw on documents, conversations, interviews, visual and material materials, and indeed any significant aspects of the culture in question (cf Atkinson, 2014; Delamont, 2014, 2016a). But interviews, focus groups and similar approaches on their own do not in themselves constitute ‘ethnography’. Ethnography implies participation with and observation of social actors in their everyday lives. Ethnography can be done on-line or offline, and – like Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce and Taylor (2012) – we are confident that a well-conducted ethnography is based on the same principles in either sphere. We have not, ourselves, conducted on-line research and do not explicitly discuss it often in this book. In our intellectual framework, ethnographers are those investigators who actually get their hands and feet ‘dirty’.We are members of the cadre of researchers who are not in the office coding

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surveys and safely playing with numbers. Our ‘tribe’ leave their warm safe homes and offices and go ‘out’ into the ‘real’ world.We get wet, cold, and frightened.We are the researchers who know what it is like to be a pole dancer at midnight, an emergency room nurse at 4.00 a.m., or an elite swimmer in the pool at 6.00 a.m. because we too were there. We have been down those mean streets. We have been at the dance hall which has an airport metal detector at the door, and a sign that says ‘No drugs, no guns, no knives’. We know what it is like to be a jazz musician, an inner city school teacher, a medical student, a hairdresser, a madam running a brothel, or a mushroom hunter. We have frozen in the bleachers and boiled in the restaurant kitchen. We have, to use the cliché, seen life. In this passage ‘we’ are not defined by any specific academic discipline. The tribe of ethnographers contains academics from a range of disciplines and entirely rejects the common anthropological claim that their discipline ‘owns’ participant observation as its ‘unique’ method.

Key themes There are several key themes that run through this book, reappearing in different guises at various points. Here we introduce them in outline. They all bear on issues of methodology and critical reflection, in complementary ways. We are aiming, through all the stages of research, analysis, and writing, to use the concepts and strategies we propose to improve the research and also to help thinking about research methods in the same frame of mind. So we use our concepts and strategies to de-familiarise the discourse about methods and methodology. In recent years, social scientists have been increasingly vocal in their consideration of positionality. An understanding of one’s own social position(s) is vital in a sustained comprehension of all aspects of research. That is, of course, important in all research, in all disciplines, and across all the social science methods, but it is normally especially prominent in ethnographic and other qualitative research, where the researcher is so directly involved and engaged with the shaping of research, the collection and construction of data, and their interpretation and representation. One’s position(s) can have a direct bearing on many aspects of the research process, therefore. Position gives perspective. Perspective can guide what we choose to research, how we research it, and what we implicitly treat as significant. Our position can encompass what social relationships we are able to sustain with our hosts in the field, making some relations easier and others more problematic. Position implies a point of view and hence impinges on what is observable, what may be inferred and what can be learned from our fieldwork. Positionality does not reflect simply one’s personal, biographical circumstances. It also depends upon our academic loyalties, preferences, lineages and apprenticeship. Scholars do not approach research simply as bland, generic social scientists; they do so as a British sociologist, or an American cultural anthropologist, or a French cultural analyst (and so on). In turn such allegiances help to shape how we construct researchable topics. They inform our taken-for-granted ideas – such as the nature of social interaction and the bases of social order – that impinge directly on our ethnographic

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practice and our conceptual imaginations. In that sense, academic ‘positions’ make problematic the idea that social researchers should select ‘the right’ method for the given research question and research problem. Such a view feels very naïve: one’s disciplinary, theoretical and methodological assumptions – some of which may well be tacit – will largely determine what ‘counts’ as a suitable research idea in the first place. Would-be ethnographers, after all, are unlikely to come up with a research project or hypothesis that forces them to undertake a randomised control trial or a quasi-experiment. Equally, a social scientist who has become a symbolic interactionist (say) will operate with different assumptions from someone who works within a Marxist tradition. Positions imply standpoints, which in turn can inform the kind of study that is undertaken. The field of sociological and anthropological research is densely populated with different standpoints that in turn imply distinctive conceptual and methodological commitments.The gradations are many, but in terms of broad categories, they include feminist, lesbian, queer, critical race, fat, masculine … .studies. These in turn usually reflect the personal biography of the investigator in question: gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability, physical appearance, and so on. Add to these political and ideological allegiances and the multiplicity of positions becomes visible. The contemporary insistence on transparency and ‘reflexivity’ means that such things are treated as central to the research enterprise: they are not simply external influences that might or might not lead to ‘bias’ in research findings. Rather, they are intrinsic to the entire process, pervading the formulation of research, and the framing of research topics. In a way, they make possible the phenomena we can study. Now, it is possible to treat positionality in purely demographic terms. One can focus on age, sex and ethnicity. Beyond that one can invoke personal characteristics such as sexual orientation or gender politics. However, in the cause of combating over-familiarity, ready-made versions of positionality need to be scrutinised. They need to be made potentially problematic because they do not in themselves guarantee analytic accuracy, validity or authenticity. It is, we suggest, a matter of variable perspectives, not a question of validating any one. It is undeniable that a radical feminist perspective can challenge the taken-forgranted analytic perspectives that are implicit in a heteronormative, masculinist worldview. Such a contrast in styles of thought will throw cherished, often tacit, ideas into sharp relief. Reading literature from a gay/queer perspective will potentially challenge the implicit assumptions of straight field researchers. Again, the value of positionality lies in the juxtapositions of alternative, even competing, perspectives and what those juxtapositions do. Irrespective of one’s own identity and orientations, the ethnographic imagination is not fed by substituting one set of assumptions for another without adequate critical reflection. One cannot simply adopt ‘the right’ position and stick with it uncritically and without reflecting on its tacit assumptions. Such critical reflection and its consequences are often referred to as ‘reflexivity’, especially in the context of qualitative research. We prefer ‘reflection’, in the sense of reflective practice on the part of ethnographers, not least because we prefer to restrict reflexivity to yet more fundamental, far-reaching aspects of epistemology

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and methodology (see Whitaker and Atkinson, 2021a). The crucial point here is the extent to which ethnographic research is intellectually mobile, as well as interpersonally and spatially. To repeat ourselves, and to avoid any doubt: ‘positions’ are not ‘givens’, and they do not determine analytic understanding of any sort. They certainly do not, simply by virtue of individual orientations and intentions, guarantee better fieldwork and better analyses. Indeed, there seems to be a recurrent danger – associated with reflexivity – of self-congratulation (for being a particular kind of person or for embracing a particular standpoint). Furthermore, ‘positions’ are, as we have already made clear, multiple. One cannot simply compile a kind of check-list or census-form that guarantees one’s research credentials. We also need to note something else about academic authors’ autobiographical reflections. There is a fairly long tradition of academic ‘confessions’, in which authors reflect on and document the personal side of their research activities. In recent years, such autobiographical accounts have been joined by a vogue for ‘autoethnography’, in which the ethnographer’s self becomes the primary focus of reflection and writing. While confessions, autobiographies and autoethnographies can be designed to, or inadvertently make the research process more transparent, partly making visible the ethnographer’s position(s), they do need to be treated with a degree of caution. All ‘confessions’ and autobiographies are themselves crafted and presented from a point of view. Such texts present their authors in particular ways. They reflect culturally shared conventions for the self-presentation of narrators. So we must not run away with the idea that self-revelation in the interests of critical reflection automatically produces ‘true’ accounts in any simple way. Our general approach is also informed by yet another guiding idea, or set of ideas. That is, sustained attention to ignorance. In this context, ignorance is not simply an undefined absence. Ignorance studies – which are predominantly a preserve of philosophers rather than social scientists – involve the sustained attention to patterns and contours of knowing and not knowing: blind spots and unexamined assumptions are among them. From this point of view, ‘ignorance’ is not the opposite of knowledge. Rather, it is a recognition that the landscapes of knowing and remembering are not uniform. Knowledge, non-knowledge and memory are all differentially distributed. There are contours of knowledge, ignorance and indifference. Domains of belief and unbelief are also manifestations of kinds of ignorance. Academic fields promote knowledge self-evidently. But they also include tacit assumptions about what ‘counts’ as valid knowledge, suitable research questions, and appropriate ways to conduct research. As a consequence, they can relegate to the margins other topics that are not canonical. Ignorance can therefore be sustained by tacit features of collective, disciplinary culture. Tacit assumptions can thus create blind spots, leading to the equivalent of scientific ‘dark matters’. It is ‘there’ but unseen, and observers lack the means to make it visible within the frameworks of disciplinary knowledge. Consequently, our focus on over-familiarity bears directly on ignorance. Over-familiarity – in its many forms – can lead researchers to take too many things for granted, to overlook or to dismiss potentially rewarding research topics or approaches. It is possible to take for granted substantive features of the

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social world, methodological strategies, or the conceptual machinery of a discipline (or sub-disciplinary speciality). Obviously, nothing will guarantee that inappropriately neglected phenomena will receive the ‘right’ attention, but a self-conscious attempt to challenge the tacit assumptions, preferences and prejudices can fruitfully reconfigure the research landscape. Fighting familiarity will not, in and of itself, generate valuable new knowledge and understanding. It will, however, help to avoid the tired and unimaginative replication of existing, implicit assumptions, biases, and areas of neglect. A good example of a scholar with an imaginative eye is Scott. Her first project created a sociological approach to shyness (Scott, 2007) and most recently has argued for focusing the sociological gaze on absences, that is ‘nothing’ (Scott, 2019). Fighting familiarity and reconfiguring ignorance require us to use our sociological imagination in understanding our own activities and commitments as sociologists. This kind of level of critical reflection goes well beyond simply acknowledging – or even celebrating – who we are (gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation), but by deploying our own conceptual apparatus to our research practice. It permeates the entire research process, and that includes the textual practices through which we create our written accounts of social worlds. In paying explicit attention to our sociological and anthropological practice, nothing is of such fundamental significance as how we write and, importantly, how we read. The nature of our ethnographic exploration – our ‘findings’ – is not expressed in summary, propositional form. Rather, it is largely implicit in the organisation and rhetoric of our texts. The ethnographic monograph, being in many ways the main vehicle for our ethnographic work, reflects conventions of representation. Ethnographers write. Of course, all social scientists write, but writing is integral to the ethnographic imagination in a fundamental way (as it is for, say, historians and biographers). Collectively, we have been aware of ethnographic writing for decades. PA wrote about the conventions of classic ethnography as early as 1983, and others – such as Boon (1982) – also analysed the textual conventions of anthropology. A number of key texts set the scene for reflection on ethnographic writing (e.g. van Maanen, 2011).The field has in the meantime become textually varied to a far greater extent. Familiarity needs to be challenged at a textual level as well as a methodological one. Indeed, more accurately, textual self-awareness is a methodological issue.We do not advocate the wholesale adoption of ‘alternative’ or ‘experimental’ textual formats. That would be as uncritical an approach as any other. Equally, we shall not be advocating the return to traditionally realist texts exclusively.We canvass some of the modes of representation in the interests of careful, principled choices. Our collective appreciation of textual possibilities reflects the wider accounts in studying ‘the rhetoric of inquiry’. This is a classic example of how the social sciences can – and should – apply their methods of inquiry to their own research practices.This reflects the more fundamental meaning of reflexivity: not so much the self-absorption of confession and self-revelation, as the application of sociological imagination to the practice of sociology itself (Whitaker and Atkinson, 2021a).

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A sustained interest in rhetoric has also led us to a sideways interest in the classics. Classical studies have self-evidently furnished the intellectual antecedents for the study of rhetoric. In recent years, classical scholars have extended the scope of ethnographic reflection, with historical work on classical authors’ constructions of the ‘other’ of the ancient world (e.g. Kaldellis, 2013; Woolf, 2011). A careful reading of relevant classical texts reminds us of the narrative construction of collective identities and the demarcation of shared identities.This is one of the important lessons that are to be learned from all historiography: texts are written from distinctive perspectives, and there is no neutral medium through which to express it. Consequently, all of our methodological commentary is informed by the necessity to be critically reflective about how ethnographic texts are written, and how they can be read. Reading, as we shall explore, is important for ethnographers, not just for content – but also for form. In other words, when we address ‘the literature’, in the form of published ethnographies – we need to pay explicit attention to how they are constructed and how they reconstruct a given social world.These themes appear throughout the book in the two ways we have outlined.

Two powerful concepts In the next section of the chapter, we expand upon two powerful concepts that are closely related to the fight against familiarity: the gradient of unfamiliarity and the epistemology of ignorance. One is a useful metaphor, the other a small area of relevant research: both speak to the fight against familiarity.

The gradient of unfamiliarity In a book called Tales of the Barbarians,Woolf (2011) explores how the Romans used a variety of ethnographic methods, and a rhetorical style that is equivalent to contemporary ethnographic writing, to make sense of the barbarian peoples on their frontiers. He defines his use of ethnography as follows: Ethnographic knowledge is that knowledge we gain of one another in conversation, specifically in dialogues conducted across a gradient of unfamiliarity. (Woolf, 2011: 17) He separates ethnography in contemporary social science usage from the way classical scholars in the past 50 years have used the term (p. 13). His work on Roman authors is paralleled by Kaldellis’s (2012) study of ‘ethnography as a literary practice in Byzantium’ (p. vii) and ‘ethnographies that we find embedded mostly in historical texts’ (p. 1) which were ‘self-conscious literary artefacts’ (p. 2) created to sell texts. These ethnographic sections were ‘a crucial component of a multi-faceted authorial performance’ (p. 2). Ethnography could ‘serve to reinforce (or create) the distinction between Rome and barbarians but it could also question that distinction’ (p. 11). We explore some of the conversations we have had across our gradient of unfamiliarity, focusing upon the necessity of seeking out the less familiar as Becker

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(1971) and Geer (1964) advocated, to do good ethnographic research. Woolf uses the phrase to explore what Roman authors had discovered, or heard, about barbarians. We have used the phrase in two different ways. Our position is that when an anthropologist goes to an unfamiliar culture, they are hoping to get to understand it across that gradient. In contrast, when a sociologist is in their own culture, they need to create that gradient by their own hard work. Our second concept is the epistemology of ignorance illustrated with a couple of egregious examples.

The epistemology of ignorance The second big idea is the epistemology, and social construction, of ignorance and the production and reproduction of non-knowledge.We are the first ethnographers to relate this area of social thought to the practicalities of doing good fieldwork. Fighting familiarity, we argue in this book, shares an epistemological base with the analysis of ignorance and non-knowledge. There is an International Handbook of Ignorance (Gross and McGoey, 2015a, 2015b) and an anthropological collection on ignorance (Dilley and Kirsch, 2015). Key thinkers in Science and Technology Studies (STS) including Haraway (1991) and Harding (2006) have highlighted it. We start our introduction to these concepts here with the philosopher Carla Fehr: The epistemology of ignorance is the study of the creation and persistence of ignorance, or in other words, the study of how we do not know things and how ignorance can be systematically generated and maintained. (Fehr, 2008: 103) Fehr used two empirical examples to illustrate the concept: the American government’s response to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina; and Lawrence (Larry) Summers’s 2005 speech about women and STEM. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. The majority of the black population of New Orleans had not been evacuated by the authorities or been able to leave by their own volition. Instead, along with prisoners, hospital patients, the elderly and disabled in residential homes: they drowned in the streets and their beds; they were shot; they sat in squalor on bridges, overpasses, and in the Superdome for days. They died in flooded hospitals (Fink, 2013), prisons and care homes. Afterwards, the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said ‘we are seeing people we didn’t know existed’. FEMA, or at least the top people in FEMA, did not ‘know’ the African-American underclass of New Orleans had no transport (no cars, vans, or trucks) and nowhere to go.They could not leave New Orleans unassisted any more than the prisoners, patients and elderly people could. Fehr uses this as an important example of the epistemology of ignorance because FEMA should have known about New Orleans. It was their job to know and the necessary data were already in the public domain. The most recent census data showed clearly that New Orleans had the highest percentage of households without access to a car, van

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or truck, of any metropolitan area in the USA and gave an accurate figure for the size of the population. So how could FEMA ‘not know’ what was on the public record of the US government? The case of Lawrence (Larry) Summers is about individual ignorance, not an organisational one but symptomatic of a wider problem. Summers is an economist and in his own sphere distinguished. In 2005 he was unseated as President of Harvard but his status and career were undamaged. He has since been a candidate to head the Federal Reserve. In a lecture at a ‘closed’ conference on women in STEM (Science,Technology, Engineering & Maths) at undergraduate, postgraduate, postdoctoral and career levels in the USA, he spoke about a topic on which he was, Fehr argues, simultaneously profoundly self-confident while absolutely ignorant. Although there is a great deal of excellent research on the topic, Summers had never investigated any relevant issues and clearly had not read any of the published findings. However, he felt free to say, without even apologising for his lack of knowledge, or recognising the existence of experts, that he could only explain the absence 1 . 2. 3. 4.

Of white men in professional basketball (in the USA?) Of Roman Catholics in investment banking (in the USA?) Of Jews in farming (in the USA?) Of women in STEM education and careers (in the USA?)

by invoking genetics. In fact, though Fehr does not comment on this, a cursory knowledge of countries other than the USA, where people genetically similar to contemporary Americans live, would make that assumption of a genetic cause look weak. There are white Serbians and Croatians playing basketball in Europe. There are Catholic investment bankers in Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and the Catholic parts of Germany (odd that Summers had apparently never heard of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic). Many Jews farm in Israel. Any of his claims about a biological genetic determinism could have raised a storm of controversy in the USA from African-Americans, Catholics or Jews. However, only the ‘women & STEM’ part got public attention. Summers was simply wrong. A letter from 80 scholars published in Science pointed out the large body of evidence on the cultural barriers to progress in STEM in the USA.They stated that: there is no evidence of a genetic cause, and a great deal pointing to cultural factors. Fehr points out that Summers is not alone in the upper echelons of the academic and management of American higher education in believing there is a genetic explanation for the absence of American women in STEM careers. Her paper is about the ‘double’ epistemology of ignorance embodied in Summers’s lecture which is, she argues, widespread in American higher education. Fehr asks rhetorically: how could the President of Harvard be so ignorant? There is 100 years of serious research published in reputable books and journals which makes it highly unlikely that the relative lack of women among the full professors of Physics in the USA is due to a genetic difference between men and women but for Summers that research simply did not exist. Fehr’s paper asks why that research ‘keeps vanishing’ from the corpus of accepted knowledge,

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is not known by those in power in American higher education, and, when it is used in debates is labelled as not-research but as ‘emotional’, ‘hysterical’, ‘biased’ ‘political’ argument or rhetoric, rather than accepted as evidence-based. (Summers’s only source of ‘evidence’ was his observations of his four-year-old daughters: not exactly the type of data he would use in his own discipline). Most of those – male and female – running STEM – giving out postgraduate studentships, supervising PhDs, selecting postdoctoral fellows, making appointments, allocating grants, organising laboratory space, awarding prizes – genuinely believe they are egalitarian in their views on gender and that they have accurate knowledge about women and STEM. But Fehr argues they do not have accurate knowledge, they have ignorance. Fehr’s two examples seem gross and a very long way from any ordinary ethnography done by an independent scholar. If such a researcher is ignorant, there will not be consequences on the scale of the carnage in New Orleans or the future of American STEM. However, in ethnographic research, failure to use strategies to make the familiar strange results in non-knowledge and ignorance, of the types that Fehr exposes in her two examples of events in the first decade of twenty-first century America. FEMA could not imagine a city where thousands of people had no access to a vehicle. Summers could not make his daughters’ behaviour anthropologically strange, or see beyond his own ‘taken for granted’ view of American STEM. Our argument is that ethnographers have to do ‘better’ than that. Leaving Fehr’s essay we move on to a second set of authors on ignorance and non-knowledge: not conventional ethnographers, but empirical researchers. The STS work on ignorance and non-knowledge draws attention to scientific work which does not get done, and so cannot be observed by ethnographers doing fieldwork on science and scientists. The body of research in STS about the sociology of ignorance, or the social production of ignorance includes Haraway (1991) and Gross (2010). Kleinman and Suryanarayanan (2013) write of ‘the social production of ignorance’, and how the systematic production of ignorance depends on ‘undone science’ (Hess, 2007), ‘knowledge gaps’ (Frickel and Vincent, 2007), ‘strategic ignorance’ (McGoey, 2012) and ‘scientific cultures of non-knowledge’ (Böschen, Kastenhoffer, Rust, Soentgen and Wehling, 2010). Klein and Suryanarayanan focus on the following: research that does not get done; how the epistemic form prevents certain questions from being asked so that the knowledge and the non-knowledge can be misleading and there can be ‘false knowledge’; and the lack of attention to inconclusive results. Our argument throughout this book is that all these features can be found in ethnography that does not break free of over-familiarity. Sandra Harding (2006) is the only scholar common to the articles by Fehr and Klein and Suryanarayanan. She argues that calls by Marx and Freud to pay attention to systematic interested ignorance were driven out of American philosophy and STS along with all the works of Marx and Freud in the 1950s, and for a whole generation of American scholars they are still ‘out of bounds’. That is, the work of Marx and Freud is, in America, ‘unthinkable’ and outside any possible discourse. She argues that Sokal and Bricmont (1997) framed their position in the ‘science wars’ around that ‘old demarcation’. Harding’s main example of a systematic interested

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ignorance is that of scientists about STS. Harding’s work is paralleled by that of Donna Haraway. Haraway’s (1991) discussions of ‘situated knowledges’ and her focus on their polar opposite ‘situated ignorances’ are also relevant here.Throughout the book, we will return to these concepts.

Strategies for better ethnography It is easy to take up a position of moral superiority when teaching or reviewing the work of others, and focus, scornfully, on criticising them for failing to articulate serious strategies to fight familiarity. It can be harder, much harder, to be that tough on oneself, especially when choosing fieldsites and topics for papers, and examples of such choices are reflected upon throughout this book. Essentially Geer and Becker argued that ethnographers needed to work hard to make the familiar strange but did not offer any specific strategies to do so. Our original set of seven well-rehearsed explicit strategies for fighting familiarity were set out in Delamont (1992, 2014, 2016a) but here we have avoided providing a superficial checklist in favour of some general principles. We have always tried to read in a purposive way: so if the research is on hospitals in the UK, we have read about formal healthcare and the sick role in other cultures, or going on a pilgrimage, or searching out accounts of hospital work conducted in the laundries or from the perspective of the mortuary attendants or the administrators chasing bad debts, or learning about unorthodox ‘cures’ such as spirit possession. Such reading needs to be done when developing the foreshadowed problems (see Delamont, Atkinson and Pugsley, 2010), during the fieldwork, and at the analysis and writing stages. We have not used visual methods ourselves. PA was active in several projects that collected visual data and explored using hypermedia to disseminate research (Dicks, Mason, Coffey and Atkinson, 2005). Our discussions of using them are drawn from our supervisions and collegial experience such as the work of Mannay (2010). She outlined the strategies proposed and adopted by ethnographers to challenge familiarity since 1971 and made a clear case for the use of visual research methods. We now expand on our strategies with some specific examples of projects where they were successfully used.

Revisiting insightful ethnographies from the past There are two things to clarify here – what is an insightful ethnography and when was ‘the past’? The social sciences, other than anthropology, move fast and quickly forget monographs and their authors. While anthropologists still teach and read and cite classics such as Tepoztlán (Redfield, 1930) or Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Evans-Pritchard, 1937), other disciplines quickly drop older works and their authors. Often this is because ‘things have changed’: medical schools in the USA no longer have cohorts of students that are ninety-five per cent men; highschool students in public schools in the USA do not learn Latin, and few golf clubs explicitly ban Jewish members. Asking American high-school students whether

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they prefer Pat Boone or Elvis Presley (Coleman, 1963) or whether their parents are worried about their use of MySpace (boyd, 2014) gives a superficial sense of ‘irrelevance’ to research from sixty or twenty or even five years ago. But it is precisely because things which were taken for granted ‘then’ now stand out as unusual that a current researcher can use such studies to generate good foreshadowed problems, or analyse their data to show the current ‘taken-for-granted’ state of affairs. In this context, any ethnography can be insightful, and ‘the past’ is any era before today’s researchers were graduate students.

Studying the empirical topic in other cultures In practice, this means looking at anthropological studies, or sociological ones, written by scholars about a culture different than the researcher’s. So if the research is about prisons, seeking out an anthropologist who has studied prison officers in Japan, or convicts in Mexico, meets that criterion. Comparative projects can also be useful. Sharon Traweek’s (1988) contrastive ethnography of high energy physics research laboratories in Japan and the USA demonstrates the benefits of a contrastive approach, even for a reader with no interest at all in physicists. When Peshkin (1986) was doing a study of an evangelical Christian school in the USA, his Jewish background helped him ‘see’ the taken-for-granted school regime in a way no evangelical Christian could have done. (The Christians wanted to convert him away from Judaism). Similarly, Bullivant (1978), a non-Jewish Australian, studied an orthodox, Hassidic, Boys School which was strange to him, although ‘normal’ for the boys, parents and staff.

Focusing on ‘different’ actors In many social worlds, there are categories of actor who are taken-for-granted or overlooked, such as school secretaries or cooks in a school, or laundry workers or office workers in a hospital. Caitlin Wylie (2015) studied the technicians and volunteers who prepare dinosaur skeletons for research and for display in a museum. As she correctly argues, the central roles technicians play in science, and the tasks done by volunteers in museum laboratories, have received little attention in science and technology studies, and focusing upon them makes the everyday practices and priorities of the scientists unfamiliar. A natural history museum and its scientific mission look different from the laboratory where bones are prepared for ‘expert’ study.

Studying the topic in an unfamiliar setting One might study health-related activities, such as healing or childbirth or dying, that do not take place in a clinic, hospital or hospice; or ‘work’ that is unpaid such as childcare by grandparents; or those who run steam railways or marshal cross-country runs or indeed volunteer to prepare dinosaur bones in a museum laboratory. Healing in a church service not in a hospital, or childbirth with traditional birth attendants,

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or dying at ‘home’, can provide insights into the status passage that are not available in the normal, official settings. Separating the processes of work from the issue of wages – as Oakley (1974a, 1974b) famously did for housework – can challenge the familiarity of work and of volunteering. One exemplary ethnographer who used this strategy is Geer (1972) herself who after research on medical students and liberal arts undergraduates edited a set of studies of learning trades such as hairdressing. Singleton followed a study of a Japanese school (1967) with a collection of essays on learning in a range of settings from pottery to theatre in Japan (1998). In our own discussion of ethnographies of education (Delamont and Atkinson, 1995), we drew on such disparate examples of teaching and learning outside schools and higher education as trainee mediums in Brazilian Umbanda (Leacock and Leacock, 1972), capoeira academies in Salvador de Bahia (Lewis, 1992), a madam training novice prostitutes to maximise their earnings (Heyl, 1979), sword swallowing and fire eating (Mannix, 1951) and an Albanian Bektaski Tekke (monastery) in Michigan (Trix, 1993). These are entirely parallel to the more famous Lave and Wenger (1991) case studies in their apparently ‘exotic’ focus, and the insights they provide for mainstream schooling. As Delamont (2005) argued, imaginative ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of ‘failing’ boys in schools could be sought by enquiries into settings and social processes that produce engaged, actively learning boys. When the success of teaching in martial arts (which attract male learners) is properly understood, then lessons could be drawn for transferring that pedagogical model to schools and universities.

Being self-consciously alert for sexism or racism or ageism or heteronormativity in the setting The good ethnographer focuses on these ‘isms’ in the everyday lives and discourses of the actors in the setting, and in the literature about such settings. Dorothy Smith (1999: 199–203) writes of the current consequences of ‘the residue sedimented by an exclusively masculine history’ where ‘men took the maleness of their university and discursive colleagues for granted’ and their everyday working lives were lived in a world where women were never colleagues’. No one reading Goffman’s autobiographical interview with Jef Verhoeven Goffman, (1992; Goffman 1992) would learn that there were any women in Chicago University when he was there in the 1950s and 1960s, or any women with any sociological ideas, research topics or methodological insights, in sociology or anthropology at all. Similarly, when PA and SD go back to classic papers such as Becker’s (1967) ‘Whose side are we on?’ we find ourselves interrogating it anew. Becker’s is a classic statement about perspective in social research. Working in the tradition of American studies of deviance, Becker is clearly committed to a variety of de-familiarisation. He urges his readers to reverse the normal polarity of credibility. The perspective of the ‘underdog’ is to be granted legitimacy, rather than that of the agents of social control. It is, of course, an ethical injunction that parallels the analytic reversal of labelling theory that sees deviance as the product of social control rather than the reverse. Most sociologists could endorse

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that alignment with the marginal and disadvantaged. But there is a further question: Who are the ‘we’ who are Becker’s assumed readership? The ‘we’ in Becker’s paper – the implied reader – is so clearly not only white, upper middle class, straight (or in the closet), but also male and American (see Atkinson, Coffey and Delamont, 2003 Chapter 3). Good ethnographers need to read that paper while thinking: ‘Who are ‘we’?’ ‘Am I ‘we’?’ ‘Can I be ‘we’?’. Hammersley (2012), Atkinson (2012) and Delamont (2012b) all address some of the ways in which non-Americans can never be ‘we’ in symbolic interactionism in any simple way. Equally, contemporary interactionism, with its emphasis on narratives of selfhood and reflective self-fashioning, implicitly assumes a distinctive kind of social actor – a speaking subject par excellence.

Adopting standpoints This implies taking, as a self-conscious research strategy, a standpoint that is different from one’s own. Social class, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and religion can all work well. This is hard work, and probably can only be done for short, intensive bursts, but it can pay off. Morelli (2017) reports studying the culture of the Matses, an indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon region, taking a child-centred approach. This was not just a study focused on the children, it was deliberately using the standpoint of the children to focus on the transition from a hunter-gather, forest-based society towards one whose future is based on settlements next to the rivers, and is increasingly engaged in trade, exchanges and new forms of moral interaction with the Chotac, or non-indigenous society (139). This is an exercise in imaginative and intellectual shifting. It calls for the realisation of an intellectual’s capacity to transcend her or his own circumstances and adopt perspectives that are different, taking the role of the other on a temporary but purposeful basis.

Middle-range concepts A middle-range concept is one that is intermediate between the actual data and the macro-concepts of social science, such as anomie, habitus, false consciousness, or the Protestant ethic. They are useful for generalising, explaining, and relating data to other studies. Two such concepts are Tournaments of Value and Awareness Contexts. (We also invoke the idea of Boundary Objects in a similar vein in Chapter 5.) Appadurai (1986a, 1986b) coined the term Tournaments of Value and defined it in terms of: ‘Complex periodic events that are removed in some cultivable welldefined way from the routine of everyday economic life’ (1986b: 21). For Appadurai participation in a tournament of value is: ‘Both a privilege for those in power and an instrument of status contest between them’ (21). A tournament of value in any field has its own currency ‘set apart through well-understood cultured diacritics’. Its core business is to dispense ‘the central token of value in the society in question’. Success brings ‘status, rank, fame’ or ‘reputation’ for the contestants, and the tournaments occur in ‘special times and places’.This is an idea that is good to think with and can be applied to events and value systems observed in many field sites. Moeran (1993, 2010) used it to

14  Core themes

analyse the most salient features of international book fairs.When Delamont, Stephens and Campos (2017) needed a middle-range concept to explain why capoeira teachers invest so much of their time and effort on their biannual festivals (batizados) tournaments of value was a useful middle-range idea. A similar middle-range concept, originally from a study of death and dying, is that of Awareness Contexts. Glaser and Strauss (1965) developed this idea when conducting research on death and dying in hospital in the United States. It captures the information-state as between the various parties – patient, family, medical and nursing staff – concerning the diagnosis of terminal illness and the prognosis of impending death. At any given time, there were four possibilities: Open Awareness, where all the parties were aware and acknowledged that fact; Closed Awareness, where neither the patient nor the family were aware; Pretence Awareness, where others maintain a front in order to keep the prognosis from the patient; Suspicion Awareness, where the patient suspects impending death but maintains the appearance of closed awareness. The nature of the awareness context has consequences for the patterns of interaction between patients and a variety of other actors. The study that is framed by this analytic concept is a central one on the study of death and dying. But it is clear that, suitably amended, the ideas are applicable in a variety of contexts. It should be noted that the idea of an awareness context is a formal, structural property of social situations. It is not a personal, individualised matter, though the management of awareness calls for strategic interaction by individual social actors as well as team-work for its maintenance. The idea can extend to many situations in which information-management is an issue. In an unpublished study of army veterans, Barry Meek conducted life-history interviews with young infantry soldiers who had been on active service. It transpires that they feel the need to manage their disclosures to different people. They do not want wives, girlfriends or parents to know the true level of the danger they faced, or the nature and causes of any injuries they sustained. Likewise, they are careful to manage their accounts of violent action in the field, and the injuries or deaths sustained by comrades. Stories had to be monitored in order to sustain closed, suspicion or pretence contexts. Awareness contexts can be ‘found’ in any settings where actors feel the need to manage the distribution and flow of information. The management of ‘coming out’ (as gay, vegan, conservative, trans, protestant…) can lead to awareness contexts as social networks get partitioned, and dissemination is facilitated or blocked.Working with a middle-range concept like awareness contexts helps the ethnographer to gain insight into the analytic possibilities of her own data, and to move – intellectually speaking – across a range of different social settings.

Permanent recordings Parman (1998) in an important re-evaluation of the work of Louise and George Spindler (pioneer American educational ethnographers) argues that they advocated making permanent recordings of classroom interactions as a strategy to make them anthropologically ‘strange’. Until relatively recently the technology was expensive and

Core themes  15

cumbersome and there were massive analytic problems. The potential for collecting, for analysing, and for disseminating previously recorded sound and vision, has changed in the twenty-first century because of technological developments. The ethical problems that arise when disseminating them are considerable but can be overcome. The size, weight and cost of recording technologies are all much reduced than they were in the 1960s, and the capacity of devices has increased enormously, as has the fidelity of the recordings themselves. The work of Vannini (2012) on ferries or of Bates (2017) on walking in the city (cf Hall and Smith, 2017) are good examples of the potential of contemporary recording technologies. Not all researchers who make permanent recordings use their potential to make the familiar strange, but Mannay (2010) makes a good case for using them to that end. She proposes that permanent recordings and creativity with other methods can be part of self-conscious de-familiarisation. Working with mothers and daughters on a large housing estate in Wales, Mannay used collage production, mapping and photo-elicitation. Each of these data collection methods produced insights for Mannay into the ways in which women with daughters understood their localities that she is clear she would not have got from interviews. Clearly we are not dealing here with recordings of action and talk for the purposes of conversation analysis or discourse analysis, as those research strategies are beyond the scope of this book. But it is worth remembering that one of the original inspirations for conversation analysis lay in the fact that recorded talk could be inspected repeatedly, with the result that ‘seen/heard but unnoticed’ phenomena could be retrieved from otherwise fleeting events. In the same vein, records such as photographs can be inspected repeatedly so as to identify physical arrangements, material settings, configurations of actors, and patterns of activity. They thus inform scrutiny that can facilitate analytic distance and de-familiarisation.

Phenomenology and ethnomethodology Phenomenology and ethnomethodology are by no means synonymous, although ethnomethodology’s intellectual roots include social phenomenology. For our purposes in this book, however, they share one important feature. That is, they both start from the premise that analysts need to make the familiar, the taken-for-granted, ‘strange’. Here strangeness has a specific reference, and it is that common thread that we introduce here. We do not dwell on the philosophical roots of phenomenology in the works of Husserl and others. Rather, we take as a starting-point the contribution of Alfred Schutz, who drew phenomenological ideas from philosophy into a sociological perspective, working in the German tradition that included Max Weber’s approach to the understanding of meaningful social action. The contribution we want to indicate here is this: Schutz and the phenomenologists stressed the need to make the everyday world ‘strange’. They identified what they called the ‘natural attitude’, as the sort of mundane level of awareness that probably characterises most of us for most of the time. It is an attitude in which it is neither necessary nor especially

16  Core themes

desirable to espouse thoroughgoing doubt about the world around us. In the natural attitude, we take for granted the phenomena that are familiar to us. It is an intensely practical sensibility. It is the antithesis of radical scepticism. We assume that the world is as it appears and that our familiar patterns of activity will serve us. We rely on what is called ‘recipe’ knowledge: we follow tried-and-tested routines that have served us in the past and – we assume – will continue to do so. The intellectual effort of the phenomenologist is to try to suspend or ‘bracket’ such common sense assumptions and routine activities. In doing so, we ask ourselves how things are as they seem. Instead of taking for granted the categories of common sense, we address them as if they were unfamiliar, in order to examine how they are produced, constituted and used in everyday life, or in sociological analysis. It was a perspective that became popularised and widely disseminated by Berger and Luckmann (1967), in their celebrated analysis of the social construction of reality. We do not pause here to elaborate on the many versions and misinterpretations of social constructivism, but see Holstein and Miller (1993). A suspension of everyday thinking leads analysts to examine the categories of everyday thought and action.That includes the recognition that what passes for reality rests on socially shared conventions.The latter include typifications. Rather than encountering people, things and events afresh, we rely on our assumptions of ‘typical’ kinds of actors and equally typical activities.This is the basis of a great deal of practical, mundane reasoning (Pollner, 1987). Ethnomethodology’s inspirations included parallel perspectives. It too begins with ‘common sense’ and subjects it to critical analysis. Harold Garfinkel’s pioneering work was simultaneously an analysis of practical reasoning and a critique of much sociological reasoning (Garfinkel, 1967). He argued that sociologists characteristically use their own common sense assumptions about the social world in order to arrive at interpretations of it. That is, they use common sense as an analytic resource.This can lead to a circular form of argument, in which unexamined assumptions are used to claim sociological insights. Garfinkel and the ethnomethodologists therefore proposed treating common sense as a topic of inquiry. (The topic/resource distinction is an important one, although in practice it is not as clear-cut as ethnomethodological critiques of conventional social research might seem to imply.) Garfinkel demonstrated his approach with, amongst other things, his (in)famous ‘breaching’ activities. They were contrivances that disrupted the taken-for-granted realities and interrupted the natural attitude of social actors. Breaching shared social conventions can throw into relief their very conventionality. Ethnomethodology, like phenomenology, enjoins social scientists to treat the everyday world as ‘anthropologically strange’. One needs to confront one’s own culture and its deeply entrenched assumptions just as if one were encountering them in the context of an entirely alien social world. In terms of practical research strategy, one cannot, of course, engage in radical doubt all of the time. Equally, one cannot really suspend all of one’s cherished or taken-for-granted cultural categories simultaneously. But the spirit of phenomenology and ethnomethodology certainly encourages us to treat over-familiar categories and habits of thought with great caution. Moreover, both perspectives encourage

Core themes  17

analysts to pay very close attention to the ordinary phenomena of everyday life. Social scientists are always in danger of ‘losing the phenomenon’: that is, seeming to analyse and write about something, while actually using it is a vehicle to write about something else. (That something else often turns out to be the standard tropes of race, class, gender, power, etc.) In the process, what social actors actually do and what their reasoning actually is get glossed over. So the recurrent task for the phenomenologist/ethnomethodologist is to return to the phenomena and examine them in their own right. Now the general inspiration of phenomenology and ethnomethodology can be incorporated into broader strategies and perspectives for social research. One cannot ‘use’ them as discrete analytic strategies. But we can learn from them. As we have indicated, they encourage us not to take for granted what we think we know about the world around us (physical and cultural). Together with other perspectives, they encourage us to ask just how things are accomplished, enacted, used or described. They urge us to de-familiarise phenomena and to open them to close, fresh scrutiny.

Conclusion In the course of this chapter, we have outlined a number of intellectual strategies for thinking about and conducting ethnographic research. They are not, of course, intended to generate a rigid check-list or protocol. Equally, there are no formulae for how to think about and re-think any given research project. They are heuristic devices, intended to help one to think in different ways about the research process. Our overall approach is predicated on the view that ethnographic research is not simply a toolbox of research techniques. Rather, it is based on a distinctive personal and intellectual orientation.The capacity to observe and participate in a social world is fundamental, and that in turn depends on an imagination of estrangement. It rests on being a stranger and seeing like a stranger. Such an intellectual commitment does not come ‘naturally’. We have to work at it. There are no short cuts. There are no recipes. But we have begun to outline some approaches to thinking ethnographically, and in the rest of this book, we shall amplify on these intellectual and imaginative strategies. They are probably of greatest value at different stages of the ethnography, but like all aspects of ethnography, we should be thinking about these and related issues throughout the project – from initial research ideas through to the analysis and writing. Throughout the book, we shall be recommending ways of making things fresh. One of the greatest enemies of ethnographic thought is a certain complacency and sense of comfort. It is far too easy to settle comfortably into a fieldwork setting and routine, in which one ‘discovers’ what we thought all along, recycling ideas and reproducing tired versions of social reality. We always need to strive to do more: to go beyond merely illustrating existing ideas (however fashionable the theorists who invented them). Much of that is about have productive ideas, and in the next chapter, we reflect on asking good research questions.

2 GOOD QUESTIONS AND GOOD DESIGNS

This chapter will explain the differences between the hypotheses of positivist research and the foreshadowed problems of interactionist research. The latter are normal in ethnographic projects but are less well and less widely understood than hypotheses. The starting point is Geer’s (1964) advice to use the thinking about the foreshadowed problems to plan the de-familiarising processes. Geer had noted that the formulation of good research questions for qualitative projects was often a mysterious process for novices to understand, using the memorable phrase ‘the concept smacks of magic’ (p. 384). This chapter will demystify how to ask good research questions to inform ethnographic research, so the concept will no longer smack of magic. Specific examples from ethnographic projects in several specialist fields, such as health, work, culture and education will be used to demonstrate how to pose good questions. We make no apology for starting the chapter back in 1964 when Geer published her reflections on formulating research questions and the initial period of fieldwork. There are not many book chapters published in 1964 that still feature on reading lists, in the citations of current articles, or in methods books like this one, particularly if the author is a woman and is dead. One exception is Geer’s ‘First days in the field’. It is not only cited by older scholars like us (Delamont, 2016a; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019). It has been frequently reprinted and still repays careful reading. It is usually mentioned as an early contribution to the literature on initial encounters. It is about those, and they are an important topic in books on fieldwork. However, in one way the work is mistitled. It could, and perhaps should, have been titled ‘Formulating ethnographic research questions’, and that is our focus here. Geer’s essay (1964) was an early example of a piece of autobiographical, or ‘confessional’ writing about a research project, when such texts were relatively rare (Atkinson, 1992). She was reflecting on the preliminary fieldwork she did alone for a subsequent team investigation of the culture shared by undergraduate liberal

Good questions and good designs  19

arts students at Kansas State University. That project, published as Making the Grade (Becker, Geer and Hughes, 1968) was a contrastive study to their earlier ethnography of medical students at Kansas Boys in White authored by Becker, Geer, Hughes and Strauss (1961). In that era, the late 1950s, American medical students were nearly all men. ‘First days in the field’ was the earliest publication from the liberal arts investigation and is a reflection on Geer’s time on the campus in the summer before the academic year began. It contains the earliest coherent formulation of what Geer, and later Becker (1971), articulated as the ‘familiarity problem’. Central to the autobiographical strand of the chapter is Geer’s drawing of a slightly rueful contrast between her own undergraduate self, with a taste ‘for milkshakes and convertibles’ that she, writing now as a professor, found almost incomprehensible, and her ethnographic ‘take’ on the lives of students in the early 1960s. The paper also includes an important insight for ethnographers: the senior faculty and administration were absolutely certain that the research into undergraduates would bore Geer and her colleagues rigid. It is not unusual for people in a setting to think that observation of their everyday lives will be unbelievably dull, and Geer’s determined refutation of that stereotype is still fresh. Here we focus on the ways in which Geer discusses formulating research questions, or, to use the terminology of ethnography, the foreshadowed problems and working hypotheses. It is in that context that Geer raised the familiarity problem and stressed that solving it must begin with the working hypotheses and the initial encounters. She argued that the ‘concept of working hypotheses is not difficult’ (p. 384) but: ‘field workers often have trouble explaining it to others, and sometimes to themselves. The concept is clear as a generality, but its mechanics, the doing of it, smacks of magic’.’ Geer used the example of a hospital ethnography to lament that ‘untrained observers … ..can spend a day in a hospital and come back with one page of notes and no hypotheses’ (emphasis ours) and if questioned say ‘everyone knows what hospitals are like’ (p384). The crucial point for this chapter is that Geer is assuming that the ethnographer should come out of the field with not only dense and ‘bulky’ fieldnotes but also with hypotheses. The notes are the core concern of the next chapter, while this one is centred on the research questions. Before we explore what good ethnographic research questions are, we briefly point out how Geer’s own paper is ethnocentrically American, in ways which limited her own preparations for Becker et al. (1968).When Geer says that her junior colleagues find hospitals too familiar, she had not forced herself, or her readers, to think about ‘those for whom American hospitals are strange. Atkinson’s (1987) amusing paper about his initial encounters with the world leading American hospital where he did the research for Atkinson (1995) is an account of culture-shock in a medical setting. In a ‘confession’ that parallels Geer’s account, Atkinson describes how he found much of the taken-for-granted procedures he had to go through to get his entry passes and credentials strange, even though he had done fieldwork in a British hospital and read widely in the American sociology of health and illness literature. It takes only a few moments thought to realise that of course everybody does not know what American hospitals are like, as Fadiman’s (1999) study of Hmong immigrants meeting American medicine shows. Writing for American

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sociologists, as Geer was, the familiarity of American hospitals to American research assistants and doctoral students it was a plausible account of what they thought and said, as evidence of the familiarity problem. It is not surprising to us that Geer did not qualify her remarks by including the word ‘American’. In sociology, anthropology and educated research, American scholars are notoriously ethnocentric in two ways.They routinely failed to state that what they are discussing is American not universal, and they fail to cite published work, however relevant, from other countries. These are of course connected. Had Geer employed a Hmong research assistant they would not have found American hospitals too familiar to describe. The ethnocentric focus of the American ethnographic literature has been a recurrent theme in our work, but it has to be one thread in this book too. James Lee Burke wrote a thriller in which his hero, who has been troubled by ghosts of Confederate soldiers from the American Civil war era throughout the story, sees, through ‘the roiling smoke’ the ghosts of the ‘weary’ yet still gallant soldiers for whom ‘the contest is never quite over’, because ‘the field [is] never quite ours’ (Burke, 1994: 344). We often feel, when engaging in debates centred in the USA, reviewing American literatures, or writing for American readers, rather like Burke’s hero in that novel.We write often with a strong sense that the contest is not over, the field is not ours and roiling smoke obscures important fundamental issues. Writing from the UK, we often share the sense of (un)reality that disturbs Burke’s hero when he, apparently, sees the Confederate dead: the battles about ethnography in the USA are not the same as ours, never have been, and never will be. American ethnographers may need to fight familiarity more urgently than others because everybody else reads American authors but they routinely ignore everyone else. Over 30 years ago, Jacob (1987) published an overview of educational ethnography, which was in fact only about American educational ethnography.We (Atkinson, Delamont and Hammersley, 1988) published a riposte, in which we argued that the original paper should have been carefully labelled ‘in the USA’, or, far better, should have been researched more adequately to cover at least all the Anglophone literature. The same problem characterises the American anthropology of education (Delamont, 2012a). Jack Katz (2019) reflected on his teaching of ethnographic field methods at UCLA over a 30-year period and he only cites four non-American or Canadian authors (Canadian because he does cite Everett Hughes): de Certeau, Gluckman, Timmermans and Van Velsen. When we pointed this out to him, he was genuinely surprised: he had not noticed that he was teaching ethnography in an ethnocentric straitjacket of his own devising. Avoiding such pitfalls is the central theme of the whole book, and here our purpose is to explore the ‘magical’ concept of developing working hypotheses to escape several straitjackets.

Not empty but open Critics and opponents of ethnographic research and researchers who find it mystifying or scary often accuse practitioners of having either an empty mind, or taking deep prejudices (usually ‘prejudices’ are beliefs opposed to what the critic thinks

Good questions and good designs  21

are’God’s truth’, or ‘facts’, or ‘natural’ or ‘scientific’ or ‘biological’ or ‘unthinkable’ into the field so the data gathering is biased. Such accusations led to the Becker (1967, 1970) discussion of ‘whose side are we on?’. It would be absurd to argue that no observer had ever gone into the field holding deeply unexamined, entrenched, prejudices and/or with a mind from which good and relevant social science ideas were largely absent, but no human mind is ever ‘empty’. It can lack social science knowledge on a topic, or be full of unexamined ‘common sense’ assumptions, or both, but those are not a good basis for research. Nor are unexamined deeply entrenched prejudices, and good foreshadowed problems will also help bring unexamined assumptions to the surface where the data will we hope confront them. We begin by focusing on the foreshadowed problems or working hypotheses with which PAA began his project on Haematology and also discuss SD’s foreshadowed problems with which she started her Savate study.

Foreshadowed problems It is a truism that ethnographers do not set out to test hypotheses, or do so very rarely.They do not necessarily embark on field research in order to test a pre-existing ‘theory’. What passes for theory in sociology or anthropology is rarely the sort of theory that allows for that sort of testing anyway: most theory consists of some very general statements about human conduct and social organisation. In other words, field research tends to be far more flexible and exploratory than is implied by most ‘standard’ accounts of research design in the social and natural sciences.That does not mean, however, that field research is undertaken haphazardly, without ideas and with no sense of purpose. On the contrary, we need to think before we go out into ‘the field’. That in turn implies the formulation of what are called foreshadowed problems. Thinking about the sort of issues one will address in the fieldwork and how to think analytically about that process inform the preparations for fieldwork as well as the conduct of the research itself. Reading is important for fieldwork, especially in the formulation of foreshadowed problems. In previous books, we have discussed reading at this stage, but in this book, reading is covered in Chapter 7, to emphasise its importance in the post-fieldwork phases. Obviously, anthropologists and sociologists do not, as a rule, head off willynilly into randomly chosen field sites. They have good reason to pursue a given phenomenon, to work with a particular distinctive group of actors, to work out a focused analysis, and so on. For instance, when PA planned his field research with haematologists in the UK and the USA, he had academic motives for doing so. On the basis of his doctoral ethnography, he had formed an interest in some of the processes whereby medical diagnoses are discussed, how ‘cases’ are formulated and how final adjudications are arrived at (if at all) by the medical practitioners. Consequently, a consulting speciality like clinical pathology or haematology seemed to provide a particularly apt setting. The final choice was dictated by the agreement of two haematology services to grant research access. In those days one ‘negotiated access’ directly with the gatekeepers to the site rather than go through

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contemporary procedures for ethics committees’ and review boards’ approval before any contact with the actors in the setting. In other words, there was a purpose and a strategic choice of research setting. That strategic thinking intersected with practical circumstances, and the precise location for the fieldwork depended on the help of sponsors and gatekeepers. The fact that PA had a fairly clear idea of who he wanted to work with and why did not mean that he could simply list the topics that his fieldwork would address, or foretell the ‘findings’ that the ethnography would generate. Hence, foreshadowed problems have to take a particular form. Typically they are those deceptively simple How? and Who? Questions. So we ‘know’ that physicians conduct ward ‘rounds’ to assess patients’ progress, we know (or PA knew) that they conduct various kinds of professional discussions or conferences about their ‘cases’. So the foreshadowed problems were of the following order: How do physicians assemble their ‘case’ presentations and narratives? How do they come to decide on diagnoses? Who – if anyone – has the last word? How do they display their professional authority? The foreshadowed problems probably were not articulated quite as explicitly as that, and as there was no grant proposal, such foreshadowed problems or topics are not expressed like that on paper. But they informed the desire to do the fieldwork. The point here is that the fieldwork was informed by something more than mere curiosity. PA did not just want to pry into the backstage regions of hospital medicine. The research desire was informed by a broadly constructivist or phenomenological perspective on medical knowledge and an interactionist interest in the work of professionals. It was also thoroughly informed by a sense of medicine as a performative activity. But note that such broad sociological interests translate themselves, for research purposes, into these elementary questions: Who does and says what? How do they do it? What are the effects and consequences? How are issues of expertise, authority and seniority enacted? How do clinicians construct and present narratives and accounts of the patients they treat? What discursively is a ‘case’? We do not wish to imply that all ethnographic projects start from such precise premises. But the specific study seems to encapsulate some more general principles that then feed into our wider interests on ‘strangeness’. It derives from those deceptively simple questions of who, how, what and so on. Let us consider studying a setting with which we have some familiarity. If we are considering fieldwork ‘at home’ that probably means most social settings. At some level, we know roughly what to expect in schools and colleges, clinics and hospitals, agencies of social control, or bureaucracies. We might even have a member’s knowledge, by virtue of current or past training or employment. And as textbooks like this one often stress, we are at pains to discuss the potential difficulty of seeing past what we take for granted in familiar settings, especially those we are already a member of. But these simple questions (which do not imply simple answers) can help us to get an analytic handle on what we observe in the field. Rather, they can help to bring us up short. We may find an event or an activity superficially familiar. We may feel that we ‘know’ what is going on. But when we ask ourselves how it is made to happen by participants,

Good questions and good designs  23

then we have to distance ourselves, and suspend our assumptions. It forces us to ask ourselves what competences, skills or resources actors bring to bear. In other words, this is akin to the ethnomethodological development of the phenomenological perspective. But it is not necessary to get lost in the more ‘difficult’ philosophy of phenomenology to appreciate the basic point. Our foreshadowed problems give us, as Herbert Blumer (1954) put it, ‘directions along which to look’. He referred to ‘sensitizing concepts’. These are general ideas that derive from our basic disciplinary backgrounds. So, an orientation derived from, say, interactionism and the sociology of the Second Chicago School (Fine, 1995) would lead us to have the following sort of questions in mind: what shared problems do participants confront? How do they work out collective responses to those issues? How do they negotiate a shared social world? What resources do they have? And so on. Equally, if one’s disciplinary interests lead one towards a more discursive orientation, then one might ask: how do these actors construct their performances and their narratives? How do they recount and reconstruct their own and others’ biographies? How do they justify their actions? How do they enact accusations and blame? These are not mutually exclusive orientations and there are many more. In many settings, foreshadowed problems that render things ‘strange’ may reflect some of the ‘big picture’ strategies for challenging familiarity. We may well want to foreground gender, for instance. It is easy to overlook gender differences when they are normalised, especially if women are a ‘muted group’, whose perceptions and models of social reality are not recognised and endorsed by dominant males. The theory of muted groups, which is itself a version of DuBois’s earlier ‘double consciousness’ about race, was developed by the anthropologists Shirley and Edwin Ardener in the 1970s and is developed by Delamont (1989). The lens of gender is not just a matter of paying attention to women, or even of reproducing women’s ‘voices’. It means challenging one’s taken-for-granted perceptions of reality. As Stanley and Wise (1983) pointed out in their path-breaking book, adopting a thoroughly feminist perspective implies a kind of phenomenological estrangement. Of course, the same argument applies to a wide range of social categories. Such a foreshadowed perspective implies being open to the possibility of multiple, intersecting and even opposing versions of reality. It also implies, therefore, ethnographic research that can traverse field sites in tracing such contrasting social constructions of reality. It means being mentally prepared to explore contradictions, captures and fissures. It means maintaining the possibility of multiple spheres of meaning, and multiple world-views. Foreshadowed problems that open up the possibility of challenging familiarity obviously cannot be specified in detail and in the abstract: the developmental and flexible nature of fieldwork precludes that. They have to be specific to a field and developed in relation to it. But contemporary interests in sociology, anthropology, cultural geography and cognate fields provide food for thought. Sensory ethnography, analyses of spaces and places, or studies of embodiment can help to furnish sensitising concepts. For instance, many field studies – paradoxically perhaps – seem poorly conceived in terms of their ‘contexts’. In fact, context is a really poor term here, as

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it implies background features. But ‘background’ is precisely what is wrong here. Backgrounds are too easily overlooked and taken as read. The aim here is to bring such phenomena to the foreground. So foreshadowed issues might well include: the spatial arrangements of a given setting, and hence actors’ movements in and across them; the physical and symbolic boundaries that help to define such arrangements and such mobility; the sensory environment, such as smells, noise, surfaces and touch. In a similar vein, we need to be prepared to examine how physical objects are part of the setting and the actions that actors undertake. That does not mean trying to maintain a complete inventory of all the physical and sensory aspects of a given social world. But it does mean being prepared to find them significant rather than taking them for granted. The same may be said of ‘things’. When PA began his fieldwork among the haematologists, he had not fully thought about such elementary things as the microscope and its potential uses, although the fieldwork itself soon forced him to think about it, as he found himself looking at blood traces with haematologists and medical students. In general, foreshadowed problems could well imply close attention to things: What material things do actors use? What physical artefacts do they produce? How do they ‘do things with things’ (as well as with words)? None of these remarks should be taken to mean that the novice researcher should arm herself with some sort of checklist of research questions and items to be ticked off as the fieldwork gets going. Rather, one offers them by way of the sort of things that might be considered in the first stages of fieldwork – and then, of course, as that fieldwork progresses. It is important to reiterate that these are all mental and practical strategies to help us foreground phenomena that we might otherwise overlook or take for granted. Stopping and asking ourselves the who, why, how questions is one way of generating the sort of ‘alienation effect’ that can help us to combat overfamiliarity, or lazy ethnographic fieldwork. Generally it is more useful to have foreshadowed problems which are focused on finding out specific things that are probably important to the actors in the setting, rather than abstract questions such as ‘what effect does globalisation have on X?’ It may be that the eventual conclusions will highlight globalisation but an abstract concept is unlikely to be the subject of conversations in the coffee bar or at the day nursery. The less experienced the scholar is, the more strongly we would advise them to try to have concrete, ‘everyday life focused’ research questions rather than higher wider ones. A set of foreshadowed problems and research questions that actually help focus the fieldwork, and can be changed fast if they prove to be unhelpful, normally produce more useful data. Examples from Fine (1996), Bosse (2015) and Paxson (2013) meet these criteria. Gary Alan Fine (1996: ix–x) sets out the main research questions for his study of vocational education in catering simply: ‘I decided to learn how students learn and are taught to cook professionally.’ He got access to a pair of ‘state-run technical–vocational institutions’. Here Fine learnt the skills, alongside the students, that are required of entry-level cooks in commercial restaurants. He also saw how young people from working-class families learnt about the food that is served to clients of a higher social class. He used his ethnographic data as the basis for the sociological

Good questions and good designs  25

thinking. He ‘developed a theory of the development of occupational aesthetics’ (p. x). This is a classic pair of foreshadowed problems about teaching and learning, typical of an ethnographic project where the research questions lead to a theoretical idea when the data are analysed. Fine moved on to do an ethnography of ‘real’ restaurant kitchens of the type in which the students could hope to be employed. He got access to four restaurants and spent a month observing and eating in each. He says ‘I was never a cook’ (p. x) but he helped by performing minor chores such as peeling potatoes. Because he ate in all four places he gained ‘about ten pounds’ in each kitchen, and used the four-week gaps between each of the observations not only to analyse the data but also to take off the excess weight. Again he had foreshadowed problems that were empirically focused: (1) What did these young men and women do when actually employed by an industrial organisation (p. x)? (2) How organisational, economic and environmental constraints affect choices and behaviour of workers in their daily routine (p. 4) or more briefly ‘how life worlds are coloured by constraints’ (p. 4). His third question came from the idea of occupational aesthetics: (3) How are the aesthetic standards of food production ‘negotiated in practice’ (p. 4).These are concrete questions that enable the researcher to get started on the investigation. A parallel example of foreshadowed problems set out at an empirical level is apparent in the work of Bosse (2015). She is primarily an ethnomusicologist who studied amateur ballroom dancers in small town Illinois. She began from the idea that a ‘change in artistic practice’ can be a solution to a social problem facing an individual. Her main research question was (1) ‘What social work did these individuals accomplish by choosing to dance?’ (p. 4). Underlying that foreshadowed problem were three ‘smaller’ questions, based on the fact that very few amateur ballroom dancers had any history of dancing, or confidence that they could learn to dance: (2) ‘Why did they choose to dance at all?’; (3) Why did they choose ballroom?’; (4) She was also interested in the relationship between their learnt embodied performativity and their emotional reactions to dance (p. 4). Heather Paxson (2013) began her ethnography of artisan cheese makers in the USA because she loves cheese.When a friend brought her an artisan cheese as a present, she thought of three good research question ‘who made it?’ ‘how did they make it?’ and ‘why did they make it?’ (p ix). She decided to study both the manual effort involved and the narratives the cheese makers create to sell their product (p x). One academic level up from those three questions she wanted to investigate the culinary and moral values of the artisan cheesemakers. Not all ethnographers reproduce their foreshadowed problems at this level when they report their results in monographs. Three ethnographies that report interesting projects start with questions or problems that we judge to be more abstract than any inexperienced researcher should use. Of course, these scholars may have had more prosaic and practical questions on their original application for access and ethical approval that are not in the published book. Tom Boellstorff (2008) suggests that he did his ethnography in the virtual world of Second Life between 2004 and 2007 when it was very new and sparsely ‘populated’: ‘to provide an ethnographic portrait of Second Life’

26  Good questions and good designs

‘to demonstrate the potential of ethnography for studying virtual worlds’ and even more abstractly ‘to contribute to a better understanding of virtual worlds in all their constantly transforming complexity’ (p. 24).These are good social science questions but in our judgement not close enough to everyday life to guide data collection. Hilary Pilkington (2016) studied ordinary members of the English Defence League (EDL), a far-right political movement in England. Her project was one of 44 case studies linked in a programme of investigations being done across the EU. Her overall framework was social movement studies but her ethnography started from the perspective of studying the everyday engagement of individual grassroots activists, not the organisation or its leaders. So her research question was to discover what are the ‘meanings attached by individuals to their activism’ (p. 9).That is a generalised research question, which would not in itself have led her to the fieldwork she actually did.To achieve answers to that ‘big’ question, she did her study in streets and pubs asking concrete questions. Among her observations were 20 demonstrations, including one where she was kettled by the police without water or access to a lavatory from 12.30 p.m. to 10 p.m. on a very hot day with the EDL activists. Kathy Davis (2015) also sets out her research agenda at a theoretical or methodological level, saying she was interested in deploying the ideas of carnal sociology and of globalisation and mobile methods using tango as her topic. Carnal sociology involves using one’s own body so the research is done from the body, rather than from outside it. These are big ideas rather than specific research questions of the sort we would advise. The book reveals that she carried out comparative studies and collected rich data. She used that comparison: she actually did fieldwork in Amsterdam and Buenos Aries: so she was ‘making a culture that is initially strange (that of Buenos Aries) familiar and a culture that is initially familiar (Amsterdam’s) strange.’ (p. 22). This description is an excellent summary of our basic proposal for good ethnography, but her reported research questions are very abstract. Clear research questions generally help produce good fieldwork. They need to be questions that motivate the investigator: she has to want to know what the answers are. Other scholars may not share the same interests, and that is fine as long as the investigator seeks answers to them. Generally it is a good idea to be able to defend the questions if challenged. Research questions can be criticised or envied. Fine (1996: xi) says his critics expressed ‘cordial professional jealousy’: that is, being in gourmet kitchens sounded like a ‘selfish’ project. But as Fine discovered, working as a chef involves long hours, and getting hot, sweaty and dirty. Paxson’s (2013: 21) research questions for her ethnography of artisan cheese makers were criticised by one of her graduate students as essentially frivolous because he believed cheese for minority tastes ‘must surely be made by elite people’. He called it ‘froufrou cheese’ disparagingly. In the student’s eyes, studying elite activities or high culture was not a good use of Paxson’s time and effort. Bosse expected peer critique of her topic and research questions parallel to Paxson’s. She writes that ballroom dance is associated with white Americans from middle and upper middle class occupations, and these class segments are not usually studied by ethnomusicologists. She expected that turning

Good questions and good designs  27

her ethnographic gaze on that group ‘will likely discomfort ethnographers of music and dance as well as ballroom dancers’ (p. 15). Boellstorff (2008) routinely had his research questions criticised by people who told him that ‘Second Life is too capitalist’, or is ‘just’ a form of escapism (p. 20). Clearly, we do not subscribe to such negative views. Studying something is not an endorsement, and studying ‘capitalist’ organisations is no bar to good research. Indeed, given its global pervasiveness, it would be all but impossible to avoid such research. Likewise ‘escape’ attempts provide valuable insights into processes of personal identity and transformation. Selfevidently, in the contemporary world, online communities and communication are equally significant domains for social research. Phillip Vannini began his ethnography of the ferries that form the basic transport among the islands off the coast of   Vancouver as a result first of moving there to live. In 2004 a student handed in a poor essay on ‘ferry culture’, and Vannini felt it had been a waste of a great topic. Later he did a small project on the ferries himself and then planned a full study which took three years and resulted in a significant monograph (Vannini, 2012, pp. 23–24). David (2017) did research on a group of elite white women in New Orleans: Women of the Storm who mobilised to rebuild the city after Hurricane Katrina hit the city in 2005. He says that ‘I didn’t set out to study privileged Southern women. The world of elites was not really one of my interests’ (xi). But a series of events led to the women of the storm becoming his focus. In September 2005, he was trying to interview disaster survivors in shelters in Baton Rouge, a city that had taken in 200,000 evacuees. The ethics and politics of that research bothered him, but he became interested in ‘the emergence of disaster-related groups’ (xiii). He was in a graduate programme in Colorado and he set out in January 2006 to study one of the self-help groups. Discovering ‘Women of the Storm’ (WOS) in the local paper, and drawn by its all women membership and its ‘location’ in an elite neighbourhood (which had not flooded), he changed his research questions. Instead of collecting narratives about the hurricane from poor displaced ‘survivors’, he decided that if he could gain access to the elite women who were campaigning to attract serious financial resources from Congress in Washington, then he would have a project that was not exploitative of underclass respondents. He got an invitation to an early WOS committee meeting and says: ‘I didn’t know it then, but this small group of women leaders would arguably become among the most powerful and influential in Louisiana’s history, contributing in countless ways to the rebirth of New Orleans’ (xv). So David was led to ‘study up’ – something anthropologists and other social scientists often fail to do (Nader, 1972).

Implementing the research questions Here we have focused on one project where the reality of the foreshadowed problems is explored. It is easy to take up a position of moral superiority when teaching and reviewing the work of others such as criticising them for failing to articulate serious strategies to fight familiarity. It can be harder, much harder, to be that tough

28  Good questions and good designs

on oneself, especially when setting up foreshadowed problems and research questions, and one example of such a choice is reflected upon here. We give an account of SD’s Savate research which was motivated by an unusual decision and led to a problematic study. It could be considered as a cautionary tale about poor foreshadowed problems and an absence of a research design. In this account, the real names of the teachers appear as they are co-authors of publications. No one to our knowledge has proposed in the large literature on ethnographic methods that in the middle of one study the researcher should start a second project, indeed open a second battlefront, primarily to fight familiarity in the original site. SD did that and it proved to be too problematic, mostly because of poorly formulated research questions. This section explores what happened when SD decided to do just that. Rather than rehearse the foreshadowed problems of a new project as a good example, this is the story of what began as a strategy to defamiliarise the ethnographer in one site by a contrastive period of fieldwork in an ancilliary site. It illustrates a way of increasing the gradient of unfamiliarity, and of seeking for areas of ignorance: finding the researcher’s own non-knowledge. This section explores and reflects on how an ethnographer set out to follow a core precept of Becker (1971) and Geer (1964) but discovered that aiming to achieve the goal of making the familiar strange, observing in a contrastive fieldwork setting exposed a new set of pitfalls around ethics, confidentiality and pseudonyms. As we write this, in 2020, SD is doing ethnographic research on two martial arts. Ten years ago, she began to study Savate, a French version of kick boxing. It is big in France and Belgium, but quite rare in the UK: the nearest classes she could observe were 80 miles away in greater London. To date, she has only managed to watch 46 lessons and nine full days of contests. Fighting familiarity became an acute problem for SD when, in 2009, she realised she had been studying how capoeira, the Brazilian dance and martial art was being learnt and taught in the UK for six years, and classes had become too familiar. The teacher she observed most frequently Mestre Claudio Campos knew her level of knowledge and said to her one evening, when he had told each pair of students to perform a sequence in front of the whole class, that she would be their judge. He said loudly ‘Judge this competition: watch each pair and tell me who is best’. He added, for the students’ benefit: ‘Doutora’ [her Capoeira nickname] knows when the esquiva (escape) is correct and has style’. SD did ‘know’, well enough to pick out the ‘best’ couple there that night doing that sequence, but as an ethnographer she realised she was too familiar with routine classes. She had her own capoeira nickname, a sure sign in UK capoeira that a person ‘belongs’ to the group.That night it was clear that the teacher thought SD could usefully discriminate between correct and incorrect escapes. It was either time to leave the field (Shaffir, Stebbins and Turowetz, 1980: pp. 257–310) or find some new strategies to de-familiarise capoeira classes in the UK. Unwilling to leave the field SD resolved that she needed to study something else to force herself to make capoeira ‘strange’ again.That is, rather than rely on any of the strategies set out in Chapter 1, she decided it would be more sociologically productive to begin a second ethnographic project: to observe a different martial art being taught and learnt in the UK.

Good questions and good designs  29

The second fieldsite was chosen by a form of ‘purposive’ or theoretical sampling advocated by Glaser and Strauss (1967) parallel to their choices of contrasting cancer wards and different psychiatric institutions. Capoeira is, in the UK, seen as ‘cool’ and exotic, associated with the struggle of African-Brazilian slaves for liberation, music of African origin, cult films, and even its own historic superhuman Besouro, a man who could escape his persecutors by turning himself into a winged beetle and flying away. The capoeira fighter hero of the game Tekken 3 – Eddy Gordo – was also ‘cool’ for young men. As a contrast, SD chose a martial art that was definitely not cool or exotic, Savate. She chose Savate, because she knew nothing about it except for one TV programme she had seen. It was French and not Brazilian and had not featured in television advertisements, video games such as Tekken 3,TV series such as Stargate SG1 or cult martial art films like Only the Strong: it was neither ‘cool’ nor ‘exotic’ nor associated with a liberation struggle. Indeed nothing French was ‘cool’ in 2009, unlike the 1950s. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s France, or aspects of French culture such as its films, jazz and Left Bank Café society, were ‘cool’, in the twenty-first century that is not so. Bakewell’s (2016) book on the leading intellectuals in 1950s Paris, when Juliette Greco and Simone de Beauvoir danced with Merleau Ponty and drank apricot cocktails, captures that era, as SD knew of it as a child and a teenager. The image of a French martial art was a good contrast with capoeira. SD quickly discovered that unlike capoeira, which can be found in every university city in the UK, and in many other towns as well, Savate was concentrated geographically. A potential student of Savate will not be near a class unless they live in the South East of England. That was also a practical contrast with capoeira, which is widely taught all over the UK. SD started to observe Savate because she was becoming too familiar with capoeira on which she had been doing fieldwork on for seven years. The idea led to double shifts of fieldwork, as described here. September can be lovely in London. On two successive sunny evenings, warm enough for people in shirt sleeves to be sitting outside restaurants eating their pizzas and paellas, a fat woman in her sixties emerges from an underground station and walks through crowds of people: commuters on their way home, cheerful people enjoying the city and tourists with maps and guidebooks. She follows a small stream of men and women heading for, on the first evening (Thursday), a commercial gym built into the arches under a railway line, on the other (Friday), a dance studio in a converted Victorian public bath house. In each case her destination is a martial arts class: not to participate but to do fieldwork. Most of the fieldwork on both capoeira and Savate takes place in routine classes.The Savate teacher watched most often, James Southwood, generally has 8–20 people, two thirds men. The class begins with stretching and warming up and then consists of learning and drilling kicks and punches alone in lines and in short sequences

30  Good questions and good designs

practiced in pairs. Savate assaut, the kind SD studies, is based on landing kicks and punches on the limbs and torso of an opponent as light touches, not as blows. Points are scored for landing the punches or kicks on target areas of the opponents’ bodies and in competition aggressive fighters are disqualified. The aim is to be stylish and elegant, move fluidly and quickly and not to hurt the opponent. It is done in leotards: all-in-one lycra suits that cling to the body, which are not what most British men would ever wear for sport or exercise (Jennings and Delamont, 2020). UK Savate has five characteristics which make it ‘work’ as a contrast to capoeira but two characteristics which make it a ‘difficult’ fieldsite in its own right. Savate ‘worked’ to fight familiarity precisely because it is not capoeira. The language is French not Brazilian Portuguese, there is no music (capoeira is always done to instrumental music and singing), and none of the moves is done upside down (capoeira uses many headstands, handstands and acrobatic moves as displays and escapes). So what SD watched was different. There is also no emphasis on Savate having any historical, philosophical, political, racial or religious dimensions such as an ideology of liberation struggles (capoeira was part of the culture of AfricanBrazilian slaves and their struggle for freedom) or being religious (some capoeira groups learn about its relations with Candomblé, the African-Brazilian spirit possession religion). Capoeira teachers vary in their emphasis on those ‘intellectual’ aspects of the art, but equivalent concerns are entirely absent from Savate. So every time SD watched a Savate class or competition or grading event she saw things that she could contrast with capoeira classes, or festivals or belt ceremonies (capoeira is not competitive, and the promotions to higher belts are celebratory events rather than tests). Some things about the comparison worked to help SD fight familiarity such as the structure of ordinary classes; key features of routine instruction; contrastive rhetoric from teachers; students’ emulation of the teacher’s body; tacit knowledge and skills; and the economic insecurity of the instructors.The last feature became highly visible when the Covid-19 lockdown began in March 2020 and all the face-to-face classes ‘vanished’ to be replaced by on-line ones. The ways in which routine classes are structured, a core interest in the capoeira research, are similar to that in Savate, and seeing the two is useful. In all the areas above, the most useful contrastive function is that watching one teacher helps SD frame questions to put to the other. That is, when SD saw James Southwood do something, she not only asked him about it but also asked Claudio Campos about his strategies. Both instructors employ contrastive rhetoric – a term we elaborate on in Chapter 5. Claudio regularly (like many diasporic capoeira teachers) contrasts capoeira in classes in the UK, which is ‘safe’ and ‘knowable’ with capoeira in the streets of Brazilian cities. Brazilian street capoeira, people are warned, is ‘unknowable’, and can be dangerous: the players may be fiercer and play a more devious game. In Savate, James contrasts kicks and punches which score points and impress judges in competitions, with those that are, essentially ‘wasted’ because they miss, are deflected, or touch non-scoring areas of the opponent’s body. Claudio’s talk is necessary partly because many UK capoeira players plan trips to Brazil, and the ‘here’ versus ‘there’ is precautionary. James’s contrast is essentially preparation for

Good questions and good designs  31

fights: learning how to win is part of how he motivates all students. So his contrast is between a tireur (a Savate fighter) who can fight and win if he or she wants to and one who has no idea how to use the skills they are supposed to be acquiring in contests. In both martial arts, serious students desire and aim to emulate the relevant features of their teacher’s body. That is obviously true for the men, but is also true for women in a more general sense, when James and Claudio demonstrate a move, or a sequence, or a fight or game, their fighting bodies are an object of emulation. The importance of tacit skills and knowledge is apparent in both martial arts. In capoeira, using deception and raising good energy are not explicitly taught, and students need to learn them by observation, experience and peer-to-peer interaction. Learning to recognise good ‘style’ is a third tacit competence, and that is also true of Savate. James does not believe that either ‘style’ or ringcraft can be explicitly taught, just as Claudio says that deception (malicia), energy and capoeira style have to be learnt rather than being explicitly taught. Comparing how that is done is a benefit of having two different martial arts to study. In both, the teachers are self-employed and have precarious finances. Halls have to be paid for, and teachers have to eat. If students do not come and pay for the classes, the teachers cannot pay their rent.The effects of this on recruitment and teaching strategies are manifest. Those contrasts worked to make capoeira more ‘unfamiliar’ and generated new research questions about capoeira. However, there were two problems associated with the second fieldsite; one ethical and the other intellectual. There are only four or five active Savate clubs in England, and none in the rest of the UK. Savate is a tiny community with only about eight key instructors and is riven with arguments about both the proper goals and the strategies for achieving them. It proved very difficult to write about Savate in the UK without revealing the ‘real’ identities of the students’ past and current key teachers other than James Southwood. Secondly, Savate classes are too interesting in their own right, and SD found it impossible to keep Savate in the mental ‘box’ of constant comparisons and contrasts and began to write about it as a separate project. In retrospect, SD should have used other strategies to make capoeira more strange or set out to examine Savate with much better foreshadowed problems explicitly worked out.

Research ‘questions’ and research ‘design’ When PA set out to study haematologists the research design was based on the research questions: to study how decisions were made, he needed to see and hear what happened in the key meetings. The data collection, using fieldnotes and audio recordings, was determined by the nature of the setting. When Paxson (2013) decided to study artisanal cheese makers, she needed to observe them on their farms with their animals and in their cheese making facilities, and as part of that, she worked on farms and made cheese herself. She also collected the life histories of the cheese makers by interviewing them and went to the places where such cheeses are sold with ‘her’ informants. In both these projects, the research questions drove the

32  Good questions and good designs

decisions about data collection and the fieldwork locations, and thus the research design.The biggest contrast between positivist quantitative and interpretivist ethnographic research design is that in the former, the investigator should not change the design once the main project begins. A pilot, or several pilots should be done, and then the design should be adhered to. This is because the epistemology privileges the understanding of the researcher over that of the ‘subjects’ in the setting. The fundamental basis of the interpretivist, ethnographic project is a belief that as the researcher discovers what the world views or ‘realities’ of the people in the setting are, the research design needs to change to focus on those. The Savate research suffered from SD having her capoeira world view at the front of her mind, rather than focusing on what matters in UK Savate. That martial art deserves an ethnographer whose main interest is Savate. When PA designed his opera ethnography, he had not explicitly planned to look at breathing as a feature of the preparation of singers for their performances. However, there was enough data on how important breathing is to professional singers to prepare him to design the master class project to include planning to pay close attention to the ways in which the experienced coaches and opera stars demonstrated, talked about, and focused on how to bring the breath up from deep in the torso and ‘float’ tshe notes on each breath. A focus on posture, gesture, metaphors and an ethnophysiology of breathing all featured in the data.What had not been planned in the design, but became a focus was the course founder, Denis O’Neill’s passion for teaching all the students how to preserve their voices to enable a sustained career and enculturing them in the bel canto tradition. Not surprisingly the guest stars he invited to do master classes shared the beliefs, that the opera voice needs to be carefully managed to enable a long career, and the enthusiasm for the bel canto tradition.

Conclusions The two themes in this chapter are inextricably linked. Designing ethnographic research to be productive – and it is too demanding, time-consuming and intrusive on other people’s lives to do unproductive ethnography – depends on having good research questions. They can be extended, modified or changed if necessary, as we explain in Chapter 5. But the initial questions need to be based on serious thought – not only about potential fieldsites, but also about what one’s conceptual repertoire will be based on. One needs to be able to entertain a variety of potentially fruitful ideas, at the outset of the research as well as during its development in the field. We have suggested that the foreshadowed research questions should, most importantly, be of intellectual concern to the ethnographer.Whether the substantive focus is on tango, or cupcake sellers, or nuclear physicists, there must be social-science questions that arise, and the ethnographer must find them absorbingly productive.

3 ACCESS, OPENINGS AND ENCOUNTERS

This chapter focuses on the early phases of doing an ethnography: negotiating access, initial encounters and finding one’s feet. The chapter forms a pair with Chapter 5, because the best strategies for fighting familiarity are slightly different in the early days of fieldwork from those that work well in the later stages. In the initial phases, it is easier to see unfamiliar things. Most methods books have one chapter on data collection and one on analysis intended to cover each topic as they are done throughout the fieldwork. We think that the pressing ‘problems’ are different in the early days and in the later stages. So, we have chosen to separate discussing data collection strategies, and some analysis strategies to accompany them, that are sensible in the initial and early stages of the project, from our coverage of data collection and analysis in the core stages of the research, and in the final, terminal phase. Chapter 9 focuses on the priorities for data collection and analysis when leaving the field. We have separated data collection into two chapters, this one and Chapter 5, and each of these two chapters has one on data organisation and analysis paired with it. So there are ideas about initial conceptualisations as Chapter 4 while Chapter 6 concentrates on the analysis of the data collected later on in the fieldwork. It makes sense to do some ‘hard thinking’ about the data collection after the initial phase of the fieldwork, in order to ensure that all the possible angles are covered and to focus on fighting familiarity after the early phase has been negotiated however ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ it has been.

Access There are two aspects of ethnographic access in the current era which were nonexistent when we were novices. Getting access has not changed, but in 2020, universities require social scientists to submit their research plans to an ethics committee (the UK name) or an Institutional Review Board (as they are known in the

34  Access, openings and encounters

USA) and to conduct a risk analysis. The requirement to submit research projects to an IRB or ethics committee (EC) has led to a literature by academics reporting their problems with such committees: a set of stories replete with resentment, derision and misery (Gotlieb Conn, 2008). The more analytic academic literature on IRBs and ECs is also well established, and it is a corpus to which we have contributed (Atkinson 2009; Denzin 2009a, 2010; Fielding 2010). The Iphofen and Tollich collection (2019) provides extensive coverage of these debates, which we do not expand on here. Rather we argue that on balance the benefits of the IRB/EC system outweigh the disadvantages. Being required to submit a research design and foreshadowed problems to a group who are generally not themselves ethnographers forces the ethnographer to learn to communicate with an ‘outsider’ audience, and to think methodically and seriously about their research questions before the fieldwork, or even the access negotiations, begins. The requirement that ethnographers have a clear plan to protect the actors’ and informants’ privacy and best interests, and to get their informed consent to their participation, generally produces a more thoughtful, and self-critical, ethnographic project. Clarity about these issues well before the access negotiations begin is sensible. The IRBS/EC often expects the applicant to have acquired and read the ethical guidelines produced by the relevant learned society (ies) such as the American Anthropological Association, or the British Psychological Society. Finding and absorbing the relevant guidelines are a reasonable standard of responsible behaviour to be required of a scholar. Alongside the ethical issues, these committees often require the researcher to have done a risk analysis to ensure they have minimised any threats to their own health and safety. Ethnographic fieldwork can be dangerous to the physical and mental health of the investigator (Bloor, Fincham and Sampson, 2007). Ethnographers need to think about those issues before fieldwork begins too. Eager inexperienced ethnographers straining to rush into the field do not enjoy these bureaucratic matters delaying their research. However, there is no evidence that these delays are damaging research. It is important that however annoying these bureaucratic requirements are, the ethnographer keeps a record of the procedures and how they reacted to them. Such records should be kept in what SD calls the ‘out of the field’ diary. If the committee raise queries about the research, it actually helps the researcher think carefully about what they really hope to do, and queries clarify that and those clarifications should be systematically recorded. We say this not because we think that the current formal requirements for ethical approval are the most significant things about ethnographic research. On the contrary, they are often ill suited to the practical conduct of fieldwork. Committees and their protocols, often derived and adapted from biomedical precedents, can implicitly assume that research is concerned solely with individual participants, who are enrolled separately, and who grant consent to being researched on an individual basis. Clearly this is entirely inappropriate for research with and about groups, organisations and networks. Ethical approval processes do, however, force us to render explicit some issues of planning and foreshadowed problems, and thus to help us to reflect critically on the field and its possibilities. More generally, however,

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we believe that the sort of personal and interpersonal commitments involved in fieldwork and the investment of the ethnographer’s self in the research process mean that ethnography is, in a profound sense, a most thoroughly ethical form of research. It commits us to sustained engagement with our fellow women and men, in an exchange that acknowledges and is faithful to the concerns and identities of our research hosts. In the years when we began our research careers, there were no protocols for individualised ‘informed consent’, but we respected the rights and interests of the actors we asked to help us.We ‘negotiated access’ to research settings. As many ethnographers have now argued, the main problem for ethnographic researchers lies in the fact that many RECs and IRBs use completely inappropriate models of research and consent. The model for most forms of research with human subjects is based on the recruitment of series of individuals. They can be very large population samples, and they can be small, carefully chosen series of participants in a psychology experiment. But the enrolment is always an individual matter. The research contract is with the research participant, and she or he can withdraw at any time. The research participants will not even meet each other in many cases (focus groups being an obvious exception). Ethnography is not conducted with isolated individuals. Fieldwork takes place with groups. They are not isolated in a laboratory or in an interview room, but go about their everyday life and work. So the normal model of informed consent simply will not work. Likewise, by its very nature, ethnographic research is unpredictable. We cannot inform participants – individual or collectively – of what we are researching in any simple way. So the nature of what they are ‘informed’ of differs too. These considerations do not mean that ethnographic fieldwork is unethical. On the contrary, we argue that it is the most ethical of research approaches. But that view is predicated on a broader view of ethical conduct than is enshrined in the bureaucracy of informed consent. Few, if any, research strategies imply the degree of personal, even existential, commitment.The ethnographer does not solicit the shortterm extraction of ‘data’. Rather, she commits herself to ‘growing old together’ with research hosts, to share their forms of life, and to undertake a faithful reconstruction of their social world. It is social research in the fullest sense, being grounded in sociality in the company of one’s research hosts (Atkinson, 2014). The negotiation of research access is a topic covered in all the standard textbooks (e.g. Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019), has a whole book devoted to it (Feldman, Bell and Berger, 2003), and figures in many autobiographical accounts of projects (e.g. de Marrais, 1998). The collection edited by Feldman et al. (2003) contains 19 short accounts by scholars of their negotiated access to a variety of fieldwork settings from factories to police departments, mostly in the USA. The chapters are straightforward narrative accounts and make useful reading. Bell (2003), for example, describes how she got access to a police department to do a study of their specialist unit which focused on hate crime. Some published research appears to have been done without any recognisable access negotiations at all. We stress ‘appears’ because authors may have chosen to gloss over their interactions with institutions in their texts. Granfield’s (1992) study

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of Harvard Law School is a case in point. He writes that when a student at one of the other Boston universities he crossed the Charles River to Harvard, and without an appointment accosted ‘a controversial professor’ (p. 209) in his office. The man agreed to see him and they had a conversation. Granfield was invited by this professor ‘to attend a course he was teaching for first-year law students’ (p. 209). So Granfield turned up at the lecture the following day, let the professor know he was there, and sat in an empty seat. In that lecture, one student publically challenged the professor’s marking and feedback strategy. Granfield then spoke to that student in a social space and was invited to attend all his law classes with him. Granfield did that for six months, interviewed many law students, and wrote ‘hundreds of pages of notes’ (p. 211). In 2020 this sounds completely impossible, because entry to any university activity would need official approval and the researcher would almost certainly need to carry ID to enter libraries, lecture halls and student spaces. Today Granfield’s story seems highly unlikely, and no ethnography published in 2020 would fail to report more about official negotiations of access. One of the differences between scholars who want to do ethnographic, or other qualitative research go through ethical approval procedures, do risk analyses and have to negotiate access and usually informed consent. Other people, such as novelists, essayists, journalists and occasionally academics not in social sciences often proceed without, as far as one can tell, doing any of these things. Andrew O’Hagan (2017), a novelist and journalist, created an adult identity for ‘Ronald Pinn’, starting from the real person who had died of a heroin overdose in 1984. He was exploring a strategy that the (London) Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) used in the 1970s and 1980s to create fake identities for officers (nearly all men) who then infiltrated ‘left wing’ social movements seeking out terrorists in them. The SDS chose the names of boys who had died in infancy or childhood and applied for adult identity paperwork in their names. The official inquiry found that between 1968 and 2008, 106 fake identities were created. The families of the boys who had died in infancy or childhood were not consulted, and the groups infiltrated were deceived. In the most scandalous cases, the policemen had sexual relationships with women in the social movements, and some even fathered children. O’Hagan decided to see how easy it was to create a new identity and how far he would have to take illegal steps. He reflects on the moral and practical issues as he created an adult Ronnie Pinn in 2014. ‘Ronnie’ bought bitcoins, had an email account, a driving licence and a passport. He was active on the well-known social media and on the dark web. O’Hagan is unusual in that he also describes how he closed ‘Ronnie’s’ existence down again at the end of the experiment. We have not focused on O’Hagan because we are particularly critical of what he did. We have mentioned his Ronnie Pinn investigation as a good example of a project social scientists in a university could not do. A parallel, more recent example is Julie Ebner’s (2020) account of two years of undercover journalism on-line and off-line joining ‘a dozen tech-savvy extremist groups’ (p. 2). She collected data on neo-Nazis, anti-feminist women, jihadi brides and Incels (involuntarily celibate males) among others. Unlike Pilkington (2016)

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whose research on the EDL went through an ethics committee, Ebner’s study did not have to go through an ethical approval process or a risk analysis system. Her project is entirely covert; she pretends to be a pure Aryan anti-feminist neo Nazi. Like O’Hagan, there is no evidence of Ebner having any experience of using research methods and because they are journalists and not social scientists there is no self-critical reflections on the methods she used. Pilkington, as any good social scientist would have done, explains her ethical procedures, such as getting informed consent forms signed, in her book. Pilkington’s verdict on the demand for signed consent forms made by the university ethics committee being for ‘an institutionfriendly paper trail’ is that it was ‘of little help in the day-to-day business of ethnography’ (p. 20). It is a verdict that many ethnographers will share. Pilkington is clear that when an important EDL figure told a group of young men ‘she’s no informer or nuffin trust lads’ (p. 19) that was because of her overt status as a researcher who could be trusted not because of any paperwork. Because she was with EDL people overtly she never had to adopt secret identities or suddenly leave on-line or off-line settings as Ebner frequently did. One example closer to an ethnographic project is a study of the public face and the discourse displayed in an American museum set up to ‘demonstrate’ the literal truth of the Bible’s account of the history of the world. The book is interesting and works hard to take the reader into the heart of the belief system the museum represents. Yet Trollinger and Trollinger (2016) seem to have researched their book on the Creation Museum in Kentucky without any official access at all. They visited repeatedly and presumably paid the entrance fee each time and never told the institution they were researching it. Their book is entirely silent about any ethics committees, risk analyses or access negotiation. It could be argued that the Trollingers were engaged in covert research. Calvey (2017) is an accessible overview of covert research in the social sciences: mostly about sociology. He discusses the classic studies such as Humphreys (1970), Festinger, Riecken and Schachter (1956) and Fielding (1981) as well as much more recent projects such as his own research on club doormen in Manchester. We have not rehearsed the moral issues here, but it is important to recognise that covert researchers may not be able to ask questions or write notes, because their role in the field setting is not compatible with writing in the site, or appearing more inquisitive than an ‘ordinary’ person. A researcher who goes undercover to work in a food bank cannot interview the clients, or stop to write fieldnotes, or ask to go out on the collection van, or query the other volunteers’ religious beliefs or financial status. Parry (1987) made the same points while reflecting on her study of naturist clubs. These are all things an overt ethnographer can do, and doing them will make the research better.

Initial encounters In this chapter, we focus on the initial encounters, the first days in the field (Geer, 1964).That is the period when the foreshadowed problems, the research design that went to the IRB or Ethics Committee, and the research questions may turn out to

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be wildly irrelevant, completely useless or seriously wrong. Or, it is possible that in the early days or weeks they may seem to be fine as guides to narrowing down the focus of the data collection which has to be done because it is impossible to study and record everything.The data in the early days and weeks can be enormously rich, precisely because many things are strange and unfamiliar and need recording while they are new to the researcher. Informants may be very keen to explain things to the stranger or ‘newbie’, and especially to get their story in first. Fieldwork is mentally and physically exhausting, and emotionally stressful. Learning to manage the investigator’s physical tiredness (aching muscles, sore feet, backache, pounding headaches, etc.), to take enough time out of the field to record and reflect on the data and to perform the emotional labour of interacting with the informants in the setting are important ethnographic skills. Physical fitness and age are relevant here. Fine (2018: 238) points out that ‘In my research on fantasy role play gaming, conducted in my twenties, I could take notes until 5.00 a.m. No longer.’ Gaye Tuchman made a similar point to Shulamit Reinharz: Participant observation is a method for the young. When one is in one’s 20s or 30s it may be possible to observe from 10 to 16 hours a day and then type notes before sleeping. Later in life such long hours pose problems (Reinharz, 2011: 185) These physical discomforts, mental strains and emotional stresses are all important ways to help the researcher think about what is unfamiliar using all five senses. When PA did fieldwork by taking intensive life drawing classes, he found himself aching and tired. His feet hurt, his back ached, his arms hurt and the intense concentration needed to do the life drawing and then go home and dictate his fieldnotes was much more tiring than he was prepared for. The physical exhaustion can be contrasted with events that do and do not ‘normally’ exhaust the ethnographer. It makes sense to ask oneself whether the bodily sensations are ‘like’ the weekly park run, or the preparation of Christmas lunch for 20 people, or nothing previously experienced. The bodily pains can be used to focus on how the body is normally used. Did the noise in the fieldsite produce the headache? Do the disrupted meal schedules or the food in the fieldsite produce indigestion or worse? Why is interacting with these policemen, or bakers, or ballet students so ‘difficult’? Are the lights ‘too bright’ or too dim to be comfortable? All the pain can be data. The fieldsite, or key informants, may smell so foul that the research seems impossible. One research student we knew who thought he wanted to study kidney dialysis found out that the smells and the sights in the hospital unit were unbearable for him and he had to find a new topic.The initial encounters are an excellent, and probably the best, time to experiment with, and think hard about, the practicalities of the data collection. During the first days in the field practising what to take into the setting to record events, and how to use the ‘equipment’ chosen while actually listening, observing, smelling and possibly touching and tasting what is important there is vital. If writing, finding the best size of notebook and organising how and when to write is best

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done by trial and error in the ‘real’ field. Recording how those practices and trials are, or are not, productive in the out of the field diary is sensible. The more the research is dependent on using technology, the more important it is to practise with it, and record any strengths and weaknesses. The most important thing to do at this stage is to practise writing fieldnotes. There are some detailed instructions in Delamont (2016a: 41–46, 2019b) and in Emerson, Fretz and Shaw (2011) which are useful for a novice. At a more analytic level, the ways in which ethnographers describe their practical engagement with their fieldnotes are also useful to de-familiarise the ethnographer with her practices. One source of such material can be found in Walford (2009). He interviewed four ethnographers about their practice at considerable length. There are reflections on how anthropologists feel about their fieldnotes, especially their symbolic importance to the investigator, in Jackson (1990a, 1990b) and Sanjek (1990). In the earliest days, it is vital to practice writing the original notes, expanding them and thinking about them. It can take a long time to transform the brief, cryptic scribble of the original notes into the version that will be the official record which will be as much as ten or eleven times longer, and have material added to capture the wider experience while it is still fresh. Fieldnotes that have not been written up quickly become pretty useless as data. That means asking yourself can I read what I wrote? How much can I remember now that I did not write down at the time and need to add now? What reflections do I need to put into my diary? Is what I have written what I think is going to be important? At this stage the ethnographer has to be her own toughest critic. Only she was there, the research questions are hers, and she is going to be spending a long time in the setting. If the notes do not seem to have captured what the researcher thinks happened or was important, then the note taking needs attention. Emerson et al. (2011) stress that experienced ethnographers differ in two ways. They first distinguish between observers who keep their fieldnotes records of ‘facts’ separate from their ‘own thoughts and reactions’ (xvi) and those who integrate them. Secondly, they describe observers who ‘work up’ their notes as soon as possible from the abbreviated record made in situ into a more elaborated and explicit account as soon as they can. In contrast, there are scholars who leave their notes untouched while they focus on developing their thinking about broader issues rather than the minutiae of everyday life in their chosen setting. Emerson and his co-authors argue for that first approach in each case, as we do. The initial phase of fieldwork is the time to experiment and decide which kind of notes, and overall approach, are most suitable for the researcher and the project. Two technological changes mean that fieldnotes do not have to be handwritten, as they had been for a century. Alongside ethnographers who do write are others who take a laptop or tablet into the field and word-process their notes, while others have adopted speaking their ‘notes’ into a device that uses word recognition software. The availability of relatively cheap and portable devices to the ethnographer has been paralleled by the ubiquity of similar devices in the hands of everyone else in the setting. A modern phone, which can collect data in several different modes,

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visual, audio, and text, can revolutionise fieldwork. SD does not have a mobile phone, but, unless the research is going to take place where carrying a smart phone could endanger the investigator, it is the ‘obvious’ choice for most people today. Thinking about backup is vital, so that if there is a power cut, or an IT failure, or the phone or recorder runs out of power, all the effort and the data have not vanished. This is the time to begin to organise ‘backing up’ the data and to get into the rigorous routine of actually doing the backing up. The history of anthropology, and to a lesser extent sociology, is replete with famous stories of lost data and manuscripts of the written-up accounts of projects. Knab (1995) did fieldwork among indigenous Mexicans focused on curing ailments and also witchcraft. His key informants, descendants of the Aztecs, still spoke that language rather than Spanish. For reasons Knab fails to explain he set off through China on a journey to Tibet with the only copies of his data. All his resources were seized by Chinese border guards who could not read the Spanish or the Aztec languages and so decided all his written materials must be seditious (p. 221). He was therefore unable to write the monograph he had planned to produce. Knab joins a long line of anthropologists who have lost their work. It was excusable for Edmund Leach to have lost his research materials on highland Burma when the Japanese invaded the country in the Second World War, but since the availability of photocopying and on-line ways of storing and sharing data, it is inexcusable to travel with the only copies. Different ways of forcing oneself to back up the data regularly is a sensible task to include in the early days in the field. It is amazing how fast first impressions, and aches and pains, fade, and with them the insights they gave. At this stage, it is particularly important to be alert for ways in which the ethnographer’s presence may be being met by a ‘performance’. John Beynon (1985) was studying a boys’ comprehensive school in South Wales and had been in the field for some time when the staff realised he had been a teacher. They were surprised, and when he said he had taught in London schools for more than ten years, one man said he now felt free to start beating the boys in front of Beynon. Corporal punishment was still legal in Wales at that time and it was not clear if the teacher’s comment was a joke or not, but that incident does remind us that actors in a setting may be behaving differently because there is an ‘outsider’ present. Our strategies for fighting familiarity are not necessarily all useful in the initial stages, because in the early phases negotiating access and ‘getting in’ are the priority tasks. In the early stages, the ethnographer needs to focus on how he or she introduces the project and its methods to the actors in the chosen setting, how to dress, where it is sensible and safe to go and on how data are to be collected. As far as observation and the fieldnotes that need to be written are concerned, Wolcott (1981) is the best advice we know on exactly how to observe. As an educational anthropologist, his methods writing is not as well-known as it could be across all of qualitative research but researchers in any discipline, studying any setting from a coal mine to a zoo can draw on that advice with profit. He starts with a story about how a famous nineteenth century biologist (Agassiz) forced a graduate student to focus on the same (dead) fish for two weeks, at least eight or nine days longer than the

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student could imagine focusing on the animal, to ensure he learnt how to observe biological specimens in sufficient detail and depth. Wolcott proposes five strategies for deciding what to look at and how to look at it: 1 . 2. 3. 4. 5.

Observations by broad sweep Observations of nothing in particular Searching for paradoxes Searching for the problem(s) facing the group Observing what the locals observe.

He argues that because the broad sweep implies looking at everything which is not humanly possible, that very impossibility precipitates three good consequences. Inevitably selection has to be done, and the selection, if well documented, will shape the future observations productively. Secondly as the selection is made and documented, the observer will discover what kind of ethnographer she is. Thirdly the data gathered in that phase are useful for writing the description of the setting for the ‘outsiders’ who will later read about it. In the eventual ‘write up’ of, for example, the hairdressing classes in the vocational college, a broad view of the college, the hairdressing area and the ethnographer’s first impressions of the staff and students are illuminating for the readers. The more that is written and the greater level of detail recorded, the better. Cep (2019) describes Harper Lee’s failure to write anything substantial after To Kill a Mocking Bird, and it contains a telling anecdote. Lee went with her friend Truman Capote to study the community that was the setting for the murder chronicled in Capote’s In Cold Blood (1994). After a day in the farmhouse where the murder had been committed: ‘Capote and Lee drove the fifteen minutes back to town and retired to the Warren Hotel to work. He made three pages of notes that evening, she made nine, including details of every one of the Clutter house’s fourteen rooms (Cep, 2019, p. 185).The point here is that Capote made use of Lee’s detailed notes in writing his account. Nine pages of notes is hardly excessive for something as central to their interests, but it is certainly better than three. Much has been written about first days in the field, and the initial encounters with the actors in the setting. As we point out in Chapter 9, initial encounters feature in text books, and in ‘confessional’ autobiographical accounts, while exiting the field is rarely discussed.To illustrate an initial encounter, we have used some data from the capoeira research drawn from SD’s out of the field diaries. It is an example of gaining access to an informal setting (that is not a bureaucracy), where building a common understanding is useful. In 2005, SD had to spend a month in New Zealand and made email contact with two men teaching capoeira classes in Auckland. She went to a community hall where one of them was teaching, and introduced herself to Master (Mestre) Nypsios. He asked how long Sara had been studying capoeira. She replied, ‘I’ve been watching Claudio Campos for 18 months or so: before that I watched a few lessons taught by an African-Portuguese man called Cadmus’. The teacher’s face changes from mild, polite interest into a broad warm smile: ‘I know Cadmus

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– he is my friend – I have been to his batizado in London – you know Cadmus?’ SD explained how Cadmus was the first capoeirista she ever saw in the flesh, how she knew two men, Raksha and Phao, who grew up with Cadmus in Portugal, why his classes in Tolnbridge were an economic failure, and that she had seen him in Cloisterham six months before, although he had had an injury and could not teach or perform there. The teacher, offered these ‘proofs’ that the ethnographer did indeed ‘know’ Cadmus, smiled even more broadly and posed a question that tested the ethnographer’s ideology and knowledge. ‘Okay – so which do you prefer Angola or Regional?’ These are the two main varieties of capoeira that are taught across the world. SD, relaxed by the smile, answered truthfully but also knowingly: ‘Angola for beauty, Regional for excitement.’ He laughed. She expanded, ‘Angola’s beautiful when done by skilled players, but is so hard for novices. In classes, regional has more vitality. Claudio teaches a mix – but it is more regional’. The teacher laughs again and says he is more of an Angola teacher: as his T-shirt proclaims. Teachers regularly come to their classes with a pile of ‘their’ T-shirts for sale, so to cement the access. SD bought a T-shirt from him. At this point, the students began to arrive, and the ethnographer stepped out of the teacher’s way so he could teach. Later that night, back in her ‘home’, a guesthouse in a different suburb of Auckland, the ethnographer reflected on, and wrote up, what happened in that original encounter. Three aspects of that evening stand out as typical features of the formal and informal negotiations of ethnographic access, across SD’s 50  year career: clothing, networks and ‘test’ questions.These are reflected upon here with an emphasis on general ethnographic insights. The clothing is important. What ethnographers wear is central to establishing rapport, gaining access, building trust. It is possible that wearing the appropriate clothing is more important for women than men, because women are judged on their moral character according to their personal appearance as well as being evaluated as competent or not, intelligent or not and even trustworthy or not. David (2017: 187–188) studied an elite women’s group campaigning to restore New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. He found that he needed ‘to shave more often and give extra consideration to hygiene’. He had to buy and wear ‘collared shirts’. He was so poorly prepared that when one woman ‘discreetly recommended’ that he should wear a suit jacket to a specific event, he did not have a suit. Men may be told their clothing is wrong, but women may be seen as immoral, ‘cheap’, or ‘posh’ because of their appearance, and judged harshly for it. Bosse (2015: 49) writes about the personal hygiene rules and suggested dress code at the ballroom dance centre she studied. The guidance for novices stated that: Dress for class should be comfortable and tend to free movement. We suggest avoiding shorts, blue jeans, t-shirts etc…. Proper footwear is important. A lightweight, securely fit [sic] leathered sole shoe is most appropriate. Bosse says that ‘as a poor graduate student’ who could not afford new clothes she began fieldwork in ‘faded blue jeans and cowboy boots’ because they were the only

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‘leather-soled shoes’ she had. Because hardly anyone wore ‘casual denim’, she got some remarks about ‘her wardrobe’. Her research led her to conclude that given the age and class of the majority of the clientele wore what she, as an American, calls ‘dress’ clothes and shoes. The women wore ‘dress shoes with heels or dance shoes’ (p. 50) with ‘dress slacks’ or ‘shirts or dresses’, while the men wore ‘dress shoes’ and ‘dress slacks’ in colours like grey or tan, and coloured casual shirts (often with button-down collars). For a non-American, it may not be clear what these clothing conventions are, because Bosse does not explain them, but she was able to acquire the right clothes herself. For non-Americans, some explanation of what the overworked word ‘dress’ means here, if only by contrasting dress trousers with ‘not jeans’, and dress shoes with ‘not trainers or work boots’. All Bosse does is in contrast with the dance clothes with ‘t-shirts, shorts, athletic shoes, workout wear’ (p. 50) which helps a little, but does not make middle aged, middle class, white American clothing ‘strange’ to Americans or clear to non-Americans. Nagar (2014: 64–66) had a much more complex task when doing her fieldwork in Dar es Salaam. In an environment of Africans and Asians, and the ‘Asian’ community including Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims (Ithna Asheri), she has to think very carefully about what to wear, in a much more complex fieldsite than that of Abu-Lughod (1986) who lived in a compound with one conservative Egyptian Bedouin extended family. Women in that culture dressed in one style before marriage and another after it. As an older, single woman Abu-Lughod chose to wear a costume of her own devising that mixed key elements of the two styles. In a big multi-faith, multi-ethnic city Nagar mostly wore the Salwaar qameez which meant that ‘Ithna Asheris, Sikhs and elderly Hindus granted me trust and respect’ because she was ‘properly’ dressed, but many Goans and young Hindus thought that was ‘too old-fashioned’. A male Goan teacher told her that no Goan woman would dress like her, so for their next interview she wore American clothes. For an upper-class Hindu celebration, she wore a silk sari and all its accompanying garments. Being labelled old-fashioned by younger women from some faiths was, Nagar concludes,‘worth it’ if her chosen dress established her among the older people. Being told by younger people in a community that one looks old-fashioned can give them a sense of superiority which can aid rapport. If the young people in a field setting are ‘hipper’, or ‘cooler’ or ‘hotter’ than ‘their’ researcher that can be useful. Being too fashionable can be intimidating. In capoeira, clothing is part of what learners acquire: novices in contemporary capoeira are urged to buy the uniform from their teacher and to wear it. It is also normal to buy clothing, particularly T-shirts, at special events and from visiting teachers. Special events, such as ceremonies when students get promoted up the hierarchy of coloured belts, have a specific commemorative T-shirts. Some learners wear these for normal classes but others get their celebratory T-shirts autographed by the guest masters and preserve them as pristine souvenirs. SD buys T-shirts but, for a few years, did not routinely wear them, because it was important to her not to try to ‘pretend’ to be a practicing capoeirista. After a few years, it became clear that wearing a capoeira T-shirt was welcomed by teachers and students, so from 2006 or so onwards SD has worn one to do fieldwork. Learning the etiquette of clothing in

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capoeira, and deciding how to present oneself by wearing, or not wearing the uniform, is one way to get into, and stay in, the fieldsite. The choices of which T-shirts to wear are not simple to make. SD has learnt to use the T-shirts strategically. When overseas, as in New Zealand, SD wore a T-shirt from her regular group in Cardiff to break the ice, to open the conversations, to distinguish her from the ‘lay’ audience or casual visitor. In ordinary lessons with her regular groups, it is sensible to wear a T-shirt produced by the host teacher. If an event T-shirt is bought, they are worn occasionally in the regular classes to ‘tell’ the regulars about capoeira events attended away from that base. Buying a T-shirt in Auckland served a dual function: it helped the finances of the teacher it was bought from and when worn at ‘home’ signals that the wearer has been to a capoeira event elsewhere that opens up conversations about such trips.The iconography of capoeira clothing is discussed elsewhere (Stephens and Delamont, 2006b), here the implications for fieldwork are further explored. When PA was doing his fieldwork at Welsh National Opera, he dressed appropriately for different settings and data opportunities.Travelling to interview wealthy donors and supporters meant a suit and tie, while sitting in the rehearsal studio or the theatre required informal, unobtrusive dark clothes that reflected the subdued clothing worn by cast-members and members of the production staff in the rehearsal studio, or in the theatre during the final rehearsals. An occasionally illchosen bright shirt could make him stand out in a way that felt uncomfortable. In draughty studios and largely empty theatres, warmth was often a consideration too. For performances, as part of the audience, he would naturally wear ‘smart’ clothes. There are different courtesies to be observed in different performance contexts. When observing some performances from the theatre wings, PA would note the stage manager in evening dress (a courtesy to the performers). The networking incident around Cadmus is typical of the first days in the field, of access negotiations with individuals and in informal settings and of establishing new fieldwork relationships. This capoeira teacher, Nypsios, had already said in an email that the researcher could watch him teach: but that did not mean he expected her to turn up, or that he was enthusiastic about being observed. The test question shifted the encounter from cool neutrality to enthusiastic warmth. The teacher and the ethnographer had a mutual friend. For that teacher, if Cadmus had let the ethnographer watch him in Tolnbridge, then it was more acceptable for her to watch the Auckland class. For the ethnographer, it linked the two teachers into the global network of capoeira instruction and was therefore a finding, and Nypsios became a potential contact for future research next time he is in Europe.The school ethnography parallels are evident: in recalling her St Luke’s study SD (Delamont 1984) wrote that she was more easily able to get into the elite girls’ school because she and the headmistress had been at the same Cambridge College. Similarly, Linda Measor (1985), while conducting a comparative study of physics and art teachers in England, used her knowledge of orchids to establish rapport with a teacher who also grew orchids. Challenges, test questions and probes are common in access negotiations and initial encounters.They can continue in the course of the fieldwork. Often the most

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difficult questions are the most tricky. ‘What are you hoping to find?’ is a common kind of question, produced when actors first meet the ethnographic field researcher. It is not always easy to answer, not because we wish to hoodwink our hosts, or because we are investigating deviant activities (though both are possible). Rather, that kind of question is just hard to answer truthfully, because of course, we do not normally set out into the field ‘hoping to find’ things. Equally we do not normally have the equivalent of a hypothesis to examine. So we can feel uncomfortable.There are answers, of the sort ‘I’m trying to write about what it’s like to work here at …’, or ‘I want to find out how one becomes a …’, or ‘I want to understand more about …’. But they do not always sound convincing. Likewise, when working in esoteric contexts, the members can challenge one’s own level of understanding, often with the implication that one will be unable to make sense of what is going on. The American haematologists that PA studied commiserated with, rather than directly challenging, his ‘inevitable’ struggle to understand what they were talking about. Again, it is not easy to respond, as an admission of bafflement will not enhance one’s relationships in the field, while the obverse (PA’s actual experience) – that one does not need to be a qualified expert in order to understand what is going on in meetings and consultations – can sound unduly arrogant. Usually, ‘challenges’ implicitly revolve around the ethnographer’s commitment. Actors are accustomed to ‘research’ in the form of ‘quick-and-dirty’ procedures and want to sound out whether the ethnographer really is prepared to stick out the discomfort, the tedium, the time, the travel, the physical effort, or whatever it takes. Assurances are one thing: visible and continuing presence establishes one’s credentials.

Initial encounters The importance of many episodes observed in the earliest days of fieldwork and especially ways in which they contrast with the ethnographer’s previous realities often appear in the out of the field thinking. Ǿstebǿ (2018) writes of sitting in the backyard of a traditional birth attendant in Ethiopia: Suddenly everyone starts running towards the gate of the compound and out onto the street. I found myself left alone, and, surprised by the abrupt loss of interest in my camera and sudden disappearance of its audience, it takes a few seconds before I start to move. (71) When she reaches the market place, she can see there is a fight going on between ‘two young men’ and it is clear that the women had run out of the yard to intervene. The women have already surrounded the men, shouting, waving their arms and ‘urging them to stop’ by the time Ǿstebǿ arrived at the scene. ‘Three women even enter the fight and physically separate them.’ (72) The women force the men to leave in different directions. The combatants continue to shout at each other ‘But the fight is over’. (72) For this anthropologist, as she realised that evening, the women’s behaviour was a classic anthropological turning point:

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It is not until the evening, when I am processing the day’s experiences, conversations, and events in my fieldnotes, that I start reflecting on what I witnessed that morning. In fact, as I am processing the incident, I realise this to be a key ethnographic moment, one of those eye-opening, thrilling moments when you discover that you have stumbled upon something of significant importance (72). The author reflects that in Norway, her home country, older women would never intervene physically in a fight between young men and thus her familiar, taken for granted, understanding of gender equality is challenged. That insight, reflecting on what she had witnessed, changed the focus of her fieldwork. A similar insight occurred early in the fieldwork for Bock (2017: 66) when he was thinking about his research in L’Aquila, a city in central Italy that had experienced a major earthquake in 2009. He did his fieldwork in 2013 and very quickly found that his foreshadowed ideas about his research were entirely misplaced. He quickly found that the citizens of L’Aquila had developed despair, and a culture of bereavement in the ruins of the unreconstructed city, and it was these negative attitudes he had to study. He comments that he was: Forced to negotiate my expectations as a young and enthusiastic student with the constraints of an urban environment defined by despair, destruction, and bereavement, I struggled alongside my friends with the exceptional conditions of city life. (p. 66) In the early stages of fieldwork, it can be particularly useful to use our strategy of revisiting some well-established ethnographies of the past. If, for example, an ethnographer were to enter a medical school in 2025, a knowledge of three previous ethnographies: Boys in White (Becker et al. 1961), The Clinical Experience (Atkinson, 1976, 1997a) and Making Doctors (Sinclair 1997) covering the USA and the UK from the 1950s to the 1990s would help sharpen the investigator’s gaze. The Becker dates from a period when any cohort of American medical students was 90–95% male, and overwhelmingly white. It also pays little or no attention to the content of the medical education explored. And, of course, being American, the students all had BA degrees and were over 21 when they began their medical student careers. Atkinson’s study, done in Scotland, on mainly white students, but with a gender balance nearer 50:50 who began the course at 18 or 19, was done in the period 1969–72, and focuses much more on what was actually taught. Sinclair’s work, in London, was on a more ethnically mixed student body, and was the last British study before there was a complete re-organisation of both the content and structure of UK medical education (see Atkinson and Delamont 2009). A knowledge of these three studies would give the investigator in 2025 ideas about three different ways to focus their ethnography, an awareness of how the medical profession in the USA and in the UK was predominantly made up of white males was until recently, and help to remind them that the ways in which medical education is classified and framed

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are socially constructed by powerful figures at the top of the profession with consequences for the student experience. In the initial encounters of such an ethnography of medical education in 2025, other strategies for making the fieldsite unfamiliar would also need to be employed as well. Seeking contrasting standpoints from which to explore medical education would help the ethnographer to make critical observations of how gender and ethnicity appear to be structural factors characterising the teaching staff, among the students, and divide or unite the patients the students encountered.The strategy of focusing on ‘unusual’ actors in the setting, could also be deployed: the laboratory technicians, librarians, those who organise the IT, A/V and virtual reality aspects of curricula delivery, and investigating how all the other professions in the hospitals (dieticians, physiotherapists, theatre technicians, nurses, occupational therapists) are impacted by the presences and absences of medical students and their teaching and assessments would be useful. Some fieldsites are never comfortable, and the ethnographer never feels safe, secure or optimistic in them. That can be because no one feels safe, secure or optimistic there, and if so the ethnographer’s discomfort is a central finding. In many projects, however, these are transitory feelings, and the observer begins to feel more settled. The insights from the early days and the experimentation with recording data and then doing the initial processing of them are as important as establishing rapport with the people in the setting. Exhaustion is normal at this stage, and learning how to pace oneself and to make time for writing up analysing and thinking are as important as establishing rapport. In general, it is sensible to keep relatively quiet about one’s own biography, standpoints and opinions, remembering that the researcher is there to listen not lecture. It is also necessary to repeat the rationale of the research endlessly because different people will have heard about the study in general but may want to hear for themselves what is being done. Care needs to be taken to tell ‘the same’ story, because people in the field may compare notes. The best part of the early days is that innocent, naïve questions can be asked. An investigator who has been travelling with a professional ice hockey team in Canada for several months cannot suddenly ask what the written rules are, the names of the owners, the structure of the league or what the coach’s background is. Those are outsider, novice questions that could only be asked early on, and of those basics were not quickly learnt the staff and players would conclude the researcher was not ‘serious’. Later in the fieldwork, it could be possible to ask players about how the rules are interpreted in real games, how the owners treat the players, how successful teams and failing ones regard the league system and whether the coach has a useful background. These would be ‘bad’ questions to ask early in the research period, because the informants have to trust the researcher, and know that she understands basic things.

Conclusion: Finding one’s feet Gradually, the ‘first days in the field’ and the ‘initial encounters’ blend into the new normality of fieldwork routines. It is not possible to specify exactly when that occurs. It happens at different times and in different ways for different actors or

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groups among one’s hosts. Unforeseen events can throw the researcher and other actors off balance and threaten the delicate tissue of trust and acceptance. During PA’s research in an American teaching hospital, one event that was nothing directly to do with him seemed to threaten the entire exercise, taking things back to square one. In the course of a perfectly routine morning round, PA accompanied an attending (consultant) physician and a clinical fellow – a specialist in training – together with a medical student. The group visited a series of patients on the wards. One man, with a serious blood disorder, was in denial, it appeared, and was blaming his blood-cell counts on the poor diet that was available in the hospital. The attending became very angry and raised his voice in berating the patient, shouting ‘You are a very sick man, my friend’, before leading the group away. The clinical fellow was, it transpired, distressed by the episode, and when PA made what he thought was an innocuous remark about it, complained to the head of the haematology-oncology service, who threatened to terminate the research in its early stages. A good deal of repair work was needed. The project was rescued, and PA became accepted as ‘part of the team’ when they toured the hospital wards and departments. It is a salutary reminder, however, that access is rarely unconditional and that ‘routine’ fieldwork is always potentially precarious. Nevertheless, after the initial encounters and explorations, the ethnographic researcher is likely to become more familiar with the setting: individual actors and their names will have started to become clearer, the hosts will have started to be more accustomed to the ethnographer, and the sights, sounds and smells of the setting will be more recognisable. However, we must remain vigilant. It is perfectly understandable that one might want fieldwork to ‘settle down’, and indeed, productive field research does rely on a degree of routine acceptance by the hosts. But that does not mean that we should spend all of our fieldwork days and weeks feeling ‘comfortable’. If we get too settled, then we can lose the sense of estrangement that throws cultural phenomena or social relationships into sharp relief. Consequently, review and reflection are needed to ensure that we do not dull the analytic cutting edge. That forms the subjectmatter of the next chapter.

4 INITIAL ANALYSIS AND FOCUSING STRATEGIES

The conduct of ethnography should be the opportunity to develop original, creative ideas on the basis of fieldwork. That fieldwork can be undertaken in a social setting of various sorts, from the most exotic to the most mundane. But wherever and however the research is conducted, it is idle if it is not generating ideas. Having ideas is integral to the entire research process, from our initial thoughts and foreshadowed problems, through the initial stages of the research, and right through to the later stages of leaving the field, completing analytic work and ‘writing up’. Such stages are for pedagogical purposes, and in real life they blur into one another. Ethnographers do not undertake their fieldwork in the complete absence of any ideas; they do so in order to develop ideas. The development of ideas includes the extension of existing ideas, testing ideas in new contexts, or modifying ideas in the light of new evidence. It is not necessary to embrace some grand theory in order to engage in the development and exploration of ideas, and it is the exploration of ideas in conjunction with fieldwork that gives ethnographic research its distinctive character. Clearly the quality of ideas, and the freshness of ethnographic inference, depends on an understanding of how ideas relate to our data and vice versa. It also depends on an understanding of how concepts and ideas are developed, how they circulate, and the work that they do. To begin with, this depends on an understanding of why ethnographic (and indeed other qualitative) research is not a purely inductive exercise, and why crude characterisations of ethnographic practice are misleading. In particular, we need to understand how the notion of abductive reasoning best captures the overall process. Ultimately, however, such labels, derived from the philosophy of science, matter much less than the actual process of establishing a dialogue between ideas and fieldwork. It is important at the outset, and indeed throughout this book, to emphasise that this is not a matter of ‘analysing’ one’s ‘data’. It is a commonplace of writing about the ethnography that fieldwork and inference, or theorising, go hand in hand: they develop in partnership. Analysis

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is not a separate phase of the overall research process and is never divorced from principles of research design, or data collection. Indeed, the very idea of ‘data’ is antithetical to the ethnographic imagination, and here, as elsewhere, we use it as a matter of convenience rather than hoping to reinforce images of information separated from other aspects of the research process, or as a corpus of observations that are accumulated over time and only then subjected to analytic scrutiny. While ethnographers should and do approach their fieldwork with an open mind, that does not mean that they do so with no ideas in their head. Some oversimplified versions of the research process emphasise the desirability of a lack of ‘preconceptions’, and it is true that one strives to avoid pre-judging what will prove to be significant and fruitful, but that does not mean that ideas are of no importance. One should have potential research ideas in mind before entering the field, while being intellectually open to their modification and even transformation in the light of the fieldwork itself. As we shall argue in this chapter and throughout the book, research design and research conduct are iterative, involving a constant and repeated dialogue between analytic ideas and fieldwork. Moreover, ideas do not ‘emerge’ simply from the collection and inspection of large amounts of data. They are products of hard work of thought and reflection, involving repeated interrogation not just of the ‘data’, but also of one’s ideas and their implications. It is abundantly clear that even when anthropologists or sociologists make claims for ‘radical empiricism’ (e.g. Jackson, 1989), they do not mean that their work is devoid of ideas. Quite the reverse: Jackson’s essays are devoted to reflections on his African fieldwork, phenomenology, existentialism and other philosophies of knowledge and perception. It is a truism – but a necessary one – that ethnographic fieldwork is exploratory and flexible. It is also something of a cliché that ethnographers do not enter their chosen field settings with the intention of testing very specific hypotheses. But that does not mean that fieldwork is primarily an exercise in undirected, aimless ‘exploration’. Ethnographers may allow themselves, or be forced, to trace unpredictable paths. They may be intellectual wayfarers, but that does not mean that there is never any direction or purpose. Moreover, the task of the ethnographer is not just to generate a description of what she has observed or participated in. The role of ideas is what gives ethnographic research – whether in sociology, anthropology, cultural geography or any other social science – its raison d’être. So we need to understand the possible relationships between ideas and the nuts-and-bolts of fieldwork. As we have just said, there is a conventional way of expressing research of this sort, in terms of collecting ‘data’ and then ‘analysing’ them. But that is not really how it should work. In the ideal world (not easy to achieve, admittedly), the fieldwork (‘data collection’) and the generation of ideas (‘analysis’) should proceed simultaneously. Ideas are data-rich, while data are in turn driven by the development and exploration of ideas.

Inductive and deductive reasoning The methodological literature on ethnographic inference and analysis is muddled, to say the least. Some versions portray ethnographic fieldwork, analysis and writing

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as purely inductive exercises; that is, inquiries based on the accumulation of ‘data’ and the derivation of regularities and concepts directly from those data. The rhetoric of ‘emergence’ is often employed: themes and ideas are held to emerge from repeated inspections of the data. The identification of ethnography with purely inductive interpretations is understandable. And to a certain extent, it is a reasonable reflection of how ethnographers operate in practice. After all, like many field sciences, ethnography is exploratory. It is repeatedly offered as one of its strengths that researchers can choose and enter ‘fields’ in a spirit of open-minded inquiry. Ethnographers can and do celebrate the extent to which unexpected findings and ideas can be derived from their immersion in a research setting. Ethnographers quite properly argue that their approach is intellectually and interpersonally flexible. Research designs are, therefore, broadly defined and open-ended, while the ‘findings’ are unpredictable. Working with field data – fieldnotes, interview transcripts, visual materials, etc – can feel like yet another exploratory process. But a purely inductive approach is an inadequate representation of research realities. Ethnographers are rarely so empty-minded as to eschew any prior ideas, whether or not they are expressed as ‘hypotheses’. While ‘preconceptions’ sound like bad things – indeed the kind of over-familiarity we argue against – disciplinary ideas sound like good things. Whether we refer to foreshadowed problems, or working hypotheses, entering the field with no sense about how social affairs might be analysed seems a recipe for emerging from the field still with no ideas. Vulgar ideas about inductive logic abound in (mis)representations of ‘grounded theory’ and hence have become popularised in many quarters. This is a topic we return to in Chapter 6. By contrast, the conduct of ethnography is not well suited to a purely deductive approach. That is normally taken to mean research designs that start with a hypothesis, derived from previous research and from existing theory, that aim to test those hypotheses. While there is plenty of research that can and should conform to such a model, it clearly does not encompass either the aims or the practical conduct of ethnography. Indeed, it does not do justice to a great deal of exploratory field science. There are many topics and sites that imply a close inspection to determine ‘What’s going on here?’, that seek to follow up on anomalous or striking observations, or simply to explore the realities of a novel environment. On the other hand, there is clearly a place for undertaking ethnographic work in order to explore specific research issues, and they can take the form of foreshadowed problems, while leaving intellectual space for the unexpected and the unpredictable. Sometimes the development of fieldwork from existing theoretical perspectives is referred to in terms of ‘extended case method’. And, as we acknowledge, there is certainly room for prior thought and ideas, but a purely deductive approach (rarely encountered in practice) leaves insufficient space for exploration and discovery. We do not wish to overstate the case.There is clearly room for ethnographic fieldwork to be conducted in sites that are specifically chosen to examine the relevance and applicability of a given theory or idea. Re-studies of ‘the same’ research setting, or ones that are expected to be similar to earlier ones, can be undertaken with the specific intention

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of testing ideas derived from those prior studies. To that extent, a degree of deductive reasoning is appropriate. At the very least the researcher needs to ask herself what will count as confirming or questioning the original, what will be treated as an adequate test, what analytic ideas are deemed appropriate, and so on. Purely deductive approaches to ethnography are hard to envisage, however, and in the main they would be costly and clumsy ways to test very specific hypotheses. In practice, purely inductive or purely deductive approaches are rarely encountered. Neither seems a useful way of conceptualising the conduct of research in the real world. Ethnographic work in particular is better captured by a different approach: abductive reasoning. This finds sufficient place for observations and ideas, and for a dynamic relationship between them. As we go on to outline its meaning and implications, it must be borne in mind that this is just a convenient characterisation of what in reality is a complex and often messy business. It does not provide a protocol to follow in conducting exemplary fieldwork and analysis. The spirit and the emphasis is on productive engagements with fieldwork and analysis. In some ways, the ideal types of inductive and deductive logic are ‘straw’ arguments. It is rare in the social sciences to find any claims to ‘pure’ forms of either. Abductive reasoning (also an ideal type) is at least closer to the realities of practical research. The ethnographic commitment to forms of empirical inquiry does not empty the fieldwork of ideas that are actively part of the fieldwork itself. We certainly do not pursue research that collects lots of ‘data’ that await our subsequent ‘analysis’. Equally, we do not focus obsessively on testing just one or a few working hypotheses that derive from pre-existing theory. The reality is more dynamic.

Abductive reasoning Issues of inference have never been far from discussions of ethnographic method; however they have been framed. The question is always (if only implicitly): How to move beyond the here-and-now of ethnographic presence in order to formulate more general ideas, or ideas of wider applicability and intellectual reach. There is, it is argued, a dialectic between ethnographic observations and social-scientific ideas. Intellectual and imaginative movement between the particular and the general is a recurrent preoccupation in the conduct and justification of ethnography. Those generic ideas may or may not be couched in terms of Theory, but their theoretical import is no less for sometimes being more modest in scope (such as ‘sensitising ideas’, as Herbert Blumer formulated them). However the issues are expressed, the crucial thing is for ethnographers to draw inferences and make connections that challenge conceptual familiarity. We shall in the course of this chapter, explore, expand and exemplify this broad issue. For now, we foreshadow the topic in this way: It makes relatively little difference how we conceptualise ethnographic inference, analysis or writing if all we come up with are stale, predictable ideas. Of course, we acknowledge that nobody, however creatively imaginative their work, can be completely original. We all have to work with a variety of ideas that derive from different sources – different disciplines, different traditions,

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different stages or periods in the development of research fields. There is, therefore, always a line to be negotiated between extending and developing existing conceptual schemes and attempting to derive original, different ideas through ethnographic fieldwork.We shall develop this argument through a discussion of abductive reasoning. It has been and remains our contention that abductive inference should be the best (if still approximate) way to capture the often complex processes whereby ethnographers make sense of their field research.We do not want to describe this solely in terms of ‘data analysis’, as that terminology can too readily create a false impression. It can make it sound as if the ethnographer collects lots of ‘data’ in the field that remain inert until she or he comes to ‘analyse’ it as a separate process in the overall arc of the research act. As we emphasise, the abductive reasoning of ethnographic work is just not like that. Abduction, in principle, derives from the pragmatist philosophical tradition, associated particularly with the writing of C.S.Peirce (Tavory and Timmermans, 2014). Here we are concerned less with the exact meaning of Peirce’s formulation, but rather with its general spirit and the uses to which it has been put in subsequent commentary by social scientists, in their attempts fruitfully to capture processes of social exploration. Abduction stands in contrast – partial contrast, as we shall see – to inductive and deductive modes of inference. Although it should be recognised that these are all ideal-typical models of reasoning and research activity that inevitably tidy up and over-simplify any and all realisations of research in practice. The general approach of abduction is, however, a far more realistic description of how original research is actually conducted. It is less strictly normative in tone than the insistence on deductive logic espoused by some philosophies of science. In essence, abductive reasoning demands of the researcher that, in the light of some observed phenomenon or regularity, she or he should ask: What underlying rule, pattern or process might give rise to such observations? It is clear – as we have noted previously – that the typical question can be framed as: What might this be a case of? The initial question is one that invites provisional, even tentative, candidate answers. Especially in its initial formulations, any possible answer is speculative. Such speculation in turn implies and informs further inspection of possible examples of the same, or similar, patterning. Hence, there is an iterative process whereby observations (data) are inspected for possible categories or explanations, which in turn are further tested against more, other, observations. As that process of exploration and speculation proceeds, so the analytic categories – the possible modes of understanding – become thickened, or modified, confirmed or called into question. They may be abandoned in favour of alternatives, which of course become part of a further process of exploration. There is, therefore, a constant intellectual shuttling between ideas and observations.This is not a description of analysing a completed, inert body of ‘data’. The ethnography does not proceed blindly, devoid of any ideas, until the fieldwork has been completed. It is not (should not be) a matter of accumulating an unsorted heap of materials (observations, conversations, images, documents) and then trying to make sense of them from scratch. Such an image of ethnographic fieldwork and its outcomes does not do justice to the active intelligence of the

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ethnographer in the field, and her or his intellectual commitments that lead to the conduct of fieldwork in the first place. One of the fundamental tenets of abductive reasoning is to do initial and preliminary analysis consistently during the data collection, and then modify the fieldwork accordingly, while at the same time evaluating the analytic ideas. There are two reasons for this. First, if the foreshadowed problems were misguided and prove to be irrelevant, then they need to be rethought as soon as possible. Second, good fieldwork is based on regularly ‘testing’ the foreshadowed ideas and the researchers’ initial findings in the field so if the foreshadowed problems are not being developed that necessary part of data collection is not occurring. It is unlikely that one’s foreshadowed problems are actually ‘wrong’, but it is far more likely that they can be limited and limiting if they are not iteratively re-visited or revised. It is proverbial that ‘first days in the field’ are crucial in the course of ethnographic fieldwork. They are often periods of uncertainty, during which ethnographers start to establish personal relationships with their hosts, start to find their feet, familiarise themselves with their surroundings, get their face known in the new setting, and so on. It is a liminal state, between being a stranger and becoming relatively familiar in and with the social setting. In many ways this can, as we know, prove to be a very fruitful aspect of fieldwork. There is no set ‘early’ phase to fieldwork, and periods of intense work feed into one another. But early days can be productive, insofar as there is potential for things to seem ‘strange’. In many cases, ethnographers place themselves in a position of being strangers (we shall return to the parallel issues surrounding ethnography in one’s own social milieu). So in principle, that is a time when possible issues for development and reflection can be highlighted. Not understanding quite what is going on is a major incentive to exploration and theorising. It is important at this stage to keep detailed fieldnotes. As and when one becomes more accustomed to a given social setting, it is too easy to forget those initial observations and responses. Careful note-taking needs to be accompanied by equally thoughtful analytic writing. We cannot ‘discover’ all of the relevant issues in a very short space of time, but it is possible to identify potentially fruitful lines of inquiry from an early stage. It is equally possible to overlook things too. That is why analytic reflection is called for, in order to promote self-critical commentary. Fieldnotes are usefully complemented by analytic notes or memoranda in which one’s first thoughts can be reviewed, at this early stage and at later stages as well. Here is an example from PA’s early fieldnotes from his study of haematologyoncology specialists in an American teaching hospital. The occasion is a weekly conference at which more junior doctors present their cases, which are then discussed by the larger group of specialists: ….The conference begins with no further ceremony. Lillian starts to talk about one of her cases from her seat in the body of the room. The cases she presents are those discussed with Dr Burns (the attending physician) during the round in the library that morning. The presentation and the discussion are very fast

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and are almost impossible to take notes on. Here I record just some general impressions about the interaction. It seems a somewhat competitive arena. The members are much of an age and give the appearance of vying with each other. They swap remarks on recent developments and correct each other’s figures (such as percentages in published series of cases). They dispute the efficacy of alternative therapeutic regimes. I also get the impression that there are several persons in the room whom they expect to have a particular ‘line’ or to be particularly argumentative. There is an atmosphere of debate and disputation engaged in for the intrinsic satisfaction of diagnostic inference. That extract is taken from notes on the first day of ‘fieldwork proper’ (after two days of preliminaries such as staff induction and introductions). As one can see, the mixture of observations and reflections starts to identify some possible lines of inquiry. One that called for note was the pace of the activity. As noted at the time, and subsequently, encounters and discussions in the hospital were conducted at a high pace, often with participants talking over each other in rapid succession. In an early form, therefore, PA’s attention was drawn to some of the temporal features of the specialists’ work. Time-frames became of relevance: different specialities operated with competing schedules for haematological consultations; clinicians expressed their frustration when test results were not forthcoming in time for their decisionmaking. The schedules of morning rounds and clinical conferences were identified as among the organisational features, and PA made a mental note to relate that to Zerubavel’s analysis of time in hospitals (Zerubavel, 1979, 1981, 2003). Equally, the notion of a rhetoric – sometimes agonistic – of clinical discussions, and that particular individuals claimed rights to offer their opinions and interpretations became an analytic theme, as did the competitive discussion of the most recent evidence from journal science. Not all of those themes were written up explicitly in the published monograph, but they were among the analytic ideas from the earliest days of the fieldwork. More generally, those ideas were part of the yet wider discussion, of how the exchange of talk about cases forms a significant part of clinical work in such a hospital environment. Before we go on to discuss and exemplify this in more detail, it is in order to recognise that a good deal of field research is undertaken by people working in their ‘own’ social world. There is work conducted by, say, educators in educational settings, by nurses in healthcare settings and so on. The early stages of fieldwork and the necessity for critical self-examination are equally important, and parallel what we have just said, but arise from somewhat different causes. For people studying their own organisational, professional or leisure settings, the problem is not one of strangeness: it is a problem of over-familiarity. Many researchers – and not just inexperienced ones – can find it hard to overcome their own socialised competence in a given social world and hence struggle to adopt a fresh analytic perspective. For them, the importance of early analysis and reflection is even more critical. It is, we argue, imperative that they undertake preliminary analysis and develop critical scrutiny of their data. They need to ask themselves the

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kind pertinent questions, perhaps with even greater urgency than the ‘outsider’ ethnographers.

Initial data analysis The most important things to remember about initial data analysis are that it must be done regularly and consistently from the beginning of the fieldwork, how and what is done must be carefully recorded and that it should be done in an explicitly provisional way. By this we mean that the structure of the analysis needs to be flexible, to be scaffolding on which to stand but not a straitjacket or prison. Consequently, it is critical that the data should not be physically ‘destroyed’ or disposed of at this stage. This means in practice that any analytic procedures, such as coding, must be performed on the data in an impermanent way, or on a copy of the data leaving a version unsullied. Equally, however, those data should not be regarded as sacrosanct. They are just materials to be worked with. Whatever form the data take – documents, interviews, fieldnotes, or audiovisual recordings, or other visual materials – just collecting them is not enough. The researcher needs to work on them from the earliest days in the field. The researcher should keep records of what has been done. The material needs to be stored securely, which probably means duplicating the data, and lodging them in separate ‘places’, in old-fashioned ‘hard’ copies and on a harddrive, on the cloud or their equivalents. Untranscribed interviews, fieldnotes not written up, recordings that have not been copied, other materials such as collages, or drawings, or quilts, or sand paintings that have not been photographed are in danger. A lost phone, a vandalised I-Pad, a stolen PC, an IT crash can happen to anyone at any time. It is not just modern technology that can fail or be stolen. Notebooks can be soaked or eaten by termites, so even old-fashioned data can ‘vanish’. The very act of duplicating and safeguarding data is part of analysis. It is rarely seen in that light, but transcribing, photographing, duplicating are an initial way to begin to think about the data. These may not seem like intellectual tasks, but actually doing this thoughtfully has intellectual pay-off. It is also important to record what decisions have been made. We once inherited a dataset to write up which had been stored as coded computer files, with no key and no record of how the coding had been done, and the original data had been destroyed. Once safeguarded, the researcher needs to work through the data regularly, and repeatedly. Insight comes from immersion. Very often these topics are not talked about, and are left implicit, as if they were common sense. However, transcription, for example, needs to be thought about (see Hammersley, 2012). Here we have demonstrated how fieldnotes are initially written up from the in situ scribble into something worth preserving and analysable. We use that demonstration to show how initial analysis can be done as the fieldwork progresses. When the fieldnotes are written in the field setting, they are normally brief and initially cryptic. Here some of SD’s capoeira data are used to demonstrate one style of initial, and written-up, fieldnotes. So, for example, on

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March 6th, 2019, the initial warm up and stretches were complete, and the teacher, Mestre (Master) Claudio Campos, began the evening’s capoeira-specific work. SD wrote C calls out ‘GAP’, ‘2 by 2’, ‘WA’, ‘VM’ ‘Free game’ C and W are in bat C calls ‘Foot of B’. ‘Let’s go’ C calls ‘VM’ and ‘Rde A’ 8.23 C calls ‘HYP’ ‘CP’ Patsy arrives This is a typical bit of fieldnote, which is incomprehensible to anyone else, and leaves out a good deal of important information. These very sketchy, schematic notes are not of much use even to the researcher until they have been amplified and elaborated. It is also normal to word-process that expanded version so that it can be duplicated, shared and stored safely. Written up into a longer narrative as soon as possible after the class, the longer version reads: Claudio calls out to the students ‘Grab a partner!’, ‘Two by two!’, ‘Walk around’, ‘Volta Mundo!’ ‘Free game!’ There is an uneven number of students, so Claudio, who goes to play the drum, signals to Winston to come and play an instrument – he chooses the berimbau and the two of them play. Claudio sings the verses, and the whole class (and I) sing the chorus ‘Axé Bahia! Bahia Axé’. Claudio decides the free games (that is the students can do any moves they wish) are looking a bit ragged, whistles to stop them, and calls out ‘Start Again!’ ‘Foot of the berimbau’. The pairs kneel and wait for Claudio’s signal to begin a game. ‘Let’s go!’ The pairs play Claudio calls ‘Volta Mundo’ and then ‘Rabo de arraia’ 8.23 Claudio calls ‘Hug your partner!’ ‘Change partners’ Patsy arrives It is important to note that this expanded record of a short section of the action in the class is still written only for the ethnographer’s own records. It needs a great deal more work for anything about the events to be clear to a reader who has no idea what capoeira is. But it provides a fieldnote extract that the ethnographer can explain, and start to write about as a social scientist. It is not necessary to ‘explain’ capoeira here, but it is easy to see that the abbreviations have been expanded (‘HYP’ to ‘Hug your partner’). Some of what Claudio calls out is in Portuguese. ‘Volta Mundo’ which means ‘go round the world’ and here involves walking round with one’s partner at arm’s length. Rabo de arraia is a kick which translates as ‘stingray’s tail’. The berimbau is capoeira’s main musical instrument, a bow strung with wire. The term for the group of musicians is the bateria, written as ‘bat’ in the notes.

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This small fragment of the notes taken during a two-hour capoeira class does not represent all the types of feature that could, and indeed should, be somewhere in the notes. These notes do not include anything about the physical setting: its smell, temperature, noise, furnishings, etc. Nor is there anything about the students present: their age, sex, race, clothing, level of expertise in capoeira, nor about the teacher’s demographics and self-presentation. There is also a strong case for recording what the ethnographer is wearing, and where she is sitting or standing. If there are familiar smells (sweat for instance) or unfamiliar ones (someone microwaving a curry in the staff room), these need recording. The expanded version must still make sense many years after it is written and be detailed enough that it can be coded, analysed and quoted in publications. Of course, it is sensible to note any very vivid comment or incident which might provide a title, or an eye-catching introduction to a chapter or paper. When Achilles said to his class of novices that they must not train with any other teacher(s) behind his back because ‘I’m, your teacher! I’m Brazilian!’ that encapsulated an important finding and also made a great title for a paper (Rosario, Stephens and Delamont 2010). Two things are clear from this: first is that the ‘leap’ from the original notes to the written-up notes, which is not normally a process visible to anyone else, can only be made if the writing up is done with careful thought given to the addition of a good deal of extra detail and some explanations and clarifications not present in the original notes, and recognition that what is not added at the time when the first version is written up into the more formal account is probably irretrievably ‘lost’. Second, the expanded version will not be very useful until it has been coded (if the data are going to be coded), analysed and embedded in an (initial) analytic framework. Data, whether fieldnotes or the recorded talk of informants, will not speak for themselves and certainly will not be social science until the researcher has worked on them extensively. Alongside these expanded fieldnotes, it is helpful to keep a set of reflective notes about the data and the possible theorising. SD calls that the ‘out of the field diary’. Much of the work of making the familiar strange is done in that diary. Reminders to oneself to follow the topic in and across other cultures; reading the ‘great’ ethnographies of the past; focus on atypical actors in the setting; looking for nonstandard settings; taking gender and race seriously; making a note of possible middle-range concepts; and considering whether permanent recording is possible or desirable. A rare piece of research on the details of how four ethnographers of educational settings took their fieldnotes, expanded them, analysed them and shared them was done by Walford (2009). The four informants were Bob Jeffrey, Paul Connolly, Lois Weis and Sara Delamont. Walford’s discussion of ‘expanding the notes’ begins with an important finding: ‘Even the most disciplined of ethnographers sometimes fail to live up to their own standards’ (125). Paul Connolly reported that his ‘3000 A4 pages’ of expanded fieldnotes only capture ‘about half ’ his notes (125). He thinks that there should have been 6000 pages, and there are ‘bundles of those little notebooks’ in the attic that he did not expand. Bob Jeffrery used voice recognition software because ‘the main thing now is to ensure that they end up as computer

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texts’ (127). Walford (2009) writes of ‘copious fieldnotes’ made by the researcher ‘throughout the whole time in the field’ (117). When field researchers reflect on their data collection, if they do so at all, they announce the size of the treasures they hoard. Thus Lubeck (1985, 55) says she had approximately 480 typed pages which: ‘Comprise my fieldnotes and related papers from this time, exclusive of the schedules, maps and flow charts that were done early in the year.’ Quantity of fieldnotes is not a guarantee of quality, and the generation of fruitful ideas is not granted by gathering and scrutinising vast quantities of materials. As we argue throughout this book, the quality of the ethnography depends on the quality of the ideas that are brought to bear on and that are derived from those fieldnotes, transcripts and other texts. It is an excellent intellectual exercise to try to derive ideas about small amounts of data. Indeed, if one does not undertake thoughtful, reflective analysis of the field data from the earliest days, then the volume of materials can seem overwhelming and ultimately stultifying. We always need to ask ourselves how many ‘routine’ activities we need to observe in order to establish that they are routine. This does not imply that they should not be studied in great detail, and they should not be glossed over just because they are ‘ordinary’. Equally, the accumulation of lots of ‘data’, in the absence of a fresh analytic vision, is pointless. No ethnographer thinks that their fieldnotes ‘speak for themselves’ or are a window into reality: they know that the original notes have to be written up and then worked on. This contrasts with currently held and mistaken ideas about interview data, especially narratives. There is a fashion for claiming that, once transcribed, the interview data will speak ‘truth’ to the reader and provide an authoritative account of the narrator’s reality without any further interventions by the researcher. This is a point that we shall expand on later in this book. It is important to note and acknowledge that no data can ever speak for themselves, and that the ‘voices’ of informants – expressed through interview-derived narratives – are self-justifying or inherently authentic. During these stages of scrutinising the data, one has to start asking oneself some potentially tricky questions. Even if fieldnotes and other data read well, and seem satisfying, we should not allow ourselves to become complacent about them or the ideas that they embody. As we know, fieldnotes or interview transcripts are not unmediated observations. We create the fieldnotes, and they in turn derive from the kinds of social encounters we are able to sustain in the field; we co-construct the interviews with our informants. Rather than tucking them away, thinking that the data are ‘in the can’, we really do need to think of them as stuff to think about and to think with. Research materials like fieldnotes are not sacrosanct texts. They are what has been called intermediate or inter-texts. They mediate – textually speaking – between the events they record ‘in the field’ and the later texts that constitute ‘the ethnography’. Consequently, they are materials to be worked on and worked with. In the early days of fieldwork, we certainly need to use our fieldnotes, and other records of research, in order to undertake preliminary analysis. That analysis

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constitutes a critical reflection on what is visible through the fieldnotes but must always prompt consideration of what is not represented, or poorly represented. We need, in other words, to think about how and why our observations could and should be different. As we have illustrated, such critical reflection should be based on asking ourselves some pertinent questions. For instance, if we are writing about our participant observation in an organisational setting, we can scrutinise our observations in terms of perspective. What if I were to shift my analytic gaze a bit? Am I paying sufficient attention to the material circumstances and the physical setting? Am I using all my senses to the full? Am I looking at things like people’s physical movements in space? Am I considering the temporal dimensions of work or social organisation? If not, then perhaps I am overlooking some potentially important features that might prove to be significant. This is not a recipe for trying to do everything at once, for castigating oneself for not noticing ‘everything’. It can, however, be a corrective to the unreflective accumulation of data without exploring complementary or alternative analytic perspectives. It is often salutary to ask oneself: Am I paying enough attention to time and place? As we have already illustrated, in a hospital setting, temporal rhythms can be highly important organising principles of work. Weekly, daily, hourly cycles demarcate not just the tasks in hand, but also the kinds of events that are to take place, and hence the forms of talk that are exchanged as well as the tasks performed. During PA’s ethnographic study of the opera company, he tried to keep close track of the schedules of rehearsal and performance that were among the main driving features of the organisation as a whole: the cycle of rehearsals, music calls, costume fittings and the like prescribe much of the activity. Noting them does not only mean that one should take account of scheduling as an analytic phenomenon: timetables create and embody imperatives and constraints, and they are organisationally productive also. Of course, in organisational settings like businesses, schools and colleges, medical institutions, or prisons, timetables and schedules are readily visible. In other settings, temporal features such as cycles and repeats, schedules and timetables, are significant but can be unnoticed background features. Bringing them to the fore can create new analytic frames. There are major turning points and calendar rituals that are prominent markers of temporal cycles and changes. The most obvious are rites of passage: ceremonially marked transitions from one social status to another (also status-passages), that are both individual and collective. Initiations, graduations, promotions and the like would be among the clearest orders of ceremony and social demarcations of time. But it is not necessary only to study rites of passage in order to recognise that there can be liminal periods, and periods of intense significance, even in apparently mundane settings. Focusing on time can therefore increase awareness of organising principles and frameworks. In the same vein, places, spaces and movements can be taken-for-granted background features. Do we focus sufficiently on how our participants move into and out of our chosen social settings. How do they do so? Do they ‘make an entrance’? Do they implicitly announce themselves? Do actors display apology for their late arrival or their early departure? (SD apparently made no note about Patsy’s late

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arrival in the capoeira class we reproduced earlier in this chapter, but she perhaps should have.) What physical and symbolic boundaries do people have to cross in the course of their work or their ordinary lives? Do they personalise spaces, such as their work-stations? It is clear that one way of thinking about social worlds is to focus on the paths that participants trace out in the course of their everyday mobilities. It is not necessary to turn every ethnographic project into a study of ‘mobility’ in order to develop a spatial and mobile sensibility in the course of participant observation and analysis, which in turn can help develop an analytic edge that might otherwise prove elusive. There are now many studies of mobility and the significance of mobility in social life, and ‘mobile methods’ are now firmly established in the canon of qualitative research methods. They reflect the broader move towards mobilities as a specific field of study (Urry, 2007). Fields have been extended and modified by recent attention to studies of mobility and mobile methods (Bates and Rhys-Taylor, 2017; Edensor, 2010). While the classic urban ethnographies stressed speed and movement in the modern metropolis, they did not make mobility an explicit topic of inquiry. Contemporary fieldwork, on the other hand, not only deals with mobility, it also develops and uses mobile methods (e.g.Vannini, 2012). Such methods are themselves reflections of ubiquitous digital technology: videos, audio-recordings and images can be collected on the move, while wearable devices mean that both the ethnographer and participants can record their own mobility. In the same spirit, methods such as the ‘go-along’ can prove faithful to the everyday activities of social actors (Bergeron, Paquette and Poullaouec-Gonidec, 2014). They stand in contrast to the static or sedentary data collection of the single-site ethnography or the more conventional interview. Mobile methods are thus in themselves methods for the study of mobility itself (Merriman, 2014). They can be coupled with fieldwork emphasis on specific senses: Henshaw (2014) for instance, developed ‘smellwalking’ which is ‘used to identify local perceptions and the meaning of urban smellscapes, with the findings of these walks easily communicated through the use of illustrative tools such as small maps’ (p. 56). Our point here is that there is no reason to confine such approaches and methods to specialised sub-fields. In principle, any ‘field’ for fieldwork will be characterised by movements in, across and through spaces. If it should happen that mobility is not especially relevant, then we really ought to ask why not. Is stillness something to think about? Are actors confined to restricted space? Then there are issues of opportunity, access and equity.We really need to ask ourselves – especially in organisations – to what extent actors can control their own space and motion, and their control over the space and mobility of others. In many organisations, such control, such agency is a key aspect of seniority and status. There are many settings – such as bureaucracies – where junior workers are virtually confined to one constrained space while working – their desk or their workstation – while senior staff occupy territories that are much more extensive, and may well take them outside of the organisation altogether. Critical reflection during the earlier stages of analysis can be focused on an array of social positions. The personal and positional status of the ethnographer

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is, of course, of crucial significance throughout the ethnographic project. But it calls for analytic work during these earlier days of fieldwork. Likewise, reflection on the range of social positions among one’s hosts and participants is called for. Gender is an obvious issue. There is no gender-neutral position for the ethnographer, and it has potential implications for the conduct of fieldwork and for the resulting analysis. It is, for instance, important to check systematically whether one has paid proper attention to male and female participants. Or has our own gender-identity led us to interact differentially? We need to ask ourselves whether there might be differently gendered patterns of perception and action in the field: Do men and women, or girls and boys, express themselves in contrasting ways? This can be akin to issues of ‘sampling’ – checking whether one has inadvertently limited one’s ethnographic engagement by favouring male or female participants. More subtly, one has to reflect on whether one has implicitly started to create a gendered reconstruction of the local social world under observation. The generic issue of positionality extends more widely, of course. It can be too easy while in the field to affiliate oneself with particular types of actor, or to become too comfortable in particular kinds of situations, settings or events. When doing his opera ethnography, PA was conscious of the relative comfort of attending rehearsals in the studio and in the theatre. It was almost literally armchair ethnography. He had to make more effort to observe and think about the opera company from different points of view: administrative offices, or the props department for instance. He had to leave the comfort of venues in Cardiff and travel to see things on tour – which included watching the ‘get in’, as sets and costumes were delivered to the receiving theatre in Bristol or Birmingham, and waiting well into the night watching the stage crew dismantling the set from the evening’s performance and loading it onto the company’s trucks. Seeing the company’s performances from different points of view included attending theatre rehearsals and performances (including first nights), but also watching from the wings, observing things like the practical management of sets from a (literally) ‘backstage’ perspective. In pursuing ideas like this, we do need to bear in mind that ‘position’ here is not the same as ‘personhood’ and is certainly not defined by the researcher’s own self-identity.To use a different vocabulary, we are not simply dealing with the ethnographer’s ascribed characteristics (age, ethnicity, gender, orientation, etc.) as if they were fixed, given characteristics. Rather, it is about cultivating alternative perspectives or points of view. It is about actively challenging one’s mundane ‘position(s)’ in order to make strange and problematic phenomena in the field that might otherwise be taken for granted or overlooked. We also need to reflect on the ideas that we are starting to develop. As we have made clear, it is vital to start having and using ideas from the earliest phases of our fieldwork. It is important, however, to ensure that we are not using ideas in an uncritical manner. There is a recurrent danger of simply using our fieldwork to illustrate existing concepts or theories without really using the data to extend, modify or deepen those ideas. They need to be engaged with just as thoroughly as our data.

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Concepts in the social sciences have their own careers. They are often terms in common usage that are then transformed into key ideas, often by an iconic author – such as Goffman (1959) on self-presentation, Douglas (1966) on dirt, or Bourdieu (1984) on habitus. The concept is then endowed with special analytic significance, transforming its usage from the everyday or profane to the realm of consecrated academic discourse. That concept then becomes part of the takenfor-granted repertoire of the social scientist. It becomes widely dispersed, appearing in multiple textbooks and invoked in multiple journal papers. Its metaphorical journey can lead to a variety of different outcomes, several of which take it away from its original meaning, sometimes robbing that particular idea of its analytic edge. Particularly ‘successful’ ideas can become all-embracing, to the extent that they become catch-all terms. We shall identify some trajectories and stages in such a conceptual career. These are ideal-typical: they do not describe the fate of all concepts and ideas. But they furnish a framework for thinking about the kinds of analysis that successful ideas – widespread and often diffuse – can sustain. In that process, ideas that should defy over-simplification are transformed into a canon, and subject to ‘definitions’, that by their very nature constrain productive ideas into simple summaries. Definitions are the stock-in-trade of introductory textbooks and encyclopaedias that, by definition, trade in simplifications. They rely on summary statements of ‘key concepts’. They can also become the vectors of vulgarised views. As a concept is taken up, sometimes by successive generations of scholars, it becomes the sort of ‘buzzword’ of academic conferences and publications. In that process it can become simplified and incorporated into textbook knowledge. It can become an ‘elevator’ word or concept (Hacking, 1999, Lee, 2012, Lindblad and Popkewitz, 2004). Such an idea endows work with the appearance of greater significance, and it links it into a wider discourse. The concept thus can serve as an amplifier, affiliating the author with a wider community of scholarship. It can be a marker of discipleship. Hence, the idea can become a catch-all term: a kind of conceptual black hole that sucks stuff in and obliterates any original precision or nuance. Then the original idea, often in its simplified form, is subject to criticism, precisely because it is perceived to be over-simplified or to lack some important dimension, sometimes for failing to achieve what the original proponents never claimed in the first place.Then some scholars have to re-visit it in order to break it back down into its constituent parts, and/or reaffirming the original value of the concept. So our own use of existing ideas needs to be better than that. This is not a recipe for ditching existing ideas in the constant search for novelty. Originality or freshness does not mean that. But it does mean not relying on hackneyed ideas without subjecting them to critical scrutiny, modifying and extending them in the process. In other words, ideas are there to be used, but not to be followed slavishly or unthinkingly. There is little value in studying an organisation only to come up with the ‘idea’ that it is bureaucratic, or that it has formal and informal ‘rules’. They need to be addressed properly: who makes those rules? Who enforces them? What happens if rules are infringed? How are they justified? How are they transmitted to

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newcomers? And so on. It is all too easy to fall back on generic, catch-all terms and think that one has ‘analysed’ a social setting without going further or deeper. We illustrate this general argument with reference to stigma. Stigma displays many of the features we have just identified. It has a clear origin, at least as a sociological concept, associated with one famous author. Goffman’s original book (1961) has become one of the topoi of sociology and social psychology. That is, one of the stocks of familiar examples and references that authors can draw upon in developing an argument – an academic commonplace. It is a pertinent example precisely because it has enjoyed a very recent burst of attention among sociologists. But when deployed too freely and without careful attention to fieldwork data, it can be used to gloss over and obfuscate. If, for instance, we start to use ‘stigma’ as a shorthand synonym for ‘shame’, ‘embarrassment’, ‘discrimination’, ‘marginalisation’, ‘racism’, ‘colonialism’ and so on, then it starts to lose its specificity, and the idea itself simply becomes an academic token with little or no analytic purchase. It also starts to lose precisely what Goffman intended it to convey. In Goffman’s terms, stigma is a phenomenon of the interaction order; weak usages lose that sociological specificity, making it a property of individuals or groups, or even a personal emotion, and so obscure and dilute Goffman’s original analysis. In undertaking an early review of the research, and while confronting issues of analytic freshness or familiarity, it is worth reflecting not just on ‘data’ or on ‘preliminary findings’. We need to think hard about the actual methods we are using in the field. There are, obviously, generic methodological strategies – participant observation, interviewing, audio recording of talk and so on. But as we review our early work in the field, we might want to ask whether we ought to extend our methodological approaches. For instance, in thinking about places and spaces, are we paying sufficient attention to such phenomena, and if not, how can we incorporate appropriate methods? For instance, fieldnotes may not fully capture the spatial arrangements of social settings. One may, therefore, need to continue by incorporating more explicitly graphic modes of recording. Simple exercises in ‘mapping’ can help to bring to the fore otherwise overlooked features of the physical surroundings. Coupled with photography or video-recordings, such visual resources can help to transform an understanding of place and its potential significance. One does not have to become entirely focused on such things. It is not necessary to turn everything into a ‘visual ethnography’ in order to benefit from graphic representations of that sort. At the same time, pausing to think about places and spaces can also prompt a more explicit awareness of movement and mobility within and between spaces. That in turn can lead us to wonder whether we have fully explored actors’ means of navigation, as well as just their physical movements. We can ask ourselves not just how people move, but also how things and even information circulate. How does new travel (and how fast)? How does personal reputation circulate within a social network? Who are the key transmitters? What are the routes of transmission and dissemination? It can also help at this self-critical stage to think of mobility, spaces and place from a radically different perspective. If we are working in a hospital, for example, we might take the perspective of (say) a virus and think about

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how it might migrate. Obviously, a virus is not an agent, and any such thinking ought to be recognised for what it is – an analogy, an ‘as if ’ argument and not be treated as literal fact. Likewise, how does information about patients circulate within that hospital? What are the vectors, and in what form is that information stored or conveyed? With what speed does it travel? What are the points of origin for such information? Are there road-blocks and bottle-necks in that process of travel? These and similar questions will provoke us to think a little more fully and carefully about strategies of investigation and recording. That same generic topic of mobility can prompt us to think about our own mobility too.We might well ask ourselves whether we are getting too set in our ways, and staying put in settings where we feel comfortable. Perhaps, we should be thinking in terms of being more mobile in our own fieldwork practice. Many authors have now embraced approaches such as shadowing individuals as they go about their daily routines of work or leisure. The ‘go-along’ or the ‘walking interview’ can facilitate an analytic understanding of how people make sense of their immediate surroundings and how they use them. There is an easy assumption that talking to people (interviewing) ought ideally to take place in a relatively quiet place, free from distractions, and one can turn the idiomatic expression of ‘sit down and talk’ into a literally sedentary activity. But if you want to work with young people and to make sense of their everyday realities, then walking with them through their neighbourhood will yield information that an interview on neutral territory probably will not. The phenomenological experience of the street and the neighbourhood, the corner shop or the supermarket, the cafeteria or the bus-stop are less likely to be reconstructed through interview talk, however informal and conversational. The point is not to pursue such research strategies just because they are novel, but because they can help to prompt fresh evaluations of one’s strategy and the kinds of data that have been produced in the first phases(s) of fieldwork. It is useful, if not imperative, to give thought to such issues early on. Just pressing on with one’s original plans without considering alternatives is to restrict analytic opportunities and will limit one’s recurrent efforts to make a social world adequately ‘strange’. As we have pointed out already, it is important to review one’s methodological strategies from the early days of fieldwork. It is clear from the rest of this book that we favour participant observation as the foundation for ethnographic research. But that does not mean, from our point of view, that it should be used uncritically. Experience suggests that it is too easy to fall into a pattern of fieldwork that becomes a routine in itself. In an organisation, one can turn up at the regular round of meetings, or client-encounters, feeling comfortable that a resource-base of observations and fieldnotes or recordings is building up. And in many cases, that can in fact be adequate. But it should at least be based on a conscious decision, not just allowed to develop as a matter of comfort and familiarity. So critical reflection needs to be focused on whether methods are being relied on too easily: Is this the only way of doing it? Do I need to step outside of my comfort zone, observe somewhere else, or observe differently? Likewise, the ‘observation’ of participant observation is not just a matter of passively watching events. It

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is an active effort of concentration. So, in reviewing our own work, we need perhaps to ask: What is it that I am really focusing on? Do I need to change that focus? Do I need to concentrate on more things, or different things? It is dangerously easy to develop an enthusiast’s commitment and loyalty to a particular method and pattern of work. Alongside our history of arguing that ethnographers need to fight familiarity, we have argued that too much qualitative research, including some of that done as part of ethnography, has been un-sceptical, un-sociological and even naïve in its treatment of and enthusiasms for narrative data. Most social sciences, and most empirical areas, have been enriched by narrative research done in the past 20 years (Atkinson and Delamont, 2006a, 2006b). However, there are some distinctly unscholarly, and frankly naive, writings on narrative around. The boom in illness narratives is one case in point (Atkinson, 1997b, 2009b). Collecting a narrative whether as part of an ethnography or as the main data collection method in a project does not provide a window through which we can see, feel and hear ‘the truth’ about any social phenomenon. Narratives are produced by social actors, they are performative, they are speech acts, and they can only be useful to social science if that is recognised. (Of course a narrative can be entertaining or frightening or have a pedagogic purpose or be a great basis for poetry or drama or fiction….but those are not the only concerns of social science.) Along with a naïve belief that a narrative is a transparent, ‘neutral’ window through which we can see social action, there is also a retreat from analysis in favour of presenting the words of the informant ‘untouched’ by the social scientist in the name of ‘authenticity’ or ‘democracy’.That is equally an abrogation of the social scientists’ duty, to analyse data. Consequently, if interviews are to be conducted, it is vital that they are reviewed both for content and for methodological reflection. It is simply unacceptable to treat interviews, however conversational, however narrative the results, as if they gave transparent access to respondents’ experiences, memories, activities, values, or whatever the researcher is interested in. We do not have to assume that respondents are dissembling when we say that they are engaged in performances. It is inevitable that personal accounts and narratives enact autobiographical work. They inevitably shape and frame the reconstruction of past events, or the projection of future plans. The narrator – equally inevitably – positions her or himself in the telling. Indeed, it is worth reminding ourselves that positioning and positionality are complex issues. The interview narrator positions herself, and we know that that involves speech acts of justification, blame, luck, hard work, and so on. We should mirror that analytic insight by acknowledging that the positionality of the interviewer is just as much of an enactment. Neither performance is a transparent revelation of an essential self, nor is it acceptable to act as if it were. Methodological reflection needs to be thorough and to be symmetrical. Narratives are performances, they are accounts that must be analysed, and not just celebrated naively as ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ (Atkinson and Delamont, 2006a, 2006b). The arguments about the interview, rehearsed by Atkinson (1997) and Atkinson and Silverman (1997), apply just as strongly to academics’ autobiographies and confessional accounts (Delamont, 2003). When sociologists collect interview

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data, especially narratives, from informants (whether elderly peasants or Nobel Prize winning scientist), they ought to recognise that accounts are not a consistent and coherent representation of some independent reality. They are rhetorical performances which create and recreate the realities they describe, which have to be analysed. The classic Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) study of biochemists’ accounts of a scientific discovery and the surrounding scientific controversy should have set the agenda for all future sociological research that uses informants’ talk. Atkinson and Silverman (1997) argued that as the western word had become an interview society, it was essential that sociologists differentiated their analytic and theorised use of interview data rather than recapitulating the use of personal stories in the media. Although that paper is much cited, it has not changed sociological practice. Every week we come across sociological work which uses informants’ talk unanalysed, or under analysed, and relies on it as if it were an entirely unproblematic factual description of reality: see Silverman (2017) for an elaboration of this point. The same is true for the methodological strategy of autoethnography. The term actually has several uses and connotations. It can mean the study of a group or culture of which one is already a member or practitioner. To that extent, it can mean much the same as ‘insider’ research (Hayano, 1982). More commonly and more recently, it means treating the author/researcher as the main focus of attention. The ethnographer’s own experiences, emotions, responses and reflections become the topic(s) of analysis, rather than the doings of ‘others’. This is often coupled with an emphasis on the emotional aspects of life and work. But autoethnographic accounts are no more ‘authentic’ than any other kinds of self-presentation and reconstruction. Hence, our recommendation for critical appraisals of research strategies and methods as well as reflections and preliminary analysis of one’s ‘data’. This calls for critical reflective practice throughout the research process.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on systematic and disciplined ways of preventing the commonest problem that ethnographers create for themselves: accumulating piles of data that have not been organised, duplicated or thought about analytically.The impetus for the book on analysis by Coffey and Atkinson (1996) was to provide a text that could be recommended to novice researchers who had a heap of disorganised data, by offering some useful analytic strategies. (It was not aimed only at such readers, of course.) Here we have stressed how dysfunctional it is to collect data without proper attention: fewer data well organised, safely stored and regularly revisited are far more use than unexamined piles of notes or unconsidered interviews.There are few things worse than thinking in terms of a fieldwork phase, followed by an ‘analysis’ phase, when one settles down to previously unconsidered data. Organising one’s materials and organising one’s thoughts need to proceed in parallel throughout the course of the research. In the next chapter, we discuss further aspects of data collection, when the insights of initial strategies explored in this chapter inform the ethnographer’s further research efforts.

5 REVISITING DATA COLLECTION

Good fieldwork is self-conscious and self-critical. As a result of the initial analysis, it may be that the same data collecting strategies can continue, but it may also be necessary to change. In Chapter 3, we focused on the initial stages of data collection or the ‘first days in the field’ as Geer (1964) memorably characterised them. Chapter 4 dealt with the initial analysis that needs to be done early in the fieldwork.That initial academic analysis needs to be accompanied by a more prosaic stocktaking exercise, which should be central to refocusing the data collection. That is the academic analysis and the stocktaking are mutually reinforcing. The stocktaking provides a good opportunity to do a thorough review of what the aims and desired outcomes of the fieldwork were before it began, and what they currently are. If they have changed enormously, it is important to think about why that has happened, and write an account of the reasons. If the research is part of a PhD that change needs to be discussed and agreed with the doctoral supervisors and to be reported in the eventual thesis, and if the research has external funding, the funding body may need to be told. There is a place for a checklist of ‘facts’, revisiting what was submitted to the IRB or ethics committee before the project began, the original risk analysis, what the foreshadowed problems were, and what the initial analysis has thrown up, as well as some careful thought about the strategies for making the familiar strange. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with discovering that the foreshadowed problems were misguided: the great strength of ethnography is that it is led by what is happening in the fieldsite, not by the plans made in pre-fieldwork ignorance. In the early stages of the fieldwork, it may be that the setting seems to be very familiar, very similar to what the ethnographer expected. It would be quite possible to be doing a study of the feminist Starhawk’s neo-pagan Reclaiming Witchcraft Halloween Spiral Dance in San Francisco in 2020 and finding that it all seemed ‘the same’ as when Magliocco (2004: 122–126) participated in it in 1995. Equally an ethnographer could be studying craft apprentices in Rhethymnon, Crete in 2020 and find

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everything seemed to be ‘the same’ as Herzfeld (2004) found in 1992 and 1993–94. Kondo (1990: 138–40) did an ethnography of Japanese family business in 1978–81 and describes how kinship and marriage patterns, succession-planning and the survival of the business are interrelated. It would be possible to go to Tokyo in 2020 and find an apparently unchanged world of family businesses and kinship patterns. If the early days of the research seem to be ‘discovering’ that everything appears initially to be the same as the earlier, well-known study, this can mean that the research is going smoothly, but it can mean that the researcher has to work harder to explore the setting.To our knowledge, no one has been ‘back’ to those three specific settings, but more generally researchers on neo-paganism, apprenticeships or family firms could discover continuities: but would need also to be self-consciously contrastive. In educational ethnography, for example, this is the time to focus on whether the school where the ethnographer is observing is coming across, in the notes and preliminary analysis, as ‘the same’ as every other school in every other ethnographic monograph. If it is, then the analytic task is to decide whether that is because the school really is ‘like’ every other school ethnographers have studied, or could be seen and described very differently if other data were collected or a contrasting analysis were conducted. There may be a strong case to argue that a school ethnography of a state secondary school conducted in England in 2020 which is accurately and faithfully revealing many basic similarities with the work of Lambart (1976) and Ball (1981) about teachers’ strategies, or pupils’ views, or interactions in the laboratory or on the hockey field, is reporting a genuine finding.That finding would be that national policies and reforms introduced in England between 1988 and 2019 did not change the mundane realities of the everyday lives of pupils or teachers. If that continuity is clearly shown by the evidence, that could be an important finding that needs to be publicised. The original ORACLE (Observational Research and Classroom Learning Environment) project conducted from Leicester University between 1976 and 83, was partially replicated twenty years later (Delamont and Galton, 1986; Hargreaves and Galton, 2002). The ethnographic research on the early weeks of secondary education in two areas of England showed that the years between 1977–78 and 1997–98 had not produced many changes in schooling, at the level of what an eleven-year-old did at 2.00 p.m. on Thursday in a maths lesson even though England had a major Act of Parliament in 1988 that supposedly reformed English state schooling. In fact the ORACLE ethnographers even found that, in 1997– 98 in at least one school the same teachers were teaching the same lessons to the children of the pupils they had taught in 1977–78, in the same rooms with the same books. It is entirely possible that state schooling in England does not change much whatever national policies are implemented by central government. However, it is also possible that using one or two of our strategies could have revealed some important changes or discovered that the continuity was more apparent than real.

Fresh strategies Once the ‘initial encounter’ or ‘first days’ phase seems to be over, it is time to force oneself to strive to keep the observations fresh. Leaving the strategies slightly in the

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background at first, we propose in this section some ways to address that task. Here we propose sensory ethnography and a focus on mobile methods. One important thing is to use all five senses. Most ethnographers report a great deal of what was seen and heard, and of course looking and listening, using the eyes and the ears are perennially vital for guaranteeing good data. However, although there should be new things to watch and hear as the fieldwork progresses, it is useful to augment what is revealed by those two senses with the use of the other three. Smell, taste and touch are often neglected. It is not clear whether ethnographers do not use those senses, or do not record what data they produced, or do not report those phenomena in their publications. Precisely because they are usually not reported, and therefore probably not been usually recorded by the ethnographer, in line with the leitmotif of the book, here we start our discussion with ideas about using them to defamiliarise the fieldsite. Riseborough’s (1988) study of a non-Jewish woman teaching cookery to girls in a Jewish school does not report either what his key informant ‘Annie Body’ thought about the taste of the kosher food she had learnt about and was teaching her pupils to cook, nor does he report tasting any of the food himself. In complete contrast, Paxson’s (2013) ethnography of artisan cheese makers regularly focuses on the taste of the cheeses, both as described by her informants who made them, by their customers, and in her own mouth. As a person who has studied a range of makers, she has probably tasted more varieties of sheep, goat and cow cheeses than many of her informants have, and so tastes are a key theme. In Fine’s (1998) study of fungi seekers (morels in America are particularly prized), he reports that the foragers had no interest in using their finds in unfamiliar gourmet recipes, but just fried them in margarine. Fine does not report whether he ever tasted his informants’ ‘cooking’ of these delicacies. In his research in upmarket restaurant kitchens he reports on the way food was ‘forced’ upon him (Fine 1996: 237–8). That is, he was offered both small pieces to taste and larger items to eat and had he refused them his rapport with the staff would have been jeopardised. He says little about the smell of the dishes in the different restaurants. In the study of a vocational catering course (Fine, 1985), one focus is the way students from homes where ‘exotic’ or ‘elite’ food such as olives, oysters and asparagus were not eaten had to learn what they should taste like so they could cook them. Fine (personal communication) tasted what the students prepared. The most famous discussion of using taste is by Stoller, whose work is clearly influential on Fine, who quotes Stoller on how quickly ethnographers become accustomed to the smells, sounds and tastes of a fieldsite (Fine, 1996: 239; Stoller, 1989: 4). Class differences in food appreciation are a major theme in Fine’s restaurant study, as is the difference between the food tastes of the vocational trainees as opposed to those of the clientele they will later cook for. Here, of course, it is vital to treat taste not only in its literal sense, but also in its more abstract and theoretical sense: as a category of choice and preference. Bourdieu (1984) is not a very useful as a guide to empirical work, but watching out for differences in taste between the participants in any field setting whether literal taste, or taste in music, clothing, art, literature, mass media or sport are worth attention. Long ago Becker (1951) wrote

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about how the musical tastes of professional jazz musicians (i.e. what they wanted to play and enjoyed performing) were different from the music their paying audiences wanted to listen, or dance, to. Touch is a parallel case. Ethnographers probably do touch things, but it is not usually clear if they do so systematically and if they recorded what they handled, but touch is rarely given much space in publications. Yet fabrics, for example, are essentially tactile. The symbolic system of clothing in the fieldsetting whether teenage boys in California (Pascoe, 2012), men in a British gym (Crossley, 2004, 2006), neo-pagans (Foltz and Griffin, 1996) are more likely to be recorded than how they feel on the body of the wearer. Carr (2015) for example describes carefully how the requirement for newly initiated adherents of Cuban Santería to wear nothing but white for a year after the rite of passage is highly problematic in urban America but reports very little about what the clothes felt like on the body. In retrospect we have both been guilty of this. The ORACLE fieldwork in Ashburton (the pseudonym for a town in the English midlands) was done by SD in 1977 based in a spare room in a council house on the estate where most of the children at the two schools being studied lived. SD slept on brushed nylon sheets, as did the children and their families, judging by what hung out on washing lines in the gardens. Brushed nylon bedding is very different from the polycotton we slept on at home then or the pure Egyptian cotton we have now, but SD wrote nothing about that. Touch is central to Atkinson’s (2021) work on crafts. The experience of creating pots in a ceramics studio is quite literally ‘hands-on’ research. Any ethnographic description of a ceramics studio, throwing and turning pots, without some account of touch would be jejune indeed. The craft knowledge of ceramics is thoroughly embodied. It depends on a choreography, a coordination of eyes with hands and feet (controlling the potter’s wheel). The feel of the clay, its cool slipperiness in wet hands, the pressure of fingers on the clay as one raises it to form a pot – these are all integral to a phenomenological grasp of the craft work. One can, of course, observe the work of skilled potters, but the direct experience of clay, the sense of tools in the hand, of the feel of the clay – these contribute to a genuinely participant observation for which there is no substitute. This is an example of carnal ethnography. Smell is more frequently mentioned by ethnographers when unpleasant and unfamiliar than when it is familiar and pleasant, but both broad categories ought to be recorded and reported. Schools, prisons, hospitals and care homes for the elderly do produce ethnographic texts with some detail about what researchers smell, but studies of other settings are often silent about smell. The different workplaces across the variety of locations when PA (2006a) studied the opera company, from the wigmakers’ studio to the staff canteen would enable him to ‘know’ where he was if put there blindfolded. A doctoral student PA supervised did an ethnography of a school for blind children in Libya. He found that they used to smell what perfume their teacher was wearing each day and decided what mood she was in by the scent she had chosen. Focusing on whether or not you have recorded taste, touch and smell, and if not, self-consciously doing so for a few days, is a good way to begin the main phase of data collection.We return to the most common senses, listening and seeing.

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Sound All ethnographers listen, although as Forsey (2010) pointed out there is less discussion about listening in the text books on ethnography than there is on observing. In the main fieldwork period, it is wise to begin a careful stocktaking of what has been heard, what has so far not been heard and what cannot, and so will not ever be, thinking about practicalities and ethics. If there are things that cannot, or should not be heard by the researcher, it may be possible and desirable to see if those things do or do not exist, and if they do, how long they take and who participates, as well as recording the impossibility of listening to them. A good example here would be a study of the Roman Catholic cathedrals in, for example, Naples and Dublin. In such cathedrals, a listening exercise could be focused on which languages the tour guides bringing in parties of visitors speak, because that is public talk. It would be absolutely impossible to listen to the priest hearing confessions, or the parishioners making them. The secrecy of the confessional is fundamental to the Roman Catholic Church’s policy and practice. However, it would be entirely possible to sit in the cathedrals with a view of the confessional boxes, count and categorise by age, sex and clothing who entered them, and time how long confession took. That would provide parallel observational data counting how many candles, flowers and petitions were placed in front of the statues and pictures of the various saints and manifestation of the virgin to discover which were the popular ones. Wilson (1980) did exactly that in a selection of churches in central Paris. He discovered that the saints being actively petitioned in the late 1970s were those popular in Spain and Portugal, rather than those historically important in France, and thus he could see an effect of migrant labour in the French capital. A parallel exercise, looking carefully at the parish notices in a church hall in central London in 2012 when SD was attending a capoeira festival, showed that the active groups aimed at mothers of young children were for Polish or Portuguese-speaking parishioners, and only the ‘pensioner focused’ groups were advertised only in English. Any music in a setting needs to be listened to, even if the actors are apparently ignoring it. DeNora (2000) did an ethnography of music in ordinary life, which of course put music at the front of her accounts of several settings. Reading that book is a productive way to remind ourselves that music is not ‘background’ noise but an important part of the setting’s social reality. DeNora’s study of music in exercise classes, and the use of different musics by shops to signal what sort of clientele should enter their premises to buy their clothes, reveals how actually listening to and recording those sounds is informative. DeNora’s work on clothes retailing is different from Entwistle (2009) who does not mention the soundscapes of the different clothing sections in the London department store where she explores the aesthetics of fashion. She contrasted the work of the fashion buyer for the haute couture department with that of the buyers for the cruise and leisure wear department, which sold very different (to the expert) women’s clothing. If the departments had music, or contrasting musics, she does not mention it. In the imaginary ethnography of the cathedrals in Naples and Dublin, paying attention to the music would be a central strategy.

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Generally, ethnographers listen to conversations and discussions that the actors in their field setting are having when they are visibly present. It is useful to focus on what kinds of talk are on-going in the setting, such as insults, jokes, atrocity stories, contemporary folktales, memories and memorialisations, talk replete with contrastive rhetoric. In addition, any fieldsite will have traffic noise, fire alarms, public address messages, music, aircraft overhead, noisy heating and plumbing systems and equipment. It is quite usual to discover that the regulars no longer ‘hear’ these noises and therefore important for the ethnographer to record them while they are still noticeable to her. A hairdresser will have one sort of noise, a nail bar another. All these sounds should be recorded, and many need analysis. The first area of what an ethnographer may hear that needs to be explored is lies. It is quite common for observers to be told deliberate or unrecognised untruths. The literature on ethnography is full of stories about how actors in the fieldsite told them outright lies: that is things that the tellers knew were wrong. Foltz and Griffin (1996) report how, when at an outdoor neo-pagan event, they were told that the lesbians hung purple bras outside their tents as a signal about their sexual orientation to fellow witches. Such lies are obviously hard to spot initially but as the fieldwork progresses may become apparent. Gentle questioning later in the research may reveal that lies were told earlier. Findings may pile up evidence that something said was probably untrue. Actors in the fieldsite may lie to ethnographers because it is a good joke for them as insiders. Other things that are not ‘true’ told to the ethnographer may not be told as deliberate ‘lies’: people can believe that both good and bad things are true, when they are not. The ethnographer, by the nature of the research, may come across as a naïve innocent who ‘deserves’ to be fooled, or teased. If the people being studied are in any way underdogs such as pupils in school, prisoners, mental patients, a subaltern ethnic group, they will be suspicious of outsiders who promise confidentiality or secrecy, and testing that is a sensible survival strategy. Equally an occupational group who fear getting a bad press such as social workers, prison officers or the police may wish to avoid the ethnographer’s scrutiny of some of their everyday work until they trust the outsider. That was the point of Beynon (1985) being told by a master that he ‘now’ felt able to cane boys in front of the researcher. These two kinds of ‘lies’ can often be overcome by the researcher who keeps their promises and works hard to show respect for their informants. Understanding these is part of reducing the gradient of unfamiliarity. The things that actors genuinely believe to be true are particularly interesting. As Davidson (1998: xxii) pointed out: ‘… misrepresentations are just as interesting as representations, and even more useful, when you can identify them, are outrageous lies.’ This is an idea derived from French poststructuralism, especially Foucault, but as Davidson uses it to inform his research on food and other pleasures in ancient Greece, especially Athens, he points out that The most obvious and unquestioned things may never make it to texts at all [because] eating was a set of banal practices that no one considered worthy of remark (p. xxiii)

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Davidson points out that everyday consumption is rarely mentioned. So texts that address something directly will probably be ‘the least interesting’ because those direct mentions are probably contrasts or exceptions used for rhetorical effects that prove the rule. Informants can tell ethnographers things that they believe, or that strike them as important, which are not literally ‘true’. The ethnographer needs to grasp the social and cultural significance of such speech events. In the capoeira community in the UK, there is a belief that ‘real’ capoeira uses Portuguese, the language of Brazil, especially as the language of the songs; proper followers of capoeira, it is believed, respect the cultural and linguistic authenticity of their Brazilian teachers. There are rumours of a group in Paris who sent their teacher back to Brazil and began to teach themselves in French, and to sing in French. There is no evidence that such a group actually exists, or ever did, but there is great rhetorical power in it. The believer or teller of the story is reinforcing the authenticity of their own group. Hearing the story as good data does not depend on its ‘truth’ but on what is ‘meant’ by it. Insults can be very illuminating about a subculture or setting and it is vital to record who does the insulting and who are the victims of them. Then the ethnographer needs to find out if the insults are categorised as ‘banter’ by everyone or are experienced as hurtful to some or many of the victims. In some environments, it can be normal to tell men who are not performing well that they are ‘like girls’, or that some male is ‘a big girl’s blouse’ but the ethnographer needs to explore how those attacks are received. Insults that are misunderstood by those who are on the receiving end can be illuminating for the research. In the 1960s, a school teacher called some adolescent girls ‘silly prigs’, but they heard it as ‘silly pricks’, a vulgar obscenity and were very upset. When this was reported back to the teacher, she had never heard the word ‘prick’ as an insult, and did not know the vulgar meaning.The girls had never learnt the word ‘prig’ and did not know its meaning. That incident revealed the culture gap or language gap between staff and pupils. Focusing on who insults whom, openly or sotto voce, in what language(s), and who receives the insult as a joke and can retaliate and who cannot, is revealing about power, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and physical embodiment in any setting. Many cultures and subcultures have competitive, stylised ritual insults, verbal duels and other verbal jousting. Public ones are more frequently reported among men, but that may be an artefact of the research done. Competitive verbal performances have been reported from Turkey and Greece, but the best-known research comes from studies of verbal art, variously documented as ‘talkin jive’ or ‘doin the dozens’ (Labov, 1997) and other interactional styles, such as ‘tantalisin’ (Edwards, 1997); see also Stokoe and Edwards (2007) on racialised insults. Any ethnographer who finds such a rich oral tradition in their fieldsite is lucky but needs to focus on ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and those excluded from the competition. Jokes are a good indication of whether the researcher is getting ‘inside’ the sub-culture. If the researcher does not ‘get the joke’, then there is work to do on understanding the setting. Cottrell (2004) contains an account of how violin players tell jokes in which all viola players are ‘worthless, stupid or ignorant’ (p. 134). These were

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‘insider’ jokes among string players, and of course, no violinist explicitly denigrates viola players when among non-musicians. Atrocity stories are widespread in many occupations and institutions, as Dingwall (2001) and Hafferty (1991) demonstrated. Analysing these stories is productive for deepening understanding of the fieldsite. Hafferty collected atrocity stories, from medical students in the USA, that circulate widely and reveal which aspects of the course are particularly feared or stressful. Such stories are a variety of contemporary folklore (or urban legends as they are sometimes called) often reveal tensions and anxieties that may never be voiced explicitly in any other form of discourse. One sub-genre is the stories shared among school children and university students. Measor and Woods (1983) and SD (1991) gathered the scary stories that circulated among pupils in Britain about the secondary (High) school they were scheduled to attend. Analysing these stories provides insights into the culture of the children or students, and beliefs or fears about peer culture, specific subjects (especially Science and PE) and even supernatural forces. Mellor and Delamont (2011) show the persistence of the themes in these stories over a twenty-year period. Treating these contemporary folktales as one route into understanding the fault lines and tensions in any setting is academically productive. The contemporary folklore research collected by Fine, Campion-Vincent and Heath (2005) reveals how racial tensions in the USA are apparent in the stories while the folklore in Fine (1992) reveals fear and ambivalence about capitalist corporations. There is no clear-cut distinction between these contemporary legends and circulating conspiracy theories. At the time of writing, two such conspiracy theories were being actively circulated: one set concerned the upgrade of UK broadband to 5G , the other related but slightly different set of conspiracy theories associate Covid-19 with erroneous ideas about vaccination that began with the claims about a childhood vaccination and autism, and produced an anti-vax movement (Reich, 2018). Any field site will have some believers in such legends and conspiracies. Speakers’ use of contrastive rhetoric is a useful source of ethnographic insight. If actors in a setting contrast what they (sensible people) do with what ‘others’ (‘outsiders’) do, such rhetorical comparisons can be illuminating. At St Luke’s, the elite girls’ school where SD did her doctoral research, the senior teachers regularly contrasted the ‘right sort’ of parent (a doctor, lawyer or university professor who had cultural capital as well as money was the ‘right’ sort) contrasted with the ‘wrong sort’ of family who ‘had made all their money in scrap metal’ and had money but no class or culture. The daughters of the latter were not as desirable as pupils because their families lacked what Bourdieu called cultural capital, said the teachers. Ethnographers may often be present when memories are shared, and these can be revealing about the contemporary culture. The talk of elderly craftsmen in Rethymnon (Crete) recorded by Herzfeld (2004) was revealing about social change in the city. Of course ‘memories’ cannot, must not, be assumed to be ‘true’ but their currency provides insight. Talk about important memorials, physical or symbolic, may not seem to be relevant to a study of the setting today, but in fact the importance of these to the actors may be far greater than is immediately apparent.

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Looking Observing is so central to ethnography that it seems strange to highlight it. However, our purpose here is to argue that once the initial encounters are over the ethnographers should be careful to think about what they are watching, who they are watching and where they are watching from.The main fieldwork period is the time to focus on actors in the field setting who are usually ignored, taking gender seriously and taking race and ethnicity seriously. It is time to ask which spaces are all male, or all female, or all children or all older people. There may be spaces that are de facto segregated by race, ethnicity or religion. It may also take time to discover how the spaces are ‘divided’. SD once studied a school which had two staff rooms which, it transpired, were segregated by the trade union the teachers belonged to, and the seating patterns in each were divided up between football supporters and those who did not like soccer and then between the fans of the two teams in that city Coalthorpe City and Coalthorpe Rangers. It took several weeks and three observers to decipher these divisions. There is educational research which showed that teachers very rarely go into the pupils’ lavatories which makes them a very different space and one much less overseen by adults when compared to others in the school, such as classrooms or playing fields. Recording clothing is useful. Very few men record what they wore in the field. Dick Hobbs (1988) and Emmanuel David (2017) are honourable exceptions. Some women do. More importantly the clothing choices (if any) of the actors in the setting need to be recorded and ‘clothing’ here includes jewellery, piercings, hair style and colour and tattoos. The art teachers in Sikes, Measor and Woods (1985) prided themselves on dressing in an arty, ‘bohemian’ way so as not to look like ordinary teachers. The science teachers interviewed in the same project made no such selfconscious claims about their dress. The art teachers were signalling to colleagues and pupils that their subject was creative, non-stereotyped, and different from other curricula offerings. To reinforce such a claim by informants, it is sensible to record both what art teachers wear and what the rest of the staff do. In the glassblowing study PA recorded that it was important to have footwear that was safe: stout, heatproof and non-slip. Pascoe (2012) is exemplary in providing a detailed account of how she dressed for her fieldwork in a California high school, including what kind of backpack she used.

Absences Susie Scott (2019) has recently written about the sociological importance of absences and of ‘nothing’. This is certainly a valuable way to focus the fieldwork and make it ‘strange’. Once the early days are over, it is useful to prepare a list of absences as they occur, both those in the ethnographic data, and those in the setting. These two lists are a useful planning tool for the main phase of data collection. Studying when, and to whom, things are closed can be illuminating.The ethnographer’s absences may be caused by limitations placed on the research during access negotiations, or by a lack

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of systematic decisions made and then followed up about where to go, when, what and whom to observe. The latter can be remedied and should be reflected upon in the rest of the field diary. The former needs to be carefully recorded, and perhaps challenged or renegotiated as the investigator progresses. If an institution operates 24 hours a day, the observer may need to organise their fieldwork to see what goes on at 2.0 a.m. and 9.0 p.m. not just in their normal working hours. One example of lost observations – and hence lost phenomena – is provided by Lois’s monograph on mountain search-and-rescue volunteers in California (Lois, 2003). The research is explicitly described as ‘ethnography’, classified as a research strategy of observing and participating as well as conducting in-depth interviews. Lois spent six years in the field, and she tells her readers that: ‘I kept detailed field notes of my participation in group activities, including missions, teaching sessions, post-training and post-mission social hours at bars, and the biweekly business meetings’ (p. 38). And yet, in the published monograph, the arguments are developed and illustrated exclusively through interview data. Now, the interviews in themselves display interesting and pertinent issues – such as the expression of ‘heroism’ – but the overall balance is odd, and frustrating. We learn far too little about how searchand-rescue is achieved (either in training or in emergencies). There is emphasis on ‘emotions’, but action is missing. The irony is that the monograph is justified in terms of participant observation. No doubt the fieldnotes informed the analysis, but the core phenomena are invisible. Desmond’s (2007) monograph on firefighters in the USA shows the same pattern. Despite the fact that Desmond was undertaking participant observation, there is an odd dearth of direct observations, despite the fact that he maintained detailed fieldnotes. There are a great many reconstructed conversations (presented as if they were verbatim), but very little account of observed actions or interactions. This is an all-too-common feature of published ethnographies: despite extensive observation and participation, it is recorded or reported talk that forms the main basis of the written account.

Practical activities It is not necessary to approach things from a purely ethnomethodological perspective. There are plenty of ethnographic studies that do pay close attention to actors’ practical achievements. Some sociologists and anthropologists have investigated phenomena by learning how to acquire the necessary techniques. For instance, Marchand (2012) worked with mosque-builders in Yemen; O’Connor (2005, 2006) gained practitioner competence in glass-blowing; Chernoff learned the techniques of African drumming (1979). It is not necessary to learn and participate directly, however, and there are plenty of settings where such participation would be impossible. But it is still possible to pay careful attention to exactly and in detail what social actors are engaged in; see, by way of example, Dudley (2014) on guitar-making, or Warren and Gibson (2014) on surfboard makers.These monographs are not ‘perfect’ in all respects, but they do help to illustrate what it means to treat practical activity seriously. It is, on the other hand, distinctly odd to read accounts of workplaces that

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tell us little or nothing about what the work actually consists of, or of artistic activities that say far too little about the actual content of the artistic production.

Ignorance(s) and non-knowledge The main fieldwork is the time to focus upon ignorance: not only the ethnographer’s ignorance, but as importantly the ignorance(s) and non-knowledge of the actors in the setting.The capoeira research was enormously improved by Neil Stephens’s learning to play the most technical instrument (the berimbau) and then being able to talk about how it works (Stephens and Delamont, 2006a). Everything he learnt, especially all the physical moves, how all five instruments were played, the words of the songs, and the ringcraft (malicia) – a tacit skill – meant that the two-handed research was much better than it would ever have been with only SD observing classes. In a similar way, SD took evening classes in Portuguese in support of her ethnographic work. Generally, if the ethnographer is watching something she does not know about, it is a good idea to learn at least something of what the actors know. When PA was planning his research in the opera company, he took an evening class in music theory so that he could begin to read a score. He then embarked on an undergraduate degree course on opera studies. That was far more engagement with the history, musicology and prosopography of opera than ‘necessary’ for that particular ethnography, or for the subsequent work on bel canto masterclasses – not least because many of the informants he worked with had relatively little expert knowledge of opera as an art form, in its historical or cultural contexts. (Obviously, they knew how to sing, to play their instrument, to make props and so on.) But many people involved in the everyday work of making an opera may have a rather restricted appreciation of opera in general. When the ethnographer reduces her own ignorance or non-knowledge, it is important to be self-conscious about what is being learnt, and vigilant about not trying to teach the actors in the setting, or to appear to be coaching them.The purpose of acquiring practical knowledge in situ is not to challenge local knowledge, nor to instruct the actors. Nothing is gained by becoming a know-all. Equally, we are not trying to ‘become’ an expert.Trying to acquire some of the local knowledge should always be done in order to scrutinise it, and sometimes that means knowing what it is we are examining.

Multiple mobilities: Embodiment in the ‘world on the move’ The past 20 years have seen ethnographic writers, and sociological theorists, focus far more on movement and mobility than was common in the twentieth century. Qualitative researchers, especially ethnographers, have argued for what Kusenbach (2003, 2012) called the ‘go along’ in which data are gathered by, and while, physically moving with the key actors. At a more theoretical level Urry (2007: 3) argued that sociology needed to adopt a mobilities paradigm, writing that ‘it seems as if all the world is on the move’ and arguing for a ‘mobilities paradigm’. Our intention here is to show that Urry’s work is another acceptable way to force the ethnographer

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to make the fieldsite strange (see also Sheller and Urry, 2006). That is, there is no need to accept Urry’s ideas as a ‘paradigm’ in order to use them as a powerful way to re-think the focus of the on-going fieldwork and even to analyse the data in a preliminary way. Here we summarise the nine types (or contexts) of movement that, Urry argued, should be the focus of sociological research (2007: 39–43) in the order that best suits our arguments in this chapter, rather than that deployed by the original author. Urry used the nine types to explore a variety of classic sociological problems in arguing for the study of mobilities: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

moving bodies transfer points or liminal places virtual movement (through, e.g. blogs and tweets) moving informants by moving with them imagined and anticipated movements memories of past movements ‘places’ that themselves move (e.g. ships) objects that can be followed around time-space diaries

Across all these types of movement and in any fieldwork site the mobilities can be actual or symbolic, and, of course, all mobilities are interpreted by humans. They are not simply ‘facts’.

Moving bodies Urry separates the importance of sociological researchers observing ‘people’s movements’ and of focusing on how movement is performed including social interactions related to mobilities. He devotes a chapter to the study of meetings which offers ways to study apparently static times and spaces in any fieldsite, as well as reminding all of us to record where we are physically in the site, and when and why we move, as well as the movements of the actors in that setting.

Transfer points and liminal places Urry (p. 42) focuses more on physical transfer points, such as waiting rooms, airport lounges, stations and parks, than he does on the symbolic transfers that expose actors to liminality (van Gennep, 1909).To fight familiarity, a focus on the symbolic movements as well as the physical ones can provide new insights into any setting.

Virtual movements Urry (2007, 40) argues that sociologists should ‘explore the imagined and virtual mobilities of people’ through analysis of emails, blogs, texting, web-sites, and other on-line sources, alongside studying ‘real’ off-line travel. Fieldwork in any setting where there are

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on-line communications, even if the main focus of the project is the off-line lives of the actors , has to take account of the imagined or virtual mobilities in them.

Studying moving informants by moving with them Urry argued for the ethnographer using ‘co-present immersion’ (p. 40) and ‘walking with’ or travelling with actors in the research setting: moving while doing ethnography. This proposition covers many facets of traditional ethnography, and the many mobile methods currently fashionable (e.g. Kusenbach, 2012; Moles, 2019).Vaninni’s (2012) ethnography of the ferries that link the islands off the west coast of Canada is an example of an ethnographer who moved with his informants. He gathered data from different types of passenger such as school children, regular commuters, and tourists, to understand what the movement meant to them.

Imagined and anticipated movements Urry (p. 41) proposes that the virtual mobilities that he advocates should be more central to sociological analysis. He advocates paying research attention to ‘experiencing or anticipating in one’s imagination’ the goals of movement. A focus on ‘atmosphere’ lifts the researcher’s gaze from ‘material infrastructures’ to the study of feelings and ‘imaginative travel’. In the capoeira research (Delamont, Stephens and Campos, 2017), we found that the everyday classes in the UK are suffused with imagined travel to Brazil, the actual and spiritual home of the African-Brazilian martial art. Non-Brazilian instructors and students feel a powerful need to go to Brazil, even if they have been many times before. Brazilian teachers always think about visiting their ‘home’ and many plan to take their students to Brazil.

Memories of past movements Urry (2007): 41) argues that because memory is so fundamental to mobility, researchers need to develop methods to recover such memories. Remembered movements can be pleasant or unpleasant and data on both are important. The researcher’s memories of movement should be recorded in the diary. The actors’ memories of past movements are frequently a useful way of understanding their world view(s). Pilkington’s (2016) English Defence League activists remembered past demonstrations and activities as a core part of their shared identity. Paxson’s (2013) artisanal cheese-makers shared memories of travel to learn about cheese-making from authentic makers, for example, in the Basque country.When memories are shared, or co-created for the ethnographer, they are useful data. If the ethnographer was present, they reinforced her co-presence.

The study of places that do and do not move Urry (2007) was particularly interested in studying ‘places’ that move, devoting chapters to trains, to cars, and aircraft, and static features associated with them: their

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stations, roads and airports. He also stressed the imaginaries of those three modes of mobility. The ferries studied by Vannini are exactly the type of field site that Urry recommended. He did not include boats or ferry ports, but in Vaninni’s ethnography, the material on the ports is particularly vivid. Peter and Patti Adler (1984) did an ethnography of car pooling, a widespread phenomenon in the USA to get children to school in small groups chauffeured by one parent in turns. Subsequent works by Laurier (2010), Laurier et al. (2008), and Ross, Renold and Holland (2009) on families and looked-after children, respectively, have shown the fruitfulness of the car for gathering data from children.

Objects that can be followed Urry (p. 41) argues that ‘methods need to be able to follow around objects’. He separates objects that gain value as they move (antiques), or lose it (cheap souvenirs), and those that move to be assembled (the components of a computer). ‘As objects travel’ he argues they can acquire symbolic and material accretions. In many fieldsites, moving objects have not been examined closely enough, if they were mentioned at all. In extending PA’s craft ethnographies, one way to explore the work of glass-blowers or woodworkers or ceramicists would be to follow the glass, wooden or ceramic objects from the studios out into exhibitions or homes or wherever they go. Such artefacts, like art-works and other memorabilia, are mobile embodiments of value. They appear in various markets (auctions, fairs, open studios, online sites) and they circulate.They find their way into private collections, corporate spaces and museums. As they move, they take with them not just their exchange value, but also the reputation of their maker, and can enhance the symbolic capital of their owner.

Time-space diaries The ninth mobile method advocated by Urry has a good deal of potential for ethnographers. Urry (2007: 40) recommends that the researcher ought to record her own ‘trajectories of travel and affordances’ and then interrogate them. Alongside that, the researcher can also ask informants to record their own time-space diaries, in digital, textual or graphic forms. These suggestions could both add depth and a new angle on the increasing familiarity of any field site. Urry’s work has not embedded itself in the literature on ethnographic methods, and he does not explicitly focus on making strange the familiar, but during the main phase of fieldwork, any of these research tactics could help a self-critical, reflective ethnographer to observe more productively.

Fieldnotes in the main phase of fieldwork In the early days, just making some vaguely adequate fieldnotes and working with them is an all-consuming task. In the main phase, it is sensible to think about them in a theorised way. We have written about the technicalities of fieldnote

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writing in Chapter 3, and elsewhere (Delamont, 2016a, 2018, 2019a; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019). Here we have adopted our more theorised stance: using two middle-range theoretical concepts to re-think a central methods issue: fieldnotes themselves. It is helpful to think sociologically about fieldnotes in the main phase of the fieldwork. Here we deploy the two theoretical concepts – boundary objects and liminality – to demonstrate how to think more self-consciously and productively about fieldnotes.We have of course already introduced the idea of boundary objects in Chapter One as a valuable middle-range concept. Here we use it to reflect back on research methods themselves, rather than as concepts to help analyse data.

Fieldnotes and boundary objects This concept originated in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Susan Leigh Star (1989, 2010) developed it to help understand how, in a natural history museum, the ‘same’ object was valued by scientists, curators and the volunteers who showed the public round the museum, and therefore it inhabited the boundary between their different occupational worlds. It meant something different in each (as a scientific object of research, as a display item, and as something that caught the imagination of visiting school children and families) but served to provide common ground for all three. Star and Greismer (1989: 393) originally defined boundary objects as things which: both inhabit several intersecting worlds and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them… For Star and Greismer (1989: 393), boundary objects were a ‘means of translation’: helping groups to work together. An important element of boundary objects is that they are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual site use. They continue their definition stressing that boundary objects are ‘strongly structured’ when used in any one individual site, but ‘weakly structured’ in ordinary use. Boundary objects may, they stress, ‘be abstract or concrete’ and have a common structure which makes them recognisable in several worlds but will have different meanings in each. A parallel example to Star and Greismer’s original museum study is Wylie’s (2015) research on a museum palaeontology laboratory, and the different meanings attached to the dinosaur bones that are prepared there. In a paper published shortly before her death, Star (2010: 604) reiterated that her initial framing of the concept was motivated by a desire to analyse the ‘nature of cooperative work in the absence of consensus’. In science and technology studies, the concept went

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fast from being analytically useful to being deployed so widely that it was a cliché and retained little meaning (Clarke and Star, 2008). It is useful to be precise about any boundary objects identified in the fieldsite (Star, 1989, 2010; Suchman, 1994). As Clarke and Star (2008) argued ‘the study of boundary objects can be an important pathway into complicated situations’ (p. 121) and fieldnotes are certainly part of a complicated situation. The idea has not been widely used in the methods literature, but it is productive for thinking about fieldnotes. The fieldnotes taken by ethnographers meet the Star and Griesemer definition of a boundary object. That description and definition could have been written about fieldnotes. They inhabit several intersecting social worlds: typically the field setting(s), the researcher’s home, and the university. Fieldnotes satisfy the informational requirements of all of these; the actors in the setting(s) can see the ethnographer writing, the family or flatmates can see the pile of notebooks growing, the university can be shown the hard evidence of the data collection. They are plastic enough; illegible to the actors in the field setting(s), and the people ‘at home’, yet when written up they are data for the thesis, the report to the funding body and eventually transmitted into publications. If the ethnographer is a doctoral student, they are plastic enough to be talked about in supervisions and other bureaucratic settings. Simultaneously fieldnotes are robust enough to give them a common identity across sites. For example, all of Walford’s (2009) four informants could talk about their fieldnotes at length. Ethnographic fieldnotes are both concrete (there are 204 reporter’s notebooks from SD’s capoeira research in a cabinet in a university office) and abstract (SD’s knowledge of capoeira classes in the UK floats free of any specific notebook). The fieldnotes are certainly a pathway into complicated situations such as classrooms, laboratories, lecture theatres, sports halls and gymnasia. For the ethnographer settled into the fieldsite and thinking about the quality, scope and eventual purposes of their fieldnotes, working backwards from the concept of the boundary object can enhance the critical reflection on how adequate they are.

Liminality There are strong similarities between the sociological concept of the boundary object, and the anthropological concept of liminality. That idea has been used to characterise traditional anthropological fieldnotes. The term ‘liminal’ is not widely used in social sciences other than anthropology, although other disciplines such as geography do focus on boundaries and on ‘border country’. For anthropology, liminal states are generally dangerous, perilous or potentially polluting in the ways Douglas (1966) wrote about human categorisation systems. Fieldwork in many cultures has revealed that people undergoing changes, such as being initiated into a religion are particularly vulnerable during the transition. Carr’s (2015) account of her Santería initiation demonstrates this, as Brown’s (1991) did for her initiation to Haitian Vodou. A vivid and thoughtful analysis of a ritual to change the ethnographer’s status can be found in Magliocco (2004). She did ethnographic research on neopagans in San Francisco, and describes a rite of passage (pp. 117–118) arranged

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for her, precisely to create and strengthen her self-efficacy beliefs. Magliocco was at the time divorced, desperately homesick for the site and people of her doctoral fieldwork in Sardinia and the “authentic” research she had done there. She had been moving around the USA in a variety of temporary posts for nine years, trying to get a tenure-track appointment. Her closest friends in a small neopagan coven in which she was apprenticed helped her devise a ritual that would change her ‘From a stranger to a native, from an outsider to an insider, from a position of insecurity and rootlessness to one of security, prosperity and belonging, through a series of symbolic transformations.’ (p. 11) That was a typical liminal experience, after which she got tenure. Societies or subcultures which have ceremonies or rituals to mark changes in social status whether public or private, usually called rites of passage, such as weddings, funerals, initiations into adulthood or secret societies, allow an ethnographer not only to learn about the statuses that are changing (from a single person to a married one) but also to be alerted to wider features of that society or culture.Van Gennep (1909, 1961) argued that anthropologists should pay attention to three phases of any rite of passage – the pre-liminal, the liminal and the post-liminal. Subsequently ethnographers have focused on liminal objects, and Jackson (1990a) explored the ways in which fieldnotes are productively analysed as such. They mediate between the field and the home, between the personal and the academic, between being in control and the feelings of being confused, out of control or inadequate. Jackson, herself an anthropologist, interviewed seventy social scientists who did ethnography, sixty-three anthropologists and seven scholars who were not.The anthropologists were all living in the USA and included both ‘obscure’ and famous scholars. Her two papers (Jackson, 1990a, 1990b) about those interviews are well worth reading by ethnographers from disciplines beyond anthropology. She reports one informant saying ‘I am a fieldnote’ (p. 21) and stresses that fieldnotes are simultaneously ‘data’ and ‘me’. That is, the anthropologist creates the fieldnotes and the fieldnotes create the anthropologist. Jackson also reports that her informants regarded their fieldnotes as very private and secret, and that was because ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, you not being made a blood brother, your childish temper’ (p. 22). Many of her informants expressed guilt and inadequacy about their fieldnotes, ‘using words like anxious, embarrassing, defensive, depressing’ (p. 27). Some of those interviewed even accused her of ‘trying to make me feel guilty’ (p. 27). The writing of the fieldnotes and the tools of the trade are also liminal between the observer and the informants: the researcher is the person with the notebook. There is also a tension between ‘doing’ the fieldwork and making the notes: that is watching the actors dancing tango and writing notes or dancing oneself. Anthropologists see fieldnotes as a sacred, mysterious source of their academic authority, in ways that other ethnographic researchers probably do not. This may be because of the subject matter: anthropologists often study the unfamiliar, exotic and even supernatural for example Brown’s (1991) work on Mama Lola, a Haitian Vodou priestess in New York.

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The work of Jackson enables us to focus on the ethnographer’s sense of self, fieldwork roles, and self-critical reflections, rather than the notes themselves. Researchers in educational settings, such as school classrooms, playgrounds, staff rooms, university dormitories and fraternity houses frequently report their liminal status(es). They are an adult among children or adolescents, a non-teacher in the staff room, a lecturer among students (e.g. Moffatt, 1989) the ivory tower intellectual in the ‘real’ world. All the tensions reported by Jackson’s informants are recognisable to educational researchers. When embedded in the fieldwork thinking about oneself as in the liminal stage between non-ethnographers and fully fledged ethnographers, and one’s notes as the treasure, or currency that enables that rite of passage is helpful. So too are Jackson’s findings: if 70 leading American scholars think their fieldnotes are inadequate, that is a strong motivation to make one’s own notes as good as they can be.

Conclusion We explored some issues that confront us during the early phases of fieldwork in Chapter 3. Analysis is, self-evidently, central to all stages of ethnographic research. In this chapter, the main phase of the data-collection has been focused on. We have to work hard to ensure that we are keeping our data-collection strategies flexible, and that we are thinking reflectively about our research strategies. Periodic stock-taking is vital. It is also important to consider the possibility of different or additional datacollection approaches. This is not a matter of more and more ‘techniques’ or ever more elaborate ‘research designs’. It is a matter of careful reflection. It depends on finding a productive balance between comfort in the field, and the ongoing need for estrangement. Such critical, productive reflection is at the heart of what – for the purposes of simplicity – we refer to as ‘analysis’. That is the theme of the next chapter.

6 ORGANISING AND ANALYSING

This chapter does not offer a simple set of instructions on data analysis, not least because practical advice is available elsewhere (e.g. Coffey and Atkinson, 1996). It is rather more generic than that, focusing as it does on core concepts that should drive the analysis. They are often misunderstood, over-simplified or used ideologically rather than analytically. We address grounded theory and coding, reflexivity, standpoints and positionality such as critical race theory and indigenous methods. Once the data collection is well advanced, the strategies for data organisation and analysis should be reflected upon. Analysis has been going on since the earliest days of fieldwork, of course, but as the research continues, more emphasis has to be placed on the analysis of field data. Here the self-conscious and self-critical plan to fight familiarity is absolutely crucial. If the analysis does not ‘trouble’ the familiarity, then it will be all but impossible to produce any accounts of the findings that make them unfamiliar.While absolute novelty and originality are not required – are indeed impossible – we need to keep asking ourselves whether we have explored any given social world as creatively and purposefully as possible.This is by no means a matter of comprehensive coverage. The logic of comparative analysis should prevail at this stage, as at all others.We emphasise that this does not involve undertaking firsthand field research at multiple sites, but it does imply wide reading. Just reading close to one’s substantive topic is not the best approach to developing ideas. It is, on the whole, better to read widely than to try to read ‘everything’ (whatever that might mean) about a particular topic. This is something we expand upon in the next chapter. But it is worth stressing here, as there, that a comparative perspective is a vital way of developing ideas: just thinking about key similarities and differences can help to bring phenomena into sharper focus, or can disrupt one’s cherished (but perhaps lazy) ideas. If one’s research is about a learning environment (such as a school or college classroom) than it could well benefit from a broad reflection on learning and

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teaching of many kinds and in many different settings.You could well seek out studies of: driving instruction, singing and dancing lessons, music masterclasses, religious conversion and instruction, military and police training, and so on.‘Education’ is not coterminous with the narrow, if implicit, definitions employed by many sociologists of ‘education’. Even within more conventional educational settings, there are plenty of activities beyond conventional classrooms that ethnographers often pay insufficient attention to. The important thing is the development of ideas, concepts if you like, about teaching and learning, not just reading more and more accounts of schools and classrooms. By reading about, say, sports coaching as a pedagogical activity, one might learn to think a bit more deeply about the mobilisation of enthusiasm, about the socialisation of the body, or about the dimensions of discipline. By reading about religious conversion, we might learn to think about commitment, loyalty, and the assimilation of new belief systems, and having done so, read back into studies of faith schools, seminaries, social work teams, orchestras and similar institutions. The same is true for reading about radical changes in political beliefs, or people’s ‘conversion’ to vegetarian or vegan diets.What might be at stake in all such accounts would be how people express their ‘road to Damascus’ moments, their life ‘before and after’ conversion, and so on. There are no formulae for such intellectual activity. While some researchers may find procedural approaches such as Grounded Theory or Thematic Analysis useful, they do not in themselves legislate for how we can most productively make comparisons, drawing out similarities and differences. Sometimes we can challenge ourselves – or be challenged by others – to come up with continuities and contrasts. After PA had embarked on his ethnography of the opera company, having completed his doctoral fieldwork among medical students, a distinguished social scientist asked him ‘So what’s the continuity between medical students and opera rehearsals?’ ‘They do things over and over until they get them right’ he replied. It was, perhaps, not especially penetrating, but it did highlight the trope of ‘repetition’ in the analysis of rehearsal and performance.The general style of thought recalls that of Everett Hughes, who famously made comparisons between the psychiatrist, the priest and the prostitute, on the basis that all three have to find ways of distancing themselves from their clients: they all have to deal with their clients’ failures. In the same vein, Hughes wrote about professionals’ exercise of power: Wherever a modicum of power to discipline by tongue or force is essential to one’s assigned task, the temptation to over-use it and even to get pleasure from it may be present, no matter whether one be a teacher, an attendant in a mental hospital, or a prison guard. The danger of major distortion of relationship and function within the framework of a formal office lurks wherever people go or are sent for help or correction: the schoolroom, the clinic, the operating room, the confessional booth, the undertaking parlour all share this characteristic. (Hughes, 1971, p. 305) A broadly comparative perspective can help us to develop ideas that transcend the here-and-now of our chosen field site. That is, in terms suggested by Glaser and

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Strauss (1967), moving between substantive and generic theories.The former are dataclose or field-close ideas, recurrent issues, topics or principles that we identify in the course of fieldwork and subsequent analysis. The latter apply to a broader range of social contexts, being ideas that represent general social processes. The exploration of generic ideas may not always generate fresh perspectives and novelty, but they can certainly help us to reflect more thoroughly on our own analyses than we can just by sticking closely to our ‘own’ social setting and not looking beyond our own data. It was one of the key components of Goffman’s analytic imagination that he collected together disparate examples and from them distilled illuminating generic ideas that can be applied to a wide variety of settings: ‘cooling the mark out’ is but one egregious example (Atkinson, 1989). Let us again take an example from PA’s ethnographic work in the American teaching hospital. He noted on several occasions that the physicians’ work with patients seemed to be almost primarily occasions for meetings and talk.The haematologists he worked with most closely held morning ‘rounds’, at which a senior physician (Attending, Consultant in the UK) would discuss new and continuing cases on which they had been consulted by other specialists with a resident (clinical fellows) and a medical student. There were, in addition, clinical conferences, at which junior physicians presented ‘cases’ to their peers and seniors, as well as other less ritualised discussions. He was led to identify these occasions – especially the clinical conferences – as competitive, in that ambitious younger physicians tried to impress others, especially their seniors, with their clinical acumen and their knowledge of the latest clinical research pertinent to ‘their’ patients. Now commenting on the competitive atmosphere and the accompanying rhetoric yields an analytic theme that helps to make sense of the professional talk and diagnostic work in the hospital. In a similar professional setting, one can make the same analytic point concerning social workers’ preparation and presentation of their ‘cases’ in discussion with peers and superiors. Like hospital doctors, they are required to work up their professional work with clients into narratives and performances that display their professional acumen, their grasp of the case, and to justify the decisions they have taken: see for instance Hall (1997) or Pithouse and Atkinson (1988) on social workers’ narrative constructions of their work. But we can, as it were, intensify that understanding by engaging with some ideas that transcend the hospital setting and were not formulated with any such social world in mind. Appadurai’s notion of tournaments of value could be an apt starting-point (Appadurai, 1986a, 1986b), and it is an idea that we ourselves have used (e.g. Delamont, Stephens and Campos, 2017). In essence, it is a useful idea that encapsulates a variety of social settings where there is a degree of contestation, in which actors try to establish material or symbolic worth. From the classic anthropological literature, such collective encounters might include kula exchanges or potlatch ceremonies. In terms of Western markets, they might include fine-art auctions.The tournament of value is an ideal-type, that helps us to identify and think about key features of such events, the range of variation, or contrasts with comparable events. Unlike some modern ‘markets’, tournaments of value retain a degree of personal self-presentation and reputation is one of the commodities

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that is enhanced or devalued. They have an element of ritualised behaviour and are strongly regulated by customary rules of etiquette. Thinking about things in that way should lead PA to re-evaluate his hospital materials: to think even more about the circulation of reputations as well as the circulation of information and opinion about cases; to pay ever closer attention to the ritualised competitiveness among the ambitious junior physicians; to examine how senior physicians might bestow the laurels on junior colleagues (without explicitly saying so), and so on. There would be a dialogue between the local and the generic, each illuminating the other. In exploring the relevance and application of such ideas, we are forced to think afresh about our own data, just as much as we have to examine those broader, generic ideas. Not only does such work help us to reflect critically and creatively on our own fieldwork, it also helps us to link that work and its outcomes with broader networks of scholars and ideas. The first analysis-related topic that needs to be demystified is that of Grounded Theory, a term that is probably one of the most misused in qualitative research. It is tricky: much good, creative research reflects the original principles of grounded theory, but contemporary usage has obscured its original inspiration, leading to poor research practice. A bibliographical exercise once identified Barney Glaser as one of the most cited social scientists. He was not a figure like Karl Marx or Michel Foucault – the sort of intellectual known to and by all other intellectuals.There can be little doubt as to the reason for the multiple citations – one of the most influential books ever written about the conduct of social research. Together with Anselm Strauss, Glaser wrote one of the earliest ‘methods’ textbooks for sociologists that was not an elementary introduction to social statistics (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). (It was a quirk of the bibliometry that credited Glaser as the key author, rather than Strauss, who was much more influential in the long run.) As ‘methods’ training has become ever more firmly embedded in the requirements for postgraduate qualifications and even in undergraduate curricula, so the demand for methods textbooks has been fuelled. In that process, the original ideas of The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) became distorted, over-simplified and vulgarised. The methodological literature is replete with crude (mis)representations of ‘grounded theory’ that use the label to justify some approaches to social research that are antithetical to the original pragmatist inspiration, and that do violence to the actual conduct of good research (irrespective of how it is described). Examples can be found across many publications. Here, more or less drawn at random, is a typical example: ‘A grounded theory is derived inductively through the systematic collection and analysis of data pertaining to a phenomenon…. Sociologists Glaser and Strauss (1967) discovered grounded theory in the 1960s’ (Bowen, 2006). And ‘A grounded theory is generated by themes, and themes emerge from the data using analysis, capturing the essence of meaning or experience drawn from varied situations and contexts’ (ibid). One can understand the appeal of such a clear exposition. Unfortunately it is not a remotely accurate summary of ‘grounded theory’, nor is it an adequate representation of qualitative social research, irrespective of the ‘grounded theory’ label. This is a particularly useful series of quotes, however, as it manages to pack so many misconceptions into so few words.

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Now we have not singled out Bowen’s paper in order to mount an ad hominem attack, nor even to suggest that it is an egregious outlier in the voluminous literature on ‘grounded theory’. On the contrary, it has been chosen, almost at random, as a fairly representative example of its kind. It captures the fate of grounded theory as it has become popularised and vulgarised in that process. By way of further exemplification, here is an extract from a textbook published by a leading publisher in the field (Marvasti, 2004): The notion of ‘grounded theory’ was originally developed by Glaser and Strauss… which argued qualitative analysis could systematically generate concepts and theories based on observational data. This is what is known as an inductive or ground-up approach to data analysis. One begins with general observations and through an ongoing analytical process creates conceptual categories that explain the topic under study. (p. 84) Again, this summary statement manages to misrepresent several things most succinctly. First, it was never intended to refer solely to qualitative work. Secondly, it is not an approach based solely on inductive analysis. Thirdly, it is not restricted to the ‘analysis’ of data. Fourthly it is not restricted to ‘observational’ data (except insofar as all data count as observations). As to how one ‘creates’ conceptual categories, or what will count as ‘explanation’ in this context – those are far from clear. To be fair, the author goes on to develop things in relation to more sensitive aspects of ‘grounded theory’, although the treatment remains crudely over-simplified. These examples could be multiplied many times over, and we shall have occasion to invoke other instances in the course of this argument. Some of the misconceptions and half-truths derive from the fact that ‘grounded theory’ is represented as a form of qualitative data analysis, rather than a generic approach to social research in general. The implication – far too often – is that one collects ‘data’, which are otherwise an inert collection of fieldnotes or, more often, interview transcripts. Grounded theorising, it is implied, then resides in a process of inspecting those data, and managing them, in order to derive ideas.This is frequently associated with procedures of ‘coding’, again too often portrayed as mechanistic techniques. Silver and Lewins (2014) offer a summary that incorporates that version of affairs. In a summary of the ‘features of grounded theory’, they offer the following bullet-points: A coding process (later to become known as open coding) consists of annotations in the margin expressed as codes based on social constructs or on the respondent’s own language (later labelled in vivo codes). Data segments are compared, thus refining ideas about this and subsequent categories. Memos are an important aspect, and should be kept updated about the development of each category. Collecting, coding and analysing data should occur concurrently…. (p. 28)

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The list of features continues. But it is readily apparent that the authors equate ‘grounded theory’ with ‘analysis’ and they equate analysis with ‘coding’. Moreover, it remains apparent that the ‘data’ consist of interview transcripts (as we can code respondents’ own language). It remains entirely mysterious as to how such ‘codes’ (which are elided with ‘categories’) are to be decided upon. The entire analytic process remains a paradox: it seems to be simultaneously a mechanical process and a mysterious one. Now one must acknowledge that the cruder versions of grounded theory owe something to Anselm Strauss’s own codification of its analytic approach, as enshrined in his textbook with Corbin (1990, 1998).This certainly appears to translate grounded theory into a procedural matter, and it does rest on ‘coding’ as the key activity in the procedures. It is almost as if grounded theory generated a kind of protocol for the management and analysis of qualitative data. Indeed, it was that somewhat mechanistic version of GT that precipitated the rift (in print) between Anselm Strauss and Barney Glaser.The latter essentially accused Strauss of betraying the original inspiration of GT, in favour of an approach that ‘forced’ the data into inappropriately rigid categories. Corbin and Strauss, Glaser argued, had undermined the capacity for GT to generate original theory from the interplay of ideas and data. Arguably, subsequent, vulgarised version of GT have intensified that divide between Glaser’s and Strauss’s versions. It was the appearance of that text that precipitated the overt break between Strauss and Glaser, expressed by the latter in a published criticism of Corbin and Strauss (Glaser, 1978, 1992, 1993). In essence, Glaser accused Strauss, aided, abetted and influenced by Corbin, of abandoning the original inspiration of their book. Rather than promoting the ‘discovery’ of ideas and sensitivity or fidelity to the phenomena, Glaser accused Strauss (and Corbin) of forcing the processes of exploration and analysis into formulaic prescriptions. There was much justice in Glaser’s accusations, and the subsequent fate of ‘grounded theory’ was to a large extent foreshadowed in the codification of which Glaser complained. To some extent, the vulgarisation of grounded theory is an example of a more generic process. Original, sometimes subtle or complex ideas undergo a sort of moral career. They become transformed into textbook knowledge, and in that process, they are simplified. Attempts to capture tacit knowledge, advocating the use of imagination and creativity, are transposed into the recipes of explicit knowledge. The latter become protocols and techniques that are susceptible to being formally taught on student courses (rather than learning through apprenticeship over a period of enculturation). Such simplification and codification is a recurrent process in the sciences and social sciences and was described by Fleck (1979) in his pioneering account of scientific thought-styles. He identified ‘journal science’, ‘textbook science’ and ‘vademecum’ science – the last being the most basic of summaries of knowledge. Knowledge is progressively stripped of any ambiguity or subtlety, until it resides in a few summary statements and imperatives. This is clearly the fate of ‘grounded theory’ in the decades since the first publication of Glaser and Strauss. There have, clearly, been careful and knowledgeable discussions of GT, notably by two authors with direct acquaintance with its origins in the San Francisco group

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around Anselm Strauss (Clarke, 2005; Charmaz, 2006, 2014). But their publications have not in themselves prevented enfeebled versions of GT from circulating. The tendency is most apparent in academic fields where ‘qualitative research’ is popular while its practitioners are not themselves based in sociology or social anthropology. It is apparent that for many authors GT provides a ready-made justification for any elementary analysis of interviews or focus-group data, on the basis of which recurrent ‘themes’ are identified. That over-simplified version of GT is amplified by its widespread appearance in academic journal papers. It is clear that, either at the prompting of an editor, or on the recommendation of one or more reviewers, authors are constrained to summarise their ‘methodology’, and resort to appeals to GT. GT can thus serve as a rhetoric of justification that satisfies the basic requirements of journals that require a summary account of research methods and data analysis. It is not only the most basic of texts that contrive to misrepresent GT. Wacquant (2002) seems also to have little feel for its original sense, preferring to castigate only the vulgar versions: ‘…there is no such thing as ethnography that is not guided by theory … [it is necessary] to work self-consciously to integrate them actively as every step in the construction of the object rather than to pretend to discover theory ‘grounded’ in the field, import it wholesale postbellum, or to borrow it ready-made in the form of clichés from policy debates.’ One cannot think of any serious ethnographer who would not endorse that view: the iterative relationships between ideas and observations are at the heart of the research process and are also core to the formulation of GT. Part of the problem resides in the pedagogical and commercial imperative to generate ‘textbook’ methodological knowledge and precepts. It also derives from a variety of publishing imperatives. Once a commitment is made to GT (in whatever version), then it can become a requirement to describe one’s methodological approach to in those terms. Consequently, journal referees and editors can require authors to describe their pragmatic, iterative fieldwork and analytic strategies in terms of GT. GT becomes a shorthand way of expressing research strategy, and it is a relatively easy solution to the requirement to justify one’s ‘methods’. Consequently, there arises a circuit whereby the significance of GT is amplified and validated in purely ritualised ways.

Coding Here we return to a related theme: data coding. There is a culture of analysis based on procedures of data ‘coding’. Now, data management is important, as it is a systematic and comprehensive inspection of one’s fieldnotes, transcripts and other data. But we should not equate coding with analysis. Coding is not in and of itself a way to think about ethnographic research and its possibilities. But because the rhetoric and practice of coding are so pervasive, we pause again here to outline its potential limitations as well as its value in the organisation and inspection of data. In its origin, data coding has at least two sources. In the first place, anthropologists and sociologists have for many decades indexed and searched their

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fieldnotes and interviews. As students of anthropology, we were trained to keep fieldnotes in notebooks, and to index them by topic and informant. Such indexing was maintained manually, using file cards. In itself, this did not promote complex and detailed ‘coding’, and consequently the retrieval of data was relatively insensitive. But some of the original inspiration for ‘coding’, using the resources of digital text files and bespoke software, were derived from that manual, predigital approach to searching and sorting data. In those pre-digital days, field data could also be physically disaggregated, fragmented into extracts, by cutting up copies of the notes or interview transcripts, and collecting together related examples, placing them physically together in thematic files. That ‘technology’ was crude; there was little opportunity to do more than simply retrieve extracts. The introduction of software such as The Ethnograph or NUD*IST in the 1980s did relatively little to change the underlying analytic approach: see Weaver and Atkinson (1994) for a contemporaneous account of such procedures and their limitations. Known as ‘code-and-retrieve’, in practice it meant an approach that segmented data (notes and transcripts) into searchable chunks, indexed by content-based codes. It is clear that while contemporary software is much more sophisticated and subtle, for many users the code-and-retrieve mentality persists in many quarters. This is because it is the most elementary strategy that satisfies the desire to ‘use the software’ while conveying an air of analytic sophistication. Contemporary software undoubtedly allows the analyst to explore their data sets in ways that were unavailable in the days before personal computers. The clear danger, from our perspective, is that the analytic process becomes little more than content analysis. The data are, in the course of that process, essentially reduced: it is too easy to find oneself boiling things down to a small number of categories in such a way as to generate rather crudely obvious summaries of the content of interview transcripts, or fieldnotes of observed actions.The point of ‘analysing’ our date is not to reduce things, but rather to open things up. Rather than just summarising, we need to use data to develop and expand our ideas. It is worth remembering that ‘data’ are things (usually documents) to think with, and that thinking ought to be as expansive as possible. One does not always have to have an interview quote or a fieldnote extract in order to use one’s own socialised competence – by virtue of fieldwork – in order to speculate productively about local cultural knowledge, practices, responsibilities, consequences and so on. As we have made clear, we hope, such thinking should inform ethnographic analysis throughout the research enterprise. But when we are engaged in a sustained period of analysis and drafting, it is vital that we explore possible ideas as broadly and as deeply as we possibly can. It was for that reason that Coffey and Atkinson (1996) demonstrated a small range of contrasting analytic strategies that could be deployed to make sense of the same set of data. In a similar exercise, Atkinson, Delamont and Housley (2008) demonstrated the complex possibilities of qualitative analysis. As we have already suggested, coding (or similar approaches to sorting and indexing) is not wrong in itself, but if relied on to the exclusion of other analytic perspectives, it can be unduly limiting.

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Accounts The culture of analytic fragmentation can do symbolic violence to the form and content of interview-based data.We recognise that interview transcripts form an important component of many ethnographers’ data. We are not enamoured of studies that are primarily based on interviewing (see Atkinson and Silverman, 1997).They neglect the most important and significant aspects of ethnographic fieldwork – participant observation. Nonetheless, we must reflect on the nature of interview talk and its analysis. At the very least, we need to look beyond just the content of interview transcripts. Summarising the content is not enough. It requires little or no social-science training just to ask people some elementary questions (however ‘open-ended’) and then just reproduce some common kinds of responses. At the very least, we need to interrogate the data in order to understand just how our informants are constructing their accounts, and what shared cultural resources they are mobilising. As a recent review by Loseke (2019) makes very clear, social actors’ ‘meanings’ are not merely given to researchers in transparent, unmediated ways. Narratives are among the means that actors use to construct their accounts of event, other actors, and themselves. Narratives are formed on the basis of socially shared formats, and there are always inter-textual relations between narrative types (such as folk-tales or urban myths).There are shared genres of narrative: tales of victimhood, survival, overnight success, narrow escapes, lucky breaks and so on. They are readily recognisable in many cultural milieux. We do not, however, assume that there is cross-cultural uniformity in narrative forms and functions. Loseke’s discussion of the American dream story as a cultural code is a case in point (p. 23 ff.). As she summarises some of its aspects, it enshrines a number of cultural codes: Individualism (the values of self-determination and self-responsibility), capitalism (the values of work, private profit), fair play (the value of equality of opportunity), meritocracy (the value of rewards based on achievement), and family (the value of attachment to, and responsibility for a defined set of others). (p. 23) In other words, such autobiographical accounts are heavily dependent on culturally shared, but culturally specific, tropes, conventions and rhetoric. The ‘American dream’, as Loseke explores it, is an American trope. Its themes are not unique to American culture of course, and individualism, a belief in meritocracy and so on are characteristic of much contemporary neoliberal culture. But they are not universal either (even in the United States). Likewise, we need often to examine just how informants are constructing themselves in the course of telling their narratives.We may, as researchers, value ‘openness’ or ‘sincerity’, or ‘frankness’ in our informants, but it remains the case that displays of frankness or authenticity are themselves performative, and deserve close attention in their own right (Whitaker and Atkinson, 2019). This in no way implies that informants are necessarily dissembling or lying but recognises that narratives and accounts are inescapably performative, and that such performances should be integral to our analytic perspectives. What is important, we reaffirm, is to avoid

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the superficial treatment of interview materials. It is profoundly limiting simply to report what actors said about a particular topic, as if that were the only, or main, point of talking to people. Content analysis is not the main purpose of the exercise, any more than participant observation should just result in a list of ‘what people do’. This not a matter of wholesale rejection of interviews and conversations.We are not so dim as to believe that ethnographers in the field should remain dumb, failing to talk to anybody about anything. We do not think that a sustained analysis of forms of interview talk robs that talk of any referential value. The fact that linguists can study language as formal systems does not empty language of all communicative function. But there is no content without form. Without a repertoire of speech acts, there are no justifications or blames; without narrative forms there is no memory; there is no life-story without narrative formats. Careers, lives and aspirations are shaped and conveyed through narrative means; ethics and values are discursively formulated. Advocates of a sustained analysis of narrative forms and functions do not have to deny the possibility of referential value. Equally we do not have to imply that informants are untrustworthy or mendacious in order to draw attention to their discursive enactments (Whitaker and Atkinson, 2020). We ought to examine the ethnopoetics of narratives and account (Carver and Atkinson, in press) in order to do justice to them as cultural enactments in their own right. In addition, and most pertinently for our argument, looking closely at how informants express themselves encourages us to approach ‘data’ with a distinctive analytic focus. It steers us towards reflection on actors’ performative competence, and upon cultural conventions for such personal expression. In addition to offering a more sophisticatedly sociological form of analysis, this kind of attention has an ‘alienation’ effect, helping to guard against superficial readings of our transcripts (or indeed, of any kinds of data). When dealing with observed action, we need to ask ourselves how to ‘open out’ the data by interrogating them closely. This does not just mean reading our notes or transcripts repeatedly and obsessively. It means asking ourselves how much we can develop from relatively small occasions, as a corrective to the common tendency to learn a little from a large volume of data. It means, as Atkinson (2021) argues, trying to ‘learn a lot from a little’. In pursuit of this, it is a valuable exercise to select certain episodes from the field (almost at random) and challenge oneself to write as much as one can about that. It is a corrective against superficial analysis. It also helps to guard against selecting only the most superficially ‘interesting’ events and examples. Finding oneself confronted with a passage reporting ‘nothing much’, or a ‘routine’ event is an intellectual, analytic challenge. We have to rise to that challenge and ask ourselves some analytically relevant questions. What makes the event recognisably routine? Do the participants frame their own activities in terms of such mundane or routinised expectations? How do they display their commitment to such ordinary events? How do such routine activities fir into wider routines of ordinary work? What does it take for something to seem out-of-the-ordinary? Is there, indeed, any justification for dismissing something as ‘ordinary’. It is useful to remind oneself that ‘nothing never happens’, as the old

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ethnographic adage has it. So how is ‘nothing much’ accomplished? We need to be as analytically alert to the mundane as to the extraordinary. Again, asking oneself these apparently simple questions can lead one to defamiliarise the setting and the observed action. It is one thing to recognise that something (a joke, say) is being performed, but quite another to ask oneself how it was, and then to go on to ask what effect it had, how it was received, if it succeeded or failed. Likewise, we can all recognise routine kinds of events, in courtrooms, clinics, school classrooms or scientific laboratories. But really observing what is done and how it is performed is another matter. It leads us to appreciate not just the ‘what’ of action, but also the kinds of skills that people need to accomplish even the most mundane of tasks, the degrees of felicity with which they bring off their performances, or the kinds of personal display that are involved. Again, we bring ourselves up short when we ask ourselves if we really know how things are done, by whom, with what success, and so on. The undifferentiated routines of everyday life become less transparent, more ‘thickly’ described, and more strange. We see the familiar, but for the strange we have to be more observant and more vigilant. In the same vein, it can be worthwhile to engage in a sort of counterfactual mental exercise. That is, when analysing one or more situations, it can be illuminating to ask oneself: How could it be otherwise? This can help us to de-familiarise ourselves from those routine kinds of activities that comprise most of the activity that we observe and participate in. Asking ourselves how things could be different can help us to think more creatively and systematically about the range and variety of events we have participated in or observed. We can, after all, not just ask if things could be different, we can also search for instances of when it actually was different. In mapping and documenting similarity and difference, we can get a greater purchase on conceptual schemes, their depth and analytic power. Counterfactuals in this context do not have to be the grand narratives of imaginative fiction. We do not have to imagine that the Nazis had successfully invaded the United Kingdom, that the Battle of Lepanto (1571) had gone the other way, or that the Ottoman sieges of Vienna (in 1529 and 1683) had succeeded. More modest, local reflections on how things could be accomplished differently can be illuminating. Often, something approaching counterfactuals can be achieved through careful cross-cultural comparison. If, for instance, one works across different healthcare systems (such as in the UK and the USA), then it is relatively easy to see how things could be done differently in one by reference to how things are different in the other. It helps us to avoid taking things for granted. Our comments on Fadiman’s (1997) ethnography earlier in this book would be a pertinent case in point. A similar kind of thoughtexperiment: imagine writing for a reader who is not a member of the culture and asking if they could make sense of what is going on in the field setting.This is good discipline anyway. Again, healthcare settings are often described in such a way as to take for granted all sort of features, as if they were the only ‘natural’ way of organising things, or schools, colleges and universities, or justice systems. Thinking about a ‘foreign’ reader can be a useful distancing device.

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Standpoints, positionality and reflective practice We inevitably approach the field and what we find there with a biography of our own. We bring, however implicitly, cultural baggage and blindspots, as well as being sensitive to particular topics. Analysis is one important aspect of the research where the ethnographer needs to think self-critically about their positionality, standpoints and expertise.There is clearly no ‘perfect’ or ‘neutral’ position from which to observe and participate in a given social world. But that does not mean that we can afford to be insouciant about our own and others’ position(s). Positions imply perspectives, and perspective also enshrines presuppositions. By virtue of our identity and our biography, we are all in danger of taking things on trust that others might find more problematic, or at least more striking and even puzzling. The analytic issue of positionality has been given prominence by several recent tendencies and developments in the social sciences.The topic of Reflexivity is a very broad and complex one and deserves separate treatment in its own right (Whitaker and Atkinson, 2021a), but its use, and even popularity, has led many researchers to reflect on and explore their own biography and its potential effect on their own research. In this intellectual process of reflection, there are clearly different sources of identity that are commonly held to affect fieldwork and therefore to demand attention. Some are regarded as being self-evidently intrusive.The social position of the prototypical white, middleclass and heterosexual male is the most obviously ‘marked’ as problematic precisely insofar as it is the least ‘marked’ identity in everyday life. It is, therefore, too easy for the gaze of that male to be naturalised, and to stand for universal reason. The fact that we cannot alter all of our personal attributes and our biography (individual and intellectual) does not mean that we must and should remain totally constrained by them. The overall intellectual purpose of ethnography is, after all, to transcend such limitations. Moreover, shifting analytic perspectives are not generated by simply stating and clinging to a set of personal characteristics. Ethnographic imagination is not served simply by asserting one’s ethnicity, sexual orientation or class of origin. One goal of ethnographic research is to make sense of how ‘others’ make sense of their social world (sometimes described as seeing things from the native point of view). Now that is an ideal, and we can rarely, if ever, achieve such complete comprehension. But from the point of view of anthropological, phenomenological and interactionist traditions, such a goal derives from the capacity of the human actors to ‘take the role of the other’, as symbolic interactionism has it. Now, if we can aspire to taking the role of the other in the field – and therefore benefit from the ‘reciprocity of perspectives’ it implies – then we ought to be able to take the role of another kind of researcher.That does not mean that all white male researchers can miraculously transform themselves into women of colour, and appropriate their life experiences. That would be a grotesque suggestion. But as an intellectual exercise, we should certainly be capable of asking ourselves if we have not already done so:What might a critical-race perspective bring to bear? How might a feminist-standpoint theory illuminate these things? Equally, of course, ethnographers who adopt a standpoint stance might also ask themselves if that too is limiting their analytic gaze.This is a point that we elaborate on

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later in this chapter, with particular reference to ‘orientalism’. It is clear that the bias of positional particularity can arise from and for any ‘position’. Simply adopting one, celebrating it and announcing it is no substitute for a willingness to examine alternative perspectives, and to be open to the possibilities of shifting viewpoints. There is, after all, no position of perfect neutrality from which to view the social world. Now, much of the field research we have undertaken lends itself to such shifting perspectives to a limited extent. But PA’s fieldwork in the American teaching hospital could have triggered some such reflections. The hospital was attached to one of America’s elite universities and was itself an elite institution. It was, at the level of the physicians, predominantly white. It was also a highly pressured and academically competitive environment. Persons of colour were not well represented among the professional staff and were much more likely to be seen among lower grades of personnel. Gender differences were less marked, and the dynamics of gender were probably subtle. It would plausibly be accurate to describe the general atmosphere of the hospital – at the level of residents and attendings (consultants) – as ‘macho’, although there were certainly women physicians, pathologists and other specialists. While the number of observed encounters involved too few actors to allow any demographic generalisations, a sensitivity to these issues could well have embedded PA’s analysis of medical discourse within a broader framework of elite institutions, race and gender. It would not have changed the analysis of medical knowledge and discourse, but it could have added a further level to the sociological analysis. Likewise, while the medical staff were drawn primarily from white, well-educated social fractions, many of the patients came from the poorer urban neighbourhoods that surrounded the hospital. Consequently, the doctors and their patients implicitly recapitulated the historic contract between the teaching hospital and impoverished ‘charity’ patients. Such insights would not be dependent on radical shifts of analytic perspective, they could certainly be encouraged by forcing oneself to think outside one’s normal approach. It is a mix of topics (gender, race, class) and of sociological perspective (standpoint perspectives). As Stanley and Wise (1983) pointed out, a feminist standpoint can underpin an analytic perspective that disrupts taken-forgranted categories (derived from a male-dominated culture). Hence it can have the function equivalent to a phenomenological bracketing, by making taken-forgranted phenomena appear problematic. Such intellectual exercises are among the kinds of activities that intellectuals (such as social researchers) ought to be engaged in on a continuous, iterative basis. Shuttling between perspectives is an excellent way of questioning and refreshing our ideas. It is, as we have suggested, limiting – to say the least – to base one’s analytic reflections solely on a restricted range of personal characteristics. One cannot simply read off issues of analytic perspective simply on the basis of one or two individualised attributes. It is certainly contrary to any of the metatheoretical considerations to assume that identities and understandings are fixed and stable in that way. Essentialising identities and ‘positions’ is, or can be, limiting. This is illustrated with reference to recent methodological contributions concerning ‘indigenous methods’.Taken-for-granted positions carry further intellectual, epistemological dangers.

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Claims for and about indigenous research are based on the undeniable fact that the vast majority of research activities are based on studies by White scholars from the global ‘North’ (Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand), while the populations studied have been disproportionately exploited, impoverished and marginalised groups. Recognition of such inequalities has been focused on the claims of ‘indigenous’ peoples. In the relevant methodological literature, they have been almost exclusively identified with a very restricted number of peoples: the first peoples of North America, Australia and New Zealand feature prominently. Remarkably few are granted ‘indigenous’ status by the methodologists. The thrust of the methodological work is twofold. First, research should be by, with and for indigenous peoples. Secondly, research should use ‘indigenous methods’. It is hard to disagree with the values enshrined in such principles. On the other hand, there are methodological issues that deserve scrutiny (see Ryen and Atkinson, 2016). In the first place, there is a great danger of essentialising ethnicity and recapitulating the Romantic European view of racial purity and the identity of race, place and culture. By emphasising only ethnic origin and self-identification on the part of the researcher, there can be a facile identification of the ethnographer with the research hosts. This becomes an uncritical assumption of ‘insider’ status, shared culture, and an authenticity of comprehension that is denied to those who do not share the relevant cultural background. In essence, this is the very opposite of what we have been arguing throughout this book. It is an approach based on cultural familiarity (to continue with that terminology) rather than on strangeness. From our perspective, any ethnographer studying her ‘own’ culture must work hard to de-familiarise it, not rely on the assumption of identity. There is no doubt that ‘insider’ research has some practical advantages – not least knowledge of the relevant language and cultural conventions – but there are many downsides too. It is far too easy to take on trust those culturally familiar phenomena. Relying on identity should not substitute for the real intellectual work of exploring how cultural forms and social realities are produced and enacted.To base one’s research solely on ethnic identity is to adopt a rather rigid position rather than attempting to take each and any ‘position’ as problematic and worthy of sustained exploration. As we indicated, there is an accompanying issue with indigenous research. There is a widespread assumption that there are indigenous research methods that should be used by indigenous researchers. In practice, they often seem to be based on the collection of oral performances, such as group discussions (‘yarning’) or the production of narratives and the expression of ethno-history. Now, as Ryen and Atkinson (2016) point out, it is far from clear that those are ‘methods’. Rather they are speech events. Now all cultures have shared conventions and spoken performances, and they might all be described as ‘indigenous’ to some group. The clinical conferences and their rather competitive performative style that PA observed among the haematologists might be described as indigenous to modern cosmopolitan hospital medicine. But of course such considerations are far distant from the methodological literature on indigenous methods. The point is not to assume that there are perfect research methods that mirror the local culture(s). Just as we should reflect critically

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on our personal identities and our social positions, so we should reflect with equal rigour on the methods we choose. If either promote a cosy feeling of belonging and identification with the host culture, then perhaps the analytic advantage of estrangement and shifting perspectives is not being addressed properly. This does nothing to detract from the aspiration that people of indigenous heritage should conduct research with the people with whom they identify, only that it does not solve the fundamental issues of familiarity. If anything, it exacerbates them. The point here is this: ready-made ‘positions’ do not in themselves challenge a researcher’s taken-for-granted assumptions. Perspectives derived from indigenous identities can certainly be used to criticise and to counter understandings grounded in Western academic discourse. But the history of anthropological and sociological research demonstrates that it is possible for ‘outsiders’ to develop a thorough understanding of indigenous knowledge-systems and skilful practices. For instance, Gladwin’s analysis of local systems of navigation in Polynesia is an outstanding example of analysing indigenous knowledge (Gladwin, 1970). So too are Marchand’s studies of indigenous building in Yemen and Mali (Marchand, 2008, 2010, 2012). In fact the entire discipline of anthropology is replete with extended ethnographic studies that display the complexity, subtlety and sophistication of indigenous knowledge. Being an insider or being an outsider, being indigenous or not, does not in itself grant privileged or superior understanding. What is gained derives from the intellectual and imaginative effort it takes to learn afresh and to unlearn some habits of thought. The analytic limitations of standpoints can be illustrated at greater length by a discussion of Edward Said’s extended critique of orientalist representations of Eastern cultures (1979) and his subsequent book Culture and Imperialism (1993). His work was not in itself ethnographic in the conventional sense, but orientalism, and a more general temptation to exoticise ‘the Other’, is one that can impinge on any ethnographic research. Said’s Orientalism was and continues to be influential in its critique of Western representations of the East (in practice the Middle East). As Marcus (2001) summarises it, drawing on: ‘… novels, travellers’ tales, music, political tracts and bureaucratic documents, Said delineates a discursive formation which he calls “orientalism”, a discourse which he shows to be the vehicle for representations of identity which are seriously deformed.’ (Marcus, 2001: 109). Said claimed that thinkers in the West always ‘othered’ the East and the Orient, so the two were inextricably linked in a hierarchy. Westerners were accused of preferring their essentialised dream because it enabled them to maintain their sense of superiority. For Said, this polarity could not be easily escaped and had considerable force. Said’s work drew on poststructuralism and critical textual analysis, to be part of an intellectual postcolonialism. He claimed that there was a long tradition of textual and visual (mis)representation that perpetuated damaging stereotypes of Eastern cultures. His critique derived in part from Said’s own politicised version of his Palestinian heritage. Subsequent criticisms of Said, however, threw doubt on his claims and their ideological bases. Ernest Gellner (1993) used an important phrase to conclude a very hostile review of Edward Said’s (1993) book Culture and Imperialism. He wrote: ‘Truth is not linked

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to political virtue (either directly or inversely). To insinuate the opposite is to be guilty of that sin which Said wishes to denounce. Like the rain, truth falls on both the just and the unjust. The problems of power and culture, and their turbulent relations during the great metamorphosis of our social world, are too important to be left to lit crit.’ The correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement which followed Gellner’s review was heated and full of invective. The scholar Robert Irwin (2006: 304) called it ‘one of the finest intellectual dogfights of recent decades’. Gellner’s core point – that Said was prone to favour authors whose positionality he shared – is an important one. Good people can do bad research, and ‘bad’ people can produce good research. Gellner criticised as bad scholarship both Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, partly because he had decided Said’s self-righteous positionality as a Palestinian was a fashionable mirage covering up sloppy research. There was also a clash of disciplines: Said was an expert in literary criticism, not anthropology, theology or oriental studies. In one way that ‘dogfight’ in the TLS from the early 1990s is very old news, a battle that took place in another country and both men who ‘fought’ it are dead: Gellner in 1995 and Said in 2003. However, we return to it because it reveals the dangers of adopting positionality without critical reflection, and without a consciousness of the relativity of standpoint perspectives. Gellner and Irwin argue that Said was so convinced that his positionality gave him moral superiority over scholars of the Middle East and North Africa that his analysis of their work was often simply wrong. That is an extreme example but a salutary one. Our argument is that good ethnography is produced by investigators who suffuse their work with flexible awareness of the possibilities of multiple and shifting perspectives. This is often referred to as reflexivity in the research process, but we prefer to refer to critical reflection, confining reflexivity to a generic feature of all research (see Whitaker and Atkinson, 2021a). Such reflective practice should be central at all stages of any ethnography – research design, access, ethical approval, data collection, data analysis, writing and dissemination. Positionality without critical reflection is a barrier to good research. Awareness of one’s own identity as a fieldworker can enhance the ethnographic imagination, but in itself it cannot protect against two potentially problematic issues. We all have to recognise that positionality is a strength, but can also be a disadvantage. An African-American scholar, such as Mason (2002) can use his racial heritage to do fieldwork among African-Cuban believers in Santería (the AfricanCuban religion) in ways no white American could, but the fieldwork is still only as good as the ways his reflective positionality operates all the time. If the acute selfconsciousness of being a researcher slips away, and for a dark skinned descendent of slaves it could have done in ways that for a European it never would, the investigation is damaged. Precisely because that is an example of an exotic fieldsite thinking about Mason’s positionality in it help us all focus on ours in our more mundane settings. We have to knife-edge all the time. Qualitative research without personal reflection will not be very good, as Coffey (1999) argued so eloquently. As ethnographers we may think we can choose to declare and display some aspects of our positionality and remain silent about or conceal others. The informants or actors in the fieldsite

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will draw their own conclusions, interpret what the researcher says and does, and make their own sense of the researcher’s presentation of self. The investigator may, or may not, discover how she was socially constructed. Sometimes informants reveal their perceptions while the study is still in progress. Sue Lees (1986) was doing an ethnography of young women in an English secondary school in the 1970s. One day she mentioned her husband and baby, and the girls were so amazed they revealed that they had been certain she was a lesbian because she wore dungarees. Parallel misconceptions may only be revealed many years after the fieldwork. Margaret Kenna (1992) for example did her initial fieldwork in the late 1960s on a remote Greek island she called Nisos. Her presence there as a single woman mystified the islanders, who decided that she must come from a poor family and so had to earn her own dowry. Kenna has returned to Nisos several times since the initial research, but it was only when she was not only married but the mother of a son that Nisiot women told her how her original body postures had baffled them in the 1960s. She sat the way she had been taught in the USA that modest women sat, with her legs crossed above the knee. On Nisos twenty years later she was told that was the way Greek prostitutes sat, so her body language conveyed a very different message from her story about doing research in order to get a degree and write a book. Positionality is a vital part of ethnography (and indeed all qualitative research). Good ethnography depends on saturating all the stages with positional reflection – not just a bold statement of it but also the hard work of thinking it through at every stage. That is essential. Hard thinking about the positionality of the fieldworker is important when reading about the research topic before the research design is done, when designing the project, when seeking ethical approval, when negotiating access, actually in the fieldsite, as the analysis is conducted and when writing up and disseminating.Ward (2016) is a collection on gender and positionality, in which the ten chapters all demonstrate how that positionality was important at all the stages, rather than being only relevant when in the fieldsite among the informants. Good ethnographers think about their positionality, and their self-presentation all the time, but they need to have a healthy scepticism about how what they do not know and cannot control may be more dominant for the key actors than anything they say. Positionality is to be used as a research strategy, born in mind at all stages of the project up to producing all types of publication. SD does ethnographic research on the African-Brazilian dance-fight-game, capoeira, as it is taught and learnt in the UK: diasporic capoeira. It would be entirely unacceptable if she failed to be reflective about many aspects of herself every time she opened her notebook or started to write a paper. Her gender, her race, her linguistic abilities, her embodiment, her age are all important, all the time. The embodiment problem – deciding not to learn capoeira herself and therefore not to change her embodied habitus – was ‘solved’ by doing the research with Neil Stephens, who learnt capoeira seriously for six years as well as bringing his sociological insights to the gym and the office (Delamont, Stephens and Campos, 2017). Every other aspect of the research has to be knife-edged every day.

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In the preceding discussion, we have referred to reflective practice on the part of the ethnographer. Such reflection, even critical reflection, is a necessary part of our ethnographic imagination. But we have avoided using the term reflexivity to capture that. There is a reason. Like many methodological ideas, reflexivity has in recent decades been over-used and often used in oversimplified ways. Our basic point has been made elsewhere (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019; Whitaker and Atkinson, 2021a). All sociological research is reflexive, in that the phenomena we describe, measure and analyse are shaped by the research methods we use in order to do so. This is not a quirk of the social sciences, and it is not restricted to qualitative research. Methods and instruments contribute to the categories of our research. Consequently reflexivity is not an option. One cannot choose to do reflexive research. In many quarters, however, the usage has become diluted, so that it has become a synonym for reflection. It has also ceased to imply careful methodological scrutiny of one’s own or others’ methods. Rather, it gets used as a term for self-congratulation, equivalent to an autobiographically based sensitivity. So we avoid the term ‘reflexivity’ in this context, preferring to use the more restricted – but more precise – notion of reflective practice to capture the ethnographer’s self-conscious appraisal of her or his positionality, methodological stance and take-for-granted assumptions. We are particularly keen to avoid the connotations of personal virtue that are clearly associated with reflexivity.

Conclusion The central focus of this chapter has been the two vital qualities that underlie good analysis, rather than advocating specific techniques. Our argument is, first, that good analysis has to begin with treating the data as materials that the social scientist works on and works with, deploying her skills and conceptual repertoires. That is because neither the data nor the informants ‘speak for themselves’. What is important is the tough-minded stance that a good social scientist takes towards their own positionality, both to understand the positionality of their informants and to make the analysis endlessly self-critical. One of the most useful tools for achieving these two goals is reading wisely, and that is the subject-matter of Chapter 7.

7 READING AND REFLECTING

This chapter deals with two activities that take place out of the field, and which depend on ‘desk work’ and thinking. They are reading and reflecting. It starts with reading: widely, critically, with a purpose: the most important task for an ethnographer. Reading is the way to learn to recognise good ethnography, and perhaps more importantly, bad ethnography. In the coverage of reading, the focus is on how to read in ways that are useful to fight familiarity of content, and of literary and textual form (s). Part of our focus is that good ethnographers read and think about not only the context of the literature, but also its possible form(s). That leads on to the section on reflecting. In a traditional linear project, reading is an activity concentrated early in the research: reviewing the literature to devise the research hypotheses. In an abductive research design, reading takes place recurrently during the whole process from the initial thinking to the publication stages. So in this book, we have focused on reading in a chapter located much later than is ‘normal’ in a methods book, to emphasise the importance of reading later in the research process. The ‘reading’ we explore here is a critical, genre-sensitive and analytical reading. It is not so much focused on the findings but instead pays attention to the rhetoric, the genre, the discourse community to which the author belongs, the omissions, and the conventions governing social science texts. We explore strategies for reading purposefully, literature to help make the familiar strange, and then move on to focus on how to reflect. In this book, the emphasis is on methods for middle-range theorising, including the famous grounded theory approach to analysis (Charmaz 2006, 2014; Clarke 2005; Clarke, Friese and Washburn 2018; Corbin and Strauss 1990, 1998; Glaser and Strauss 1967) approaches which are the most commonly used in ethnography. It is important to locate the material on reading in relation to the overall theme of fighting familiarity. We use our strategies for making the familiar strange in two ways.We emphasise reading as one way to implement some of our strategies (indeed

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often the only way to do so), but we also explore how they can inform the analysis of the literary or textual forms used by the authors of ‘the literature’. Five of our strategies are primarily guides to the reading. The best way to discover other cultures, look into the past, take gender and ethnicity seriously and find useful middlerange concepts from other sub-disciplines is by searching for literature that addresses them. Using phenomenology and ethnomethodology and reading about making permanent recordings are particularly useful for learning how to exercise judgement about the quality of the ethnographic work of others in order to improve one’s own fieldwork. Focusing on the unusual actors in the setting and finding the key activities in unusual or non-standard settings are useful not only for organising the empirical work, but also for guiding the search for ‘relevant’ literature, by expanding the idea of ‘relevance’, and for judging the mainstream work they are invaluable. In a parallel process, which is equally important, our strategies can be mobilised to focus on recognising and categorising the literary or rhetorical forms used by other authors. Three examples of omissions in the literature start the chapter. All the strategies for fighting familiarity are relevant: it is pointless to think about adopting the standpoint of a feminist, or a queer theorist, during the data collection but then only reading literature written from a straight male position that the author has not recognised as such. An author who recognises their standpoint is, of course, helpful for thinking about unfamiliarity, both yours and theirs.The ‘good’ reader thinks carefully about the positionality of scholars that he or she reads. Authors with interesting things to say can be unconscious of the biases in their own reading. We have shown three recent examples of lacunae in the reading habitus of established ethnographer which suggest unconscious biases in their normal scholarship. There are twin aims when reading for content. Clearly there are positive aims, in that seeking out and reading publications that help the ethnographer see familiar phenomena differently because of reading about unfamiliar things. However, there is also a second aim, focused on the content, which is to scrutinise what is read to decide if the authors are too familiar with their own culture or standpoint. For a British researcher on nursing any study done in Sweden or Thailand will be consciousness raising if only because aspects of the content will be unfamiliar. At the same time, it can also be easier to see that a study has taken a great deal for granted when it is a country, culture or subculture unfamiliar to the reader. So searching for the ‘too familiar’ in research done in settings that are unfamiliar to the reader heightens the contrasts with the reader’s own research setting, and heightens the potential difficulties the ethnographer may be having in making her own research ‘strange’ for her own compatriots. Three examples follow of pitfalls to avoid: blindness to gender, to academic discipline, and the ethnocentric nature of American anthropology of education. Blindness to gender has characterised many ethnographic scholars for the past 50 years. Here our emphasis is on blindness to the scholars who have authored works in the field. In 1980 a Belgian interactionist sociologist called Jef Verhoeven conducted a long interview with Erving Goffman, part of a set done with leading figures in Symbolic Interactionism (even though Goffman was not really a symbolic interactionist). All

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were men. Goffman died in 1982 and in 1992 Verhoeven published the text of their conversation, which was about his mentors, the ideas that he thought important, his contemporaries, and his approach to sociology. In twenty-nine pages of transcript, Goffman (1982) only mentions two women, one of them his first wife, who is not named even though she was a scholar herself. Goffman’s mentors were seventeen men, and five other men are mentioned. His contemporaries are described as ‘my best friends’, explaining that he has ‘known them all very well for 30 years’ and that ‘they are the only persons I eat with at meetings [at academic conferences such as the American Sociological Association]’ (Goffman, 1992: 335). These 15 people are all men except Arlene Kaplan Daniels, added as an afterthought. There were, of course, women in American sociology between 1950 and 1980, including some leading interactionists (Delamont, 2003; Fine, 1995) but they had not registered with Goffman as people in his academic circle worth mentioning to Verhoeven. Reading Goffman in 2021 that blinkered view of his intellectual field is an important thing to notice. It is easy to think that things have changed, but when reading contemporary scholars, it is not hard to find the same blinkers, despite 30 years of feminist evidence about the exclusion of women from the canon (Behar and Gordon, 1995; Delamont, 2003). One recent example is the distinguished anthropologist Michael Jackson, author of Paths Toward a Clearing (1989), who exemplifies the same gender blindness. In 2018 Jackson was interviewed by a woman doctoral student, Stephanie Postar. Apparently unselfconscious about his own biases, or ignorant of their existence, and without remarking on them when asked to describe the work and authors important to him, the following novelists, philosophers and savants appear in this order (Jackson and Postar, 2018): Kenneth Read, Henry Miller, Blaise Condrars,Thomas Wolfe,William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, D.H. Lawrence, Lawrence Durrell, Claude Levi-Strauss, John Paul Sartre, Robert Murphy, Theodor Adorno, Peter Berger, Erick Fromm, R.D. Laing, Georges Devereux, William James, W.G. Sebald, George Orwell These are all interesting writers and their work, whether fiction or social science, could be drawn upon in powerful ways to illuminate fieldwork. But they, as you will have spotted, are all men. It is striking that Jackson cheerfully told a woman researcher that the only authors he valued were men, and makes no comment on that bias at all. Women scholars do not practise the reverse gender blindness and of course not all men are guilty of it. But when reading, it is worth checking that an all-male literature review may be an inaccurate one and may have prevented its author from making gender strange in the field setting or theoretical discussion. Gane and Back (2012), for example, discuss scholarship on C. Wright Mills 50 years after his death and do not cite a single woman author’s work on Mills. Once that is noticed, it is a good idea to seek out whether there is another body of research that has been missed.

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Gender is not the only potential problem with literature. Checking to see if an investigator has raised their eyes from their own discipline or specialism is also important. The following extract comes from a review by a British social anthropologist of an anthropology book: What makes social anthropology so distinctive in its methods is its emphasis on the importance of intensive fieldwork, in which the researcher becomes immersed in a quite alien cultural or subcultural milieu. The purpose of this is not only to obtain data about the group under study but also to shake the researcher out of his or her own cultural presuppositions and prejudices through both culture shock and, on return to the original group, reverse culture shock. Through this process, one’s assumptions about what is cultural and what is natural become destabilised and interrogated. The anthropologist, having emerged from the Promethean fire that is fieldwork, is thus reforged as what Michael Agar famously called “the professional stranger”, able to look at other cultures and his or her own with an informed detachment. The core of this statement is very similar to our position in this book, but taken-forgranted disciplinary boundaries are apparent in this book review by Mark Jamieson (2018). No one who had read outside their discipline could write such a paragraph, which claims anthropology’s monopoly on and exclusive ‘ownership’ of intensive fieldwork. Intensive observation has not been the exclusive method of anthropology for a hundred years, and there have been professional strangers since, for example,A.M. McLean did intensive sociological fieldwork with shop workers in Chicago and with migrant hop pickers in Oregon before the 1914–18 war (Deegan, 2017). Hundreds of social scientists who were not anthropologists have done intensive fieldwork and this grandiose claim that only anthropologists engage in it can only be based on Jamieson’s lack of reading outwith anthropology. All specialisms and disciplines can be blinkered, of course. Science and Technology Studies have generally neglected to study science education and socialization and to read about research on those fields done by educational investigators (Delamont, 1985). A good ethnographer will strive to find and read relevant work outwith their own discipline or subspecialism. The third way in which the literature may be produced by scholars who are unaware of their own practices is predominantly an American issue. Researchers in Anglophone countries other than America usually read and cite American work and therefore routinely compare and contrast their fieldsites with parallel American ones. The reverse is very rarely true. American ethnographic work is ethnocentric to an extreme degree. Jack Katz (2019) reflected on 30 years of teaching qualitative research methods in sociology at UCLA. Every empirical or methodological text he cited was American. We pointed out that he had not introduced his students to relevant scholarship from outwith the USA, and he was genuinely surprised, saying he ‘never thought about’ the nationality of the authors of what he read, or set his students to read. This ethnocentrism is no better among younger and early career American scholars. The collection edited by Jerolmack and Khan (2018) is

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another example. The editors and the ten authors of chapters in it also fail to cite any ethnographers from outwith North America. European theorists are cited, but not empirical researchers. We pointed this out to the chapter authors who either did not reply or said that there had been ‘no room’ to include any non-American studies. This might seem to be reasonable to an American, but no New Zealander, Australian, Canadian or British scholar would dream of saying that they had ‘no room’ for any American scholarship. Inside the four nations of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, there is a similar problem on a smaller scale. Authors based in England routinely ignore research done in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the existence of devolved governments in those nations, and write ‘Britain’, and the ‘London Government’, when they mean England. Dermot (2012), for example, writes of ‘British’ students protesting against tuition fees, when Scottish students have never been charged any such fees, before discussing a route for army veterans into school teaching that only existed in England without specifying that limitation for her readers. Reading only male authors, only scholars in one’s own discipline, or only material from one’s own country can lead to deeply entrenched familiarity in the fieldwork and in the publications from it. If a settled canon of literature gets established, it can narrow a whole sub-discipline into an intellectual cul-de-sac. The sub-discipline of Anthropology of Education in north America can be criticised for such tunnel-vision, as Delamont’s (2012a) overview concluded. She was not alone in drawing attention to the parochial nature of that sub-discipline. Leading figures inside anthropology of education such as John Singleton (1999) had also pointed out that the familiarity problem was endemic in the sub-discipline. He argued that too often ‘education’ is assumed to be coterminous with the study of schools and that teaching and learning in other contexts is neglected. To disrupt, or ‘trouble’ anthropology of education Singleton’s (1998) collection on learning and teaching in a variety of Japanese contexts outwith schools including pottery, theatre, drumming and the tea ceremony is a good place to start reading. A consequence of the ethnocentric nature of the subdiscipline is the existence of many ethnographies about the children of minorities who are ‘failing’ in American schools. There are many well-written, carefully researched, thick descriptions of a minority group suffering because their culture fits badly with the dominant, hegemonic, culture of mainstream American schooling. For 45 years, the anthropologists working in the USA and Canada have studied African-Canadians and African-Americans, First Americans and Canadians, Latino and Latina Americans being ‘outsiders’ who ‘fail’ when they do not ‘fit’ in their country’s schools. Only occasionally is there an example of a success story such as Casanova’s (2011) Si se Puede! about Cibola High School, where Mexican American students achieve highly. Precisely because the dominant theme of so much of the American anthropology of education is vivid documentation of the failure of ethnic minorities, it is useful for non-Americans to help them fight familiarity in their research setting. However, it is equally useful to recognise how the American anthropologists regularly fail to make their own field unfamiliar so we learn not to make the same error.

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In many areas of social science, novelty is king: there is pressure to read the ‘latest’ work and a prejudice against anything ‘old’. In Atkinson, Coffey and Delamont (2003), we argued for paying attention to some classic methods papers of the 1950s and 1960s, in order to focus on what was still useful and what needed re-thinking. ‘Fashion’ in methods can lead to neglect of classic ideas. Reading ethnographies from the past sharpens one’s eye for the historical development of the use of the method in empirical research. The gradient of unfamiliarity with an ethnography or a piece of methods advice from 50 years ago can be very steep but have enormous benefits. Reading for the first time, or re-reading an older methods book such as Spradley’s (1980), can serve several useful functions at this stage. Spradley cites a whole range of empirical studies – of ballet classes, cocktail waitresses, bus passengers, flea markets, poker players and homeless men. Following up any of those could provide a useful contrast or complement to an ethnographer’s own fieldsite. Some of the methods suggested – for data collection and for analysis – might seem old-fashioned but could be thought-provoking. Spradley was always interested in discovering how actors categorise the features of their subculture. For example, he celebrated a study of glider pilots and how they categorised manoeuvres, such as the ‘chandelle’ and the ‘crab’. Spradley’s emphasis on the necessity of the ethnographer collecting and understanding such category systems, and his obvious pleasure in discovering them, are a good reminder of why studying the unfamiliar at home is so vital for good ethnography. Going even further back, and into a purely sociological text, it would be interesting to re-read Schatzman and Strauss (1973) on field methods if it had been read before, and very enlightening to read it for the first time if it is not known. In some ways, the book reads as much ‘older’ than it actually is. Many of the messages are not very different from our perspective in this book. Schatzman and Strauss (1973: 99) propose organising notes into three categories: observational, theoretical and methodological. Nowadays, one would probably be advocating a personal, reflective diary or file as well.Their suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter are an instant time-machine trip back to the best work by the best scholars of the 1960s. Turning to empirical work that is no longer fashionable, we have briefly mentioned two books that have worked to refresh our thinking. Herzfeld’s (1985) study of how men in the White Mountains of Crete performed masculinity – by competitive dancing, verbal duels, generosity in the all-male kefeneion (coffee-house), sheep-stealing and occasionally fighting – captures a local culture that had been shaped by the Nazi occupation of Crete in World War II and by the Ottoman Empire’s oppression of Crete before that. So it reads as an account of a lost world. At the same time, its analytic framework provided valuable for Stephens and Delamont (2014) to conceptualise features of male embodiment in diasporic capoeira, and the role of dancing in teachers’ strategies to produce the desired male performativity. Similarly, Juliet du Boulay’s (1974) ethnography of a very remote (reached only by donkey path) village in Greece contains a detailed analysis of the forms, functions and power of gossip – in a competitive society – that captures its attractive and repulsive features which would help the analysis of any small group offline or

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online today. Those two books are ‘old’ but the ideas can help an understanding in all fieldsite of performativity and of verbal ‘control’.

Ethnographic genres We have argued that the ethnographer needs to be alert to not only the content of the literature, but also to the genre. Many conventions about how anthropology is written up for publication have changed since 1970 as we discuss below, but reading older work in 2020 provides a good basis for thinking about how to write about any kind of fieldwork precisely because it is such an extreme example of how genres have changed. Debates concerning how ethnography, or any type of qualitative research, can and should be written about have been around for over 40 years. In 1986, two anthropologists, James Clifford and George Marcus, edited a collection of essays. The authors in that landmark collection argued for the same levels of self-conscious critical reflection that characterised data collection and fieldwork roles in anthropology to be self-consciously applied to writing, and to reading the literature. Initially only controversial in anthropology, where the monograph has an iconic status both for the author and for the people or culture it describes, later other social sciences where ethnography is used gradually absorbed the same concerns. The ways in which qualitative research is written have changed as a result of that increased scrutiny. New literary forms, polyvocal texts and the explicit presence of the author as a character in the text have all become acceptable as genres of academic publication, and there are journals and publishers which disseminate the new forms. The analysis presented here concentrates on Anglophone texts. There are vibrant traditions of ethnography in other languages but those bodies of research need analysis by native speakers of the languages in which they are written. When Clifford and Marcus (1986) edited Writing Culture, they advocated polemically a new standpoint for, and argument about, ethnographic writing. That collection and their arguments are still controversial 35 years later. Their volume generated a ‘crisis of representation’ in cultural and social anthropology. Atkinson and Delamont (2008a) reprint several of the most famous papers that generated and developed the controversy such as Denzin (2002), Flaherty (2002) and Manning (2002) in the USA and Spencer (1989, 2001) in the UK. Collections of essays responding to Clifford and Marcus’s volume have been published regularly since 1986 such as Behar and Gordon (1995), James, Hockey and Dawson (1997), Zenker and Kumoll (2010), Waterston and Vesperi (2011), Starn (2015), Wulff (2016) and Jeffery and Russell (2018). The phrase ‘crisis of representation’ was used because the initial response from some fellow ethnographers to the arguments in Clifford and Marcus (1986) was of horror, despair and panic. When the contributors to Clifford and Marcus argued that anthropologists had not deployed their epistemological beliefs about how data should be collected and understood when they read the work of other scholars, or when they wrote their own publications, many felt that the bedrock of the discipline was being undermined. If the monograph could not be read as a factual, true,

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authoritative account, what did that do to the discipline? Other scholars were quick to offer a more balanced response, such as Manning (2002) who called his comment ‘The sky is not falling’. Once the initial furore had abated, it became clear there were benefits. Anthropologists could help their students to read the literature in a more informed and reflective way (Gay y Blasco and Wardle, 2007). The proposed changes widened and increased the range of what was ‘publishable’ so ethnographers could generate more publications from their fieldwork, their writing and their reading. Today the new self-conscious forms of thinking about texts, both reading them and writing them, are generally called much more neutrally ‘The Literary Turn’ or ‘The Rhetorical Turn’. The literary turn is used because there was, and is, an overlap between academic social science reading and writing and theories from literary criticism (Atkinson, 1983, 1990, 1992, 2013b, 2020). The rhetorical turn is an alternative way of signalling that authors recognise that all academic writing is inevitably rhetorical, not only in the humanities and social sciences but even natural-scientific texts. Outside anthropology and interactionist sociology in the 1980s and 1990s, the main advances and debates about texts in social science were found in Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Ashmore, Myers and Potter, 1994), among feminist and LGBT scholars (Krieger, 1983), and in communication studies (Ellis, 2004). The ideas discussed in Clifford and Marcus were brought to an audience beyond anthropology by Norman Denzin and were promulgated in the early editions of Denzin and Lincoln’s (1994, 2000) large handbooks of qualitative methods. In the editorial for the 2000 edition, Denzin and Lincoln set out a developmental scheme for qualitative research – The Five Moments Model – which celebrated the rhetorical turn, and amplified its importance. That scheme was problematic, as Delamont, Coffey and Atkinson (2000) argued. Central to the criticisms levelled at Clifford and Marcus, and Denzin and Lincoln, were two related arguments, one about novelty and the other focused on gender, which overlap. They are briefly covered here. A reader of the collection of essays edited by Clifford and Marcus, or indeed of Denzin and Lincoln’s (2000) model, could have concluded that there had been one orthodox way to write about ethnographic research during the first 70 years of the twentieth century and that all the important authors were men. By focusing on the rhetorical style of some famous male anthropologists, there appeared to have been uniformity, but that conclusion was based on ignoring other authorial approaches. There had been a dominant genre, and most authors wrote in it, but there had always been other minority styles (Caplan, 1988/1989). The response from American feminist anthropologists was about two aspects of Clifford and Marcus (1986). First, it only included one woman author, Pratt (1986), who is a literary critic and not an anthropologist. Second, not one of the chapters focused on the publications of a woman anthropologist. Those two criticisms led to a corrective collection, Behar and Gordon (1995) which contained pieces by women about women scholars. The intellectually important angle of that critique is that the history of anthropology includes women who not only pioneered fieldwork in a variety of hitherto unstudied contexts – such as Ruth

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Landes’s (1947) study of the candomblé priestesses of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil – but also chose to write about their work in ways that deliberately challenged and even subverted the dominant anthropological textual genre. Caplan (1988/1989) pointed out at the time that when women had chosen to write in unconventional ways, their work was dismissed as self-indulgent, whereas when elite men began to construct such text, it was boldly experimental. Uncanonical publications and their authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston (1935) and Ruth Landes (Cole, 1995), were systematically defined as ‘not proper scholars’ by the dominant men in the 1930s and 1940s, and subsequently written out of the history of the discipline.Van Slyke-Briggs (2009) summarises the fate of Hurston’s life and work as follows: ‘she was dismissed by anthropologists’ and ‘sanitised from the canon of texts’ (p. 340). Hurston wrote her fieldwork up in novels, autobiographies and memoires: so unacceptable and ‘uncanonical’ in the 1930s that her texts were marginalised. In the current decade, Hurston’s choices of literary forms to report her findings look contemporary and fresh. So the core argument of Clifford and Marcus and their authors about the urgent need to challenge the established textual orthodoxy of one standardised non-reflective style of authorship was only valid if women who had subverted it in the past, such as Zora Neal Hurston and Ruth Landes, were deliberately excluded from the history of American anthropology. If Clifford and Marcus, or Denzin and Lincoln, had been clearer about how authors who did not follow the canon had been thoroughly excluded and could ‘now’ be profitably revisited and reinstated into the disciplines, feminist criticism of their arguments would have been avoided. It is also important to note that while the Clifford and Marcus anthology was, and is, an important book for all ethnographers, it was not as original as is often thought. The editorial essay (Atkinson and Delamont, 2008b), and the contents of the four-volume set of papers on ethnographic representation we edited (Atkinson and Delamont, 2008a), shows that the arguments were around before 1986. There were precursors, such as Brown (1977), Edmonson (1984), and Atkinson (1983). Atkinson and Delamont (2008a) contain 20 papers published before Clifford and Marcus that raise the same issues, such as Lofland (1974) and Bazerman (1981, 1988). Despite these caveats about Clifford and Marcus or Denzin as authors who changed the ethnographic paradigm, when reading ethnographies and other qualitative studies, it is important to pay attention to the era when they were written, and the genre(s) used by their authors. The ethnography by Favret-Saada of witchcraft beliefs in rural France is a case in point. Published in English in 1980, the original French edition appeared in 1977, before Clifford and Marcus’s collection. It challenged the traditional form of the anthropology monograph, in that Favret-Saada ‘wrote herself into’ the monograph. Far from being an impersonal and detached account of the fieldwork and the local culture, the book placed Favret-Saada as a participant in the local system of witchcraft and un-witching and not just as a passive observer. She claimed that there was no neutral position from which to conduct the ethnography, and she was identified as an un-witcher by her informants. Her work was transgressive, in the tradition of Landes and Hurston before her.

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So Clifford and Marcus crystallized, and gave status to, a set of ideas that had been circulating for a decade before 1986. By the time Favret-Saada’s monograph was published in English, it seemed much less transgressive, as textual conventions were steadily undergoing change. Atkinson and Delamont (2008b) show how ethnographic texts written before 1980 do look different from those published since 1988. The comparisons drawn by Atkinson and Delamont (2008a), using the ethnographic research on African-Brazilian, and African-Caribbean religions in Brazil, Cuba and Haiti, between ethnographies published in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and those written after 1988 show two changes. Authors of ethnographies in the twenty-first century rarely write in the impersonal voice (‘it was decided’) or use ‘we’ when there is only one author and contain more direct quotations from subaltern actors in the setting. The authors of the recent ethnographies of those secret subaltern belief systems treat them as religions not primitive superstitions, claim to be believers themselves, report their own initiations and incorporate their own race, gender and embodiment explicitly in their fieldwork and their texts. Delamont (2018) makes a similar comparison between the style of monographs reporting ethnographies of education from the 1960s and 1970s and those of the current century. Wolf (1992) suggests a parallel analysis – to which we refer in the next chapter – and Atkinson (2020) explores these issues in depth. There has been resistance to the rhetorical turn among some qualitative researchers, which we discuss before we explore four consequences of alternative or experimental writing practices for reading and reflection. In most social sciences, few scholars use any of the new forms of texts, and even among ethnographers, the adoption of the new genres has remained a minority interest. There are journals, such as Qualitative Inquiry which do publish poems, dialogues, and self-indulgently self-referential papers. The educational researchers who are contributors to Bagley (2009) are relatively unusual in their enthusiasm for deploying poetry, performance and fiction rather than conventional texts. Other examples of scholars using the freedoms that followed Clifford and Marcus are Wolf in anthropology and Clough in education. Wolf ’s (1992) book which presents an incident from fieldwork in rural Taiwan in three different textual forms, including a short story, is a powerful example of the advantages of experimenting with textual genres. In educational research, Peter Clough’s (2002, 2009) explorations in the use of fictional genres was pioneering. More commonly, authors who produce orthodox texts feel able to include an unorthodox element in their work. For example, Coffey and Atkinson (1996: 129–130) use a poem to convey the emotional response of a doctoral student to her PhD oral examination in an otherwise conventional methods book on data analysis. More recently, Mannay (2011) published a poem about one aspect of her research on working class women in South Wales. There are consequences of the rhetorical turn for the reader. Whether she is reading discussions of methods, or findings, the modern reader needs to be aware of the conventions of the various genres, and how they should, even must be, read. Here we discuss how to read the ‘confessional’ literature, author’s autobiographies and autoethnography. We briefly describe these three types of text and then explain how to read them.

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Fieldwork ‘confessions’ In the category, we are discussing the accounts written by investigators of one project that they did, alone or in a team, in which they recall what ‘really’ happened. There have been autobiographical writings about the processes of fieldwork for many years. Some of the early ones were fictionalised and published under pseudonyms, such as Laura Bohannan’s Return to Laughter published ‘officially’ under the pseudonym Elenore Smith Bowen (1954) and presented as a ‘novel’ or travel book. In sociology, the collection of reminiscences about research projects edited by Hammond (1964) was a landmark, and there was a flurry of such volumes in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Bell and Newby (1977), Bell and Encel (1978) and Bell and Roberts (1984) on sociology projects. Education scholars produced a great many (e.g. Burgess, 1984, 1985a, 1985b, 1985c, 1989; Walford, 1987, 1991, 1994, 1998). Among the many collections since Hammond are: de Marrais (1998), Lareau and Shultz (1996), Generett and Jeffries (2003), Spindler and Hammond (2006), McLean and Leiberg (2007), Puddephatt, Shaffir and Kleinknecht (2009), Faubion and Marcus (2009), Watson (1999) and Young and Goulet (1994). This type of text reports some aspects of the everyday experiences of the investigator(s) who carried out a piece of research. The label ‘confessional’ is unfortunate, because it implies that there are guilty secrets to be revealed, when in fact the genre has well-established conventions for establishing the self-presentation of the scholar as credible and competent. Qualitative researchers have been more likely to publish autobiographies and confessions than quantitative scholars, and there is a literature focused on analysing the accounts of qualitative investigators (van Maanen, 1988, 2011). Scholars who use quantitative methods do write confessionals, as the collection edited by Philip Hammond (1964) illustrates, but the genre is more commonly produced by qualitative researchers. The Lost Ethnographies edited by Robin James Smith and Sara Delamont (2019), for example, is a collection of papers by ethnographers about projects they did not complete, which is all by ethnographers and does not have any equivalent for quantitative research. When methodological insight is sought, analysing the confessionals rather than just reading them is particularly important. One powerful analytic strategy deploys the conceptual framework of Vladimir Propp (1968) originally developed to study the morphology of the Russian folktale. PA (Atkinson, 1996) used that strategy to explore the underlying structure of the autobiographical accounts of American urban ethnographers. It transpired that those autobiographical narratives were constructed using a similar narrative structure to the quest motifs that characterise classic folktales. The quest narrative involves a journey made by the hero (such as Sir Lancelot, or Bilbo, or Luke Skywalker) to find or retrieve a desired object (the Holy Grail, the treasure including the Dwarves’ Arkenstone, or the princess Leila), being lost or held by an enemy (Smaug, the evil empire). The Hero in a folktale, and in an academic’s narrative, can be a female character, such as Gerda in The Snow Queen or Lara Croft. In many stories, the Hero has been born with an advantage (e.g. is

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the seventh child of the seventh child). Other key characters are one or more False Friends who meet the hero and betray him or her and, to counterbalance them, a True Friend who stays loyally by the Hero (as Sam stays with Frodo) and a Helper (such as a Fairy Godmother) who provides a magical object (a cloak of invisibility, Excalibur, seven league boots) that facilitates the quest. Eventually the hero overcomes the enemy (Sauron, Moriarty), obtains or retrieves the desired object and lives happily ever after. Films including modern stories like The Scorpion King often have exactly that structure. PA’s analysis reveals that the ‘confessionals’ by the ethnographers of American inner city (mostly ethnic minority) neighbourhoods are presented as classic quest narratives. There is a social science finding here. Academics write their narratives about fieldwork as quest stories because it is a genre that is easily recognised by readers. At its simplest, the quest story in an academic autobiography is one in which the scholar (Hero) overcomes obstacles to reach the treasure (great data). Lessons that can be learnt from Atkinson’s analysis include the recurrent tropes of initial plans proving unrealisable, that finding a sponsor is vital, the researcher will meet a great deal of suspicion and mistrust and may encounter danger and violence at worst. Insight can be gained from blunders, and if lucky, the researcher will find some friends in the setting. Initial encounters and learning what to wear and how to speak are all recurrent, core themes in the narratives. Delamont (2009a) suggests a parallel analysis of the confessional texts by eight ethnographers of neopagan witchcraft. Superficially very different from the male stories of researching urban America, the women from four different countries who studied neopagans wrote accounts which, when analysed in terms of Propp’s model, revealed themselves to be classic quest narratives. Atkinson’s (1996) analysis can be read contrastively with Van Maanen’s (2011) study of accounts of ethnographic fieldwork in which he drew attention to the differences between two main styles: ‘realist’ texts in which the author presents an account of their ethnographic fieldwork in a detached, impersonal style, and the ‘confessional’ text in which the scholar ‘reveals’ the many personal aspects of observational research. In the latter, the author often stresses examples of their own mistakes and difficulties, such as wearing the wrong clothes or using language inappropriate for the fieldsite. A related, but not identical genre is the academic autobiography (see below). But the lesson of PA’s analysis is that the ‘unvarnished truth’ of the confessional is just as crafted and just as artful as the realist text. The contrast is not simply between ‘the real’ and the ‘personal’. They are both genres, and both display the conventions of their respective genre.

The academic autobiography or life study The academic autobiography or life-story is a wider piece than a confessional about one project. The published academic autobiography tells the life story of an academic: that is of their whole career. It is rarely book length, but a chapter or paper of 6,000–7,000 words. They are usually found in year books, such as the Annual

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Review of Anthropology (Leach, 1984), edited collections of such autobiographies (e.g. Berger, 1990; Riley, 1988) or in journals. Autobiographies by academics can be read for a variety of reasons.They can be entertaining, or demystify academic careers and university life, or provide insights into social research methods. They can be a useful source of insight into research methods in general and how these methods actually worked out, or failed, during specific research projects. If they are texts produced by scholars who have done empirical research, they contain insights into data collection, analysis and textual production; and how those things fitted into their lives, led to their success, and changed their disciplines. Autobiographical essays are relevant to research methods because they frequently reflect on the major projects that the author worked on in his or her early career as well as the investigations they led in their later careers (Olesen, 2009). Autobiographies by social scientists usually focus briefly on family background, education and career, include a good deal about the scholars who taught them, who their contemporaries were in graduate school and after, and the ideas that shaped their social science. There are two important caveats: such autobiographies are only published by important scholars, who completed graduate school, got academic posts and tenure, published and frequently are high achievers who have won awards and held offices in learned societies such as being elected the President of, in the UK, the Royal Geographical Society or in the USA, a medal winner of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Most academics never publish their autobiographical reflections.Those who do not complete their doctorates are not appointed to lectureships and who fail to publish are not asked to write their autobiographies. A reader who intends to use analysis of academic autobiographies for insight into research should always be alert for the autobiographies that do not exist: those never written by scholars who refused opportunities to publish, who died young, who left university life, and those who were too ‘insignificant’ to get their stories into print. The second important caveat about using such autobiographies to study research methods is that they are – like any other life-history – rhetorical performances, or accounts, and need to be read accordingly. Their authors themselves are experienced both as authors and as readers, who know how to craft a text for publication. When such autobiographies are to be used by social scientists, they have to be analysed, for what is said, and how they are written. When an academic in social science is senior, or famous, enough to write and publish an autobiography, they will inevitably be an experienced author. The scholars who write autobiographical narratives are self-consciously producing a self-affirming account of their lives that they intend their audience to find entertaining and informative. It is an ‘honour’ to be asked, and to contribute is a mark of success. Produced by experienced authors, they need to be understood by readers as carefully crafted, not spontaneous, and produced for an audience according to cultural conventions. Such autobiographies should not be read as simple accounts of the ‘facts’ or as uniquely insightful, revelatory, ‘true confessions’. Until the 1980s, the autobiographical genre was normally kept well away from the main academic publications: the refereed journal paper or book. They were segregated

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into appendices or anthologised in separate volumes and did not appear at all in the high-status journals where results and theoretical arguments were disseminated. When the paradigm change in writing about ethnography took place, the openness of scholars to using new textual genres, and the intellectual currents behind such genres led to the rise of new types of publication including more autobiographies.

The autoethnography An autoethnography is a report of a piece of ethnographic fieldwork in which the ethnographer’s main focus is herself. As a term, it has several origins that have little in common with today’s usage. It was used to describe texts of an ‘ethnographic’ nature that examined everyday life in the United Kingdom, America and Europe: it captured an anthropological imagination turned on authors’‘own’ society, as opposed to the ‘exotic’ venues of ethnographic fieldwork (Buzard, 2009). It has also been used to describe explicitly sociological work on ‘one’s own’ (Hayano, 1979): what is often referred to as ‘insider’ research where the researcher is part of the group, subculture or occupation that is being studied. More latterly, it has taken on a rather different meaning. In current usage, autoethnographic writing is a form of autobiographical writing. The author’s attention is less on the ‘others’ whom ethnographers normally address. The author’s own ‘experience’ forms the central subject-matter. Moreover, the main preoccupation is often with the author’s ‘feelings’. Consequently, as PA has suggested (Atkinson, 2020), it is best considered a variety of autobiography and autofiction, itself a contemporary genre that celebrates ‘the self ’. In the hands of many authors, it seems to have departed from ethnographic reconstructions of social phenomena, into a narcissistic obsession with the self. It has grown into a new subspecialism. There is, for instance, from 2020 a Journal of Autoethnography (published by the University of California Press). There are numerous texts advocating autoethnography (e.g. Adams, 2014; Bartleet, 2012; Chang, 2008, 2012; Denzin, 2013; Ettore, 2019; Muncey, 2010;Spry, 2016), with Handbooks (e.g. Jones, 2016), and compilations (e.g. Sikes, 2013) and conferences devoted to it. We have expressed our reservations about autoethnography elsewhere (Atkinson, 2006; Delamont, 2009b) which are shared by other conventional or traditional ethnographers (Anderson, 2006a, 2006b). Here we focus on just a few points central to this book. Autoethnography does not encourage us to fight familiarity. It is hard to fight familiarity in our own society even when we have data. Studying ourselves will rarely make anything anthropologically strange. Of course, critical reflection on our research practices is, as we have emphasised repeatedly, vital for a thoroughgoing process of estrangement. But that is very different from a narcissistic obsession with one’s own feelings and experiences. The latter is a form of memoir, but rarely a major contribution to social research. Autoethnography is almost impossible to write and publish ethically: when Clough (1992, 2002) published poems alluding to a lover’s genitalia, did he agree to them being made public? When Ronai (1996) published ‘My mother is mentally

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retarded’ did her mother give ‘informed consent’? Other actors cannot be disguised or protected in autoethnography. Readers will always wish to read autoethnography as an authentic, and consequently ‘true’ account of the writer’s life, and therefore the other actors will be, whatever disclaimers, or statements about fictions are included, identifiable and identified. Moreover, other people are usually more interesting than ethnographers themselves. The social worlds of prisons, hospitals and colleges, of drug-users and gangs, of stock-exchanges and ballet companies, of seafarers and farmers are infinitely more significant than the everyday lives and emotions of middle-class academics. In any case, our focus here is only on how to read autoethnographies, and for this purpose, we have classified them with the confessional texts and the autobiographies.

Reading these three genres The key point is that these genres lead to texts that are narratives, produced in an era that celebrates narrative as a social science method (Atkinson and Delamont, 2006a, 2006b; Atkinson and Silverman, 1997). Most social sciences, and most empirical areas, have been enriched by narrative research done in the past 20 years. However, there are some distinctly unscholarly, and frankly naïve, writings on narrative around. The boom in illness narratives is one case in point (Atkinson, 2009a). Collecting a narrative does not provide a window through which we can see, feel and hear ‘the truth’ about any social phenomenon. Narratives are produced by social actors; they are performative, they are speech acts and they can only be useful to social science if that is recognised. Of course, a narrative can be entertaining or frightening or have a pedagogic purpose or be a great basis for poetry or drama or fiction … but those are not the proper concerns of social science. Along with a naïve belief that a narrative is a window through which we can see social action, there is also a retreat from analysis in favour of presenting the words of the informant ‘untouched’ by the social scientist in the name of ‘authenticity’ or ‘democracy’. That is equally an abrogation of the social scientists’ duty, to analyse data. These two basic precepts apply equally to the life histories of miners’ wives in the Rhondda, or of Maori elders, or retired physics teachers, or gravity-wave physicists, as they do to published autobiographical accounts by social scientists about their research projects on liberal arts undergraduates in Kansas, or the autobiography of Edmund Leach (1984) or Martyn Hammersley (2012) or an autoethnography such as those collected by Ellis and Bochner (1996). Narratives are performances, are accounts, must be analysed, and not just celebrated naively as ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ (Atkinson and Delamont, 2006a, 2006b). As Whitaker and Atkinson (2020) argue, ‘authenticity’ is a matter of self-presentation through narrative enactment. It is not a characteristic inherent in any particular story or genre of story-telling. The arguments about the interview, rehearsed by Atkinson (1997), Atkinson and Silverman (1997) and Silverman (2017), apply just as strongly to academics’ autobiographies, confessional accounts and autoethnographies. Hence, it is important to recognise that confessions and autobiographies

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parallel interviews and personal narratives. They are technologies of the self. They presuppose introspective and loquacious narrators/authors, who construct versions of their self and identity by crafting accounts of self and others, through which the narrator is reconstructed in a desired image (hero/ine, victim, survivor, etc). Autobiographical writing, whether by a social scientist or by others, also implies a further quality. Confession in itself is a virtue in contemporary cultures of revelation. Celebrity is itself enhanced through ‘celebrity interviews’ in which an expectation of self-disclosure is fulfiled. In a culture in which ‘truth’ is constantly challenged by ‘post-truth’, we would be naïve indeed to take on trust such self-constructions.

Conclusions This chapter has focused on strategies for reading to aid the fight against familiarity. We have emphasised throughout the need to read texts analytically and to pay attention to their textual conventions.We study cultural practices when we conduct our fieldwork, and we must recognise the extent to which practices of reading and writing are equally outcomes of disciplinary cultures.The critical self-consciousness that ethnographers need to cultivate should extend to their reading and writing. The writing of ethnographies is the theme of the following chapter, where the same core issues are shown to be relevant.

8 WRITING THE UNFAMILIAR

One of the ways in which familiarity has to be challenged is in the construction of the texts produced for readers. There is no point in the ethnographer working hard to fight familiarity when planning, conducting and theorising the fieldwork and data gathered, and then producing a text that does not make the familiar strange for the reader. The writing stages need to be organised so that the fight continues up to and beyond publication. Potential readers of research done in their own culture or society, such as the resident of Auckland reading about a school there (Fitzpatrick, 2013), will be expecting to find the text relatively familiar. In contrast, readers of studies about exotic ‘other’ cultures – classics such as Malinowski (1927) on the Trobriand islanders or Ruth Landes (1947) on the African Brazilian culture of Salvador de Bahia in the 1930s – expect to learn from the texts about unfamiliar kinship and family structures, religious beliefs and practices, or ways of earning or not earning a living. The author has to fulfil those expectations of unfamiliarity and emphasise the common humanity of the reader and the actors in the exotic setting. Our main purpose in this book is to help the former group of authors, but those writing about exotic settings may find it helpful. When writing about institutions and subcultures which readers are familiar with, such as schools, hospitals or offices in their own society, it is the job of the ethnographer to defamiliarise those institutions and subcultures. This chapter emphasises writing strategies that defamiliarise research findings. It begins with writing in ways that make the familiar strange for the reader with a focus on producing the conventional outlets for reporting the findings of ethnographic research: the thesis, the academic article for a journal, the book chapter and the monograph.The pros and cons of using new textual forms, and dissemination by alternate means such as DVDs/dance/plays, are also covered. Most of the strategies (1) Drawing comparisons with the core phenomena as they exist in other cultures, (2) revisiting the ethnographies of the setting or core phenomena done in the past,

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(3) seeking the phenomenon in non-studied settings, (4) focusing on unusual actors in the setting, (5) paying careful attention to gender, (6) paying careful attention to race and ethnicity, (7) drawing on middle-range concepts from other sub-specialism, (8) making permanent recordings and (9) drawing on phenomenology and ethnomethodology) are applicable to those standard forms of writing and to the newer textual forms. In the later sections we turn, more briefly, to some of the newer forms of publication, such as autobiographical pieces, where the conventions are less well established, and necessity for making the familiar strange is less obvious – how do I make my own life story unfamiliar to myself? – but is equally desirable. First we briefly explain the conventions that govern how ethnographic research is written up. Some of our advice may seem conservative, because we know that writing in unconventional and genre-busting ways is harder than it seems and if done badly can be career-damaging. A conventional text is easier to do well. In Chapter Seven, we outlined the literary or rhetorical turn and its impact on the reading and writing of qualitative research in the social sciences. Here our focus is on how the expansion of genres available to the qualitative social scientist enriches, but also complicates, the writing stages of the ethnographic project, as well as how to harness writing to continue the fight against familiarity. Choices of genre and new types of literary convention are both exhilarating and perilous for the early career scholar. One reason for the continuation of conventional reports, journal papers and books is the desire of researchers to have influence on policy. The high value placed on doing and publishing research that can have policy implications has meant that many researchers have eschewed the most experimental textual forms because they are generally not acceptable to audiences of policy makers or practitioners.The new forms of writing also distance qualitative researchers from policy makers, which can lead to their rejection by ethnographers. Nor are the more experimental textual forms normally a good choice for the higher degree student writing a thesis: most institutions and examiners prefer or even require a traditional text. Ethnographers who have explored new forms in some or all of their publications have developed three new forms of output, alongside producing rather different forms of three longstanding varieties of publication. Some of the new types of publication are based on research and analysis that was not previously conducted. Firstly, self-conscious reflection on ethnographic texts has led to a set of publications about the ways in which specific aspects of qualitative research are conducted such as how fieldnotes are written (Sanjek, 1990) and how transcription is done (Hammersley, 2012; Mishler, 1991). Secondly scholars in social science have explored how writing is itself part of the inquiry (Richardson, 1994). Her focus on ‘writing as a method of inquiry’ pioneered the methodological advantages of using writing as an integral part of the ethnographic investigation. Thirdly the tools of literary analysis such as metaphor analysis have been applied to academic social science texts (Atkinson, 1990). The growth of scholarship applying the tools of literary analysis to academic social science texts is exemplified by Fine and Martin’s (1999) textual analysis of Goffman’s work on total institutions such as prisons and boarding schools. Delamont

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and Atkinson (1995) contains two Chapters (3 and 4) which present analyses of how teachers and pupils are written about differently in ethnographic texts by anthropologists and sociologists. Chapter 5 analyses the pseudonyms used for schools in British educational ethnographies which are shown to be based on three main themes, one rural (‘Riverdale’, ‘Applegarth’, ‘Maindene’), a second gritty urban evocations (‘Dockside’, ‘Hammertown’) and the third is literary sources (‘Kenilworth’ and ‘Casterbridge’). The methods text has changed its contents because a section or chapter on writing is now normal but not in its textual or rhetorical style. Otherwise the format and overall content of the guides to doing ethnography has been relatively unaffected by the rhetorical turn. A comparison of the four editions of Hammersley and Atkinson (1983, 1995, 2007, 2019) shows two developments: more space devoted to writing and more coverage of the technological and digital developments in the social world. The core of this chapter is how to make the familiar strange at the writing stage. We briefly separate the types of output and then explore how the strategies can be deployed. One important point is that if an author has made efforts to challenge the familiarity of their field site, it is important to articulate why, and how, that has been done. If the fieldwork has been done using one of our strategies, then as long as that is clearly explained and justified the results and the author’s conclusions can be written up with that choice foregrounded. Authors whose work was wholly or partially done using our strategies or whose work was not done with them at the time of the planning or conduct or analysis of the fieldwork can also use those strategies at the writing stage. It is entirely possible to use our strategies at the writing stage to improve the text. It is important to remember why ethnographers write about their results. When Woolf (2011: 17) writes about Roman ‘conversations’ conducted across ‘a gradient of unfamiliarity’ in the Roman world, he suggests that ‘Most of what was learned in each generation was presumably almost immediately forgotten’. One purpose of writing about ethnographic research is to preserve what is learnt and make it available to others. That is, the first aim of ethnographic writing is to communicate to readers what the investigation has discovered and how it advances the discipline. Badly written texts do not attract, hold and impress readers. A well-written text that makes the familiar strange is the most likely to be remembered. Making conscious choices about genre is part of the skills of authorship, central to attracting readers and retaining them. We begin with fighting familiarity in writing a doctoral thesis, then address the academic publications normally of 5,000 to 8,000 words, whether journal articles or book chapters reporting findings, and then focus on the monograph. For the doctoral thesis, we do not use our own ethnographic work. Our own doctoral theses are far too old (the theses were submitted in 1973 and 1976 and were typed not word-processed) to be used to illustrate our arguments. We have drawn instead on our experience of supervising a great many ethnographic projects that became doctoral theses and research we conducted on doctoral students and their supervision

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(Delamont, Atkinson and Parry, 2000). However, for articles and chapters, and for monographs, we do use our own research. Similarly, when the chapter moves on to academic autobiographies and autoethnographic texts, we draw on our own outputs in these genres.

The doctoral thesis The higher degree thesis is a conservative genre, and candidates are generally wise to use innovative textual forms, such as poems, sparingly or avoid them altogether. However, demonstrating the strength and depth of the ethnographic work by making the familiar strange is highly desirable. When Ann Oakley framed her interview research on housewives by treating domestic labour not as an aspect of family life or the sociology of marriage, but as work, using the literature on types of waged labour, which was, in the late 1960s, overwhelmingly research on ‘male’ labour, she made features of ‘housework’ sociologically strange. Her thesis and the subsequent two books (Oakley, 1974a, 1974b) were successful precisely because she had researched a previously ignored social phenomenon (regarded as trivial) and because of her strategy of treating housework as work. She changed the agenda of sociology by making unfamiliar a previously understudied, and invisible, part of marriage and motherhood. Making the familiar strange in a thesis by doing the data collection and analysis in self-consciously innovative ways, and by taking an unusual intellectual stance rather than by adopting non-standard textual strategies. A good thesis will use and display several of our strategies.The literature reviewed will not be solely focused on the author’s own culture or subculture, and it will include studies from the past if there are any, and if there are none, mention that absence. Whoever the central actors in the main narrative of the thesis are, the doctoral candidate will not neglect to mention the other types of actor. Comparisons should be drawn between the way phenomena unfold in the researcher’s own fieldwork, and in that of other authors. Care will have been taken to make the race and gender issues in the fieldsite problematic and to make the ethnographer’s own standpoint explicit. If permanent recordings were made, their strengths and weaknesses will be explored. The middle-range theory (ies) will be appropriate and not clichéd and if relevant phenomenological or ethnomethodological insights will have been drawn upon.

Journal articles and book chapters Academic journals serve different audiences and even among those which will publish ethnographic work, there are differences which need to be researched before doing advanced drafts of any potential paper. Choosing a journal to target with a paper involves inspecting several possible titles which seem likely and reading papers in them. That enables the potential author to see what the editors think will interest their journal’s readers, or to be more academic, its ‘discourse community’ and have therefore chosen to publish, selecting them from the large number submitted.

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A journal article has to be written to be publishable in one of the targeted journals. Some publish innovative textual forms (e.g. Qualitative Inquiry), others demand more conventional texts (e.g. Ethnography). It is a waste of time to submit a paper to a journal if in either content or rhetorical style the paper does not meet its criteria. These are usually set out on the journal’s website in the ‘instructions to authors’, which need to be read carefully. Any ethnographic journal paper can make the familiar strange, but it has to be done succinctly because journal articles have strict word limits. Journals which appear in print enforce their word limits very strictly, while on-line-only journals can choose to be a bit more flexible. In all cases, over-length papers, if submitted, waste everyone’s time and energy. Book chapters have to meet the agenda of the editors of the volume, in style and content. These too have word limits, so the challenge to familiarity has to be done crisply and concisely. Among the ways to make the familiar strange in a short article or chapter are having an eye-catching title, stressing a real or apparent paradox, and opening with a striking vignette, and in the introduction stressing that something dramatic is central to the paper. A title which is a quote from the fieldnotes or an interview, an abstract that ‘explains’ it, and then taking the reader into the heart of the argument, have all become increasingly important when most potential readers scan on-line alerts or front pages and rapidly move on. Many ethnographic papers or chapters have a two-part title, with either the eye-catching phrase followed by the social science content, or vice versa. In the first format, we have used ‘Upstairs, downstairs: Medical students in their first clinical year and their previous experience of work in hospitals’(Atkinson, 1976b) ‘Doctoring uncertainty: Mastering craft knowledge’ (Atkinson and Delamont, 2001), ‘The golden star: Emotion, legacy and medical discovery’ (Sampson and Atkinson, 2013) and ‘The smell of sweat and rum: Teacher authority in capoeira classes’ (Delamont, 2006). We have rarely used the reverse format but all those could have been reversed, so the Sampson and Atkinson could have been ‘Emotion, legacy and medical discovery: The golden star’. Taking the reader straight into the action or the social world of the informants is also important. This is the academic equivalent of the opening of Mannix’s (1951) memoir of his time in an American travelling carnival which begins: ‘I probably never would have become America’s leading fire-eater if Flamo the Great hadn’t happened to explode that night in front of Krinko’s Great Combined Carnival Side Show’ (p. 5).Taking the reader directly to an unfamiliar place or time like that often works well, as this piece by PA illustrates: Edinburgh is where I did my first sustained fieldwork and that experience shaped much of my subsequent career. Edinburgh itself was sufficient evidence that our fellow men and women are a constant source of fascination. I was staying in the New Town. As I walked to Buccleuch Place, my journey would take me over George IV Bridge and past the end of the Grassmarket, and on towards Sandy Bell’s Bar, spiritual and spirituous home of the Scottish folk revival, where I might bump into Hamish Henderson, who was a Lecturer in Scots Song, but much more. He had been the first to translate Gramsci’s Prison

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Notebooks, he had fought with the Scottish regiments across the Western desert and northwards through Italy. His poems to the dead in Cyrenaica were among the most significant poetry to emerge from the Second World War. He had been present when the Italian military high command signed an instrument of surrender and had contrived to keep it. Depending on the time of the morning, one might well pass Lindsay Kemp, flitting homewards with his companion Orlando, from performing in The Turquoise Pantomime, or in Genet’s The Maids (Atkinson, 2016: 8) Stephens and Delamont (2013) used a similar device with the following opening At 9.45 p.m. there is a shuffle among the musicians in the bateria. An AfricanBrazilian woman takes over the drum and begins to lead the singing, changing the song.The chorus, picked up quickly by the Cloisterham students and more hesitantly by others because it is not one of the commonest songs: MoraYemanja! Mora Yemanja! Soon at least 50 people of many nationalities and several races, and many religions or none, are singing praise to an African-Brazilian orixa, a sea goddess, to enthuse the capoeira play . (Stephens and Delamont, 2013: 271–272) That paper is called ‘Mora Yemanja!: Axé in diasporic capoeira regional’, and opens with that extract from the fieldnotes that begins to explain the title. Paradoxes are also a good way to capture the attention of readers. Atkinson and Delamont (2001) ‘Doctoring uncertainty’ opens with just such a paradox: ‘Central to this socialisation process is doctoral students’ discovering that experiments….do not always – or even frequently – ‘work’: that is they do not habitually produce useful or even usable, results’ (p. 87). That paper contrasts the stage managed, carefully planned experiments done by undergraduate students, which are designed by lecturers to produce the results that confirm normal science with the ‘real’ laboratory work of the doctoral students who are being enculturated into their new scientific identity. While word limits can be frustrating and feel constraining, they do have benefits. One well-crafted challenge to the familiarity of the research setting should fit into the word limit, but several will make the piece too long and should be saved for another paper or chapter.The good thing about the word limit for a paper or chapter, and the advice to have only one challenge to familiarity in it, is that an adept use of one challenge can in itself make the paper or chapter eye-catching and different. To illustrate this, we have chosen a paper by Atkinson (2013b), about ethnographic writing, given originally as a plenary at a conference run by Norman Denzin. The paper is a far-reaching critique of the key arguments advanced by exponents of the new textual forms, but it does not start from them and their claims. Instead Atkinson begins with the novels of Denis Williams (1963, 1968), the Guyanese intellectual. For Atkinson, his career and writings ‘exemplify the intersection of a visual aesthetic, a literary aesthetic, and an anthropological sensibility’ (p. 20). From this starting point distinctly unfamiliar to most ethnographers, Atkinson develops his argument

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that ‘Too much contemporary ethnographic fiction, and autobiographical reflection, is too rooted in its own mundane forms of reality construction’ (p. 32). In short, Atkinson accuses would-be avant garde ethnographic authors of ‘sentimental realism’ (p. 32), an accusation that a group of self-styled revolutionaries are actually not innovators at all. Writing a journal article or book chapter does involve the ethnographer choosing whether to write in the ‘old’ way, as a disembodied detailed expert, or in the more common contemporary ‘voice’, as an individual who is co-present in the setting. That choice will influence the journal targeted in the type of edited book that the scholar wishes to contribute to. Edited Handbooks and Encyclopaedias still expect the ‘absent’ author writing in the third person, while such a style would not appeal to the peer reviewers of a journal such as Qualitative Inquiry. The authorial voice chosen is a serious decision, and can help the reader by varying and sharpening the gradient of unfamiliarity. Because there are many journals and can be multiple invitations to write for edited books, authors can adopt different styles and structures for different papers and chapters, designed to reach different audiences. A paper for practitioners should be different in style from one for policy makers and different again from one for fellow academics who want to learn about cheese makers, ballroom dancers or ferry passengers. In a book, however, there is usually some leeway to the authorial voice(s) that can be deployed, and it is to the monograph that we now turn.

The monograph The monograph is the quintessential ethnographic text but is likely to reach a much smaller readership than a journal article. (There are, of course, exceptions among the classic ethnographies in anthropology that have sold many copies over the years.) The ‘voice’ of the ethnographer in the academic ethnographic monograph has shifted since the 1960s. Delamont (2018) compared the rhetorical style of three ethnographic monographs reporting educational studies from the 1960s and 1970s with three from the turn of the millennium and shows how the rhetorical style has changed. The conventional or traditional monograph in educational ethnography from the 1960s and 1970s used a detached, authoritative and impersonal authorial voice. Those texts, which still repay a reading, or rereading, in the twenty-first century, now seem old fashioned. They are not just because of their ‘findings’ but also because of their detached textual style. That was the traditional genre: and today it does not seem like the sum total of ‘ethnography’. Many more recent monographs are written in a different style.What is noticeably different is the rhetorical style that authors have chosen to persuade their readers of the authenticity of their accounts. While there is little room in journal papers for many layers of text, although Stephens and Delamont (2006a) do use two styles of writing contrastively, a monograph does enable polytextual writing. Because it is a book, usually of 65,000 to 90,000 words it allows the space to challenge familiarity, and the freedom to set out the case for doing so in ways the reader can understand. A good example of how

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a monograph gives space to write in ways that challenge the reader’s thinking is Karen McCarthy Brown’s (1991) Mama Lola. This is a book about Haitian Vodou, seen through the work of a priestess – Alourdes – in Brooklyn. For most readers of this book, as of Brown’s, Haitian Vodou is not at all familiar, so it may seem an odd place to start thinking about making familiar fieldsites, such as hospitals or schools, strange. However, there is a feature of Brown’s book that is worth examining and it makes inspirational reading. Brown chose to write four different kinds of chapter. There are two types of conventional anthropological chapters which show the reader what Vodou is in modern Haiti and in New York. One set reports the fieldwork on the everyday practice of Vodou in New York, and a parallel set describes the main gods and goddesses revered in Vodou. These chapters are the spine of the book, because they introduce core beliefs and practices and are written ‘traditionally’ reporting ethnographic ‘findings’. They are interspersed with fictional chapters in which Brown has written stories about Alourdes’s ancestors, all Vodou priests and priestesses. There are five of these fictional chapters, crafted from the life history and oral history material Brown gathered over many years from Alourdes. Woven through the book are several chapters in Brown’s own voice, as her understanding develops from her initial meeting with Mama Lola through their increasing friendship, Brown’s decision to go to Haiti and be initiated. This achieves one of the major goals of anthropology done in exotic settings: it makes the material and the spiritual lives of poor Haitian Vodou believers appear rational and simultaneously leads the reader into the world of Vodou believers. Brown’s structure allows the reader to move along the gradient of unfamiliarity into the world of Vodou and also reveals how much ignorance about the religion most readers did not even know that they had. A powerful monograph challenges the familiarity of fieldwork settings in the reader’s own society or takes the reader to a strange environment and makes it seem familiar. Most of that work is done by the quality of the data collection and their analysis, but the structure and style of the text also contributes to the key task.

New forms of output and of text In this section, we first describe the new forms of writing that can be used to present ethnographic research with unpublished examples, and then cover the ‘new’ forms of output, especially the autoethnography and the autobiographical narrative, can challenge familiarity in a different way from our strategies. Precisely because they display the researcher explicitly in unfamiliar ways, they can challenge the stereotypical, or familiar, research. An autobiographical account of how a Muslim lesbian studied women in an evangelical Christian community in Australia will make its subject matter unfamiliar in ways that study done by a straight Christian woman might not.When Howard Becker (1967) asked rhetorically ‘Whose side are we on?’, he did not consider who the ‘we’ he was addressing actually were. Entirely invisible in that important paper (see Atkinson, Coffey and Delamont, 2003) was any examination of the possibility that a researcher might not be an American, WASP,

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Catholic or Jewish, straight man.Women, ethnic minorities and researchers who are LQGBT were not considered. In 2021, it is inconceivable that most ethnographers would assume all scholars were straight (or at least not ‘out’), WASP American men. The personal narratives explicitly place ‘other’ researchers into their disciplines and de-throne the hegemony of the WASP man as an author. The landscape of academic writing has expanded and become more varied in the past 30 years. There are far more opportunities to publish about ethnography, as well as publishing the results of it. An examination of the journals and edited books shows there are analyses of how academic texts are, and can be written and more focus on reflective and deconstructionist ways of reading ‘the literature’ getting written and getting published. Such social science scholarship did not commonly take place before the literary turn. The twenty-first century has seen many innovative ways to ‘write up’ research findings such as poems, plays, short stories, novels and mixtures of all those – messy texts (Delamont, 2010)). These are experimental ways to valorise the voices of the informants, and celebrations of what Coffey (1999) called the ethnographic self. Bagley (2009) edited a special issue of a journal on the boundaries of ethnographic methods, which includes advocates of fiction (Clough, 2009), poetry (Phipps and Saunders, 2009), performance pedagogy (Denzin, 2009) and writing with digital video (White, 2009). These authors, and others who have adopted the new genres, are concerned to give a clearer voice to their respondents and informants, to convey emotions, to be more actively engaged in campaigns around class, race and gender inequalities, and to explore their own identity as ethnographers. One powerful argument for using ‘literary’ genres is to make the familiar strange by the form of the presentation. There are some data sets that are enhanced by performance, and some findings and understandings that are best communicated by ‘artistic’ rather than conventional presentation. The three commonest forms are poems, ‘plays’ and short stories, and we have illustrated these below. In the three examples, the data are drawn from SD’s capoeira research, because Atkinson has used his data in innovative ways on his book in ethnographic writing (Atkinson, 2020).

Poems Poems can be used to convey emotions, as in Mannay (2011). In Coffey and Atkinson (1996, 129–130), there is a poem written by SD based on an interview with an anthropology lecturer who recalled her doctoral viva as abusive. In that poem, the tone of the original interview data is reproduced by repetition of key phrases in the poem. Our work has been included in published poems by colleagues and friends. Mannay used our exhortations to fight familiarity explicitly in her guava tree poem. Denzin (2018) turned an autobiographical paper by Delamont (2012b) into a poem. Here we have used interview data which focused on the physical and mental health of long-term capoeira students that could be well represented by a poem. In an interview conducted by a fellow capoeira student, called here Ceridwen – a Welsh pseudonym for a Welsh woman – a man we call Yadu

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discussed his mental health and his feeling about capoeira. Yadu has a history of depression and obsessive-compulsive social anxiety, and when his ‘head is in that space’ he cannot face training, and especially not a festival where ‘a lot of people who are really in that moment with their high energy’ and you’re ‘thinking oh god I cannot interact in the same way’. I mean that’s probably been my big white whale than any physical condition and I suppose with capoeira it’s probably one of the closest things that I’ve come to like when you get in that first roda and you’re playing. It’s the closest thing I could say to having a spiritual experience you know I can imagine what that’s like. It can be very good. If you’re feeling great, it can make you feel 100 times better, but if you’re feeling shit, it can make you feel 100 times worse because nothing’s working and you’ll just go home and you’re like aaah. I like to socialise but with people I know well and small groups of people, and I’ve kind of had times at festivals and things when I probably shouldn’t have gone and it’s just too much and too overwhelming. I mean that’s the only time when I’ve really felt capoeira can conflict with my health, just because of my mental health stuff. Short extracts from a long interview are unlikely to convey the depth of Yadu’s ambivalence about capoeira to the readers of an academic paper or book. He credits involvement, which had lasted a decade when he was interviewed, with providing good friends, helping his mental health and being a satisfying hobby, but as this extract shows, he sometimes cannot bear to participate. This is the sort of interview that can generate a ‘found’ poem. The extract, which shows how far Yadu trusted Ceridwen, is full of the emotional speech of the kind that is frequently presented as poems. Generally when ethnographers and other qualitative researchers create poems they are ‘modern’ in form, that is, they are free verse and do not rhyme. There are reasons for that, but at first glance it is an odd choice. The data turned into poems are usually narratives, and the narrative poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was rhyming, and written to a strict metre. So W.W. Gibson’s (1927) poem Flannan Isle, about a tragedy in which three keepers vanished mysteriously from a lighthouse, begins. Though three men dwell on Flannan Isle To keep the lamp alight, As we steer’d under the lee, we caught No glimmer through the night It would be possible to take Yadu’s interview and begin Through capoeira’s good for me To keep my body strong When I feel my mental health is bad I know to train is wrong

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That verse form worked well to capture the mystery of Flannan Isle, but is utterly ‘wrong’ for ethnographic data: it feels as though Yadu’s whole existence is being trivialised. Much ‘better’ as an ethnographic poem is free verse such as: My Big White Whale If you’re playing, if you get in If you get in that first roda And you’re playing, It’s the closest thing, the closest thing To having a spiritual experience. If you’re feeling great, it can be very good If you’re feeling great , it can make you feel A hundred times better. I can imagine what, imagine what A spiritual experience is like. But if nothing’s working, if you’re feeling shit You get in that first roda And nothing’s working, nothing’s working It can make you feel a hundred times worse Because nothing’s working. Then it’s just too much, too overwhelming It can make you feel worse I probably shouldn’t have gone You go home, you just go home I need to come out and be away When you are really bad, you shouldn’t play I need to be in a darkened room I just go home and I’m like aaaaaaaah That’s probably been my Big White Whale My Big White Whale, My Big White Whale Part of the trick of the free verse format is the use of repetition to indicate the emotions that are apparent on the sound recording but are not easily conveyed in text. Arguably this helps the reader understand Yadu’s capoeira experiences more than ‘just’ reading the interview extract.

A play for three voices When there are several different viewpoints to be explained for the reader, ethnographers can find the dialogue or play format a concise and accessible way to set out their informants’ standpoints or opinions. These texts are based on the Platonic dialogue of ancient Greece. Actors rehearse standpoints rather than speaking sparkling witty dialogue. Plays can be excellent for disseminating results ‘live’ and if there can be a performance to an audience often works very well. However, dialogues

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of no more than three participants are more usually incorporated into texts than performed. Full-scale plays with stage directions (‘Exit pursued by a bear’) and a full cast are not reader friendly. We have ourselves been put into a play as characters. Denzin (2009c) published a short play called Apocalypse Now in which he criticised a book by Martyn Hammersley (2008) instead of writing a conventional book review. We appeared as ‘silent witnesses’ in a chorus of ‘social science and education superstars’ along with Freud, Foucault and Barthes. Hammersley (2010) wrote a formal response, while we wrote a play in response called ‘Can the silenced speak?’ (Atkinson and Delamont, 2010). In 2018, SD expanded the focus of the capoeira research to enquire about experienced students’ attitudes to the African-Brazilian origins of capoeira to discover if they were anxious about cultural appropriation. The data came from an on-line enquiry sent to experienced capoeira students to produce evidence for a book chapter (Stephens and Delamont, 2021) which is conventionally written as an academic research text. Organising the presentation of some of these data as a threeparty dialogue is a useful way for a reader to understand the opposing student views which are nuanced and often internally inconsistent. There are good reasons why ethnographers might choose a dialogic format to present some of these data. First there were three broad categories of response in the on-line material collected, represented by Gaillarda, Bariaan and Darzee (these are pseudonymous capoeira nicknames). Using a character to represent a standpoint can be helpful to showcase results. Second all the respondents to the survey revealed they were acutely conscious that as white privileged citizens of a first world democracy, learning capoeira which is, in origin, an art form developed by African-Brazilians in slavery: there could be a cultural appropriation issue in their own lives. It is easier to give fictional characters speeches in which complex issues are explored than to present data conventionally. Thirdly, the issues around cultural appropriation can be troubling for capoeira students. Their teachers routinely suggest that all learners should appreciate the history and philosophy of capoeira but teach anyone who pays for classes and enjoys the exercise whether they engage or not. Mestre Poncianinho, a high-profile Brazilian teacher in London urges students to make an effort to learn about African-Brazilian cultural phenomena, because if they do not they ‘might as well do zumba’. Since the data were collected, these issues have become more acute, because a capoeira master, an African-Brazilian, was murdered during the 2018 election campaign, and Bolsonaro was elected on a racist platform. Experienced capoeira students are attracted to it for different reasons which came through in the data. The three broad positions on cultural appropriation were (1) it is fine to love capoeira as a white person if you understand and respect its AfricanBrazilian roots and history; (2) we all have problems to deal with and, though mine are nothing like being a slave, its fine to use capoeira to face my life’s obstacles and (3) I come to see friends and do exercise and have fun and I do not spend time on the backstory. In the play, all the characters’ words are taken from the on-line survey but allocated to only three actors. The title of the play – ‘It’s Our Colour’ – is the

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refrain (response) of a well-known and widely performed capoeira song that celebrates how everyone involved is the same colour. Answers to several of the actual questions SD asked have been amalgamated around one key topic raised: a question about a specific song ‘Sometimes they call me a Negro’ written by a contemporary Mestre (Luiz Renato) who is also a professor of sociology as a focus for opening up the cultural appropriation debate(s). ‘It’s Our Colour’: A Play about Cultural Appropriation The Scene: A vegan café in Cloisterham, a university city in England, 2018. The characters: Three white British capoeira students, Darzee (male), Bariaan (male) and Gaillarda (female). They have all been training for at least five years in the Cloisterham club with Mestre Claudio Campos. Here they are discussing the on-line data collection Sara Delamont and Neil Stephens have recently done. Delamont’s capoeira name is Doutora, Stephens’s is Da Lua. Bariaan: Have you ever heard that song Doutora asked about? Gaillarda: I think it is on a CD I borrowed from Claudio when I was a no-belt, but I’ve never heard anyone sing it ‘live’. Darzee: I went to Tolnbridge one week with Claudio and Doutora asked him to sing it, so he did – but it is a long solo: not a song that you could play for a game – Doutora said afterwards she asked Claudio to sing it because everyone was exhausted, there were a lot of beginners who knew nothing about capoeira, and she’d never heard it live. Gaillarda: I think it is in Assuncão’s book, which I got from the library but haven’t read: my bad! I want to know things but I’m so tired from teaching all day…. Bariaan: Claudio likes songs we can all sing loudly and play to? That’s what he sings all the time. Gaillarda: Yeah. That one is about how if you are a capoeira person and someone calls you a Negro, you should be proud, not insulted because capoeira is about everyone’s struggle for liberty and justice. Darzee: Yeah that’s it! – I asked about it driving back to Cloisterham. Luiz Renato taught Claudio in Brasilia, so he’s known it since he was 16. Bariaan: So that’s why Da Lua and Doutora asked if we identified with the message? I said I was “a white middle class European who sings badly in broken Portuguese” [All three laugh]. But I’m not very musical, or religious, and I don’t enjoy dancing. I’m a “bad” student. I feel a bit silly singing songs about being a negro, or a slave, or being all the same colour. I said that [All three laugh again] Gaillarda: But you love capoeira: you’re always at class. I felt bad doing the form. I haven’t read anything about the history or slavery: it was years before I found out Yemanja was an African goddess. I just sang the song ‘Mora Yemanja’ for years. But it’s a good question. We are all here, and we could all – except Darzee – get better at Portuguese, and singing, and the instruments and the history: but there’s no time. Darzee: I’m conflicted: I feel a tension between appropriation and appropriateness Bariaan: What? Darzee: Sorry: that sounded very grand. What I mean is that on the one hand it can feel strange to joyfully sing all those songs about Brazilian slavery – a struggle I’m very disconnected from – but the sport of capoeira, captured in its songs, resonates for me with a much wider struggle – to be a bit pompous capoeira can subvert oppressive regimes and allow new ways of being.

Writing the unfamiliar  133 Bariaan: Day to day I don’t think about any of that. People come to class to escape the pressures of their outside lives: escaping into shared joy and positivity. I respect the history, but it’s not mine. I think it’s great that we can all enjoy it here. Gaillarda: Are we having puddings?

Obviously in real life, even experienced capoeira students would not speak like that, to each other, on a social occasion. The words and the sentiments are derived from their responses to research questions. The playlet is clearly a contrivance, created to make clear a point about capoeira and its adherents for readers who have no knowledge about non-Brazilian enthusiasts for capoeira.

Fiction Fictionalising events or stories recorded during fieldwork can be a helpful device. Wolf (1992) offers three versions of a critical incident from her own fieldwork in 1960 in a Taiwanese village. There were three interpretations of the incident in the village at the time, offered to Wolf by the locals: A young wife and mother had a mental breakdown, had become a spokesperson for a god (a shaman) or was being exploited by her husband who made her pretend to be a shaman to make money. Wolf includes in one volume her three written versions of the event: a short story she wrote at the time, which lay neglected in her files for 30 years (pp. 15–44), her fieldnotes (p. 62–83) and an academic article from 1990 (pp. 93–116), each with a scholarly commentary. The fieldwork was done with her then husband, and an assistant, pseudonymised as Wu Cheh, a Taiwanese woman with a high-school level education.Wolf says she had forgotten that she had written the story and in the early 1960s would never had considered publishing it. When we finally sat down to write up our data being experimental with form or analysis was not encouraged. If we wanted to be taken seriously as scholars, and to have our interpretation […] accepted we knew there was a style of presentation within which we had to write (Wolf 1992, pp. 3–4). By 1990 there was much more enthusiasm among anthropologists for experimenting, and the short story was almost as ‘acceptable’ as the journal article. Wolf herself was opposed to using fiction for academic dissemination, but it can be useful to protect informants, when criminal, deviant or deeply embarrassing material needs to be put into the public domain. Peter Clough (2002) has used fiction when writing about a teacher who had been so destroyed by his work that he had completely lost control and hit a pupil. There are four aspects of the capoeira research about which we could have decided to write a piece of fiction. There are capoeira teachers who are illegal immigrants, whose identity has to be very carefully protected. There have been some incidents of adultery and of sexual harassment. There has been one capoeira teacher jailed for a serious crime. Another teacher converted to an extreme form of

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evangelical Protestantism whose leader believes capoeira to be the work of the devil, and stopped teaching. His students, who had left one of the big international groups for his ‘new’ group, were abruptly ‘orphaned’. If any of these events had happened in a group that was central to SD’s investigation, a fictional treatment would have been appropriate. It would have been presented to the readers like this: Capoeira students become deeply attached to their capoeira teacher, and if he or she leaves them, there can be strong feelings of grief and bereavement, or of anger and betrayal. If a Brazilian teacher returns to Brazil, they tell a story of return from exile in the UK, while their students in the UK speak of abandonment, grief and anger. These stories are partly about globalisation and diaspora and race and migration and transnationalism. They are also ‘about’ sex and love and raw emotions. The following example is fictional, to protect the teachers and students we have known, but reflects real events. Told from the student perspective, this is a ‘My teacher has abandoned me’ story. The Triple Betrayal or Never Love a Malandro Tuesday 17.25 Sierra Randolph stepped out of Kings College London onto the Strand. It is a hot London day, in July, the queues for the busses are long and the pavements crowded. Tourists visiting the Courtauld Gallery and Covent Garden, and heading across the Thames to ride on the London Eye shuffle past the locals trying to get home. The elation she felt when she saw the results of her coursework – a distinction overall mark of 75 – appear on her phone had been dented when Adhemar – her Adi – was not in the coffee shop to meet her as they had arranged. He was not answering his phone, and she’d waited 40 minutes. Her pleasure in the overall mark – 75 for the coursework for her masters in Lusophone Studies – had drained away. Now she was hot, and cross, and hungry. She needed to get home and shower and change: she’d been in libraries all day. First a long morning in the RAI library in the British Museum peering at the faded almost illegible field diaries and letters home written by Lady Vera Chatters Frank a pioneer anthropologist. Lady Vera studied the German-Brazilian community in Santa Cruz do Sol, Brazil in the 1920s and her fieldwork was part of Sierra’s thesis project. Back to Kings College Library in the afternoon to work on oral history research methods. It had been hard to concentrate, knowing that the exam board had met in the morning, and her coursework results were due, but the thesis research had to be done by early September. Standing at the bus stop in the heat and the crowds, Sierra worries. Adhemar is not only her capoeira teacher, and she loves capoeira, he is also her partner of four years. She remembers how Adi had arrived in London from Recife Brazil with little or no English to replace another teacher the group Cobra Verde (Green Snake) had moved to Frankfurt. She spoke Portuguese and

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initially he relied on her to translate for him, in class and outside it. They had become a couple. Only last year he’d moved in with her. He was often late, but when he couldn’t make dates he’d always phoned. What had happened? A 188 bus appeared, and Sierra managed to get on board: hoping a seat might come free at Waterloo, or Elephant and Castle, or Tower Bridge. An hour later the bus reached Deptford, and at 6.40, Sierra entered ‘her’ flat on the top floor of a Victorian house. Something was wrong. There was no bicycle in the hall, carried up three flights of stairs, and no smell of food. In the main room, Sierra sees an absence: all the capoeira instruments are gone, except her berimbau in its case. In the bedroom, the garment rail is empty, and two drawers are pulled out and contain only one sock and an abandoned lace for a trainer. In the bathroom, two of her towels lie wet on the floor but all the shaving gear is gone. Adhemar has left with all his belongings. She looks for a note, checks her phone, and in desperation her laptop: nothing. She goes to the Cobra Verde Capoeira Group What’s App site: only the usual things and a generic message from Adhemar ‘It’s festival time! Come to Class and Train!’ Sierra is numb: she thought she and Adi were a committed couple. Where had he gone? Why had he gone? She lies on the bed and weeps. Wednesday 5.15 am Sierra wakes – still dressed – looks for Adhemar and then realises what happened yesterday. There is no message from him on her phone but texts from two university friends asking what mark she got and telling her theirs, and one from a capoeirista friend Madison ‘see you at class tonight? There’s a surprise visitor’. Sierra texts back ‘Who’s the visitor?’ and then tries phoning Adhemar: no reply. She tries Facebook and he has blocked her. Instagram is the same. Her fear and misery begins to turn to anger. She showers and makes coffee and then begins to weep uncontrollably. In this story, Adhemar’s wife has just arrived from Brazil: a wife Sierra did not know he had. Sierra loses not only her lover but also decides she cannot stay in her capoeira class or group, where most of her London friends are loyal students. She has lost twice over, been doubly bereaved. Adhemar is revealed as a malandro: an African Brazilian man who lives by exploiting his attraction to women. Capoeira students can lose their teacher in other ways, by deportation, by death, by a simple decision to go ‘home’ to Brazil, or because they give up teaching. The aftermath is students experiencing all the classic symptoms of bereavement. Fictional texts can be particularly useful to protect the identities of informants and locations. Identifying text as fiction means that incidents of criminal, violent or embarrassing behaviour by the actors or the researcher can be explored with less chance of the real people being exposed. Alice Goffman would have been safe(r) from the ferocious attacks she received at conferences, in print and on social media after publishing On the Run (2013) had she published a novel about AfricanAmerican men in Philadelphia. In her book she reported allegedly criminal behaviour on her own part, and on the part of people she was close to. The considerable

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force of her monograph, and its central argument about the relentless criminalisation of young urban black males, has been obscured by a number of controversies and negative criticisms. It is claimed that the actual identity of her research participants is inadequately disguised and that she was guilty of conspiracy to commit a crime. Whatever the merits of the adverse commentary, had Goffman chosen to fictionalise the most dramatic events, then she could have escaped the methodological and ethical criticisms. We have argued that the contemporary ethnographer can choose several textual strategies to present their findings, and sometimes the best way to help the reader ‘see’ things in an unfamiliar way is to write in self-consciously different ways such as these three examples. However, many performances and literary representations when carefully examined turn out actually not to be about findings or understanding of social science.They are autobiographical, or auto-ethnographic and represent material that is ‘about’ social scientists not about the social world: this argument is developed by Delamont (2010).

Conclusion Writing should become enjoyable for the ethnographer, but it only becomes so with regular practice. We have always advocated writing early and writing often, from the outset of the research. Like ‘analysis’, writing needs to be done throughout the project. Indeed, the processes of thinking and reflection that go into both are inextricably linked. Writing is a way to think about one’s research, and – as we have insisted – confronting an inert pile of ‘data’ in order to ‘analyse’ and then ‘write up’ is no way to reflect critically and creatively about one’s field research. There are no ‘natural’ authors. Writing does not ‘come easily’. It is a craft skill that comes with practice. The wider range of genres that can be used to write about ethnographic research in the current century expands the range of writing that the productive scholar can explore, while not being wedded to just one textual style. Using drafts to develop ideas, and to fight familiarity, helps improve not only authorial skills but also helps with the intellectual engagement with the variety and complexity of field research

9 LEAVING THE FIELD

Leaving the field is probably the least discussed aspect of ethnography, but if social scientists are going to take fighting familiarity seriously the exit(s) from the field need academic attention. It is important to recognise that the social processes and the data collection opportunities and the ethnographer’s decisions about leaving and how those are reflected upon and recorded are all potential opportunities for defamiliarising the ethnography by employing the strategies. It can be helpful to think of leaving the field using van Gennep’s (1909) model of a rite of passage, with its pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal phases. If the whole experience of an ethnographic project is seen as a status passage, the initial phase is one status passage from being the scholar as non-researcher (preliminal) to an active field worker (the liminal phase) and leaving the field is the post-liminal phase. We have argued throughout the book it is important to fight familiarity at the preliminal phase, before the fieldwork begins. The period immediately before the researcher leaves the field is an important part of the long data-gathering ‘liminal’ stage. Once the investigator is out of the field he or she is entitled to call themselves an ethnographer, but it is a conditional identity until the post-liminal phase, when the writing is completed and the work goes public, is also completed. The scholar who never writes up is not, in any meaningful way, an ethnographer. Equally all scholars expect that intellectual insights will be gained when data collection is over, and analysis is the main task in the post-liminal phase when ‘the research is done’. Good researchers think about their exits, just as they think about their first days, and this chapter focuses on leaving. Many authors do not discuss how they left their fieldsites in their books and papers, and most text books say little or nothing about exits and what can be learnt from them. Bosse (2015), Davis (2015) and Vannini (2012) for example do not describe the ends of their studies of ballroom dancing in Illinois, tango in Argentina and The Netherlands or the lives of people in Canada who depend on the ferries. Boellstorff (2008) says little about leaving the on-line

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fieldsite of Second Life. Some anthropologists have explored the ‘reverse’ culture shock of their homecomings: Barley (1983) for example is very funny about his return from fieldwork in West Africa. Here we focus on exits from fieldwork ‘at home’ and the strategies for maximising their intellectual payoff. It is also possible to gain methodological and empirical insights from ‘failed’ or ‘lost’ research projects: those that fail may have involved an unplanned or even enforced exit. The small literature on ‘lost’ projects includes stories of exits from the field just as the small literature on leaving the field includes a few accounts of ‘lost’ projects. Two recent accounts describe fieldwork that had to be terminated due to forces outwith the ethnographers’ control: Scott (2019) reports on how a study of a swimming pool became impossible when it was privatised and Galman (2019) who writes about how she had to leave a fieldsite in India because she got too ill to work. It might be thought that leaving the field has relatively little to do with fighting familiarity. There is no doubt that the ‘first days in the field’ are crucial. By the time that fieldwork is drawing to a close, issues of strangeness and familiarity might well seem to be closed issues. But the end of fieldwork – which of course is not the end of the project – is an important period for critical reflection.When fieldwork is brought suddenly to an end, through no fault of the ethnographer, there is no ‘leaving’. Scott’s pool was closed to her: she did not decide that her research was at an end. But for many projects, the ethnographer does the ‘leaving’. For physically distant sites, that is likely to be a physical as well as a social departure. For field sites that are close at hand, it can be more gradual, or a more episodic series of absences. As we have said, this is not the end of the research. Obviously, the thesis, the monograph, the papers all have to be written. But as time in the field goes on, we do need to think about our comfort zones.There are interpersonal comfort zones and intellectual ones, though often they coincide. As we know, it can be easy to get absorbed into a routine of fieldwork, observing and participating in the same round of activities, spending one’s time with the same people, observing the same phenomena. That can easily be a consequence of feeling personally comfortable in familiar places with familiar people. Routine fieldwork of that sort means not having to re-negotiate day-to-day access and social relations. It means in many cases that there is a ready-made framework for the fieldwork itself, such as an organisational schedule. At the same time, one can become thoroughly accustomed to what is being observed. School classrooms, court proceedings, clinics or opera rehearsals can all become thoroughly familiar. But it is easy to go on attending them, accumulating ‘data’, but not acquiring any novel insights. That is what we mean by intellectual comfort zones. It is comforting to accumulate more cases, more examples, and a certain volume of material can indeed be analytically valuable. But compiling more cases without any apparent discoveries can be a waste of time and effort.When that is happening, maybe it is time to ‘leave the field’. On the other hand, it may be time to ‘leave’ that particular aspect of the field. It is, as time passes, worth thinking about breaking out of comfort zones. When he was working with the opera company, PA had to acknowledge to himself that he found it easier to work in the rehearsal studio and the theatre (each of which furnished a structured and secure setting for observation). He comforted

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himself with the thought that access to all of the rehearsals and some performances of a series of operas was a unique opportunity. But it must be admitted that although each opera was a different group of performers, and each was directed by a different guest director, some of the analytic issues were observable across productions. He did leave the comfort of the rehearsal studio, spending time in administrative offices, the props department, touring with the company to various cities. But he acknowledges that he probably spent too much time in the safety of the studio. So it could be time to ‘leave the field’ when things have become that familiar. But before ‘leaving’, it is a good idea to review things. The main questions include the following: Have I got too comfortable, too ‘at home’? Are there people, settings, events or things that I have neglected? Are there phenomena that I am now taking for granted, and need to re-visit? Am I confining my field relations to a sub-set of actors I feel comfortable with, or have grown close to? There is a methodological rhetoric concerned with the ‘completeness’ of ethnographic fieldwork. It depends on analysing the data in the process of that fieldwork. It relates to the idea of ‘saturation’. Now saturation is not about having a lot of data but is about the thorough exploration of one’s key analytic ideas. So as we construct analytic categories, we need to explore their dimensions, the extent of their application, to search for variations and deviant cases. We might add that when it comes to identifiable phenomena, it also means being able to document how they are accomplished, how they are identified by the actors and how – if applicable – they are evaluated. Now ‘saturation’ is, if anything, an ideal. Realistically, we recognise that most fieldwork involves compromises, and the perfect coverage of actors and events is virtually impossible. In the real world, we usually have to make the most of what we can get, and elaborate plans about theoretical sampling are rarely matched by the reality. But that is no argument for not reviewing the basics of our fieldwork before we leave the field, and attempting to remedy manifest shortcomings. That means asking if we have done justice to different categories of actor, exploring the patterns and rhythms of everyday life and how they relate to our own fieldwork, or whether we have paid adequate attention to key phenomena, rather than treating them as obvious or ‘given’. The rhetorical style which predominates in the confessional literature (Atkinson, 1992) is one in which accounts of crises, disasters and incompetencies are publishable while normality, success and competence are not news. As Chapter Seven showed, authors’ autobiographies should never be read naively as if literally ‘true’. They are a genre with its own conventions. So ‘the literature’ on exits is likely to give a novice a more negative, and highly coloured overview of terminating fieldwork than a balanced one. Because being thrown out of a field site is dramatic, there are probably more accounts of that in the confessional literature than reflections on planned and scheduled exits. And, no doubt there are more accounts of dramatic exits in proportion to orderly ones than accurately reflect the real ratio of ‘failed’ fieldwork to successful projects. Compared with other aspects of fieldwork, there are relatively few accounts of ‘leaving’.The most valuable literature on leaving the field is to be found in nine book

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chapters, one journal paper, one encyclopaedia entry and one edited collection. The topic was a section in the Shaffir, Stebbins and Turowetz edited collection Fieldwork Experience (1980) with four papers, and there is a parallel section in Shaffir and Stebbins (eds) (1991) Experiencing Fieldwork with five chapters. The journal paper is by Iverson (2009) on “Getting out” in ethnography and she has written the entry for the Sage Research Foundations project (Iverson 2019). That entry is a clearly written overview of the sparse literature available, and we have not recapitulated it here. The lack of attention paid to exits was the inspiration for the edited collection, compiled by Smith and Delamont (2021), deliberately intended to expand the literature on the topic. In Shaffir and Stebbins (1991), there are five papers on leaving and keeping in touch by Wolf (1991), Gallmeier (1991), Kaplan (1991), Taylor (1991) and Stebbins (1991) which complement the four chapters in Shaffir, Stebbins and Turowetz (1980). In that earlier collection, Roadbury (1980), Letkemann (1980) and Altheide (1980) have individual papers and Maines, Shaffir, Stebbins and Turowetz (1980) reported on their own experiences and correspondence about exits they conducted with senior figures of that era whose work is revisited in Atkinson, Coffey and Delamont (2003): Rosalie Wax, P. Raines, Anselm Strauss, Donald Roy, Howard Becker and Herbert Gans. Rosalie Wax told the story of two very different exits: one happy and centred on a ceremony, the other a clandestine escape at night because of a government edict to the organiser of the programme Wax was supposed to be researching. Altheide’s (1980) essay is particularly useful for our purposes, because it focusses on productive use of the end days of the research period. He argues the fieldwork period prior to leaving can be very fruitful. He had been studying newsrooms in California and argues that once his exit date was known, he was able to capitalise on it to get data that had previously been hard to obtain. Some informants agreed to be interviewed in his last weeks, and he could collect material by stressing it was his last chance to obtain it. Maines et al. (1980) had been doing a study of postdoctoral fellows in an American university, and he writes insightfully about how, precisely because the ‘post doc’ is a transitory status, his informants routinely moved on to jobs in other cities leaving him ‘behind’. In other words, his ‘field’ left him. The chapters in the Shaffir and Stebbins volume are slighter than those in the earlier collection, but address exits from very different fieldsites. Gallmeier (1991) and Stebbins (1991) include fieldwork on male sports teams: Stebbins on a Canadian football team and Gallmeier an ice hockey team. In both cases, the rhythm of the sports season provided a ‘natural’ end for the fieldwork. Wolf (1991), who studied a biker gang in Canada, writes more about his access than his exit. He writes usefully about how, because the bikers were very self-contained, tightly organised and socially marginal, he was only able to do the research by being totally immersed in their world. Wolf had thought that after he had ‘finished’ his main data collection, he ‘would at least maintain ties of friendship’ (222) and that ‘the enduring emotion would be one of comradeship’ (222). However, he realised that the engagement had to be all-embracing or entirely non-existent, and so when he left he quickly became an ex-member ‘who had simply drifted away’ (222), as other men did. In a neat phase, Wolf says he was ‘quickly reclaimed by everyday life’.

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The only woman author in this section, Ilane Kaplan (1991), did fieldwork among fishermen, like Carolyn Ellis (1986). Kaplan’s very short chapter says little about leaving, which she implies was unproblematic. Instead she offers basic advice about relationships in the field, such as ‘Express genuine interest’ (235). It reads in 2021 as simplistic and even patronising. She was greeted with suspicion, and accused of being a government inspector, from the taxation (IRS) authorities, or an investigator for an insurance company. Even if people active in, and dependent upon, catching fish believed she was a scholar, they were sure ‘the government’ would read what she wrote and use it against the fishing community. As far as leaving her fieldsite, she points out that ‘Comings and goings fit the life-style of fishermen who are regularly out at sea’ (234), and so her departures were unremarkable. That is a similarity with the research on ‘post docs’ by Maines. Fighting familiarity is enhanced by finding and recognising the analytic power of such parallels between apparently disparate fieldsites. Steven Taylor (1991) focuses on an ethnographic study he conducted in a secure hospital on a ward warehousing 73 young men with major learning disabilities, and a long-term study of a couple surviving life in extreme poverty. His chapter is surprisingly unusual in that collection because it actually focuses on issues about leaving. Taylor explores the ‘how do you know when to stop?’ question in an informative way. His first suggestion is that a project is nearing its end ‘when one can begin to recognise the puzzle and the pieces fit together’ (242) and ‘the data become repetitious’ (242). More personally he confesses that he knows the end of a study is near ‘when I become bored writing fieldnotes’ (243). However, he advises that when that stage is reached ‘Firstly, stay a while longer’ (243) because ‘research suffers when it is rushed or concluded prematurely’ (243). Following that personal revelation, Taylor’s advice is that once he is becoming bored with writing fieldnotes, it is time to check carefully that the fieldwork has been thorough. The ethnographer should ‘think what you may have missed before you conclude your study’ (243). In his study in the total institution he was, in the late stages of the project, able to focus on an aide who had been reluctant to talk to him thus far and finally convinced the man to be interviewed. Taylor’s chapter also addresses a commonly reported but under-analysed feature of ethnographic research. He is the only one of the five authors in the collection to point out to the inexperienced ethnographer that informants may well have forgotten that the ethnographer is a researcher and feel abandoned and even angry when the investigator leaves. Gallmeier (1991) spent the 1981-82 American ice hockey season embedded in a minor league men’s team. American professional ice hockey has four tiers, with the NHL, the Majors, at the top, and three ‘minor’ levels below. Gallmeier’s team, ‘The Rockets’, was in the third tier. He had his own nickname (The Scarecrow) and spent many hours at rinks, in changing rooms, on the tour bus and hanging out in bars. The fieldwork ended ‘naturally’ when the ice hockey season did, and the men all dispersed. Gallmeier got a job in another part of the USA but was able to keep up with the team because his family lived in The Rockets’ home town and he could combine family duty and reunions with the players he had studied. He

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reports that as the season drew to a close, he experienced feelings of ‘alienation, guilt and sadness’ (226). However, he was also ‘looking forward to disengaging from the Rockets’ because he felt ‘a cultural clash’ (227) between himself and the sexism, violence, practical jokes and homosocial atmosphere of the team. Gallmeier argues that leaving, revisiting and staying in touch, which he did by subscribing to Hockey News, have advantages for improving the original data, but only if they are analysed using the exit, any revisits and other contacts. Gallmeier’s guilt and sadness at leaving the Rockets is contrastive with the experiences of Stebbins (1991). He reflects on 12 ethnographic projects he had done on jazz, classical music, magicians, stand-up comics, Canadian football (which is like American football), astronomy, archaeology, baseball and the theatre. He says that when he packs up and goes home after fieldwork, he is generally very happy, because while he starts projects with enthusiasm, he is used to them ending with fatigue and theoretical saturation. Stebbins’s pleasure in leaving the field is partly because he finds that writing and publication is ‘the most interesting phase’ (248) of his investigations. Eight of his 12 studies were based on participant observation. Stebbins has himself performed as a magician, a stand-up comedian and a musician. His contribution to the edited collection says little about the processes of exit and focuses on varieties of engagement after the fieldwork. He has, for example, been involved in negotiations to lower Canadian customs duty on imported telescopes (253) as a contribution to the ongoing lives of amateur astronomers he had met initially as a researcher. He does, however, stress that some researchers ‘may reach the end of the data collection phase of their research unaware that they have done so’ (249). One reason for this chapter is precisely that we do not want our readers to drift out of their fieldwork without self-critical reflections on what day they are doing. The papers collected in Smith and Delamont (2021) are intended to reinforce the message that leaving needs to be thought out. Another scholar who has left as many fieldsites as Stebbins is Gary Alan Fine. He has also done ethnographies in many settings and therefore has left many fieldsites, from Little League baseball, and vocational training for catering students to competitive chess players and graduate students in fine art (Fine 1987, 1985, 2013, 2018). The account of deciding it was time to leave the field in the monograph about the Golden Brigade fantasy game club (so called because it was in a room over a fire station); a central part of a wider project in the then novel field of fantasy gaming (Fine, 1983) suggests a parallel thought process to Stebbins’s. Fine discovered that because of the high level of turnover at the Golden Brigade, he had become one of the ‘experts’, expected to explain rules to novices, run games rather than just play them, and he was not learning anything new. This combination of having become too familiar (this is not a phrase Fine himself uses) and too much a full participant meant that the sociological ‘pay off ’ had declined sharply. Recognising one’s own lack of any sense of novelty or unfamiliarity is not limited to academic social scientists. Marquese (1994) is an American, a Jew, and a Marxist, who surprisingly loves cricket. He came to England in 1971 and fell in with some friends who listened to ‘Test Match Special’, a long-standing BBC radio

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commentary programme about international cricket. In 1976, when the West Indies destroyed England, he ‘fell in love with the game’ (p. 6). Knowledgeable about baseball, he began to study cricket as an American outsider. By 1994, he knew he had ‘gone native’. Marquese had, he realised, moved a long way across the gradient of unfamiliarity as a cricket lover.The lesson here is that the researcher cannot envisage being ‘taken aback’ by the enquiries of ‘outsiders’ needs to work harder on her or his own familiarity. The exit period is a good time to do that. Over the years I have come to take for granted many of the peculiarities of English cricket. Nowadays when I take Americans to a cricket match….I find myself taken aback by their enquiries…. many products of cricket’s history have become invisible to me, a distressing sign that I may be becoming ‘English’ (26). Leaving the sparse literature, this chapter moves on to our advice to the novice on and around maximising the experiences of leaving the field after we have focused briefly on long-term and perpetual fieldwork, leaving and returning, and studies that come back to ‘bite’ the ethnographer.

Those who never had a separate ‘field’ Some ethnographers study themselves (autoethnography) and others research a setting or group of which they are ‘perennial’ members such as their own workplace or close community. These researchers are quite different from those like Stebbins and Fine, who have done multiple projects in separate settings. Autoethnography has grown rapidly in the past 30 years and has generated handbooks and by edited collections (Sikes, 2013) as well as its ‘own’ journal. ‘Leaving’ is a problematic concept for an autoethnographer. Some have studied a specific episode in their own life, such as an illness or bereavement, and that sort of autoethnography can end when the experience ends. Others research and write repeatedly about themselves and so never make an exit. Several of the leading advocates of autoethnography have written about their conversion to autoethnography in such emotional terms (Ellis and Bochner 1996) that we feel free to talk of potential apostates. The community of autoethnographers does not seem to have produced apostates: if there are any, they have not written about it. If the researcher has chosen autoethnography for one specific project, then the lessons to be learnt from its completion, and the strategies for learning to make oneself strange, can be used.We have been unable to envisage a fully committed autoethnographer leaving themselves.The autoethnographer could only ‘leave’ by abandoning their autoethnographic stance, and that is not discussed any further here. For ethnographers who have done fieldwork in their own culture or society, it may be possible to stop formal fieldwork and revert to their former role.Vannini (2012) still lives on the west coast of Canada and still uses the ferries he studied. Those scholars who work on their own workplace or community may find that ceasing to study their research setting is a hard task unless they have a thesis deadline or a research grant

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with its own schedule ‘which forces them to stop fieldwork’. At the time of writing, SD has been studying capoeira for 17 years and Savate for 11 years and has reflected on her reluctance to leave (Delamont, 2016b). The Covid-19 lockdown has ‘paused’ the offline fieldwork for five months, but the classes have gone on-line, and provided another way in which the familiarity has been challenged. However, since the publication of the monograph (Delamont, Stephens and Campos, 2017), the ‘fieldwork’ has become much less intense, and the attendances at classes and festivals more like the maintenance of long-standing friendships than proper ethnography. PA has continued to support WNO as a Partner since his fieldwork ended. In that sense, he has never ‘left’ the opera company, and some surviving members recognise him as the author of the monograph he wrote. For most current members of the opera, he is just another supporter and member of the audience.

The study, the re-study and the much-studied ssite Anthropology has a tradition of long-term fieldwork, whereby a researcher routinely returns to the same site in order to re-study it. There are also some places or institutions that have been investigated and then re-studied by different researchers. One Brazilian settlement in Amazonia was twice studied by Wagley (1953, 1976) and then by Pace (1998). Itá is a small town on the banks of the Amazon whose population and economic fortunes have changed several times when the price of rubber rose and fell. It had ‘boomed’ early in the twentieth century but was in deep recession and had shrunk to essentially a hamlet when Wagley first went there in the 1930s. During the Second World War when the Japanese occupied Malaysia Brazilian rubber became very valuable, and Wagley went back to encourage its production. He made a subsequent field trip in the 1950s. An anthropologist of a younger generation, Pace, studied the settlement again in the late 1960s. Since then, there has been archaeological research and further anthropological fieldwork. Redfield’s site – the Mexican town of Tepoztlán – has been studied for about 50 years and has been one of the classic examples of revisits and re-studies. Indeed, restudies and re-visits have been part of anthropology’s staple diet. In one unusual case, the Essex village of Elmdon was studied over several years by young Cambridge anthropologists. The village and its long-suffering inhabitants were used as a sort of training-ground: see Strathern (1981) for a synthesis of those investigations. As Burawoy (2003) points out, continuities and differences in separate accounts of ‘the same’ social world provide significant methodological and analytic issues (allowing for social change over time): they bring into sharp focus issues of reflexivity in ethnographic interpretation. Here Burawoy is using ‘reflexivity’ to refer to the inescapable fact that any and every analysis implicates the observer’s interpretative acts and engagements with the field: Every ‘visit’ to the field is unconnected to previous and subsequent ones, so in the final analysis visits are aggregated as though they were independent events. In the reflexive view of fieldwork, on the other hand, ‘visits’ to the

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field are viewed as a succession of experimental trials, each intervention separated from the next one to be sure, but each in conversation with the previous ones. (p. 668) The point is that re-visits to the field, either by the same ethnographer, or by members of later generations, can be excellent methodological exercises. The identification of differences in interpretation, of paradoxes, or nuances of meaning, are not best thought of as revelations of error or failure on the part of the original study. Rather, as Burawoy suggests, they are interventions that can reflect differences in perspective, changes in theory, shifts in analytic priorities. As Burawoy also makes clear, we should not view re-visits or restudies as corrective or as additive. Leaving the field and going back to the field can be an important methodological and analytic experiment in its own right. Re-studies by different observers can prove equally significant. There are some scholars not in anthropology who have studied, left and then returned to re-study the same site. Hammersley (2016) reviews a number of ethnographic restudies. Burgess (1984 and 1987) did two distinct projects in the same Roman Catholic comprehensive secondary school in England he called Bishop McGregor. Galton led a team of ethnographers into the same four schools in two east midland cities in England 20 years apart (Delamont and Galton, 1986, Hargreaves and Galton, 2002). Bruce (2011) did a re-study of the religious life in the sites of the classic UK community studies (such as Emmett 1964) in 2008–2009 to see how it had changed since the 1940–1970 era. Stacey studied the English town of Banbury and later returned with a small team of young researchers to conduct a re-study (Stacey 1960; Stacey, Batstone, Bell, and Murcott, 1975).

Leaving We return here to the theme of ‘leaving the field’, picking up several of our recurrent themes. There are five aspects of leaving that deserve attention here: ‘deciding’ or recognising when to go; doing a careful review of the fieldwork to check that there are no omissions that can still be remedied; organising and communicating the exit; documenting the exit; challenging one’s accumulated familiarity.The last point is particularly relevant to our message in this book. We have argued that all fieldwork needs to start and continue with strategies to create and ensure unfamiliarity. Despite the best efforts of a self-confident ethnographer who tries to keep working on their gradient of unfamiliarity, it is inevitable that if the fieldwork has gone well, most aspects of the site will have become familiar even if they were not at first, and a process of re-challenging familiarity when leaving is necessary. The collection edited by Smith and Delamont (2021) includes papers on several of these topics.

‘Deciding’ to leave We have put ‘deciding’ in quotes because there are times when the exit is enforced on an ethnographer who is so powerless they cannot remain. Wars, disasters like

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earthquakes, closure of an institution and ejections can all terminate fieldwork when the researcher has no desire to leave. Ironically we wrote this during the lockdown which was enforced in 2020 because of Covid-19, when SD’s fieldwork on Savate and capoeira had to be suspended offline because the classes all stopped or went on-line. PA was unable to do any more intensive studies, and Neil Stephens was in the middle of fieldwork on Big Tissue and had to abandon a field trip to Japan. In extreme cases, the fieldwork ends because of the death, or life-threatening injury on illness of the scholar. Changes of government, especially by coup d’êtat, can end fieldwork. One experienced anthropologist had to leave Libya, abandoning a promising project, when Colonel Gadafi seized power. Anthropologists have, like Wax as reported in the Maines et al. (1980) study who was ordered to leave one fieldsite, reported being warned to ‘escape’ because of politics, war and disasters. Herzfeld (1985) originally planned to do his doctoral research in a village on Rhodes but found it so unpleasant he moved to a different site on Crete he called ‘Glendi’ where he was able to complete a project on performative masculinities. One anthropologist friend of ours was about to go to Ethiopia for his fieldwork 40 years ago when a fellow student who was already in that country was killed and our friend’s supervisor stopped him from going into the field. He never became an anthropologist. Ebner (2020) was trying to join Generation Identity, a far-right white supremacist group, covertly using a false identity, when they discovered her real identity as a journalist who exposed racist groups. She had to retreat (p. 48). In advanced industrial democracies, the enforced exits are more often due to the researcher’s funding ending, the schedule of their doctorate or research post precluding a longer stay, or the nature of the site itself: typically the end of a school term or the clinical trial or the run of the ballet. Any enforced departure requires careful adherence to the procedures we advocate. We have already referred to the termination of Scott’s swimming-pool study (Scott 2019). Krautwurst (2014) had been studying a new science research centre on Prince Edward Island in Canada which opened in 2007. In 2010, the university decided that the research centre should go virtual and his fieldwork ended. Our own seven projects had different endings and exits. PA had a limited period in the American hospital for that phase of his haematology study, because he was on sabbatical leave from his full-time job. He had a year’s leave but had planned to do fieldwork for one UK term (the autumn) and then after Christmas in the UK go to San Francisco to work with Virginia Olesen and Anselm Strauss. The main opera project had a time limit for the intensive ethnography based on a time-limited grant to ‘buy’ him out of teaching for a finite period. The opera master classes ended in the form we were observing them, and the tango lessons finished in the hall near our home and began again in a farflung suburb.The craft experiences were all pre-scheduled to be intensive and short. Only the two martial arts ethnographies are at the time of writing ‘unfinished’, in that SD has not left either fieldsite officially or permanently. A mixture of planned timetables, events beyond one’s control, long-term work with an indefinite timeframe are all common among ethnographic projects.

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For those investigators who are choosing how long to stay, the most important criteria that should lead to a decision to come ‘home’ are as follows: theoretical saturation and motivation to continue insightful data collection. Theoretical saturation is an “acceptable” reason to leave a field, while “lacking motivation” sounds like a euphemism for being lazy or lacking insight or being bored. A sensible investigator offers the first reason rather than the second because the former is more analytically informed. The idea of theoretical saturation goes back to Glaser and Strauss (1967) and is related to theoretical sampling. Essentially it means that the fieldwork is not triggering any new social science ideas, while the analytic categories that have been identified have been explored thoroughly. Such saturation may be desirable, and ideal to aim for, but in practice, few field researchers would claim that they have identified all of the potentially fruitful analytic issues and have also documented them fully. In practice, there is always more to be explored. It is, however, salutary to ask oneself whether sufficient exploration and analysis have been done in order to check whether anything new is being learned in the field.The accounts by Stebbins and Fine quoted earlier in the chapter are both by experienced ethnographers who have learnt from their careers as observers when “enough is enough”. The accounts by Stebbins and Fine suggest that they regularly left fieldsites for this reason. They are both experts. Knowing when to stop because of theoretical saturation is an acquired tacit or indeterminate skill.The distinction between tacit and explicit skills developed by Jamous and Peloille (1970) is a useful way of thinking about the knowledge and skills required to succeed in various occupations, knowing when the time in the field has reached the point of diminishing returns is a classic example of a tacit skill. No explicit rule can be written, but the experienced ethnographer is more likely to be confident that they have judged correctly when that point is reached. Fieldwork is often boring, because what is being observed is boring for the actors themselves or because it is, in fact, tedious to observe. Scholars who say that they ceased fieldwork because they were bored usually mean that their boredom had become all-encompassing. If none of the strategies suggested in this book help disperse the sense of tedium, then it is probably time to withdraw, using the steps that are set out below. Delamont (1995) has written about how unacceptable it is to publish admissions of boredom with fieldwork, although the repeated observation of mundane events can readily become ‘boring’. Of course, it is important to observe what actors in the field find dull, repetitious and unremarkable and then make that interesting for the readers.

The careful review There is probably nothing more likely to make an ethnographer feel a failure than realising after leaving the field that data were not collected on some things that seem essential for analysis or writing up. Because no scholar is infallible, there will always be lacunae, but it is worth a careful check while still in the field.The strategies central to this book can all be useful as a frame for that self-scrutiny.We do not need to strive for ‘completeness’, as that is an unattainable goal. But as we said earlier in

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this chapter, it is a good idea before leaving the field (if that exit can be predicted) to reflect self-critically on what has been achieved, and whether strategies like theoretical or purposive sampling have been done adequately.

Organising and communicating the exit The issues here are very different in formal institutions and in more informal and public settings. Fieldwork in a formal organisation, such as a bank, accounting firm, hospital, opera company (Atkinson, 2006a), or stem cell bank (Stephens, Glasner and Atkinson, 2008), generally needs to be officially ‘completed’ by a formal communication to the management or senior administrator. In contrast, a study of skateboarders (Petrone, 2010) or graffiti artists (Valle and Weiss 2010) needs no formal communication because there is no formal organiser. Both sorts of setting will involve face-to-face ‘goodbyes’ exchanged with the actors in the setting, and it is those which can generate senses of relief or loss in the ethnographer. The more informal the setting, the more likely it is that some or all of the key informants will not have understood that the researcher’s presence was a job, and not a choice, and news of the departure can be the occasion for re-explanation of the research.

Documenting the exit There are three kinds of ‘documentation’ about exits that a wise ethnographer preserves. If a formal exit letter or email is sent, it is sensible to keep a copy. If any payment is involved, such as a receipt for a locker or door key, preserving that is useful evidence of the bureaucratic nature of exits in that organisation. The researcher should keep fieldnotes about the exit processes, not abandon or even pay less attention to data collection during the last weeks, days or hours. Thirdly, thoughts about leaving are a good thing to record in the ‘out of the field’ diary in order to provide evidence of the ethnographer’s feelings while they are fresh and also to focus on the ethnographic self: its sensory and embodied engagement and disengagement.

Challenging the accumulated familiarity As we have already acknowledged, ‘leaving the field’ is not always a matter of principled choice. Quite often, it is a matter of sheer practicality: the end of funding, the end of study leave, the timetable for the doctorate. Nevertheless, there is no reason not to review the fieldwork and its intellectual progress before necessity brings it to an end. We have suggested throughout this book that we do need, periodically, to think about our comfort zones in the field. It is very easy to get too comfortable in particular settings and in the company of some people. As a consequence, we can find ourselves ‘discovering’ the same things over and over again, rather than challenging ourselves intellectually and interpersonally. Before leaving the field, we ought perhaps to pay particular attention to that. Have we done justice to the social contours of our chosen site(s)? Or should we, before departing, make renewed efforts

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to challenge ourselves more? Perhaps we should try to access events we have not previously attended or observed. Sometimes we can be too polite and allow ourselves to get into a rut of daily and weekly routines of participant observation. Perhaps, too, we should review the people we have interacted with. Again, are there people we have been avoiding or overlooking? This is not a matter of comprehensive coverage. Rather, it is about addressing our own unreflecting reliance on routines, and reliance on particular perspectives. The value of ethnographic fieldwork lies partly in our social and spatial mobility.We have (limited) licence to roam, and we often have more freedom of that sort than do the members of an organisation, group or network. We can trace things as they circulate and as they acquire significance over time. Hence, we ought to ask ourselves whether we have made the most of those kinds of fieldwork opportunities, and whether we have documented them adequately. We know that ‘sensory’ ethnography is currently prominent. It is not necessary to embrace sensory phenomena as a specialist area of research, or as an array of discrete phenomena. Any participant observation will involve a range of senses. It is not just a matter of visual understanding. It also involves touch, smell, heat and cold, texture. Again, we do not need to turn these into checklists of sensory phenomena that must be completed. But prior to leaving the field, it is a good idea to reflect on these things: have I documented the colours, the textures and surfaces adequately? They can, after all, be aspects of practical and symbolic ordering of many settings. The visual sense also needs to be exercised self-consciously. It is not just a question of seeing, but of observing. And being observant can mean paying close, concrete attention to colours, to light and darkness. Settings change in character in the cold light of day and when illuminated at night: think of theatres, bars, clubs that can become much more agreeable at night. They might well contrast with settings (such as workplaces) that take on a much less welcoming character at night. For police and other security workers, issues of light and darkness can be hugely significant in framing their attentiveness, alertness and sense of safety. Earlier in this book, we suggested that estrangement could be aided by paying very close – perhaps obsessive – attention to the practical and material means by which actors conduct everyday life. As part of our critical reflection, therefore, we ought to think about that before we leave the field. Can we actually document how ordinary activity is carried out? Have we paid full attention to the material means that people use? Have we paid equal attention to the routine methods that actors employ in their everyday work, or in order to conduct themselves in their ‘normal’ manner. Ethnographically speaking, it makes little sense to think and write about ‘practices’ if such practices cannot be documented properly. Needless to say, these and similar considerations should be kept to the forefront of our mind throughout the course of fieldwork. They are not meant to be things that are only addressed towards the end of fieldwork. But the process of leaving the field can be an analytic, intellectual rite of passage that includes an element of methodological reflection. And in a purely practical way, preparing to finish fieldwork is the right time, if for no other reason than to address some of these things before it is too late.

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Recordings and documents A researcher whose fieldwork is coming to an end may well be able to make permanent recordings that would not have been feasible earlier: perhaps because the researcher is more trusted, and actors who were concerned about being filmed, photographed or recorded feel comfortable about the investigator’s motives and aims. Actors may be happy to share phone numbers and email addresses and to establish more enduring on-line contacts with the ethnographer which will generate ‘written’ communications. Equally, it is a useful juncture to make sure that one has collected or copied (with proper permission and safeguards) the relevant documents (if any) that are part of the everyday work and self-documenting in the relevant setting(s). They are not, of course, gold-standard sources of evidence. Written records do not trump what has been said and enacted. But they are often key artefacts in their own right.

Middle-range concepts Given the necessity of doing provisional analyses during the research, there may well be (indeed should be) middle-range concepts that look promising but need different data to be collected to ‘test’ their usefulness before leaving the field. The exit period is the ‘last chance’ to collect data about whether something can usefully be seen as a boundary object, to ask oneself if some event is a tournament of value, to focus on awareness contexts, or to explore whether some feature of the setting shows evidence of being a ‘sticky culture’ (Fine 2013). As we leave the field, we should not be doing so with an inert pile of notebooks, transcripts, documents and photographs. Analysis should have been a recurrent process throughout the fieldwork. So as we ‘leave’ physically, we should be taking with us not just accumulated ‘data’, but an array of possible ideas. We should be in a position to start working with them, sometimes in the absence of those data, but canvassing a variety of possibly fruitful conceptual schemes. It is a poor idea to get fixated on just one or two: they may help us to get going, but ideally we want to be buzzing with ideas. They do not – as we have reiterated – ‘emerge’ from repeated readings of data, nor indeed from obsessively coding transcripts and notes. They come from our wide knowledge of anthropology, sociology and other fields.

Taking race and ethnicity seriously The last phase of the fieldwork is a good time to think seriously about race and ethnicity. In some settings that will mean focusing on one or more absences: the setting may not be at all multi-racial or multi-ethnic, and if so, that is a good reason to explore how and why that is, and what the actors think about race and ethnicity. These can be ‘awkward’ questions and therefore good to pose at the end of the fieldwork. It is also a sensible stage at which to explore and record the use and visibility of images of various specific races: are the only black faces on posters about

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African poverty, or do they appear once a year for Black History Month and then vanish? There may be some ethnic minority people in the setting who work at different times of day or in different spaces. In our university building, the cleaners are women of Somali origin who work from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m., so ‘no one’ sees them, and there is one man of Filipino origin who empties rubbish and checks lavatories once a day in the afternoon. An ethnographer could easily miss them altogether. It is a fine line between doing excellent research, which enable the researcher and then her readers to see the world as the actors see it, and becoming so over-identified with that viewpoint that the others in the setting become stereotyped, or are ignored. It may not be possible, or desirable, to try and see the setting from all the possible angles, but if a study is partial, that needs to be explained to its eventual audience. For example, one of Merryfield’s respondents describes a formative experience (Merryfield 2000): I visited Stanford’s campus as a high school student and sought out a young woman from my home town. She went to my church and our parents grew up together in the South. Although she had been at Stanford for two years, no one seemed to know her; she was invisible even to the other women in her dorm (435). This informant, Joyce King, and her family friend are both African-American. If an ethnographer had been studying that dorm, or that class at Stanford along the lines of Moffat (1989) or Holland and Eisenhart (1992), it would have been all too easy not to ‘see’ Joyce King’s friend: to ignore her as this student’s dorm mates apparently did. Our use of ‘visual’ here does not just mean pictures. Checking what languages are used on official and informal notices is a good strategy. If the signage is only in English, or bilingual in English and Welsh, that is very different from a school foyer near our house which says ‘welcome’ in 15 languages including Greek, Maltese, Portuguese, Hindi and Somali.

Gender The last phase of the fieldwork is good time to do a gender ‘audit’. When the ethnographer is known to be leaving, it can be a good time to ask about gender issues. In the early 1980s, SD was doing a short ethnography in a comprehensive school in South Wales. It was breaking the law: specifically a ten-year-old equality act which made it illegal to offer different subjects to males and females, but the school segregated boys into metalwork and woodwork while the girls did cookery and needlework. When the short fieldwork period was nearly over SD asked about this and discovered that not one of the teachers she asked about this division had ever heard of the legislation. That would have been a provocative question early in the fieldwork and could have ‘branded’ SD as a ‘feminist’ or a ‘troublemaker’.Yet it was important that it was asked before SD left the field. A researcher who focuses on gender can add an interesting dimension to any study. David (2017: 9) found

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that the social movement he had studied in 2005–6 in New Orleans was highly transitory. He returned to the city in 2015 and went to the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams Research Centre to check what materials on the Women of the Storm (WOS) were archived there. The research assistant he spoke to had never heard of WOS and there were no new materials. He remarks that such an interaction was a record of an important absence. His original plan was to study WOS so they did not vanish from history as women often do, and yet within a decade they had become ‘unknown’.

Other actors The pre-exit phase of the ethnography is a good time to ‘audit’ the ethnographic work to see if all the actors (relevant to the research questions) have been studied or left out for carefully documented reasons. Many ethnographies in Science and Technology Studies have ignored the technicians, for example, and yet they are central to the research agenda and the support for graduate and undergraduate students in university labs. They often know the equipment much better than the more highly qualified academic researchers, and know how to tinker with it in order to make experiments work. The studies by Wylie (2015), Doing (2004) and Charlesworth et al. (1989) focus on technicians which makes them very unusual laboratory ethnographies. It is too easy to concentrate on the senior ‘star’ scientists, who may take much of the credit for discoveries, but do not do the hands-on dayto-day work of the laboratory. In medical settings, one should pay attention to staff who prepare images, test results and other resources vital for clinical and research work.

Three ‘reading’ strategies The last days in the field – or more realistically the last weeks – are a good time to do a little reading, or better, re-reading of a few ethnographies about the core topic in other cultures, of that topic in non-standard or unfamiliar settings in the same culture, and, perhaps most usefully, a couple of historical ethnographies. A big part of the familiarity problem is that what may be believed by the actors in a setting to be novel or innovative may be long-standing, and what is thought traditional may be novel. What any culture thinks is traditional, and rhetoric about the ‘good old days’ can be both inaccurate. Powerfully held beliefs may be important in the culture, but not be at all accurate as Herzfeld (1983) pointed out in a paper on older Cretan men’s talk about the higher standards of morality in the good old days. No evidence about actual behaviour Herzfeld could find supported the rose-tinted view of the past. That did not mean that an ethnographer should dismiss the lamentations about the ‘lost’ past. The ethnographer may have no more knowledge of how things used to be or of what is innovative than the actors. Reading a few ‘old’ ethnographies is the best way to get an outside view of what is the same and what is actually new, or changing as the research took place.

Leaving the field  153

Mellor and Delamont (2011) used that device to look for continuities and changes in pupils’ thinking about what awaits them during the transfer period from primary to secondary school in England between 1977 and 2003. SD had done ethnographic fieldwork on pupils’ first month in secondary school in 1977 and 1978 in two English cities, and David Mellor had done a parallel piece of research in England and Wales in 2002. The continuities of children’s anxieties and anticipations were remarkable. Re-reading Isabel Emmett’s (1964) study of a community in North Wales as it was in 1956 would sharpen insights into any rural British community in 2020, especially a Welsh one. Spradley and Mann’s (1975) study of the work of cocktail waitresses in the USA would sharpen insights into current data on the hospitality industry or any low-paid women’s work. Even if the historic study was read before the fieldwork, re-reading it before the end of data collection is likely to generate new insights. Reading or rereading some ethnographies of the core topic in other cultures is also a useful strategy in the last phase of fieldwork. One or two studies will be enough at this stage to ‘jolt’ the ethnographer. Reading a few ethnographies focused on relevant topics in a different setting in the researcher’s own culture.

Conclusion Time spent on these strategies before the ethnographer leaves the field can be very valuable. They can help guard against a ‘blunt’ or ‘cold’ exit. In other words, they help us to ‘shape’ the outcomes of the fieldwork, to develop and extent our understanding of the field. They can also help us in shifting our perspectives, rather than having a single, fixed viewpoint. They can help launch the ethnographer towards lively, fruitful analytic strategies. In this chapter, we have stressed that planned exits should be subject to rigorous self-scrutiny. Unplanned and forced exits both have to be documented carefully. Reading about the exits from the field of earlier scholars can provide insights to improve any study. In the final chapter, we focus on the ethnographic ‘hangover’ and the reaction to publication, as well as concluding the volume overall.

10 EPILOGUE

The aim of this book is to offer some practical advice, and some more conceptual discussion about how to do better ethnography.We began by outlining the familiarity problem set out by Geer (1964), Becker (1971) and Wolcott (1981). Those three inspirational scholars partly diagnosed the problem, but they did not systematically or explicitly describe how they had attempted to fight familiarity themselves in their own ethnographies, or to teach their graduate students to do so, or how ‘making the familiar strange’ could be central to methods courses. We have focused this book on both the practical and the conceptual strategies that we have found, over our long careers, as ethnographers and teachers can work. There is a danger that some readers will think that the strategies can be applied mechanistically like a checklist or tick-box evaluation. Many exciting provocative ideas in research methods quickly descend into such sterile practices. The history of the ideas of grounded theory since 1967 reveals that dreary possibility, and it is a common feature of what Fleck (1979) called textbook science. We cannot, of course, prevent such mechanistic uses of our proposals. Our hope is that readers will look at our strategies and think about what inspiration they can draw from them to fight familiarity in their own work. Few of us can be Erving Goffman or Clifford Geertz or Susan Leigh Star or Adele Clarke, but our hope is that all ethnographers can aspire to work with concepts, such as the total institution, which take their readers out of the familiar (‘it’s a mental hospital’) into the shocked recognition that prisons and the most expensive elite male boarding schools like Eton are in an important way ‘the same’. Once that sameness is appreciated, the differences are brought into a sharper focus and can be highlighted for the reader who will never themselves enter a mental hospital, a prison or an elite school but will understand its fundamental characteristics beyond the lazy stereotypes that ‘everyone knows’. Thinking hard about the epistemology and sociology of ignorance is to be encouraged. Finding one’s own place on Woolf ’s

Epilogue  155

‘gradient of unfamiliarity’ (2011, 17) is a necessary step towards enlightening one’s readers. Hard thinking about positionality is important. Ethnographic research has an afterlife. It is normally more enduring, less ephemeral, than other forms of research. We still read ‘classic’ ethnographies decades after they were conducted and first published. That is true of anthropological monographs in particular, but it also true of sociological and other work too. If we read, say, Geertz or Malinowski or Evans-Pritchard today that is not because we harbour Romantic visions of ‘lost’ worlds and a hankering for the past. We do not think that the Nuer or Dinka people of Sudan live now how they did when the classic studies were conducted; their lands have been traversed by armed conflict in the intervening years. We do not think that Melanesia now is the way it was described by Malinowski a century ago. Those classic studies retain their interest because they are models (however imperfect) of how an ethnographic engagement can generate a unique reconstruction of a form of life, of social forms that inform our understanding of what it means to be a social being. Likewise, if we read Whyte’s classic work (Whyte, 1981), we do not expect to find the North End of Boston now exactly as he described it then, nor do we assume that social actors of Italian-American heritage are precisely like that several generations later. We do so in order to learn how to make sense of local social organisation, of distinctive urban cultures. We can read classics for evidence of social change, of course, and they can be treated as historical records. But that is not the main reason for their recurrent appeal. We probably cannot expect our monographs to become classics in that sense. But we should expect them to have a life. In the first place, ethnographic research provides a rich repository of ‘data’ that we can return to. For many researchers, their doctoral fieldwork is a precious period in the career, given that they either have to move on to new research projects, as a postdoctoral researcher, or to a post that includes a substantial amount of teaching. Fieldwork is greedy, and time is a precious resource. So many of us find ourselves returning to our store-house of ethnographic materials, in order to re-visit analytic themes. The fieldwork can have new life breathed into it for a long time after its formal completion. Most researchers collect far more data than they can ever deal with in their doctoral thesis or even in their monograph. The accumulated knowledge derived from weeks and months of intensive fieldwork provides a ‘camel’s hump’ of materials that can go on informing analysis and publications well after the formal end of the study. Further, the experience of ethnographic fieldwork is of even greater lasting value. Fieldwork is, proverbially, a rite of passage. It endows the successful researcher not only with ‘data’, but also with the authority to talk about and write about the conduct of fieldwork itself. Indeed, for many ethnographic authors, there can be at least two book-length publications based on their fieldwork. First, there is the monograph, often a specialist publication. Monographs are often expensive, appeal to a small number of fellow specialists and therefore have very limited lifetime sales. On the other hand, reflections on method, autobiographical and methodological, can be much more popular. So the successful ethnographer should always think in terms of those two parallel opportunities (at least). Moreover, there is ample opportunity to use one’s

156  Epilogue

field research to develop papers targeted at very specific, sometimes esoteric, aspects of the research – not least for special issues of journals or conferences that examine distinctive topics or methods. Nevertheless, it is also common to feel that we have never quite done justice to the research setting. However, we represent it in texts, or by other means, it can feel incomplete, with so many aspects of everyday life omitted, so many social actors we have not been able to represent ‘in the round’, and so many activities overlooked. There can be a sense of betrayal, and of relative failure. The important thing is to honour the implicit research contract by creating something new and illuminating on the part of the ethnographer, even if aspects of it seem unpalatable. That after-life of ethnographies is not always under our control. Some scholars who think they have left a fieldsite find themselves (re)entangled with it when the publications produce controversy. One famous case was Scheper-Hughes’s (1979) research on the west coast of Ireland. When her book was published, the townspeople objected vociferously to her findings and her interpretation of them. Brettell (1996) edited a collection of papers by anthropologists whose work and publications subsequently caused controversies. Most recently Alice Goffman’s (2014) book about African-Americans in Philadelphia caused an academic controversy in conventional print media and on social media, in which her integrity, competence and veracity were all attacked from a confusing range of perspectives. The work of Laud Humphreys (1970) is an earlier, notorious sociological example, discussed most recently by Calvey (2017). Our mistakes follow us, and – ideally – our best ideas take on a life of their own that can last long after the fieldwork is ‘finished’. We have repeatedly made reference to the need for reading in this process of creative thinking. There is little more deadening than the conventional ‘review of the literature’, which is a feature of too many doctoral dissertations. It is not normally the place for creative thought, although it certainly could be. But we are not writing about the sort of reading that results from the attempt to cover the research literature in a narrow research field. It is quite the reverse.We are advocating the use of published work – monographs and papers – that extend and deepen our stock of ideas, of analytic resources that help us to recognise and develop fruitful ideas. Reading widely and eclectically is more productive than obsessive searching on databases for every conceivable reference on a given topic. The same is true of the analytic process when dealing with ‘data’. It does not matter what kind of data one is dealing with, we should always be asking ourselves questions. Interrogating the data is much more useful than summarising them. Opening it up is much better than condensing it. If we can identify a particular or distinctive episode or activity, we can ask ourselves questions. We have suggested these previously in this book. But we need constantly to question how something gets done, what is distinctive about it, how it can be different, how it is evaluated, how people react, whether it is valued, and so on. Some approaches to ‘ethnographic’ analysis are conducted in the reverse of that spirit. Too often we read of studies that have ‘discovered’ a small number of ‘themes’ in the data, that turn out on closer analysis to be the self-same ideas that drove the research in the first place, or that formed the thrust of the interviews that were

Epilogue  157

conducted. Far from ‘discovering grounded theory’, far from uncovering ‘themes, such approaches merely confirm the researcher’s presuppositions. At worst, the ethnography merely illustrates existing ideas. One practice we have not explicitly addressed so far is the exercise of talking things through with someone else. Doctoral students have their supervisors, and postdoctoral researchers have their principal investigators. They really ought to use those working relationships to talk through their fieldwork and their ideas. It is not, in the ideal world, just a matter of planning a research design, or presenting ‘findings’, or even sharing draft thesis, paper or report. Those professional meetings – sometimes social occasions as well – can and should be the opportunity to explore ideas. Sometimes it is worth reconstructing or even re-enacting potentially significant episodes. Puzzles, paradoxes and possibilities can and should be explored fruitfully. Moreover, our own experience suggests that postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers are strangely reluctant to talk to members of academic staff who are not their supervisor or line-manager.We do not understand such reticence.Within the academy, one should always be ‘allowed’ – actually encouraged – to interact in a collegial manner with anyone.The more widely one can share, the more diverse the ideas that can inform the research. Research on education, say, might benefit from insights from a criminologist (cheating, social control), while an expert in science studies might have something valuable to add to a study of sex workers (detachment, safety at work), and research on health and illness might be informed by work on religion (ritual behaviour, faith). In many ways, a research group is the ideal vehicle through which to share and discuss. At our own university, the ethnography research group has been meeting regularly for over 40 years.We all try to make it a ‘safe’ space for colleagues, at all stages of their career, to share, to try out and to discuss in a supportive environment. Equally, there are other research groups where ethnographers can learn and contribute. As with everything else we have advocated in the course of this book, these are but suggestive ideas, intended to help in the creative process that is ethnographic inquiry.That is, the reconstruction of a social world in such a way that the sociological or anthropological insights can transcend the purely local, and the ideas transfer to a range of other settings. Such aspirations can lead to work that endures. For even when we ‘leave’ the field, the ethnography stays with us. For many scholars, their first major fieldwork project – often their doctoral research – is a resource to which they return repeatedly in the years that follow. If an academic monograph is the outcome, then that normally takes some time to prepare: we cannot simply publish a slightly revised version of the thesis, as the two texts represent quite different genres. The same is true for journal articles. For many aspects of ethnographic work, the journal paper is tricky, being too short to do full justice to detailed ethnographic reportage. Each paper needs to be driven by key ideas, and to present something that displays the freshness of the author’s thinking. We also return to our ethnographic data for methodological publications, drawing on our personal experiences of fieldwork to contribute to broader debates and developments about field methods. All of this means that the original ethnography can stay with us as an active part of our academic career for many years (even when we move on to newer projects).

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INDEX

abductive reasoning 52–56 absences 4, 5, 76–77 Abu-Lughod, L. 43 academic autobiography 115–117 academic ‘positions’ 3–4 access: covert research 37; ethical approval 34–35; informed consent 35; IRBs and ECs 33–34; negotiations of 35–36; risk analysis 34; social movements 36; study of public face 37; undercover journalism 36–37 accounts 94–96 Adams, T.E. 117 Adler, P. 81 Adler, P.A. 81 Adorno, Theodor 106 Altheide, D. 140 American ethnographic literature 20, 107, 108 analytic mobility xi Anderson, L. 117 Annual Review of Anthropology 115–116 Apocalypse Now 131 Appadurai, A. 88 Atkinson, P.A. ix, xv–xvii, 1, 4, 5, 10, 12, 13, 18–20, 34, 35, 46, 66, 67, 71, 82, 86, 88, 93–95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 110–115, 117, 118, 121–128, 131, 140, 148 atrocity stories 75 authenticity 74, 94, 118 autobiographies 4, 66, 114–117, 124–125, 136 autoethnography 67, 117–118, 136, 143 Awareness Contexts 14

Back, L. 106 Bagley, C.L. 113, 128 Bakewell, S. 29 Ball, S. 69 Barley, N. 138 Bartleet, B.-L. 117 Bates, C. 61, 15 Bazerman, C. 112 Becker, H.S. ix, xii–xiv, 6–7, 10, 12, 19, 21, 28, 46, 70–71, 127, 140, 154 Behar, R. 106, 110, 111 Bell, C. 114 Bell, J. 35 Berger, B. 116 Berger, M.T. 35 Berger, P. 16, 106 Bergeron, J. 61 Beynon, J. 40, 73 Bloor, M. 34 Blumer, H. 23 Bochner, A.P. 118, 143 Bock, J.J. 46 Boellstorff, T. 1, 25, 27, 137–138 Bosse, J. 24, 25, 42–43, 137 boundary objects 82–83, 150 Bourdieu, P. 63, 70 Bowen, E.S. 114 Bowen, G.A. 89 boyd, d. 11 Boys in White 46 Brettell, C.J. 156 Bricmont, J. 9 Browning, B. xvi

Index  177

Brown, K.M. xv, 83, 84, 127 Brown, R.H. 112 Brown-Saracino, J. xv Bruce, S. 145 Bullivant, B.M. 11 Burawoy, M. 144, 145 Burgess, R.G. 114, 145 Burke, J.L. 20 Buzard, J. 117 Calvey, D. 37, 156 Campion-Vincent,V. 75 Campos, C. 14, 30, 31, 41, 42, 57, 80, 88, 102, 144 Caplan, P. 112 capoeira ethnography xvi, 12, 29–32, 102 capoeira research xvi, 41–43, 56–58, 74, 78, 102, 125, 128–135 Capote, Truman 41 carnal sociology 26 Carr, C.L. 71, 83 Carver, N. 95 Casanova, U. 108 Cep, C. 41 Chang, H. 117 Charlesworth, M. 152 Charmaz, K. 92, 104 child-centred approach 13 Clarke, A. xiv, 83, 105, 154 Clarke, A.E. 92, 104 classical studies 6 Clifford, J. 110–113 The Clinical Experience 46 clothing 42–44, 58, 70–72, 76 Clough, Patricia 117 Clough, Peter 113, 133 coding 92–93 Coffey, A. 10, 13, 67, 86, 93, 101, 111, 113, 127, 128, 140 Coleman, J. 11 competitive verbal performances 74 Condrars, Blaise 106 ‘confessional’ writing 4, 18–19, 66, 114–115, 139 Connolly, Paul 58 conspiracy theories 75 contrastive rhetoric 30, 73, 75 Corbin, J. 91, 104 Cottrell, S. 74 counterfactuals 96 covert research 37 Covid-19 75, 146 crafting ethnography xv, xvii, 71, 81 crisis of representation 110–111

cross-cultural uniformity 94 Crossley, N. 71 cultural capital 75 Culture and Imperialism 100–101 data analysis: autoethnography 67; concepts 63; critical reflection 61–62; educational settings 58–59; fieldnotes 56–57, 59; hospital setting 60; informants 59; intermediate/inter-texts 59; issue of positionality 62; narratives 66–67; organisational settings 60; participant observation 65–66; places, spaces and movements 60–61, 64–65; preliminary analysis 59–60; recording 56–58; reflective notes 58; research strategies 65; shadowing individuals 65; structure of 56; temporal rhythms 60; visual resources 64 data collection: absences 76–77; craft apprentices 68–69; fieldnotes 81–85; ignorance(s) and non-knowledge 78; imagined and anticipated movements 80; informants 80; liminal places 79; mobilities paradigm 78–79; objects 81; observing 76; past movements memories 80; practical activities 77–78; sound 72–75; strategies 69–71; study of places 80–81; time-space diaries 81; transfer points 79; virtual movements 79–80 data organisation: academic journal papers 92; accounts 94–96; coding 92–93; explicit knowledge 91–92; grounded theory 89–91; hospital setting 88; journal referees and editors 92; positionality 97–102; reflexivity 101, 103; standpoints 100–101; substantive and generic theories 87–88; tournament of value 88–89 David, E. 76 Davidson, J. 73, 74 Davis, K. 26, 137 Dawson, A. 110 de Beauvoir, Simone 29 de Certeau 20 deductive reasoning 51–52 Deegan, M.J. 107 de-familiarisation 12, 15 Delamont, S. ix, xvi, xvii, 1, 10, 12–14, 18, 20, 23, 30, 39, 44, 46, 58, 66, 69, 75, 78, 80, 82, 88, 93, 102, 106–113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 121–128, 131, 136, 140, 142, 144, 145, 147, 153 de Marrais, K. 35, 114 Denniston, C. xvi

178  Index

DeNora, T. 72 Denzin, N.K. xiv, 34, 110–112, 117, 125, 128, 131 Dermot, E. 108 Desmond, M. 77 Devereux, Georges 106 Dicks, B. 10 Dilley, R. 7 Dingwall, R. 75 The Discovery of Grounded Theory 89 Doing, P. 152 Douglas, M. 63, 83 Dreiser, Theodore 106 du Boulay, Juliet 109 Dudley, K.M. 77 Durrell, Lawrence 106 Ebner, J. 36, 146 Edensor, T. 61 Edmonson, R. 112 Edwards, D. 74 Eisenhart, M.A. 151 Ellis, C. 111, 118, 141, 143 Emerson, R.M. 39 Emmett, I. 145, 153 Encel, S. 114 English Defence League (EDL) 26, 37 Entwistle, J. 72 epistemology of ignorance 7–10 equipment 38, 73, 152 ethics committee (EC) 33–34 ethnicity 13, 74, 99, 150–151 ethnographic genres 110–113 ethnography 1–2; categories of actor 11; critical race theory xii, 3, 86, 97; cultures 11; education 12; ethnomethodology 16–17; gender standpoints 13, 97; health-related activities 11–12; insightful ethnography 10–11; material analysis 15, 24, 56, 59, 81, 155; middle order concepts 13–14; permanent recordings 14–15; phenomenology 15–17; strategic comparisons 12–13 ethnomethodology 16–17 Ettore, E. 117 Evans-Pritchard, E. 10, 155 Experiencing Fieldwork 140 exploration of ideas 49–50 extended case method 51 Fadiman, A. 19, 96 familiarity problem xi–xii, xiv–xv, 19, 108, 152; anthropology xiv–xv; empirical examples xv–xvii; ethnographic fieldwork xiv;

higher education and school settings xii–xiii; ignorance xiii; intellectual feminism xiv; strategies for fighting xii Faubion, J.D. 114 Faulkner, William 106 Favret-Saada, J. 112 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 7–8 Fehr, Carla 7, 9, 26 Feldman, M.S. 35 Festinger, L. 37 fiction 133–136 Fielding, N. 34, 37 fieldnotes 31, 37, 39, 40, 59, 81, 121; as boundary objects 82–83; data analysis 54; liminality 83–85 Fieldwork Experience 140 Fincham, B. 34 Fine, G.A. xv, 23, 24, 26, 38, 70, 75, 106, 121, 142, 143, 150 Fitzpatrick, K. 120 Flaherty, M. 110 Flannan Isle 129–130 Fleck, L. 91, 154 Foltz, T.G. 71, 73 foreshadowed problems: abductive reasoning 54; backgrounds 24; carnal sociology 26; case presentations and narratives 22; contexts 23–24; EDL 26; elite activities/high culture 26; empirical level 25; escapism 27; globalisation 24; human conduct and social organisation 21; inductive and deductive reasoning 51; perceptions of reality 23; phenomenology 23; sensory ethnography 23; strangeness 22–23; theory of muted groups 23; vocational education 24–25; WOS committee 27 Forsey, M. 72 Foucault, Michel 89 Fretz, R.I. 39 Frickel, S. 9 Friese, C. 104 Fromm, Erick 106 Gallmeier, C.P. 140, 141–142 Galman, S.C. 138 Galton, M. 69, 145 Gane, N. 106 Gans, Herbert 140 Garfinkel, H. 16 Gay y Blasco, P. 111 Geer, B. ix, xii, xiv, 7, 10, 12, 18–20, 28, 68, 154

Index  179

Geertz, C. 154 Gellner, E. 100–101 gender 13, 62, 151–152 Generett, G.G. 114 Gibson, C. 77 Gibson, W.W. 129 Gilbert, N. 67 Gladwin, T. 100 Glaser, B. 14, 29, 87–89, 91, 104, 147 Glasner, P. 148 Gluckman 20 Goffman, A. 135, 136, 156 Goffman, E. 12, 63, 64, 105, 106, 154 Gordon, D. 106, 110, 111 Goulett, J.-G. 114 gradient of unfamiliarity 6–7, 126, 154–155 Granfield, R. 35–36 Greco, Juliette 29 Greismer, J. 82 Griffin, W. 71, 73 Gross, M. 7, 9 grounded theory 89–91, 154 Hacking, I. 63 haematology ethnography 21–22 Hafferty, W. 75 Hall, C. 88 Hall, T. 15 Hammersley, M. ix, 13, 18, 20, 35, 56, 82, 103, 118, 121, 122, 131, 145 Hammond, L. 114 Hammond, P. 114 Haraway, D. 7, 9, 10 Harding, S. 7, 9 Hargreaves, L. 69, 145 Hayano, D.M. 67, 117 Heath, C. 75 Henshaw,V. 61 Herzfeld, M. 69, 75, 109, 146, 152 Hess, D. 9 Heyl, B. 12 Hobbs, D. 76 Hockey, J. 110 Holland, D.C. 151 Holland, S. 81 Holstein, J.A. 16 Housley, W. 93 Hughes, E. xii, xiv, 87 Humphreys, L. 37, 156 Hurdley, Rachel xvi Hurricane Katrina 7–8 Hurston, Z.N. 112

ignorance studies 4–5 indigenous methods 98–99 inductive reasoning 50–51 informed consent 35 initial encounters: capoeira 41–42; challenges, test questions and probes 44–45; clothing 42–44; corporal punishment 40; data back up 40; data collection 37–38; fieldnotes 39; field practicing 38–39; medical education 45–47; networking 44; physical tiredness management 38; strategies 40–41; technological changes 39–40 insider research 67, 99, 117 Institutional Review Board (IRB) 33–34 intellectual exercises 97–98 intermediate/inter-texts 59 interview transcripts 90, 91, 93, 94 Irwin, R. 101 Iverson, R. 140 Jackson, J.E. 39, 84, 85 Jackson, M.D. 50, 106 Jacob, E. 20 James, A. 110 James, William 106 Jamieson, M. 107 Jamous, H. 147 Jeffrey, B. 58–59, 110 Jeffries, R.B. 114 Jennings, G. xvi, xvii, 30 Jerolmack, C. 107–108 Jones, S.H. 117 Journal of Autoethnography 117 Kaldellis, A. xiv, 6 Kaplan, I.M. 140, 141 Katz, J. 20, 107 Kenna, M. 102 Khan, S. 107–108 Kirsch, T.G. 7 Kleinknecht, S.W. 114 Kleinman, D. 9 Knab, T.J. 40 knowledge 9, 16, 21, 31, 46, 78, 124 Kondo, D.K. 69 Krautwurst, U. 146 Kumoll, K. 110 Kusenbach, M. 78, 80 Labov, W. 74 Lacey, C. xiii

180  Index

Laing, R.D. 106 Lambart, A. 69 Landes, R. 111–112, 120 Lareau, A. 114 Laurier, E. 81 Lawrence, D.H. 106 Leach, E.R. 40, 116, 118 Leacock, R. 12 Leacock, S. 12 leaving the field: comfort zones 138; confessional literature 139–140; documentation 148; enforced exits 145–147; formal communication 148; formal organisation 148; gender ‘audit’ 151–152; middle-range concepts 150; opera company 138–139; practical and material, attention to 149; race and ethnicity 150–151; reading strategies 152–153; recordings and documents 150; ‘reverse’ culture shock 138; review 147–148, 148–149; ‘saturation’ 139; sensory ethnography 149; separate field 143–144 Lee, Harper 41 Lee, I.-F 63 Lees, S. 102 Leiberg, A. 114 Letkemann, P. 140 Levi-Strauss, Claude 106 Lewins, A. 90 Lewis, J.L. 12 liminality 83–85 Lincoln,Y.S. 111, 112 Lindblad, S. 63 literary turn 111 literature review 156 local social organisation 155 Lofland, J. 112 Loseke, D. 94 The Lost Ethnographies 114 Lubeck, S. 59 Luckmann, T. 16 Luker, M.J. xvi

Marcus, J. 100 Marquese, M. 142, 143 Marsden, D. xiii Martin, D.D. 121 Marvasti, A.B. 90 Marx, Karl 89 Mason, B. 10 Mason, M.A. 101 McGoey, L. 7, 9 McLean, A.M. 107, 114 Measor, L. 44, 75, 76 Meek, Barry 14 Mellor, D. 75, 153 Merriman, P. 61 Merryfield, M.M. 151 middle range concepts 13–14, 58, 82, 105, 121, 150 Miller, G. 16 Miller, Henry 106 Mishler, G. 121 mixed methods 1 mobile methods 61, 65, 70 mobilities paradigm 78–81 Moeran, B. 13–14 Moffatt, M. 85, 151 monographs 126–127, 155–156 Mora Yemanja! 125, 132 Moles, K. 80 Morelli, C. 13 Mulkay, M. 67 Muncey, T. 117 Murphy, Robert 106

Magliocco, S. 68, 83–84 Maines, D. 140, 146 Making Doctors 46 Malinowski, B. 120, 155 Mannay, D. 10, 15, 113, 128 Mann, B.J. 153 Manning, P.K. 110, 111 Mannix, D. 12, 124 Marchand, T.H.J. 77, 100 Marcus, G.E. 110–113, 114

Oakley, A. 12, 123 Observational Research and Classroom Learning Environment (ORACLE) 69, 71 O’Connor, E. 77 O’Hagan, A. 36, 37 Olesen,V. xiv, 116, 146 O’Neil, Denis xvi On the Run 135–136 open-ended questions 94

Nader, L. 27 Nagar, R. 43 Nardi, B. 1 narratives 66–67, 94–95, 118–119 natural attitude 15–16 negotiated access 21–22, 35–36 Newby, H. 114 New Orleans:Women of the Storm 27 non-knowledge 4, 7, 9, 78

Index  181

opera ethnography 32, 62 opera master class ethnography 146 Orientalism 100–101 Orwell, George 106 Ǿstebǿ, M.T. 45 over-familiarity 55–56 Pace, R. 144 Paquette, S. 61 paradoxes 125 Parman, S. 14 Parry, O. 37, 123 participant observation 71, 77 Pascoe, C.J. 71, 76 Paths Toward a Clearing 106 Paxson, H. 24, 25, 31, 70, 80 Pearce, C. 1 Peirce, C.S. 53 Peloille, B. 147 performativity xvi, xvii, 25, 109, 110 Peshkin, A. 11 Petrone, R. 148 phenomenology 15–17 Phipps, A. 128 Pilkington, H. 26, 36–37, 80 Pithouse, A. 88 Pollner, M. 16 Ponty, Merleau 29 Popkewitz, T.S. 63 positionality 2, 3, 62, 66, 86, 97–103, 105, 155 Postar, S. 106 Poullaouec-Gonidec, P. 61 preconceptions 50–51 Propp,V. 114 Puddephatt, A.J. 114 purposive/theoretical sampling 29 Qualitative Inquiry 113, 125–126 race xii, 3, 13, 23, 58, 97, 98, 123, 150–151 radical empiricism 50 Raines, P. 140 reading and reflection: academic autobiography 115–117; American anthropology of education 107–108; autoethnography 117–118; confessional literature 114–115; empirical studies 109; ethnographic genres 110–113; gender blindness 105–106; male performativity 109–110; narratives 118–119; organising notes 109; specialisms and disciplines 107; strategies 104–105

Read, Kenneth 106 ‘realist’ texts 115 reflective practice 3–4, 67, 97–103 reflexivity 3–4, 97, 101, 103, 144–145 Reich, J.A. 75 Reinharz, S. 38 Renold, E. 81 representations 2, 5, 51, 64, 100, 110, 112, 136 research design 31–32 research groups 157 research methods 116 research questions: abductive reasoning 53–54; American ethnographic literature 20; culture-shock 19; familiarity problem 19–20; foreshadowed problems 21–27; implementation 27–31; prejudices 20–21; preliminary fieldwork 18–19; research design 31–32; working hypotheses and initial encounters 19 research strategy 102 restudies 144–145 rhetorical turn 111, 113 rhetoric of inquiry 5 Rhys-Taylor, A. 61 Richardson, L. 121 Riecken, H.W. 37 Riley, M. 116 Riseborough, G. 70 Roadbury, W. 140 Roberts, H. 114 Roman Catholic cathedrals 72 Ronai, C.R. 117–118 Ross, N.J. 81 Roy, Donald 140 Russell, L. 110 Ryen, A. 99 Said, E. 100–101 Sampson, C. 124 Sampson, H. 34 Sanjek, R. 39, 121 Sartre, John Paul 106 Saunders, L. 128 Savate class 28–31 Savate ethnography xv, xvii, 21, 28–32, 146 Schachter, S. 37 Schatzman, L. 109 Scheper-Hughes, N. 156 Schutz, A. 15 Science and Technology Studies (STS) 7, 9, 111, 152 Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths (STEM) 7–9

182  Index

scientific cultures of non-knowledge 9 Scott, S. 5, 76, 138 Sebald, W.G. 106 self-conscious literary artefacts 6 sensory ethnography: smell 24, 70, 149; taste 70; touch 24, 70, 149 Shaffir, W. 114 Shaffir, W.B. 28, 140 Shaw, L.I. 39 Sheller, M. 79 Shultz, J. 114 Sikes, P. 76, 117, 143 Silver, C. 90 Silverman, D. 66, 67, 94, 118 Sinclair, S. 46 Sinclair, Upton 106 Singleton, J. 108 ‘situated knowledges’ 10 Smith, R.J. 15, 114, 140, 142, 145 social position(s) 2–3 social production of ignorance 9 sociological imagination 5 Sokal, A. 9 sound 72–75 Southwood, J.V. xvi, 29–31 Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) 36 Spencer, J. 110 Spindler, G. 114 Spradley, J.P. 109, 153 Spry, T. 117 Stacey, M. 145 Stanley, L. 23, 98 Starn, O. 110 Star, S.L. 82, 83, 154 Stebbins, R.A. 140, 142, 143 Stephens, N. 14, 78, 80, 88, 102, 109, 125, 131, 144, 146, 148 stigma 64 students 10, 20, 26, 31, 46, 57, 80, 125, 128, 135 Stokoe, E. 74 Stoller, P. 70 strategic ignorance 9 Strathern, M. 144 Strauss, A.L. xiv, 14, 29, 88, 89, 91, 92, 104, 109, 140, 146, 147 Summers, Lawrence 8 Suryanarayanan, S. 9 tacit knowledge 30, 91 Tales of the Barbarians 6 tango classes xv, xvi, 84, 137, 146 Tavory, I. 53 Taylor, S.J. 140, 141

Taylor, T.L. 1 teachers xv, 30, 42, 69, 76, 122, 134, 151 textual genres 112, 113, 117 textual practice 5 theoretical saturation 147 Thurk, J. xv time 19, 26, 47, 55, 60, 64, 147 Timmermans, S. 20, 53 total institutions 153–154 tournament of value 13–14, 88–89 Traweek, S. 11 Trix, F. 12 Trollinger, S.L. 37 Trollinger, W.V. 37 Tuchman, Gaye 38 Turowetz, A. 28, 140 Urry, J. 61, 78–81 Valle, I. 148 van Gennep, A. 79, 84, 137 Vaninni, P. 80, 81 Van Maanen, J. 5, 114, 115 Vannini, P. 15, 27, 61, 137, 143 Van Slyke-Briggs, K. 112 Van Velsen 20 Verhoeven, J. 12, 105, 106 Vesperi, M.D. 110 Vincent, M.B. 9 virtual movements 79–80 Wacquant, L. 92 Wagley, C. 144 Walford, G. 39, 58, 59, 83, 114 Ward, M. 102 Wardle, H. 111 Warren, A. 77 Washburn, R.S. 104 Watermeyer, R. xvi Waterston, A. 110 Watson, C.W. 114 Wax, Rosalie 140, 146 Weis, Lois 58 Weiss, E. 148 Whitaker, E.M. xiv, 4, 5, 94, 95, 97, 101, 103, 118 Whyte, W. 155 Williams, D. 125 Wilson, S. 72 Wise, S. 23, 98 witchcraft beliefs 112 Wolcott, H.F. xiv, 40, 41, 154 Wolf, D.R. 140

Index  183

Wolfe, Thomas 106 Wolf, M. 113, 133 women 12, 23, 36, 42, 45, 102, 106 Women of the Storm (WOS) 27, 152 Woods, P. 75 Woods, R. 76 Woolf, G. xiv, 6, 122 Writing Culture 110 writing practices 113 writing stages: doctoral thesis 123; journal articles and book chapters 123–126; monograph 126–127; ‘new’ forms of output 127–128; plays 130–136; poems

128–130; Roman ‘conversations’ 122; strategies 120–121; textual analysis 121–122 Wulff, H. 110 Wylie, C. 11, 82, 152 Young, D.E. 114 Zenker, O. 110 Zerubavel, E. 55 Zerubavel’s analysis of time 55