Bloggers, ethnographers and journalists

At the moment I’m starting to think about rewriting my introduction/first chapter so that I’ve got something solid on paper before I go in to the work placement that I may or may not be starting in a few weeks (no more details for now, in case it doesn’t come off). As a consequence I’ve been thinking quite hard about methodology. In the spirit of anthropological reflexivity I have also been thinking about why I’m doing this: how I ended up with my research topic and which prejudices I need to take into account. That will be the subject of another post but in the meantime I’m preparing for the return to a less hermitic existence (August has been very quiet) by thinking about the pratice of ethnography.

One of the most useful summaries I’ve read on the practice of observation and note-taking is from Cicilie’s research blog. She bases her approach on Emerson, Fretz & Shaw, Writing ethnographic fieldnotes (1995); the key point – and also the biggest challenge – it seems to me is finding ways to continue to stay attuned and alive to the strange, especially if, like me, your instinct is generally to find ways to make yourself blend in as much as possible and to try to eliminate any experience of strangeness, a process that is almost beyond my control and certainly very hard to analyse (hence picking up a ridiculous New Jersey accent after only 2 weeks in the US last year). Until now none of this has been that important to me; my research approach has been more hands-off/analytical in the manner of much political science (if admittedly largely on account of my own reticence and lack of experience as a ‘field’ researcher). However, it will become crucial if I do enter a work environment for a bit as part of my fieldwork. In the not-yet-museum my focus will be much more on how the daily life and interpersonal relations of a nascent institution shapes the messages it produces, or, as Handler & Gable put it (The New History in an Old Museum, Durham U.P. 1997), on the ‘epistemological politics; that is, the relationship between historiography and internal struggles over interpretive choices’ (p.26). Having no experience of French office culture I think a lot of things will inevitably seem a lot more strange than they do in everyday life; the hard thing will be remembering to see awkward situations as research material rather than just problems or obstacles…

In thinking about this question of preserving strangeness Savage Minds has recently returned to C. Wright Mills for inspiration on how to take notes / blog. Some of you may remember that I – or rather my mother – was ahead of the game on this one. (Read my post about C. Wright Mills here). The Savage Minds author has replaced ‘file’ in Wright Mills’s original with ‘blog’ and I agree that the parallels are uncanny:

By keeping an adequate blog and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them on your blog and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The blog also helps you build up the habit of writing.

Unlike the file the blog can also be a means to ‘repatriate’ your work, or, minus the jargon, to share your ideas with the people who inspired them. I was particularly struck by the importance of this when listening to a recent programme on France Culture where there was a discussion about how journalists in France represent the banlieue. One of the main reasons for the perpetuation of damaging stereotypes is that not only do most journalists come from more privileged backgrounds they are also rarely sufficiently ‘embedded’ to get a wide range of stories and a balanced view on events. Indeed, tellingly, during last November’s riots many newspapers (and I imagine other media) apparently relied on ‘fixers’ to set them up with contacts and stories, a practice reserved as a rule for foreign news in the absence of a permanent correspondant. It’s a whole other world la banlieue … One newspaper, the Swiss L’hebdo decided to take a much more ethnographic approach and sent a team of journalists to the suburb of Bondy where they started writing a blog. What was most interesting about this approach was that it gave the inhabitants an immediate right to reply. Moreover, the blog has now been fully ‘repatriated’ by being handed over to local people – and it continues to attract a lot of comments, not all of them that constructive, a bit sadly. (Read the Bondy blog here.) Nevertheless, the end result is clearly something that gives more insight into life in the banlieue than anything in the mainstream media, not least because writers can no longer post a sensationalist story and then run for cover in the bars of the capital. The Swiss journalists’ experiences have been published as a book, which I’m looking forward to reading (currently on loan from almost all of Paris’s municipal libraries, except in the 15e, 16e and the Ile St Louis…well there’s a surprise).

The point that I’m trying to make is that a more accurate and hopefully more ethical journalism would be both more engaged on the ground and more devolved; that is, more ethnographic. I am reminded of a remark made to me recently by an American student of documentary film-making who told me that in the view of her professors there was no better training for film-makers than anthropology. Of course, as a general rule, journalists have all sorts of priorities that make this kind of approach difficult; there are not the staff and good news is no news so you can’t post people in Clichy, say, for months on end in the ‘hope’ there’ll be more riots. But nevertheless, new media – and some not so new techniques – seem to be setting the standard for a more responsive, more responsible journalism.

Anyone who wants to pursue this further might also be interested to see the recent special issue of Etnography on precisely this subject (thanks again to Savage Minds for the link). When anthropologists turn their attention to the dynamics of the 24h news channel (article here) it gives a whole new meaning to Leiris’s definition of ethnography as ‘des flashes relatifs a des faits subjectifs’ (Afrique fantôme, Gallimard, 1981 (1934)).

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