Courses

Anthropology 558

Methods in the Ethnography of Everyday Life
Fall 2001, Tom Fricke

(The syllabus in Word format)

I. What We're About and What I hope You Take Away

This is the course that was never offered when I was in graduate school, the one that every cultural anthropology student lobbied for but that no faculty member would touch. For anthropologists the whole idea of a "methods" seminar sounded too pat and normal sciencey for any self-respecting scholar. Ours was the human discipline of serendipity and the unique encounter, after all, and how could anyone suggest that what worked in one place would work in another.
It wasn't so much that we wanted a cookbook. We were anxious types and we really just wanted self-confidence in the pursuit of something that very few had any experience at. Still, our faculty had a point. Most general discussions of method in anthropology are awful. They tend toward a listing of techniques with no real sense of why you'd want to use them. The very immersion into the everyday that constitutes what most ethnographers do appears as background rather than the main point. If they provide any anxiety-reducing confidence, it's a confidence based on junk and, so, phony. This is a problem. The desire for self-confidence doesn't go away and it helps to have it rooted in something.

Technique is important, but the special methods all researchers need will depend on their particular theoretical orientations, the problems they are pursuing, and their research settings. That's why the kinds of omnibus methods texts are of so little real value. They try to cover too much and emphasize the author's pet approaches, ignoring the things that are shared by most ethnographers. Probably the worst thing though is that they seem oriented to a well-oiled world in which everything works according to plan. What's an ethnographer going to do when she finds that a part of her plan can't work? It's important to know that when specialized techniques break down, there's still a story to be told.

Since graduate school I've continued to be concerned with what's useful to think about before going to the field. I've worked for 16 years as an anthropological outlier in a place where the reasons for using one technique or another are built into disciplinary understandings of what counts as research. I've reviewed proposals by both senior scholars and dissertators. Lots of proposals, I've found, tend to be elegant and thoughtful in every section but the one that tells a reviewer what the researcher plans to do and why. The most obviously lacking thing is a sense of where the researcher stands in the field of possible approaches to the everyday. In these proposals I seldom find clues to a researcher's sense of self beyond a simple clutching at technique. Since things often go awry in fieldwork, I want confidence in the researcher's own self-confidence.

So, this is a seminar in self-confidence. We won't ignore technique entirely. I assume that all of us want to work with and write about people. It follows that all of us plan to live in a concrete place, observe concrete things, and talk to people. So we'll look at some of the nuts and bolts of fieldwork along those shared lines (taking field notes and conducting open-ended interviews). But we'll mostly look at the issues that motivate, defend, and arise out of the whole enterprise of ethnographic fieldwork. I have my own theoretical predilections, but these will lie as much as possible in the background in this seminar since I believe that all ethnographers share an interest in telling stories about people that make sense to other people. The issues we discuss will arise in any fieldwork enterprise.

Over the years, I've read a lot that has appealed to me in these terms. There's no one way to do things, no one way to think about things. I've constructed our reading and discussion along the lines of a sampler of readings I have liked for one reason or another. They go back and forth between the general and the specific. Concrete examples from various ethnographies or ethnography-like writing will give us the proper grip on a more general theme. We'll have something to talk about. Seeing the different ways that a range of people have tried to convey the immediacy of human experience within more general discussions will help us to feel confident in our own experiments with experience.

II. Required Books (Available at Shaman Drum Bookshop):

Howard S. Becker
1998 Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You're Doing It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mitchell Duneier
1992 Slim's Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Douglas Harper
1987 Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop. Berkeley: University of California Press.
John Van Maanen
1988 Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


III. Required and Option Readings in "Coursepack" (I'll be giving these to you in class):

Basso, Keith H.
1996 Wisdom sits in places: Notes on a Western Apache landscape. In Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (eds.), Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 53-90.

Becker, Howard S.
1970 On methodology. In Sociological Work: Method and Substance. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, pp. 3-24.
1970 Problems of inference and proof in participant observation. In Sociological Work: Method and Substance. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, pp. 25-38.
1970 Field work evidence. In Sociological Work: Method and Substance. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, pp. 39-62.
1970 The life history and the scientific mosaic. In Sociological Work: Method and Substance. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, pp. 63-73.
1970 Social observation and social case studies. In Sociological Work: Method and Substance. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, pp. 75-86.
1986 Freshman English for graduate students: A memoir and two theories. From Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1-25.

Berger, John
1980 The suit and the photograph. In About Looking. New York: Pantheon, pp. 27-36.

Briggs, Charles L.
1986 Introduction. From Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-30.

Brody, Hugh
1981 Maps of dreams. From Maps and Dreams. New York: Pantheon, pp. 34-48.

Bynum, Caroline Walker
1995 Introduction: Seed images, ancient and modern. From The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1-17.

Casey, Edward S.
1996 How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: Phenomenological prolegomena. In Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (eds.), Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 13-52.

Cather, Willa
1996 Selections from My Ántonia. New York: The Modern Library, pp. 14-23, 32, 40-41, 58-59.

Certeau, Michel de
1984 General introduction. From The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. xi-xxiv.
1984 A common place: Ordinary language. From The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1-14.

Coles, Robert
1997 The work: Locations in theory. From Doing Documentary Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19-48.
1997 The person as documentarian: Moral and psychological tensions. From Doing Documentary Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 49-86.

Dillard, Annie
1982 Two wild animals, seven crazies, and a breast. From Living by Fiction. New York: Harper and Row, pp. 36-48.

Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw
1995 Fieldnotes in ethnographic research. From Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1-16.
1995 In the field: Participating, observing, and jotting notes. From Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 17-38.

Fadiman, Anne
1997 Birth. From The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, pp. 3-11.

Fricke, Tom
2001 Taking culture seriously: Making the social survey ethnographic. CEEL Working Paper 022-01. Ann Arbor: Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life.
2001 Studying West River: North Dakota field letters, 2000. CEEL Working Paper 024-01. Ann Arbor: Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life.

Gardner, John
1983 Faith. From On Becoming a Novelist. New York: Harper and Row, pp. 119-145.
1984 Aesthetic law and artistic mystery. From The Art of Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 3-16.
1984 Basic skills, genre, and fiction as dream. From The Art of Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 17-38.

Geertz, Clifford
1988 Being there: Anthropology and the scene of writing. From Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1-24.

Gullestad, Marianne
1992 Reflections of an anthropological commuter. In The Art of Social Relations. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, pp. 1-33.
1992 The transformation of the notion of everyday life. In The Art of Social Relations. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, pp. 35-60.
1992 Symbolic fences. In The Art of Social Relations. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, pp. 165-182.
1996 Why study autobiographies? From Everyday Life Philosophers: Modernity, Morality, and Autobiography in Norway. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, pp. 3-32.

Harline, Craig and Eddy Put
2000 Mathias' pence. From A Bishop's Tale: Mathias Hovius Among His Flock in Seventeenth Century Flanders. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 55-72.
2000 A word after: How we found Mathias. From A Bishop's Tale: Mathias Hovius Among His Flock in Seventeenth Century Flanders. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 299-310.

Harper, Douglas
1992 Small N's and community case studies. In Charles C. Ragin & Howard S. Becker (eds.), What is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 139-158.

Hughes, Everett C.
1971 The place of fieldwork in social science. In The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, pp. 496-506.

Johnson, Mark
1993 The narrative context of self and action. From Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 150-184.

Klinkenborg, Verlyn
1991 Eddie. From The Last Fine Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 10-34.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson
2000 Dancing with professors: The trouble with academic prose. In Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 333-341.

MacIntyre, Alasdair
1981 The virtues, the unity of human life, and the concept of a tradition. From After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 204-225.

Orsi, Robert A.
1997 "Mildred, is it fun to be a cripple?": The culture of suffering in mid-twentieth century American Catholicism. In Thomas J. Ferraro (ed.), Catholic Lives, Contemporary America. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 19-64.
Ortner, Sherry B.
1973 On key symbols. American Anthropologist 75(4): 1338-1346.
1989 Introduction & Conclusions. From High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 3-18 & 193-202.

Portelli, Alessandro
1997 Oral history as genre. In The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 3-23.
1997 There's gonna always be a line: History-Telling as a multivocal art. In The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 24-39.
1997 Tryin' to gather a little knowledge: Some thoughts on the ethics of oral history. In The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 55-71.

Shweder, Richard A.
1996 True ethnography: The lore, the law, and the lure. In Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard A. Shweder (eds.), Ethnography and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 15-52.

Stilgoe, John R.
1998 Beginnings. From Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. New York: Walker and Company, pp. 1-19.

Taylor, Charles
1985 Interpretation and the sciences of man. In Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15-57.
1989 "God loveth adverbs." From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 211-233.
1989 The culture of modernity. From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 285-302.

Vidich, Arthur J. & Joseph Bensman
2000 The Springdale case: Academic bureaucrats and sensitive townspeople. From Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community. Revised Edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 430-475. [Originally 1964, 1968]

Weiss, Robert S.
1994 Interviewing. From Learning from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies. New York: The Free Press, pp. 61-119.


IV. The Schedule: Meetings, Topics, Readings (number of pages in selection at right)

September 5 Introduction & General Information

Orientations:

Limerick 2000 Dancing with professors 9
Stillgoe 1998 Beginnings 19

September 12 Method & Madness

Required for Discussion:

Becker 1998 Tricks..., Chapter 1 9
Becker 1970 On methodology 22
Van Maanen 1988 Tales..., Chapter 1 12
Harper 1987 Introduction 14

Angles (optional):

Brody 1981 Maps of dreams 15

September 19 Culture & Authority

Required for Discussion:

Van Maanen 1988 Tales..., Chapter 2 32
Coles 1997 The work: Locations in theory 30
Geertz 1988 Being there... 24
Fadiman 1997 Birth 9

Angles (optional):

Gardner 1984 Aesthetic law and artistic mystery 14

September 26 Everyday Life

Required for Discussion:

Taylor 1989 God loveth... 23
Gullestad 1992 The transformation of the... 26
Gullestad 1991 Symbolic fences 18
Berger 1980 The suit and the photograph 10
Harline & Put 2000 Mathias' pence. 18

Angles (optional):

de Certeau 1984 Intro & Common place 28
Taylor 1989 Culture of modernity 18


October 3 Ethnography

Required for Discussion:

Ortner 1973 On key symbols 9
Shweder 1996 True ethnography... 38
Fricke 2001 Taking culture Seriously 31
Bynum 1995 Seed images, ancient & modern 17

Angles (optional):

Taylor 1985 Interpretation and... 43

October 10 Fieldwork

Required for Discussion:

Gullestad 1992 Reflections of... 33
Becker 1998 Tricks..., Chapter 2 57
Harline & Put 2000 A word after 12
Harper 1987 Introduction 14

Angles (optional):

Hughes 1971 The place of... 11

October 17 Being a Fieldworker

Required for Discussion:

Coles 1997 The person as... 38
Portelli 1997 Tryin' to gather... 17
Vidich & Bensman The Springdale case 46

Angles (optional):

Fricke 2001 Studying West River (letters 8-11) 22

October 24 Storied Contexts

Required for Discussion:

Johnson 1993 The narrative context... 35
MacIntyre 1981 The virtues... 22
Duneier 1992 Chapters 1 & 2 44
Harper 1987 Moral Universe/Community(173-198) 26
Angles (optional):

Portelli 1997 There's gonna be... 16
Ortner 1989 Intro & Conclusions 26

October 31 Biography & Character

Required for Discussion:

Gullestad 1996 Why study... 30
Klinkenborg 1991 Eddie 25
Orsi 1997 Mildred, is it fun... 46
Harper 1987 Knowledge in the body (p 117-131) 15

Angles (optional):

Dillard 1982 Two wild animals... 13
Basso 1996 Wisdom sits in places 38

November 7 How many is enough? The case

Required for Discussion:

Harper 1992 Small N's and... 20
Becker 1998 Tricks..., Chapter 3 42
Harper 1987 Work as bricolage (p 74-117) 44
Duneier 1992 Chapters 8 & 9 33

Angles (optional):

Becker 1970 Social observation... 12

November 14 Fieldnotes & What to Note

Required for Discussion:

Emerson et al 1995 Fieldnotes in... 16
Emerson et al 1995 In the field... 22
Duneier 1992 Chapters 3 & 4 35
Harper 1987 Work & environment (p 151-167) 17
Harper 1987 Work & self (p 167-173) 7

Angles (optional):

Casey 1996 How to get from space... 40
Cather 1996 My Ántonia (selections) 15

November 21 THANKSGIVING!!

November 28 Interviews

Required for Discussion:

Briggs 1986 Introduction 31
Weiss 1994 Interviewing 59
Duneier 1992 Chapters 5-7 31
Harper 1987 Disassembling intuition (p 31-61) 31

Angles (optional):

Nepal Project Interviews; selections to be handed out

December 5 Writing

Required for Discussion:

Van Maanen 1988 Tales..., Chps 3-5 80
Duneier 1992 Chapter 10 12
Harper 1987 Epilogue 3

Angles (optional):

Gardner 1984 Basic skills, genre, and... 22

December 12 Back to the Beginning

Required for Discussion:

Gardner 1983 Faith 27
Becker 1986 Freshman English... 25


V. Assignments

A. Each week (from Sept 12 through November 28--11 classes): A 3-5 page summary of the main points from that week's readings from your point of view. What's useful & relevant to your own work. What's trivial and disagreeable. A relating of the concrete case material as examples of the more abstract reading. These are mainly to form the basis for discussions but they need to be handed into me every week.
B. There will be a sequenced series of writing assignments focused on capturing the everyday, selecting from it, and using it to make conclusions--a kind of practice in doing ethnography that will be spoken of in more detail when I get a feel for who is in the class. I will be discuss this in the Oct 10 class.

VI. About Me

I got my PhD in Cultural Anthropology in 1984 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison based on research into household economy, demographic processes, and developmental cycles among a community of people called Tamang in Nepal. I started out life in college wanting to write the Great American Novel and studied with the poet Tom McGrath at a regional college in Minnesota that went from calling itself a Normal School to calling itself a University. My demographic interests took me a long way from the Great American Novel and I have been beating my way back to it by way of a lot of detours. I have conducted survey research in impossible settings in Nepal. I have worked with data gathered by others in Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Taiwan. I've written through the everyday during several separate field periods in Nepal, three field periods in a farming and ranching community in North Dakota, and in work just beginning with autoworkers in Southeast Michigan.

Working alone as a fieldworker and in teams on settings I have no first hand knowledge of has made me very aware of the difference personal knowledge makes in what researchers can say with confidence. My publications have given me a modest reputation as a number cruncher, mostly among people who don't crunch numbers. Real quantitative researchers see me as an ethnographer who doesn't mind talking with them. I like that better since the common thread in all my field research has been a concern with everyday life and the observation, talking, and writing that helps me to make sense of it. Mostly, I'd be happy if I got down the art of telling a good story.

Since 1985, I've been a researcher and professor in both the Institute for Social Research and the Department of Anthropology here at Michigan. Lately, I've become the director of a research and training center called the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life. As the director, I'm concerned with training and research that works toward an ethnographic understanding of American working families. Here are some of the things I've written:

2001 The farming family: Work, character, and change in rural America. E-publication on Fathom.com. http://www.fathom.com/index.jhtml?pageName=/story/story.jhtml?story_id=122243
2000 Studying West River. LSA Magazine 23(2): 4-9.
1997 Marriage change as moral change: Culture, virtue, and demographic transition. In G. Jones, R. Douglas, J. Caldwell, and R. D'Souza (eds.) The Continuing Demographic Transition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 183-212.
1997 Culture theory and population process: Toward a thicker demography. In D.I. Kertzer and T. Fricke (eds.), Anthropological Demography: Toward a New Synthesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 248-277.
1995 History, marriage politics, and demographic events in the Central Himalaya. In S. Greenhalgh (ed.), Situating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 202-224.
1994 Himalayan Households: Tamang Demography and Domestic Processes. (expanded edition) New York: Columbia University Press. [Originally 1986]
1993 Marriage, social inequality, and women's contact with their natal families in alliance societies: Two Tamang examples. American Anthropologist 95(2): 395-419. (With W.G. Axinn and A. Thornton)
1993 Writing the names: Marriage style, living arrangements, and family building in a Nepali society. Demography 30(2): 175-188. (With J.D. Teachman)
1990 Elementary Structures in the Nepal Himalaya: Reciprocity and the Politics of Hierarchy in Ghale-Tamang Marriage. Ethnology 29(2): 135-158.
1986 Rural Punjabi social organization and marriage timing strategies in Pakistan. Demography 23(4): 489-508. (With S.H. Syed & P.C. Smith)




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