Ethnotale: Up Close and Personal

Should ethnographers use tripods or not? The question may seem trivial, but thanks to Margaret Mead, tripods signify two very distinct approaches to ethnographic filmmaking.

In terms of practicality, tripods can be cumbersome in the field. There’s plenty of sit-down interview time where a tripod is nice to have, but as the self-proclaimed “world’s clumsiest ethnographer,” I know that tripping over tripod legs while you’re following participants around isn’t a good look. In terms of the resultant video, using a tripod has its pros and cons. Using a tripod results in cleaner footage, and, of course, a more stable shot, while handheld footage can be livelier and more vibrant.

They each have their merits, but how does Margaret Mead, one of our very first ethnographic filmmakers, factor into the discussion? What did she think about this pressing issue of tripods? We get some insight from an article from 1976, “For God’s Sake, Margaret,” a transcript of the banter between her, at 75 years old, and her ex-husband, Gregory Bateson, with whom she filmed “Trance and Dance in Bali” almost forty years earlier. In the article, Bateson expressed his own position, arguing, “If you put the damn thing on a tripod, you don’t get any relevance.” To which Mead said, “No, you get what happened.”

Essentially, Mead argues that filming handheld gives the ethnographer too much power to choose what and what not to film, whereas with a tripod, you can leave the camera be and simply record whatever goes on for later analysis. This argument echoes the early “salvage ethnography” days where a primary motive of ethnographic filmmaking, and ethnography itself, was to document and preserve cultures that were in danger of disappearing. It also speaks to the inductive approach of ethnography where everything is data and the goal of filming is to capture as much of that data as possible, a position held by other anthropologists like Karl Heider. Filming, for Mead, was more about capturing evidence than creating art. She asks, “Why the hell should it be art?” She continues:

I mean an artistic film maker can make a beautiful notion of what he thinks is there, and you can’t do any subsequent analysis with it of any kind. That’s been the trouble with anthropology, because they had to trust us… [Before film] there was no way of probing further [into] material. So, we gradually developed the idea of film and tapes.

Her ex-husband, Bateson, in contrast, contends that you can only record one percent of what goes on anyway, whether you’re using a tripod or not, so you might as well get the best one percent. He values film more as a means of storytelling or conveyance and complains that without the ethnographer playing an active role in what to film, the end result will be dull and lifeless. He says, that, with a tripod, “You’re stuck. The [camera] grinds for twelve hundred feet. It’s a bore.” To which Mead retorts that he gets bored too easily.

Bateson is not alone in his preference for handheld. Jean Rouch, anthropologist and documentarian, found his filmmaking groove after losing his tripod in the rapids of the Niger River, forcing him to adopt the handheld, Cinema Verité style he pioneered:

For me, then, the only way to film is to walk about with the camera, taking it to wherever it is the most effective, and improvising a ballet in which the camera itself becomes just as much alive as the people it is filming.

By losing the tripod, Rouch is gaining himself, embracing reflexivity and the role of the researcher in the process. Through this embrace, he was able to create powerful, very human films. Rather than a tool for documenting culture, like in the Mead model, for Rouch, the camera is a medium for interpreting and expressing culture, ideally in creative, entertaining ways.

In the end, the choice to use a tripod or not is a personal preference that comes down to how practical it is in the field and the look you want from your footage. The real lesson from Mead is that we not go so “handheld” that we miss all the great data that surrounds us. The beauty of the camera is that it can collect data that we might not think to collect were we just armed with pen and paper. We also don’t want to be so devoted to the “tripod” approach that we’re collecting lifeless video—for most of us, we still use our videos for storytelling. A balanced approach may be best. The ideal may be to collect all the data we can with our cameras while acknowledging that all the while, we’re making choices and are influencing the world and our recording of it, tripod or not.

So they’re talking about much more than just tripods. With a tripod you still pick and choose what to film, and likewise with a handheld camera, you can still capture as much data as possible. Even if you compare a Mead film like “Trance and Dance” with a similar Rouch film, like “Horendi,” the differences are there, but they are not monumental. Still, the different approaches to ethnographic filmmaking have practical applications. You can take the “tripod” approach, where you’re focused on data collection, and it can impact how you film a context. Whether or not you actually have a tripod, you might tend towards long shots with the goal of capturing all of the actors and their actions with your camera. Taking a “handheld” approach, whether or not you are actually filming handheld, might mean focusing more on capturing what you find insightful in the moment, like the expression on someone’s face or the hands of someone using a tool. Most ethnographers have likely had times where they see something they find incredibly interesting and fight the urge (or succumb to the urge) to zoom in like a lunatic.

If you’re interested, you can find the whole conversation between Mead and Bateson at: http://www.oikos.org/forgod.htm

After more than a couple of decades of being a professional ethnographer, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve seen it all. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it in an authentic way. I’ve been present to share in the good, the bad, the joyful, the heartbreaking, the beginning, the end, the scary, the exciting, the uncomfortable, and the easy. During each of these moments, my craft has required that I maintain a focus that allows me to stay firmly grounded in the experience at hand and to stay the course, no matter how awkward. Although sometimes this can be difficult, I’ve found that there are a couple of strategies that help me to do good fieldwork no matter what comes my way.

Authenticity

Oscar Wilde said it best when he said, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” I don’t think it is possible to do good fieldwork unless you are willing to be authentically yourself. This doesn’t mean that you have to bare your soul or uncover your blemishes with participants, but it does mean that you behave and speak in a way that is normal for you. This is important for a lot of reasons, but it often becomes especially important when fieldwork is more intense or when it departs, more than usual, from the standard. We are usually asking people to share so much of their lives that it is not unusual for them to end up sharing things that we didn’t anticipate or maybe weren’t fully prepared to discuss. When this happens, the process is just quicker, easier, and more fluid when the ethnographer is her/himself. That is because going off script is easier to navigate inside the skin in which you are most familiar.

One time, I spent about three weeks following families on vacation at a theme park. Originally I had planned to keep my intense fear of roller coasters to myself. I knew that I had a pretty good poker face and that I would be able to manage riding along with families, even if it wasn’t very pleasant. After my first day of fieldwork, however, I realized that sharing my fear with families actually opened up an interesting dialogue and surprisingly seemed to help build a more intimate rapport. I stumbled upon this when one of my participants, an 8 year old boy, asked me if I liked scary rides as we were standing in line to board said scary ride. I knew I couldn’t lie so I told him the truth, which sparked a heated discussion amongst the family about just how scary the ride was and about the definition of “scary.” It also resulted in the son holding my hand on the ride and moving me into a deeper participant role with that family. Several days later, the family had a collective meltdown as I was shadowing them. It was not pretty and was uncomfortable for everyone present, but I think that having shown them my authentic self (and weakness), made them more comfortable to share this event with me. The rapport we had built over the last few days made it more comfortable for me to witness.     

Flexibility

I wish I had a quarter for each time my job required me to do something I didn’t know I would have to do. A deep commitment to flexibility is really the price of entry for being a good ethnographer. We take an inductive approach to our work which means that we never really know what is going to happen. It is best to show up with a sense of adventure and a wiliness to experience and do whatever helps us better understand who our participants are and what it is like to be them. This means that I have consumed lots of delicious food over the years, but also tons of things that I would have rather not eaten or drank. I’ve stayed longer than expected and sometimes even returned for an additional visit. I’ve spent hours and hours waiting patiently (or lending a helping hand) while my participants had to deal with or manage a crisis that was unexpected and (at least on the surface) unrelated to the reason for my visit. One time my colleague and I helped clean up a very serious water spill when our participant’s washing machine emptied out onto her floor. I’ve helped feed hungry kids, put babies to sleep, carried boxes, moved furniture, given rides, helped fill out forms, searched for lost items, helped fold laundry, sat outside in 100-degree weather for a visit with a cancer patient who was always cold. At every venture, I’ve been given the opportunity to learn additional context that helps me to better understand my participant’s lives and often their challenges.

One time I was doing fieldwork on how families with young kids used their minivans, so I was riding along while they did errands. When we called to arrange one of the visits, the dad had mentioned that I was welcome to join, but that I would have to enter the minivan from the hatch back. The third row was not accessible from the sliding door because of the child car seats. Although this didn’t sound like much fun, I figured it would be okay—I’m a practitioner of yoga after all. But once I arrived and saw just how little room there was between the top of the third-row seat and the ceiling of the minivan, I started to panic. For a minute, I considered asking if there was an alternative, but then I remembered that they had mentioned that this was how grandpa got in when he rode with them and so I hopped into the trunk area and threw myself over with abandon! Not only did my colleagues get a good laugh, I developed a keen appreciation for the need to create a different solution for grandpa! 

Empathic Curiosity 

Obviously being curious is an important skill for an ethnographer, but it is a particular type of curiosity that ensures fieldwork inquiry leads to understanding and not just a macabre documentation. Our work requires not just the observation and recording of data, but an attempt to better understand the challenges, experiences, and feelings that our participants have, from their perspective.  This can be really, really hard, especially when the topic at hand is a difficult one. It requires that the ethnographer open themselves up in a way that is sometimes painful. We have conducted a lot of fieldwork with people who are seriously ill or who are caring for someone who is seriously ill, and in both cases, the day-to-day experience is often excruciatingly difficult and the discussion of that experience can be equally difficult. In these kinds of situations, people often stop talking to their loved ones about what they are experiencing since it is just too painful for both parties, and so when we visit them, there is sometimes a little bit of a watershed moment when our participant understands that we really are there to learn from them and to hear their story. This can be exceedingly emotional for the participant and sometimes for the ethnographer.

One time I was visiting a woman who had a very serious chronic lung disease that had left her socially isolated. Her home was the majority of her world. She rarely got out and maintained very few relationships outside of her husband, her doctors, and the woman who came in to clean for her a few times a week. She had been a powerful and social executive prior to her diagnosis, and the transformation had been devastating. As we spent our final hour together, I was exhausted. She had walked me through her life in a way that left me feeling like I could truly understand what it must be like to be her. In order for this to happen, I had to be not only curious and willing to listen, but also be willing to let her lead and to be open to seeing the world from her point of view.

Holism

After a particularly frustrating round of fieldwork, a colleague once reminded me that there are no mistakes with ethnography. By definition, ethnography is all about real life and real life is messy, and therefore ethnographic fieldwork is often messy. Sometimes ethnographers forget this when butting up against deadlines or when working with clients that prefer a more tactical approach, but it is really, really true. Things tend to be connected in ways that we don’t always understand, especially at first blush. Sometimes when we are doing fieldwork, we can get distracted by our fieldguides and forget what we are really there to do—which is to learn about the social and cultural context of our participants’ lives and then and only then to dig into the specific topic that our client has hired us to learn about. It is understanding our specific topic in the context of our more general learnings about who people are and how they live that creates the much deeper insights that our clients are looking for. But sometimes the social and cultural context of people’s lives are complicated or thorny. Over the years, I’ve found myself witnessing a variety of illegal or unsafe activities. Once when we did fieldwork with people who had chronic pain and found ourselves in the middle of some sticky pharmacological situations. One participant, an elementary school teacher, asked me to ride with her to finish packing up her classroom for the year. After a few minutes on the road, it became clear that she was impaired. Luckily the drive was not that far and after spending some time moving things into a storage shed, she seemed to be less impaired than before. When touring another participant’s medicine cabinet, it became clear that they received prescriptions for pain medications from a variety of different doctors. Naively, I had not anticipated either of these situations and neither were covered on the official fieldguide for the project, but a quick re-grounding in the project objectives made it clear that understanding the context in which both of these events happened would provide me with a much more holistic, accurate, and real understanding of what it is like to live with chronic pain.

Ethnographic fieldwork isn’t always easy, but it is almost always interesting. Maintaining authenticity, flexibility, empathetic curiosity and a commitment to holism goes a long way towards ensuring that even when fieldwork is difficult, insights are trustworthy and even deeper and more real.

We never really know what to expect when we roll up to do ethnographic fieldwork. Even though we’ve been doing ethnography for more than 30 years, arriving at a participant’s home or workplace always feels a little like our first day on the job. We’re anxious and hopeful that everything will go okay but are never really sure what is going happen when we walk through the front door and into someone’s life. Some contexts are more exciting or more unnerving than others, but we have to be prepared for almost anyone or anything. And boy-o-boy, have we not been disappointed. We have met so many interesting people and heard so many interesting stories over the years.

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it 1,000 times—we’ve got the best job in the world. One reason it is such a great job is that it gives us the opportunity to meet so many interesting people. As sociologists, we believe that people are inherently interesting and what we’ve discovered as professional ethnographers is that EVERYONE has a story to tell that is uniquely captivating. If you take time to learn about someone, you discover that they are way more multi-dimensional than they appear at first blush. Although our job is usually to focus on the patterns that tie people together, we generally get there by first listening to and trying to understand each individual and what makes them who they are.

Over the years we have met thousands of people. We have been invited into their homes and into their lives and have found ourselves entertained and inspired by most of them. Here are some of the people who have stuck out as being particularly impressive, entertaining, or inspiring.

• Alma from Missouri was 85 years old, played the organ, and kept a refrigerator stocked with six different kinds of soda (she lived alone). She had a Facebook page and texted before either were mainstream and recorded herself reading books so that her kids could listen to her homemade books on tape.
• Dina from Pennsylvania was a twenty-something year old mother of two diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. We met her when we conducted a study on chronic pain. She had one of the most positive attitudes and brightest smiles of anyone we’ve ever met.
• Robert from Georgia was a postal worker we met during a study on diabetes. He had hardly traveled outside Atlanta except for a tour of Korea while in the army. He was soft-spoken and exceedingly polite and spent a lot of time wondering how scientific theories intersected with philosophy and religion.
• Rene from Kansas single-handedly cared for her husband with dementia even though she was in her 70s. She was amazing and truly inspiring and gave us a new appreciation for unconditional love.
• Chubby from Georgia was a really thin man receiving treatment for cancer but was far more concerned about his wife’s happiness and comfort than his own.  
• Dr. Anderson from Minnesota was a primary care doctor who had been treating most of his patients for several decades. He moonlighted as the primary fundraiser, organizer, and healthcare provider for massive shipments of medical supplies and treatment of patients in the Philippines.
• Deanna from Arizona was a young mom who had spent a few years in a prison where she worked as a firefighter, then met her husband at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and together they built the kind of suburban life for their kids that they never had.  
• Edwin from Georgia was a barber who delivered a homily with every trim, complete with a bible that he encouraged patrons to open to the page of their choice from which he would extemporaneously preach in a strong baritone.
• Fanny and Lloyd from rural Louisiana owned and ran a booming roadside fish restaurant, in their retirement.
• Annie from Missouri was a single woman with no kids, until she met and married a widower with eight kids, after which she became a stay-at-home mom.
• Brenda, a physician’s assistant from Oregon, had a treatment style that combined science, tough love, and a bohemian philosophy to motivate her patients to get healthy.
• Sheila from California was diagnosed with a serious chronic lung disease that caused her to be fatigued and winded virtually all of the time but refused to take on the role of “sick person” no matter what came her way.
• Samantha a restaurant manager and bartender from Illinois highlighted her love of cats and witches in her talented artwork.
• Angela in Tennessee, after meeting her husband on an oldie’s music cruise, decided to quit her job as an architect in Washington and move cross-country to live with him and start a second career as an uber driver.
• Candace and Dean from the Upper Peninsula in Michigan were in their 70s but still shoveled their own rooftops (we didn’t know people did that either!). Dean has decided to donate his body to science and has been getting medical trivia tattooed on his body for the last several years to make it more interesting and educational for whoever does his autopsy.
• Dr. Monroe, a veterinarian in rural Kansas, treated every kind of animal under the sun and did professional ballroom dancing on the side.  

Our research over the years has included more interesting characters than the Marvel Universe. They might not be able to fly or bend metal with their minds, but they’re all superheroes to us—doing their own things and making their own, unique life stories. We are just thankful that they have been kind and generous enough to share their rich experiences with us. We are so excited to see who we get to meet and learn from during the next 20 years!  

Like carpenters who build dream houses from simple wood and concrete, it takes a lot of work for ethnographers to build dazzling insights from raw data. Doing analysis is where we spend the vast majority of our time. Still, an essential step in creating value for our clients is presenting our findings in a way they can easily digest and incorporate into their platforms and strategies. Here are four things we do to help our clients transform ethnographic insights into action:

1. Insights that are compelling to begin with

First you need a good foundation. Having great data collection and analytical processes that make the most of that data goes a long way in creating compelling reporting.

We study a lot of ordinary things like cooking, cleaning, personal care, using technology, and managing health and illness. Frequently our clients have spent years working in these categories and most of their lives engaging in the behaviors themselves. It becomes our challenge to bring fresh insights to the table, powerful enough to change the ways our clients think about topics they are already very familiar with. To do that consistently takes our entire toolkit: including sociological theory, inductive data collection and analysis, and just a lot of hard work. This is step one. You can shine and shine shallow findings, but they will still be shallow.

• Reporting for success

Once we have strong findings based on strong data, we make sure to report it in a way that’s engaging and exciting for our clients. The insights aren’t going to gain traction if people fall asleep while we are sharing them.

Typically, we have more findings than we have time, so just the fact that we have to fit a lot into our presentations makes them fast-paced and entertaining. We also make sure to pair our findings with stories from the field. Sharing real life examples helps the audience get a better sense of what an insight looks like in practice, hopefully in ways that our clients can relate to and connect with solutions.

• Video from the field

Almost all of our presentations use video clips to illustrate key insights. Seeing our participants in action helps clients get to know their needs on a more personal level.

Video helps us to demonstrate patterns and call out opportunities for innovation visually. We try to choose video clips that are empathetic, engaging, and entertaining. This level of engagement helps make the insights sticky. Individual clips will live in clients’ memories long after the presentation is over, and ultimately, the accompanying insight might find itself shaping the direction of their brand.

• Ideation sessions

We regularly use ideation sessions to help clients develop action steps from ethnographic work. This is an extended brainstorming session shortly after we present our findings, usually the same day or the next day. The structure of the session differs depending on how much time we have and the audience size, but usually ethnographers and client stakeholders break up into small groups and come up with lists of ideas inspired by the ethnographic insights. We then compile and refine those ideas, spending time discussing and developing a select group to move forward with. Later, we send the client a report of all of the ideas for their reference. Ideation sessions are a great way to ensure concrete, direct solutions right away.

There you have it. Four ways we help our clients transform their insights into action. What other ways have you found helpful in making the most out of your research findings?

With COVID-19 moving a lot of market research online, we thought it’d be a good idea to highlight some considerations for getting deeper insights using remote and online methodologies. Although most of our work usually includes an in-person visit, we are big fans of video diaries and generally include those in our project toolkit as well as the occasional online interview. Right now, we think pairing online interviews with video diaries makes for a great, one-two punch.

Stay in-context if possible

Just because we aren’t there, doesn’t mean that life isn’t going on and that people aren’t still doing all of the things we are interested in learning about. The key for ethnographers is always trying to capture those moments (and the context around those moments) that help us learn about how something occurs. Being able to watch a person do something is exponentially more interesting than asking them to describe it. The messiness of observing real life is not replaceable, but we have found that it is possible to do some of that remotely.

Encourage participants to show and tell you more

When we visit participants in their homes or at their workplaces, we always let them know that we will likely want to see everything. Ethnographers know that it is not enough to ask people to show you the thing that you are interested in without seeing how it fits into the daily life and the physical space of the person using it. We always go deep in trying to get a handle on the routines, rituals, and habits of our participants. We also generally ask for tours of their whole homes because we know that the front stage spaces of someone’s home or work usually tells us far less than the backstage stage spaces. Touring homes remotely is possible. We have been doing them for years, usually with video diaries.

Be inductive

We approach all of our work assuming that we don’t already know the answers. We look to our participants to show us not only what is important but also in how to think about and talk about what is important. We learned a long time ago that no matter how much we would like to be the expert, when we are trying to get a handle on how a specific person uses a product or what it is like to live with a particular disease, no one knows more than the person in question. Therefore, all of our observations, interviews, and analyses are funneled through an inductive approach, which is just as easy to do remotely as in person.

Give it some time

Deep understanding takes some time to achieve. It would be great if we could drop into someone’s life for a few hours and learn everything we needed to know to ground a brand or to design a new product, but life (and especially culture) is more complicated than that. Whether you are trying out online interviews or launching some video diaries, it is probably a good idea to plan on investing a little more time than your initial instinct. Not only does more time result in more instances of what you want to observe, it also allows for more opportunities to capture variation in routine. Allowing our participants to keep diaries for a few weeks always results in way better data. Allowing them to keep video diaries for a few months is always amazing.

One of the great things about being a sociologist AND a mom is that I got to watch 3 kids grow up from scratch. If I hadn’t been so exhausted when my kids were younger, I would have taken better notes on all of the interesting and sociologically insightful things they did and said.   It was fascinating stuff. It was so cool to watch them figure out their physical and social worlds. They were always negotiating language and social norms and trying to classify and categorize EVERYTHING. I always thought that in a lot of ways, my kids were like little social scientists who were trying to figure out their social and cultural context. They were always refining their understanding of the categories and classifications to which various types of people belonged and the unspoken rules about what was and was not socially appropriate behavior.

But learning is hard, especially when you are trying to learn something as complicated as social patterns or social norms. This is because social norms are often simultaneously obvious and invisible. On the one hand, most of us know what the rules are and we do a pretty good job of following them (at least most of the time). But on the other hand, the majority of social norms are taken for granted and are often not formally taught. Young kids have to learn them through careful observation and often through a process of trial and error. This often results in kids making widely inappropriate and politically incorrect observations and (to their parents’ horror) comments as they negotiate their understanding.

Since my kids are older, I had forgotten about how interesting it was to watch them figure all of this out. But recently, my colleague, Kazuyo, shared a story with me about her five year old son, Marcel, that got me to thinking about all of this again. Marcel, who is bilingual and bicultural told Kazuyo that one of his friends (who is from Chinese decent) ate noodles for breakfast. Marcel thought it was ‘crazy’. Kazuyo was mortified and quickly set about educating Marcel on the variety of things that people from different cultures eat for breakfast. She told him that when she was growing up in Japan, many of her friends ate rice, soup, and fish for breakfast, but that her family ate toast. Marcel immediately wanted to know why her family didn’t eat soup. Kazuyo then realized that Marcel wasn’t making a judgment about his friend and that her initial fears of having raised an ethnocentric child were unfounded. Marcel was just trying to refine his understanding of how things work.

This story reminded me of a couple of times that my kids let me know they were struggling with social classifications. When my oldest daughter was about two she went to day care for the first time. She was in a class with lots of other two-year olds and one day she came home and announced “Kevin is a boy.” Smartly, I asked, “how do you know if someone is a boy?” Rebecca thought about it for a minute and then said, “boys use their outside voices when they are inside.”   I asked if there were other differences between boys and girls and Rebecca said, “boys are not very good listeners.” I asked if there was anything else and she finally said, “what is that thing?” Although I knew as a sociologist that gender differences were often more important than sex differences, I was still surprised that Rebecca listed two (stereotypical) gender differences before she got around to noting a sex difference.  

Several years later, after attending a talent show at the elementary school, my four year old, Isabel, was running around the house repeating a phrase from one of the skits that went something like “I’ve got a girlfriend.” Her five year old brother, Sam, quickly jumped in to correct her by saying, “Isabel, you are a girl, so you would have a boyfriend.” At this point, my nine year old, Rebecca, corrected Sam by saying “She can have a girlfriend if she wants to, there is nothing wrong with that.” I remember thinking that this was a perfect snapshot of three stages of social and cultural development and understanding.

There are so many social and cultural rules and classifications that we don’t talk about. This is partly because we don’t need to (because we think we know and understand the rules) and partly because we aren’t comfortable discussing differences between people. But if you ever want a quick lesson in the sociology of gender or ethnicity, or anything else for that matter, spend a few hours with a preschooler and ask them to tell you what they notice. Chances are, you will find that they are working hard to map out their social environment and therefore are noticing (and commenting on) lots of things every single day that most of us either just ignore or aren’t comfortable discussing.

I like to say that our theme song here at Ethnographic Research, Inc. is I’ve been everywhere man.  We travel a lot, a whole lot, but more importantly, our ‘office’ (when doing fieldwork) can be almost anywhere.  Since one of the most important mandates of ethnography is to be there to observe the thing you are interested in, while it is happening, we find ourselves ‘going to work’ in a lot of unusual places.  When we were hired to understand how oral care happens, we spent months hanging out in bathrooms watching people brush, spit, and gargle all over the world.  When we were hired to understand how Gen Y families used their cars, we logged hundreds of miles squeezed into back seats, in between car seats.  When we were hired to understand teenage gamers, we hung out in strip mall card shops observing late night Dungeons’ and Dragons’ games.  When we were hired to understand pet health, we spent the day in veterinary clinics.  In fact, we spend the majority of our time hanging out in places where we have never been before.  Each new day of fieldwork presents a new context to explore. 

For most of the best ethnographers I know, this is a fairly easy challenge.  Sure it is a little unsettling to report to work at a different ‘office’ each day, but once you get used to it, it is kind of fun.  And most of the time, the transition period is fairly short.  In fact, it is almost imperative that we hit the ground running and get comfortable as soon as possible.  In each new setting there are unique distractions that must be overcome.  And really, we never know what each setting will bring.   Sometimes there are unique sights, smells, or sounds that we have to get used to.  Often there are additional people (especially in public places) that we must filter in or out depending on our goals.  Since we approach our work assuming that everything is potentially data, we generally try to take in as much as possible in each setting whether it is someone’s kitchen or a hospital operating room.  But there are some times that the ‘background’ of a particular setting asserts itself as foreground, and ethnographers have to struggle to focus on the topic at hand. 

This happened one day when I was working on a project designed to understand travel and tourism in Atlanta.  I had spent weeks hanging out in all of the usual tourist spots, seeing historical sites, eating at great restaurants, and visiting local attractions.  Based on what I was learning about what people did when they visited Atlanta, it became increasingly clear that I needed to visit the Cheetah (a very famous high-end gentlemen’s club) if I was to get a complete understanding of what drew visitors to the ATL.  So, we set about getting the appropriate permission and finding the right contacts.  Surprisingly it was fairly easy to gain access and we scheduled a time to visit the next day.  I had never been inside a gentlemen’s club before and really didn’t know what to expect, but I approached it like any other fieldwork setting, assuming that everything was potentially data and ready to take in all that was unique to the Cheetah.  Our visit started with a tour and then we settled in and began to talk to some of the employees and customers.  Just as we sat down, a show began around us.  Several, mostly nude, women were dancing on elevated stages in front, behind, and beside us. Although the people I was talking to were saying very interesting things, things that were probably really important to my understanding of tourism in Atlanta, I found it increasingly difficult to hear what they were saying.  My attention was drawn more and more to the dancing women and I found that I really just wanted to talk to them.  It’s important to note that this rarely happens to me.  No matter what the topic, I generally find whatever it is I’m studying to be pretty riveting.  Participants are always saying ‘you must be bored to death’, but the truth is, almost everything can be interesting if you know how and what to ask.  So, I found it a little bit unsettling to be struggling to stay focused.  But then I remembered that participant observation requires me to not only make observations and conduct interviews, but also to immerse myself into the experience and to become a true participant in the action.  And so I did.  I stopped trying to focus only on the patrons (the primary target of our research), and begin to take in the experience of being at the Cheetah. 

When we left the Cheetah, I felt like I had a very good understanding of the culture and history of the space, and why the Cheetah was such an important tourist draw for Atlanta.  As we got into our car, my colleague and I began to debrief and realized that we had both had trouble applying our usual approach to fieldwork during our time at the Cheetah.  Our typical ability to ‘jump right in’ and be-at-one with the space and with our participants had been put to the test.  Although both of us had found ourselves in lots of unusual and even uncomfortable fieldwork situations, we had never tried to conduct fieldwork in a space quite like the Cheetah.  As we drove through the ATL, I felt like I had passed another ethnographic rite of passage, and knew that I had definitely gathered another interesting story.    

I had been doing ethnographic research for almost a decade when I began working for businesses about 17 years ago.  Honestly, I wasn’t sure that the methodology would ‘transfer’ very well.  Prior to my work for corporate consumption, I had done much more traditional ethnographic fieldwork; this usually entailed spending months trying to work my way into settings, getting to know people, and building rapport.  If there was one thing I was sure of, ethnographic fieldwork could not be rushed.  Almost by definition, ethnography requires patience and a lot of persistence. 

So when my colleague suggested that we could conduct all of our fieldwork for a retail project within a few weeks, I was . . . uncomfortable.  But blessed with an open mind and a tendency to see the glass as half full, I decided to hear him out.  For this project, we were trying to learn about how certain holidays fit into modern American culture.  Our goal was to understand how consumers shopped for and celebrated these events.  Coming from a traditional ethnographic approach, I saw all sorts of problems with a research plan that assumed our access to the right people and the right contexts could be secured so quickly.  And even if we were lucky enough to find the right people and places, I was sure that it would take some time and effort to convince them to let us in. 

Part of my skepticism was based on my ethnographic training, which always seemed to tell me that gaining access to any group of which I was not a member was going to take some time and effort. I had experienced this firsthand, too.  My first ethnographic project involved spending a couple of years hanging out with police officers.  And I had seen how long it had taken for me to gain access to THAT group!   

Still, we forged ahead with a plan to begin fieldwork in retail spaces (where permission had already been granted).  As I begin to approach consumers and ask them if I could hang out with them as they shopped, I was REALLY surprised at how many said yes.  In fact, hardly anyone said no.  Not only were they letting me shop with them, they were seemingly letting me into the process in a way that went above and beyond an observational exchange.  As they pondered which greeting cards they should choose for their loved ones, they began to share wonderful stories about their relationships, their history, their feelings and values.  Within a matter of a few minutes, we were able to establish a rapport that gave me access to lots of intimate details of their lives.  I was a little bit confused.  I was accustomed to spending days, weeks, and sometimes months building relationships with my study participants before trying to segue into the ‘deep’ stuff.  

My colleagues and I, encouraged by our success, decided to take things a step further and see if some of the people we were approaching in the retail shops would allow us to follow them home in order to add some context to what we were learning in the stores. My colleague suggested that we offer to bring a pizza with us as an incentive.  Again, I was skeptical.  I remember saying “they are NOT going to let us do that.”  But, we gave it a shot.  And again, I was shocked to find that the majority of people we asked were game.  Most responded with something like this: “You are going to be so bored, I’m not very exciting, but if you want to come over, it’s fine with me.”  It was this response that started to give me some insight into exactly WHY it had been so easy to convince people to not only let us shop with them, but also to let us into their homes and into their lives.  It turns out that most of us don’t often have someone who is really interested in us, much less someone who views us as an expert.  Not only did the people I approached not find my request offensive, in many ways they found it a welcome opportunity.  It is a very compelling thing to have someone interested in your experiences, ideas, and values.  When I explained  WHY it was so important that I learn about them ‘in context’ they got it, even if they thought it was a little bit odd.   

Of course there are methodological and insight sacrifices that we corporate ethnographers make while trying to do our work within the deadlines and other constraints that come with working in the business world, but after almost two decades of working in this realm, I am convinced that gaining access to the right types of people and contexts need not be one of those sacrifices.