In Defense of Interpretation in Fieldnotes
For the sake of debate, two things came to mind during our discussion in class about how much interpretation to write into fieldnotes. One, I think we can all agree that the ethnographer will inevitably do some filtering, from observations and experiences, to jotting an idea in some form of language onto a notepad, to creating full sentences in a fieldnote at the day's end. Sonja's description below of the dilemmas surrounding individual parts of speech in a fieldnote is a humorous example of the larger interpretive struggle.
Two, perhaps fieldnotes can be not just a record of experiences and observations, but a running dialogue about how and why the ethnographer observed and experienced the way she or he did. Without some narrative introduced by the ethnographer a fieldnote may be more or less a mirror of the "actual" events, but does that make the fieldnote any more readable to its audience?
Ethnographers go to the field with a purpose. Making that purpose explicit will help readers contextualize the vignettes in a fieldnote. An explicit purpose also forces an element of transparency. Rather than having an a-ha moment at the end of, say, six months of fieldnoting, the story that writes itself along the way through certain observations and experiences, can be traced through the ethnographer's own process of developing and rethinking interpretations. In other words, the "what does it all mean" moment can happen in stages, as needed, rather that at some artificial "end" point.
Emerson et al. (1995) summarize a couple strategies for in situ interpretation, staring page 100 with "as the field researcher participates in the field, she inevitably begins to reflect on and interpret what she has experienced and observed," and "field researchers pursue several kinds of analytical writing that stand in stark contrast to the descriptive writing we have emphasized before." Granted, as Emerson notes, "descriptive writing [...] produces the bulk of the researchers fieldnotes." However, fieldnoting, in my view, is more that just reporting, it is a tricky balance between seeing (observing), feeling (participating) and thinking (interpretation), which then needs to be written as part of a larger interpretive process. Our fieldnoting exercise and workshop were very useful and I look forward to seeing more fieldnotes in future.
posted by Caroline Chumo at 9:55 AM
1 Comments:
Perhaps some of the possible tensions here might be eased if the audience of the fieldnotes is consistently (or only) their own writers. Many more narrative concerns then can basically (or literally)be bracketed (but thus by no means forgotten) in the interpretive fieldnotes, which could (or might) then appear more rather than less like reporting, if reporting here means 'data' in the form of lush descriptions and 'meaning-making' interactions.
Still, there would need to be a balance between attending to these more narrative concerns in the actual writing of the ethnography and the writing of fieldnotes of course. And this would seem basically to be left for individual ethnographers to decide. I can only agree with the above point on being explicit with one's 'purposes'. These would seem sometimes a matter of documenting proceedure and, depending on one's tendencies, reflexivity, until writing up the ethnography, when the audience becomes a most central concern.
[Apologies, all, for the late post.]
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