I have moved to Canada when I was 17. Reading Luker made me
smile a few times this week:
When you are enmeshed in a
different culture, everyday life becomes problematic and challenging. You don’t
get your regular morning coffee in your familiar coffee mug, you don’t read the
comics in your local paper <…>. Then the day goes downhill from there.
I realized that during the last 12 years of my life as a new
Canadian, I have incidentally learned and have continuously been using a major
research methodology: participant observation. I have been writing home and
describing the whole society of Canada in conversation with friends on skype. I
have been generalizing based on what I know about the groups of people that I
know. For a long time now I have been “someone who watches and notes things
that everyone else takes for granted”.
I have been documenting practices and attempting to explain my Canadian
friends’ actions by describing their distinct lens of beliefs. I have been
creating “a fixed narrative for a specific audience”. Of course, the motivation
I have for this is not based on a desire to publish volumes of research, but to
personally understand my own life. I took up ‘figuring out’ Canada casually
and, as a result, skipped a few steps of analyzing the data I collected. I am
glad Luker is pointing those out for me. I see that I sometimes didn’t stop to
think whether the events I had talked about or had written home about were
atypical or widespread. I assumed categories without thoroughly researching
them. Sometimes I found theories to back up my conclusions, but often not.
Mostly skipping these steps, I simply arrived at a model of why Canadians do
what they do.
Participant observation is dangerous because it is
completely personal and is based on individual impressionability. Your
generalizations are often based on the groups you personally chose to join.
Sure, often there is a highly structured theoretical explanation of why you
analyze who you analyze. But, similarly to the study of ‘reproduction ‘ of
social class, where the researcher chooses to look at groups in a public school
because she believes, it is obvious to her, that those groups are
representative of the whole, you will too always choose those certain groups
and categories based on your personal experience. My entire analysis of living
in Canada is my interpretation and my perception. And so is the analysis
derived from participant observation in general.
Unsurprisingly, I also wanted to comment on this section of Luker's article. I say "unsurprisingly" because I had the same experience, having moved to Canada at 16. I actually thought it was quite interesting, because ethnographic research seems to assume a homogenous culture which the researches analyzes - like the traditional old white dude coming to sub-Saharan Africa or the Arctic and living with the people there who (supposedly) share the same values, beliefs, behaviours, etc. We now live in a very different society, which most of us will be researching - North America, where there are tons of different "categories" of people who have very different values, beliefs, behaviours, etc. For example, I'm looking into immigrants' use of public libraries. It's literally impossible to make any statements about "immigrants". Each immigrant community has different ideas about libraries and different ways of interacting with them. To add to this, second generation Canadians are even more interesting and complicated with regards to their world views.
ReplyDeleteLooking at myself as a possible researcher, I realized that I will be an observer observing observers... Sort of... Perhaps because my area of interest is not how the immigrant communities view Canada, but rather what they want from libraries, it's not that complicated. But still, it was really interesting thinking about the idea of "fitting in" as a researcher in a North American context. I really don't think this ever exists anymore - too much plurality of world views. Or perhaps "fitting in" never really existed at all...
Many questions were asked in class this week about the value and the issues of ethnography and participant observation. I must say I actually really enjoy the fact that we always have to think and re-evaluate how to navigate our experience as researchers.
ReplyDeleteHow do I fit into the group I am observing? What methods do I choose and how often? How appropriate are the methods I've chosen? If I blend in - is it consentual? Do I really have enough data to offer analysis?
The bottom line is questions and categories have to come out of my personal experiences (as a researcher). Everything I do is deeply interpretative and based on my background of experiences, impressions, and competencies. Even if my methods are scientific, I had chosen them because I have a specific knowledge of these scientific methods through my education, which, again, is my experience!