Ethnotale: Up Close and Personal

We spent time with women and mothers to learn more about how they approach the holiday season, and specifically, how they go about sending holiday cards. We learned about their annual traditions, how they decorate their homes, what they try to get accomplished during the last month of the year and how they really, really feel about everything that makes up the holiday season. We also explored the universe of holiday cards with them, from paper to photo to ecards, and we learned more about what these women look for when they set about the task of wishing their friends and family Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Happy Holidays, etc. We were just as overwhelmed as they were with all the options for cards. There’s just so much to choose from! We learned a whole heck of a lot about the creative process, about multi-tasking and about the impact of technology on decision-making, not to mention how everyday life impacts all these things.

Of all our projects on health and illness, this was one of our favorites. We wanted to better understand how having acromegaly impacts the daily life of the men and women who have it. To learn, we spent time with men and women who have acromegaly throughout the U.S., and we also asked them to keep video diaries of their experiences in between our visits. We also spent time with endocrinologists throughout the U.S. to learn more about how they treat acromegaly, and we even got to go on doctor visits with some of our participants! We discovered so much about what it means to have acromegaly, from a physiological standpoint but also in terms of how it changes how those who have it relate to the world, not to mention how it can turn what we think we know about the nature of illness on its head. We are extremely grateful to our participants, each and every one, for sharing so much of their lives with us.

Tis’ the season for wishful thinking. That’s why here at ERI we have put together our holiday wish list of ethnographies we would just LOVE to undertake. Take a look, and if you think of something else that might be fun to study, just let us know!

1. Travelers by necessity, we would love to work on more projects related to travel or hospitality of some type. We really enjoyed the project we did for Brand Atlanta [check out a project summary in the notes/boxes tab on our facebook page]. Melinda would like to do any project that allows her to go to Spain [she has ALWAYS wanted to go]. Everyone at ERI is particularly interested in doing a project for one of the airlines or for TSA. We feel like we have a TON of useful information already and they could obviously benefit from some ethnographic research.

2. We would love to do something on HIV. Particularly Melinda, who would like to see how living HIV positive is different than it was when she did ethnography 14 years ago with the same population.

3. We really appreciate when we have the opportunity to do projects that are aimed at helping organizations improve how they serve populations in need. Any kind of project where we could help organizations improve the way they serve people living in poverty or help them better understand their clients is an A-plus!

4. We would love to do some more research on how moms take care of their kids around the world, looking at different cultural, social and historical influences on child care. We’d also like to learn more about baby traveling behaviors (stroller vs. sling vs. holding baby, etc.) How do people move about the city with their babies?

6. We would like to know more about how people conceptualize “entertaining others” and what that involves (food, wine, cocktails, music, etc.). How are people entertaining others and how do lifestyle differences impact their styles of entertainment?

7. We would love to explore the concept of relaxation. After all, our way of life has people super-busy and connected all the time, so what do they do to relax? How do they relax? We are ultimately hoping that this would lead to an ethnography on spa experiences!!!!!!

8. We’d like to revisit fast food and eating rituals outside the home. When is fast food a choice? How do people think about fast food? What defines it?

9. We’ve always been really interested in how people meet and fall in love. Now that internet dating sites are a real force in the dating world, we’d like to explore how internet dating impacts people’s lives around the formation of relationships and how it compares to some of the more traditional ways in which people meet, date and fall in love.

10. We would really love to do something for ESPN or other sports media outlets. There is so much variation and interest in sports and sports programming, and as our communities continue to grow in diversity, there’s an opportunity to really get to know the men, women and children who stay connected to the sports world [all over the world] to see where new opportunities lie. We’d like to learn more about sports fans and their rituals and behaviors in Europe vs. the U.S. too. For example, what do people do in preparation for games? Afterwards? Where and how do they watch games?

I love working as an ethnographer because I get to be a perpetual student! Each project I work on, each fieldwork I do, is fresh and exciting in its own right. Every one has a story to tell, given the chance. Doing this kind of work has really taught me the value of listening and opening up to understand how others navigate our social worlds (and really, worlds is the operative word here). And the people. I LOVE just how many viewpoints and experiences there are. The people we spend time with are almost always gracious, hospitable, and very, very interesting. And if I’ve done my job right, I honor them by transmitting insights our clients just couldn’t get with other methodologies.

Sometimes the path we travel to find the people we spend time with is just as interesting as our actual time with them. Doing ethnography constantly requires me to step outside of my comfort zone, whether that means stepping off the plane in a new and unfamiliar city and making my way to our participants, or being willing to ask the delicate questions that help us get to the heart of our topic of study. It keeps me on my toes.

And how exciting is it that as an ethnographer, I get to spend time in places that ordinarily I would never have access to, like hospital basements, patient bedsides, or the gardens of people I am meeting for the very first time? I studied journalism in undergrad and the leap to sociology only seemed natural. Then in graduate school I studied ethnography and spent time learning about the Cambodian community in Long Beach, California. I remember thinking to myself, “Man, I wish there was a job out there that would let me do ethnography.” Voila!

I love symbolic interactionism, partly because I love language and communications, but also because I appreciate how our reality is socially constructed. I find it fascinating that each family member can have a completely different interpretation of the same birthday party, and that we constantly adjust who and how we are to fit our perceptions of how we think others see us. One of my colleagues said it best when she referenced the prominent American sociologist Charles Cooley and his theory of the looking glass self by saying, “I am who I think you think I am.”

I am too new to this work to have ‘a favorite’ place. I try to relish the gems bobbing along the surface of seemingly mundane experiences. Like Herman the hotel shuttle driver in Albany, the ferry trip from Seattle to Bainbridge Island, the scrumptious potato pancakes at Zaftig’s deli in Boston, or simply a visit to a new neighborhood in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio.

I always knew that I wanted to be a sociologist, I just didn’t know what it was called! Growing up in a family of 9 kids sure taught me a lot about people and the nature of social interactions. Then in my senior year of high school, I took a sociology class from Marcelus Reed and I finally knew what to call my career aspiration.

Teaching sociology for several years taught me a lot about sociological concepts and theories (more than I ever learned in graduate school.) Doing fieldwork with police officers as an undergraduate and with people who were HIV positive as a graduate student taught me a lot about how to listen and approach fieldwork in an inductive way.

I love that ethnography allows me to embrace my curiosity about the world and about people. I love that it allows me to meet people with a variety of experiences and backgrounds. I love that it allows me to continually learn without having to pay tuition or take exams! I love the analytical process of putting it all together—I get paid to do puzzles. I love sharing what we learn with clients and helping them to see their product and their consumer in a more holistic way. I love being able to put my training as a sociologist to practical use. Really, I could go on and on. . . .

I really like dramaturgy (Erving Goffman) because I can see it in practice everyday, in almost any social situation. We are ALL doing impression management ALL the time. This theory helps to remind us how SOCIAL virtually all things are, even things that we tend to think of as personal (like thoughts).

Manila is probably the favorite place I have traveled for work. . .

I loved the mixture of so many different cultures. Daily life routines and rituals occur within a collision of Eastern and Western norms. You can see the many different indigenous, Spanish, Chinese, and American influences in everything from architecture, to food, to language, to religion, to healthcare, and beyond. I often think about places in terms of the ‘heartbeat’ that you feel when moving around the city. I think that Manila has such a friendly, funny and hospitable heartbeat!

Within the US, I love to travel anywhere in the Wisconsin/Minnesota area–some of the nicest people in the US live there. I also have a soft spot for Atlanta and Seattle. Both places where I have conducted oodles of fieldwork, have met lots of people, and eaten lots of good food.

By Rebecca Rea-Holloway, Office Assistant and Transcriptionist at ERI

Hujambo rafiki!

As some of you may know, this summer I went to beautiful Tanzania for 3 weeks with National Geographic Student Expeditions. I did some things I expected (like meeting some wonderful new people) and some things I didn’t (like touching a Black Mamba, the deadliest snake in Africa). I have been to a waterfall, climbed a mountain with Maasai men, seen a Black Rhino on safari, been inside a hollowed out Baobab tree, visited the UAACC (United African Alliance Community Center, founded by former Black Panther members from our own Kansas City), visited an orphanage, played soccer with local children, attended a funeral, visited a leprosy center, bargained in the markets of Arusha, drank goats blood, dug up an old water pipe to make room for the new in our home village of Maji ya Chai (which means tea water in Kiswahili), gotten up at 5:30 to go on a game drive in the Ngorongoro Crater, visited a boma (traditional Maasai dwelling) where a man had 7 wives and 42 children, attended church, and danced with our Maasai guides.

When I signed up to go to Tanzania I knew it was going to be great, but I didn’t really realize the impact it would have on me. One of the main things that makes National Geographic Student Expeditions unique is its emphasis on the “On Assignment” project. I chose photography while some of my friends chose people and cultures. We had three leaders, two of which were photography mentors. We were encouraged to take photographs of anything that inspired us and to try to pick out a pattern in what we found most interesting. I ended up with the theme of “Women Working.” I chose ten pictures, and those ten pictures were then put in a bigger presentation and shown at the UAACC on our last night. It was interesting to me to see what each person came up with and how different they all were.

We also worked on a project to learn about Tanzania and it’s current issues, and we chose the theme of Water. There’s a drought at the moment so it was interesting to interview people about how they use their water, and exactly how they get it. We were a small group, only 14 students and 3 leaders, so it was easy for us to get to know each other. We took turns helping to cook meals, clean the bathroom, etc. A major adjustment was the freezing cold showers, which I tried to avoid if at all possible.

Every morning I would get up and look outside at our compound (complete with pet turkey) and remind myself where I was. At night we would sit around our campfire tended by our askaris (guards), Urio, Godi, And Gili, and look at the stars. There’s no pollution so it’s absolutely amazing how many are visible. The people we met were very kind and friendly to us, often wanting to practice their English and teach us some Kiswahili. It struck me how these children living in rural Tanzania were speaking to me in English spoken remarkably well, and I sit at home not putting in my best efforts to learn French with thousands of resources available to me. I loved, loved, loved every minute of my trip and was very sad to go home.

There are so many things I love about working as an ethnographer —
traveling and experiencing new places, meeting new people and learning about their lives and traits, looking inside new unknown subcultures, and being able to go to spaces where we don’t normally go, such as peeking inside someone’s medicine cabinet. As a sociologist, I really like ethnography because it doesn’t limit me to one particular method to understand a culture. It’s holistic, which means I can use participant observation, historical analysis, language examination, or use a combination of methods to understand a group or subculture. Looking at the big picture from the inside out is just plain awesome.

One of the most important parts of gathering data as an ethnographer is being comfortable in multiple environments. I’ve worked a variety of jobs in my life, from dishwasher to landscaper, grocery store clerk (yes, pushing carts) to clothing store clerk, bartender to warehouse dockworker. In these jobs, I met so many types of people with all sorts of social, racial, and economical backgrounds, and I have worked in various parts of different cities. I think my experience working with a multitude of different people in a multitude of places has helped prepare me for ethnography.

I have always been interested in people in general, how different we all are, and how our commonalities bring us together. I had worked as a journalist (covering technology and music for different magazines) after my Masters work and became more interested in studying cultures and subcultures up close, getting inside of them and learning what makes them tick. When I returned to grad school for PhD work, I took a course called “Communities in America” and one of the first books we read was ethnographer Andrew Ross’ Celebration Chronicles about his year long study about Celebration, Florida, a small Disney-spawned community near Orlando, Florida. I saw how Ross combined data from his interviews, cultural artifacts from the community, and other aspects of the cultural context to understand the whole body of the community, from the heartbeat to the guts.

I read others in that course, such as Philippe Bourgois’ study on East Harlem social problems, and I saw how the ethnographer placed himself inside the community to learn about it. I learned how viewing a community from the inside out allows a researcher to learn far more about it than looking at it from the outside. I was really interested in this concept.

I am very fond of sociologist Paul Gilroy’s work on social identity. He says that identity is always both rooted and routed. So the roots of a culture, its origins, is always intertwined with that same culture’s roots–where the culture has traveled geographically, spiritually, psychologically, etc. This means that as a culture or subculture’s identities continue to form, their old identities are always going to be there, but that the new ones constantly alter the culture. So societies, subcultures, and groups are continuously developing, changing, and moving depending on an array of social variables. This keeps sociologists, us, very busy!

I am really interested in mass media and social identity and dig both Stuart Hall and John Fiske’s work on audience reception (encoding and decoding). Both Hall and Fiske argue that social situations of different cultures may lead them to adapt a different understanding of something produced, whether that production is a movie, book, a newspaper article, or even a school bus. So a person may adopt the mainstream understanding of the movie or school bus, or adopt it differently, depending on the background (social, economical, geographical, etc) of the culture. What this means is that people don’t simply passively use items as they were intended. They will interpret it differently depending on their cultural roots and routes. A punk band can use a school bus for late night gigging, just as a homeless man can use a shopping cart for his belongings as he treks through the city. Both items, in this case, are being culturally adapted and used for something other than their originally intent, which is just really cool. I am interested in seeing how these sorts of things move around in our society.

In this job, I get to experience all kinds of communities, from a small town in frigid Wisconsin to a large metropolis in sunny Florida. I really loved traveling to Berlin, Germany this past summer—the ease of public transportation and bike paths along city streets was really interesting to me. Boston, Massachusetts and Berkley, California were appealing for different reasons. Oh, and Miami, Florida was awesome too—South Beach rocks!