Recap of Last Night's Meeting

Kono, Natalie, and AJ:

I copy'n'pasted our notes from last night's meeting.  Cha cha cha check it out, beneath this awesome photo.

What a happy bunch.  :)

Pinpointing Pieces of Ethnography: Compare/Contrast 2 Pieces About the Same Topic/Culture

AJ’s Ideas:

• Bowling, as seen through an LA Times investigative piece and The Big Lebowski
• Grower culture

Aunt Alderson’s Ideas:

• Burning Man culture / festival culture / transformative festival culture
• consciousness culture
• homeowners article or magazine issue
• 30 year doc on Burning Man!!!
• Different cultures within Burning Man and the experiences

Kono’s Ideas:

• HST vs documentary
• Hell’s Angels

Random Ideas/Notes:

• Ethnography and ethnographic research is LOCAL.  situated.
• “the general lies within the particular” (NOT the particular lies within the general) … it can help us get to broader generalizations… taking something MICRO and considering how that plays out on a MACRO level
• Abby Huffman/Hoffman…  implicit in committing a crime, re: participant observation
• Dishes here vs dishes there

Key Questions:

• What is/isn’t ethnography?  
• What does it mean for something to be/have ethnographic writing in it?
• What terms/concepts/theories are we associating with ethnography?
• thick description
• activity theory
• discourse communities
• participant-observation
• grounded theory (inductive reasoning... let the data speak

And some follow-up on that:

• thick description
• detailed, which comes from observation
• insights are contextualized within the/a greater contextualized whole
• “be there”  ~~> provide info about the setting/environment (imagery… sensory info), the history/background of the folks/context, subjective feelings of the observer and the participants, dialogue
  
• activity theory
• what kind of tools/instruments are used by people, why, how are they doing what they’re doing, what’s the goal
• Engestrom triangle
• culture ~~~> how participants communicate with one another through writing and orality
  
• discourse communities
• discourse = (more or less) communication
• how do people communicate with each other?  direct dialogue (f2f), email, letters, nonverbal (includes body language, looks/facial expressions)....   
• can it be culture of 1? (probably not, but you can gain insights into cultures and values, for sure...)
  
• participant-observation
• hanging out.  becoming accepted →  more data, the “inside scoop”
• does this get at “epistemology” -- the construction of knowledge…..  or does it impede/interfere with knowledge?
• subjectivity and objectivity...
  
• grounded theory 
• inductive reasoning... let the data speak
• let your questions + data be your guide!
• not hypothesis-driven