Robert M. Emerson Rachel I. Fretz Linda L. Shaw
Anthropology / Reference / Sociology SB S.
'--i-     ^ ?
In this book, three leading scholars develop a series of guidelines; suggest) ^ =—" Er practical advice about how to write useful fieldnotes in a variety'[of settirj ° < cultural and institutional. Using actual unfinished, "working" notes .as exa ^3 =^ * illustrate options for composing, reviewing, and working-fieldnotes into-f ?- 55 % texts.They discuss difFerent organizational and descriptive strategics,and s ^ 3! transforming direct observations into vivid descriptions results nčír, skupt    §Bf cb good memory but more crucially from learning to remember dialogue at     *=■■== 5 ment hke an actor, to see colors and shapes like a painter, and toseiisemi rhythms Hke a poet. A "vigorous and persuasive response to those -feho'say that field-notes are too idiosyncratic, personal, and dependent on natural talent to allow formal instruction, this book shows that uote-takijig is a craft that can be, taught. It is an essential tool for students and social scientists alike. - t -. -       _ - ,
"Writing fieldnotes has always been a skill passed on in the oral tradition.This excellent book makes a systematic analysis of this fundamental fieldwork'activity, allowing us for the first time to teach it and discuss it in a rational .way.'' —Howard S. Becker, University of Washington
"This book will be very much welcomed. Its many insights will be. useful across a variety of disciplines which use qualitative methods." ',
—George E. Marcus, Rice University ,.,.
"I know of no other published work which provides this level of detailed step-by-step instruction for writing fieldnotes; this is the sort of nitty gritty information that is typically conveyed orally in the classroom and in one-on-one research supervision
situations." ..... .  1 •
—Lyn H. Lofland, University of California, Davis
"This is a superb guide. Avoiding both confessional solipsism and realist fundamentalism, it will be appreciated by apprentice and veteran fieldworkers alike. Drawing —but not fawning—on critiques brought to bear on the trade, the authors bring the past of ethnography into its future by promoting in the present a move in perspective from the discovery of theory to the crafting of theory."
—John Van Maanen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Robert M. Emerson is professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Rachel I. Fretz is a folklorist who teaches ethnographic field research in the Writing Programs at the University of California, Los Angeles. Linda L. Shaw is associate professor of sociology at California State University, San Marcos.
www.press.uchica90.edu
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20681-3 ISBN-10:0-226-20681-5
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 9
978022620681390000
4240757694
xviii preface
Francisco "Chuck" Martinez, Martha Moyes, Deanna Nitta, Phil Oka-moto, Bkir Paley, Kristin Rains, Lisa Ravitch, Joanna Saporito, Kristin D. Schaefer, Joe Scheuermann, Cliff Spangler, Lakshmi Srinivas, Martha Stokes, Kathryn L. Tatar, Laura Miles Vahle, Linda Van Leuven, Karina Walters, David Whelan, Nicholas H. Wolfmger, and Terri Young. We especially thank Lisa Holmes and Martha Millison, not only for allowing us to use excerpts from their fieldnotes, but also for providing a "student response" after reading an earlier draft: of the manuscript.
chapter one
Fieldnotes in Ethnographic Research
Ethnographic field research involves the study of groups and people as they go about their everyday lives. Carrying out such research involves two distinct activities. First, the ethnographer enters into a social setting and gets to know the people involved in it; usually, the setting is not previously known in an intimate way. The ethnographer participates in the daily routines of this setting, develops ongoing relations with the people in it, and observes all the while what is going on. Indeed, the term "participant-observation" is often used to characterize this basic research approach. But, second, the ethnographer writes down in regular, systematic ways what she observes and learns while participating in the daily rounds of life of others. Thus the researcher creates an accumulating written record of these observations and experiences. These two interconnected activities comprise the core of ethnographic research: Firsthand participation in some initially unfamiliar social world and the production of written accounts of that world by drawing upon such participation. In the following sections we examine in detail each of these activities and then trace out their implications for writing fieldnotes.
Ethnographic Participation
2
fieldnotes in ethnographic research
ethnographic participation
3
and activities; the field researcher must be able to take up positions in the I midst of the key sites and scenes of other's lives in order to observe and I understand them. But getting close has another, far more significant com- 1 ponent: The ethnographer seeks a deeper immersion in others' worlds in j order to grasp what they experience as meaningful and important. With immersion, the field researcher sees from the inside how people lead their lives, how they carry out their daily rounds of activities, what they find meaningful, and how they do so. In this way immersion gives the field-worker access to the fluidity of others' lives and enhances his sensitivity to interaction and process.
Furthermore, immersion enables the fieldworker to directly and forcibly experience for herself both the ordinary routines and conditions under which people conduct their lives, and the constraints and pressures to which such living is subject. Goffman (1989:125) in particular insists that field research involves "subjecting yourself, your own body and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation, or their work situation, or their ethnic situation." Immersion in ethnographic research, then, involves both being with other people to see how they respond to events as they happen and experiencing for oneself these events and the circumstances that give rise to them.
Clearly, ethnographic immersion precludes conducting field research as a detached, passive observer; the field researcher can only get close to the lives of those studied by actively participating in their day-to-day affairs. Such participation, moreover, inevitably entails some degree of resocialization. Sharing everyday life with a group of people, the field researcher comes "to enter into the matrix of meanings of the researched, to participate in their system of organized activities, and to feel subject to their code of moral regulation" (Wax 1980:272-73). In participating as fully and humanly as possible in another way of life, the ethnographer learns what is required to become a member of that world, to experience events and meanings in ways that approximate members' experiences.'1 Indeed, some ethnographers seek to do field research by doing and becoming—to the extent possible—whatever it is they are interested in learning about. Ethnographers, for example, have become skilled at work activities they are seeking to understand (Diamond 1993; Lynch 1985) or in good faith have joined churches or religious groups (Jules-Rosette 1975; Roch-ford 1985) on the grounds that by becoming members they gain fuller
insight and understanding into these groups and their activities. Or villagers may assign an ethnographer a role, such as sister or mother in an extended family, which obligates her to participate and resocialize herself to meet local expectations (Fretz n.d.).
In learning about others through active participation in their lives and activities, the fieldworker cannot and should not attempt to be a fly on the wall.2 No field researcher can be a completely neutral, detached observer, outside and independent of the observed phenomena (Pollner and Emerson 1988). Rather, as the ethnographer engages in the lives and concerns of those studied, his perspective "is intertwined with the phenomenon which does not have objective characteristics independent of the observer's perspective and methods" (Mishler 1979:10). The ethnographer cannot take in everything; rather, he will, in conjunction with those in the setting, develop certain perspectives by engaging in some activities and relationships rather than others. Moreover, it will often be the case that relationships with those under study follow political fault lines in the setting, exposing the ethnographer selectively to varying priorities and points of view. As a result, the task of the ethnographer is not to determine "the truth" but to reveal the multiple truths apparent in others' lives.3
Furthermore, the ethnographer's presence in a setting inevitably has implications and consequences for what is taking place, since the field-worker must necessarily interact with and hence have some impact on those studied.4 "Consequential presence," often linked to reactive effects (that is, the effects of the ethnographer's participation on how members may talk and behave), should not be seen as "contaminating" what is observed and learned. Rather, these effects are the very source of that learning and observation (Clarke 1975:99). Relationships between the field researcher and people in the setting do not so much disrupt or alter ongoing patterns of social interaction as reveal the terms and bases on which people form social ties in the first place. For example, in a village based on kinship ties, people may adopt a fieldworker into a family and assign her a kinship term which then designates her rights and responsibilities toward others. Rather than detracting from what the fieldworker can learn, first-hand relations with those studied may provide clues to understanding the more subtle, implicit underlying assumptions that are often not readily accessible through observation or interview methods alone.5 Consequently, rather than viewing reactivity as a defect to be carefully controlled or elminated in entirety, the ethnographer needs to
4
fieldnotes in ethnographic research
inscribing experienced/observed realities
5
become sensitive to and perceptive of how she is seen and created by others.
To appreciate the unavoidable consequences of one's own presence strips any special merit from the highly detached, "unobtrusive," and marginal observer roles that have iong held sway as the implicit ideal in field research. Many contemporary ethnographers advocate highly participatory roles (Adler, Adler, and Rochford 1986) in which the researcher actually performs the activities that are central to the lives of those studied. In this view, assuming real responsibility for actually carrying out core functions and tasks, as in service learning internships, provides special opportunities to get close to, participate in, and experience life in previously unknown settings. The intern with real work responsibilities or the researcher participating in village life actively engage in local activities and are socialized to and acquire empathy for local ways of acting and feeling.
Finally, close, continuing participation in the lives of others encourages appreciation of social life as constituted by ongoing, fluid processes. Through participation, the field researcher sees first-hand and up close how people grapple with uncertainty and confusion, how meanings emerge through talk and collective action, how understandings and interpretations change over time. In all these ways, the fieldworkers closeness to others' daily lives and activities heightens sensitivity to social life as process.
Inscribing Experienced/Observed Realities
Even with intensive resocialization, the ethnographer never becomes a member in the same sense that those "naturally" in the setting are members.0 The fieldworker plans on leaving the setting after a relatively brief stay, and his experience of local life is colored by this transience. As a result "the participation that the fieldworker gives is neither as committed nor as constrained as the native's" (Karp and Kendall 1982:257). Furthermore, the fieldworker orients to many local events not as "real life" but as objects of possible research interest, as events that he may choose to write down and preserve in fieldnotes. In these ways, research and writing commitments qualify ethnographic immersion, making the field researcher at least something of an outsider and, at an extreme, a cultural alien.7
Fieldnotes are accounts describing experiences and observations the re-
searcher has made while participating in an intense and involved manner. But writing descriptive accounts of experiences and observations is not as straightforward and transparent a process as it might initially appear. For writing description is not merely a matter of accurately capturing as closely as possible observed reality, of "putting into words" overheard talk and witnessed activities. To view the writing of descriptions simply as a matter of producing texts that correspond accurately to what has been observed is to assume that there is but one "best" description of any particular event. But in fact, there is no one "natural" or "correct" way to write about what one observes. Rather, because descriptions involve issues oi perception and interpretation, different descriptions of "the same" situations and events are possible.
Consider, for example, the following descriptions of moving through express checkout lines in three different Los Angeles supermarkets, written by three student researchers. These descriptions share a number of common features: all describe events from the point of view of shoppers/ observers moving through express checkout lines; all provide physical descriptions of the other major players in the lines—the checker, other shoppers—and of at least some of the items they are purchasing; and all attend closely to some minute details of behavior in express lines. Yet each of these fieldnote accounts takes a different tack in describing a supermarket express line. Each selects and emphasizes certain features and actions, ignoring and marginalizing others. Furthermore, these descriptions are written from different points of view, and they shape and present what happened on the express lines in different ways—in part because the researchers observe different people and occasions, but also in part because they make different writing choices:
Mayfair Market Express Line
There were four people in line with their purchases separated by an approx. 18" rectanguhr black rubber bar. I put my frozen bags down on the "lazy Susan linoleum conveyor belt" and I reached on top of the cash register to retrieve one of the black bars to separate my items. The cashier was in her mid thirties, approx., about 5 "1" dark skinned woman with curly dark brown hair. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but recognized some accent to her speech. She was in a white blouse, short sleeved, with a maroon shoulder to mid thigh apron. She had a loose maroon bow tie, not like a man's bow tie, more hangie and fluffy. Her name tag on her left chest side had red writing that said "Candy" on it.
[Describes the first two men at the front of the line.] The woman behind him was dark skinned with straight dark brown hair cut in a page boy. She was wearing a teal blue v-neck knit sweater with black leggings. In her section was juice, a
6
heldnotes in ethnographic research
inscribing experienced/observed realities
can of pineapple juice, and a six-pack of V-8 tomato juice. The guy in front of
me had a pink polo shirt on and tan shorts. He was about 6'2", slender, tan with i
blond short hair with a gold 18 gauge hoop in his left ear (1 thought he was gay).
In his triangle of space he had packaged carrots, a gallon of whole milk, and a
package of porkchops.
Candy spent very little time with each person, she gave all a hello, and then told them the amount, money was offered, and change was handed back onto a shelf that was in front of the customer whose turn it was. Before Candy had given the dark-haired woman her change back, I noticed that the man in the pink shirt had moved into her spatial "customer" territory, probably within a foot of her, and in the position that the others had taken when it was their turn, in front of the "check writing" shelf. (I thought it was interesting that the people seemed " more concerned about the proper separation of their food from one another's than they did about body location.) ...
As I walk up to the shelf (where it all seems to happen), I say "Hi," and Candy says "Hi" back as she scans my groceries with die price scanner, . . .
This observer describes the line spatially in terms of individual people (particularly physical appearance and apparel) and their groceries as laid out before being rung up ("in his triangle of space he had . . . "). Indeed, this account notes as an aside the contrast between the care taken to separate grocery items and the seeming disregard of physical space that occurs at the "check writing shelf" as one shopper is about to move on and the next-in-line to move in.
Ralph's Express Line, Easter Morning
I headed east to the checkout stands with my romaine lettuce, to garnish the rice salad 1 was bringing to brunch, and my bottle of Gewurtztraminer, my new favorite wine, which I had to chill in the next half hour. As I approached the stands, I realized that the 10-kems-or-less-cash-only line would be my best choice. I noticed that Bolattd was behind the counter at the register—he's always very friendly to me—"Hey, how you doing?"
I got behind the woman who was already there. She had left one of the rubber separator bars behind the things she was going to buy, one of the few personal friendly moves one can make in this highly routinized queue. I appreciated this,
and would have thanked her (by smiling, probably), but she was already looking      ■,.....i
ahead, I suppose in anticipation of checking out. I put my wine and lettuce down. There was already someone behind me. I wanted to show them the courtesy of putting down a rubber separator bar for them too. I waited until the food in front of mine was moved up enough for me to take the bar, which was at the front of the place where the bars are (is there a word for that? bar bin?), so that I wouldn't have to make a large, expansive move across the items that weren't mine, drawing attention to myself. 1 waited, and then, finally, the bar was in sight. I took it, and then put it behind my items, looking at the woman behind me and smiling at her ■-« as [ did so. She looked pleased, and a bit surprised, and I was glad to have been
able to do this small favor. She was a pretty blonde woman, and was buying a bottle of champagne (maybe also for Easter brunch?). She was wearing what looked like an Easter dress—it was cotton, and pretty and flowery. She looked youngish. Maybe about my age. She was quite tall for a woman, maybe 5'10" or so.
The woman in front of me didn't take long at all. I've learned quite well how to wait in queues and not be too impatient. Boland, the checker, saw me, and said, "Hi! How's it going?" or something like that. ...
This observer describes moving through the line as she experienced the process on a moment by moment basis, framing her accounts of others' behaviors as she received, understood, and reacted to them. This style of description gives the reader unique access to the observer's thoughts and emotions; for example, while space is an issue, it is framed in terms not of distance but of its implications for self and feelings (e.g., avoiding "a large expansive move across the items that weren't mine").
In the next excerpt, the writer shifts his focus from self to others:
Boy's Market Express Line
... I picked a long line. Even though the store was quiet, the express line was long. A lot of people had made small purchases today. I was behind a man with just a loaf of bread. There was a cart to the side of him, just sitting there, and I thought someone abandoned it (it had a fewT items in it). A minute later a man came up and "claimed" it by taking hold of it. He didn't really try to assert that he was back in line—apparentiy he'd stepped away to get something he'd forgotten—but he wasn't getting behind me either. I felt the need to ask him if he was on line, so I wouldn't cut him off. He said yes, and I tried to move behind him—we were sort of side by side—and he said, "That's okay. I know where you are."
An old woman was behind me now. She had her groceries in one of those carts that old people tend to use to wheel their groceries home. She was thumbing through the National Enquirer, and was clutching a coupon in her hand. She scanned a few pages of the paper, and then put it back in the rack. I looked ahead at the person whose groceries were being checked out—she was staring at the price for each item as it came up on the register.
At this point the guy who I'd spoken to earlier, the guy who was right in front of me, showed a look of surprise and moved past me, over to an abandoned cart at the end of the aisle. He was looking at what was in it, picking up the few items with interest, and then put them back.. I thought he'd seen something else he wanted or had forgotten. He came back over to his cart, but then a supermarket employee •walked by, and he called out to the man, walking over to the cart and pointing at it, "Do you get many items like this left behind?" The employee hesitated, not seeming to understand the question, and said no. The guy on line said, "See what's here? This is formula [cans of baby formula]. That's poor people's food. And see this [a copper pot scrubber]? They use that to smoke crack." The
8 fieldnotes in ethnographic research
employee looked surprised. The guy says, "I was just wondering. That's very indicative of this area." The employee: "I live here and I didn't know that." The guy: "Didn't you watch Channel 28 last night?" Employee: "No." Guy; "They had a report about inner city problems." Empioyee, walking away as he talks: "I only watch National Geographic, the MacNeil-Lehrer Hour, and NPR." He continues away. . . .
Meanwhile the man with the bread has paid. As he waits momentarily for.his change, the "guy" says, "Long wait for a loaf of bread." Man says, "Yeah," and then adds, jokingly (and looking at the cashier as he says it, as if to gauge his reaction), "these cashiers are slow." The cashier does not appear to hear this. Man with bread leaves, guy in front of me is being checked out now. He says to the cashier, "What's the matter, end of your shift? No sense of humor left?" Cashier says, "No. I'm tired." Guy: "I hear you." Guy then says to the bagger: "Can I have paper and plastic please, Jacob" (he emphasizes the use of the baggers name)? Jacob complies, but shows no other sign that he's heard the man. Guy is waiting for transaction to be completed. He's sitting on the railing, and he is singing the words to the Muzak tune that's playing. Something by Peabo Bryson. Guy's transaction is done. He says thank you to the bagger, and the bagger tells him to have a good day.
Cashier says, "How are you doing?" to me. ...
In these notes the observer initially writes himself into a prominent role in the line, but then he moves himself offstage by spotlighting another character who says and does a number of flamboyant things as he waits and then gets checked out. This express line becomes a mini-community, first marked by ongoing exchanges between those in line, then drawing in a passing store employee, and culminating in interactions between this character and the checker and bagger.
Writing fieldnote descriptions, then, is not so much a matter of passively copying down "facts" about "what happened." Rather, such writing involves active processes of interpretation and sense-making: noting and writing down some things as "significant," noting but ignoring others as "not significant," and even missing other possibly significant things altogether. As a result, similar (even the "same") events can be described for different purposes, with different sensitivities and concerns.
In this respect, it is important to recognize that fieldnotes involve inscriptions of social life and social discourse. Such inscriptions inevitably reduce the welter and confusion of the social world to written words that can be reviewed, studied, and thought about time and time again. As Geertz (1973:19) has characterized this core ethnographic process: "The ethnographer 'inscribes' social discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment
inscribing experienced/observed realities 9
of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscription and can be reconsulted."
As inscriptions, fieldnotes are products of and reflect conventions for transforming witnessed events, persons, and places into words on paper.8 In part, this transformation involves inevitable processes of selection; the ethnographer writes about certain things and thereby necessarily "leaves out" others. But more significantly, descriptive fieldnotes also inevitably present or frame objects in particular ways, "missing" other ways that events might have been presented or framed. And these presentations reflect and incorporate sensitivities, meanings, and understandings the field researcher has gleaned from having been close to and participated in the described events.
There are other ways of reducing social discourse to written form. Survey questionnaires, for example, record "responses" to pre-fixed questions, sometimes reducing these answers to numbers, sometimes preserving something of the respondents' own words. Audio and video recordings, which seemingly catch and preserve almost everything occurring within an interaction, actually capture but a slice of ongoing social life. What is recorded in the first place depends upon when, where, and how the equipment is positioned and activated, what it can pick up mechanically, and how those who are recorded react to its presence. Further reduction occurs with the representation of a recorded slice of embodied discourse as sequential lines of text in a "transcript." For while talk in social settings is a "multichanneled event," writing "is linear in nature, and can handle only one channel at a time, so must pick and choose among the cues available for representation" (Walker 1986:211). A transcript thus selects particular dimensions and contents of discourse for inclusion while ignoring others, for example, nonverbal cues to local meanings such as eye gaze, gesture, and posture. Researchers studying oral performances spend considerable effort in developing a notational system to document the verbal and at least some of the nonverbal communication; the quality of the transcribed "folklore text" is critical as it "represents the performance in another medium" (Fine 1984:3). The transcript is never a "verbatim" rendering of discourse, because it "represents ... an analytic interpretation and selection" (Psathas and Anderson 1990:75) of speech and action. That is, a transcript is the product of a transcriber's ongoing interpretive and analytic decisons about a variety of problematic matters: how to transform naturally occurring speech into specific words (in the face of natural speech elisions); how to determine when to punctuate to indicate' a completed phrase or sentence (given the
10
fieldnotes in ethnographic research
implications for. writing fieldnotes
11
common lack of clear-cut endings in ordinary speech); deciding whether or not to try to represent such matters as spaces and silences, overlapped speech and sounds, pace stresses and volume, and inaudible or incomprehensible sounds or words.9 In sum, even those means of recording that researchers claim come the closest to realizing an "objective mirroring" necessarily make reductions in the lived complexity of social life similar in principle to those made in writing fieldnotes.10
Given the reductionism of any method of inscription, choice of method reflects researchers' deeper assumptions about social life and how to understand it. Fieldwork and ultimately the fieldnote are predicated on a view of social life as continuously created through people's efforts to find and confer meaning on their own and others' actions. Within this perspective, the interview and the recording have their uses. To the extent that participants are willing and able to describe these features of social life, an interview may prove a valuable tool. Similarly, a video recording provides a valuable record of words actually uttered and gestures actually made. But the ethos of fieldwork holds that in order to fully understand and appreciate action from the perspective of participants, one must get close to and participate in a wide cross-section of their everyday activities over an extended period of time. Ethnography, as Van Maanen (1988:ix) insists, is "the peculiar practice of representing the social reality of others through the analysis of ones own experience in the world of these others." Fieldnotes are distinctively a method for capturing and preserving the insights and understandings stimulated by these close and long-term experiences. Thus fieldnotes inscribe the sometimes inchoate understandings and insights the fieldworker acquires by intimately immersing herself in another world, by observing in the midst of mundane activities and jarring crises, by directly running up against the contingencies and constraints of the everyday life of another people. Indeed, it is exactly this deep immersion—and the sense of place that such immersion assumes and strengthens—that enables the ethnographer to inscribe the detailed, context-sensitive, and locally informed fieldnotes that Geertz (1973) terms "thick description."
This experiential character of fieldnotes is also reflected in changes in their content and concerns over time. Fieldnotes grow through gradual accretion, adding one day's writing to the next's. The ethnographer writes particular fieldnotes in ways that are not pre-determined or pre-specified; hence fieldnotes are not collections or samples in the way that audio recordings can be, i.e., decided in advance according to set criteria. Choos-
ing what to write down is not a process of sampling according to some fixed-in-advance principle. Rather it is both intuitive, reflecting the ethnographer's changing sense of what might possibly be made interesting or important to future readers, and enipathetic, reflecting the ethnographer's sense of what is interesting or important to the people he is observing.
Implications for Writing Fieldnotes
We draw four implications from our understanding of ethnography as the inscription of participatory experience: (1) What is observed and ultimately treated as "data" or "findings" is inseparable from the observational process. (2) In writing fieldnotes, the field researcher should give special attention to the indigenous meanings and concerns of the people studied. (3) Contemporaneously written fieldnotes are an essential grounding and resource for writing broader, more coherent accounts of others' lives and concerns. (4) Such fieldnotes should detail the social and interactional processes that make up people's everyday lives and activities.
Inseparability of "Methods" and "Findings"
Modes of participating in and finding out about the daily lives of others make up key parts of ethnographic methods. These "methods" determine what the field researcher sees, experiences, and learns. But if substance ("data," "findings," "facts") are products of the methods used, substance cannot be considered independently of method; what the ethnographer finds out is inherently connected with how she finds it out. As a result, these methods should not be ignored. Rather, they should comprise an important part of written fieldnotes. It thus becomes critical for the ethnographer to document her own activities, circumstances, and emotional responses as these factors shape the process of observing and recording others' lives.11
From this point of view, the very distinction between fieldnote "data" and "personal reactions" between "fieldnote records" and "diaries" or "journals" (Sanjek 1990c), is deeply misleading. Of course, the ethnographer can separate what he says and does from what he observes others saying and doing, treating the latter as if it were unaffected by the former.12 But such a separation distorts processes of inquiry and the meaning of field "data" in several significant ways. First, this separation treats data
12
F1ELDNC tes in ethnographic research
implications for writing fieldnotes
13
as "objective information" that has a fixed meaning independent of how that information was elicited or established and by whom. In this way the ethnographer's own actions, including his "personal" feelings and reactions, are viewed as independent of and unrelated to the events and happenings involving others that constitute "findings" or "observations" when written down in fieldnotes. Second, this separation assumes that "subjective" reactions and perceptions can and should be controlled by being segregated from "objective," impersonal records. And finally, such control is thought to be essential because personal and emotional experiences are devalued, comprising "contaminants" of objective data rather than avenues of insight into significant processes in the setting.
Linking method and substance in fieldnotes has a number of advantages: it encourages recognizing "findings" not as absolute and invariant but as contingent upon the circumstances of their "discovery" by the ethnographer. Moreover, the ethnographer is prevented, or at least dis~ couraged, from too readily taking one person's version of what happened or what is important as the "complete" or "correct" version of these matters. Rather, "what happened" is one account, made by a particular person to a specific other at a particular time and place for particular purposes. In all these ways, linking method and substance builds sensitivity to the multiple, situational realities of those studied into the core of fieldwork practice.
The Pursuit of Indigenous Meanings
In contrast to styles of field research which focus on others' behavior without systematic regard for what such behavior means to those engaged in it, we see ethnography as committed to uncovering and depicting indigenous meanings. The object of participation is ultimately to get close to those studied as a way of understanding what their experiences and activities mean to them.13
Ethnographers should attempt to write fieldnotes in ways that capture and preserve indigenous meanings. To do so, they must learn to recognize and limit reliance upon preconceptions about members' lives and activities. They must become responsive to what others are concerned about, in their own terms. But while fieldnotes are about others, their concerns and doings gleaned through empathetic immersion, they necessarily reflect and convey the ethnographer's understanding of these concerns and
doings. Thus, fieldnotes are written accounts that filter members' experiences and concerns through the person and perspectives of the ethnographer, fieldnotes provide the ethnographer's, not the members', accounts of the latter's experiences, meanings, and concerns.
It might initially appear that forms of ethnography concerned with "polyvocality" (Clifford and Marcus 1986:15), or oral histories and feminist ethnographies (Stacey 1991) which seek to let members "speak in their own voices," can avoid researcher mediation in its entirety. But even in these instances, researchers continue to select what to observe, to pose questions, or to frame the nature and purpose of the interview more generally, in ways which cannot avoid mediating effects {see Mills 1990).
Writing Fieldnotes Contemporaneously
In contrast to views holding that fieldnotes are crutches at best and blinders at worst, we see fieldnotes as providing the primary means for deeper appreciation of how field researchers come to grasp and interpret the actions and concerns of others. In this respect, fieldnotes offer subtle and complex understandings of these others' lives, routines, and meanings.
As argued earlier, the field researcher comes to understand others' ways by becoming part of their lives and by learning to interpret and experience events much as they do. It is critical to document closely these subtle processes of learning and resocialization as they occur; continuing time in the field tends to dilute the insights generated by initial contact with an unknown way of life. Long-term participation dissolves the initial perceptions that arise in adapting to and discovering what is significant to others; it blunts early sensitivities to subtle patterns and underlying tensions. In short, the field researcher does not learn about the concerns and meanings of others all at once, but in a constant, continuing process in which she builds new insight and understanding upon prior insights and understandings. Researchers should document these emergent processes and stages rather than attempt to reconstruct them at a later point in light of some final, ultimate interpretation of their meaning and import. Field-notes provide a distinctive resource for preserving experience close to the moment of occurrence and, hence, for deepening reflection upon and understanding of those experiences.
Similar considerations hold when examining the ethnographer's "findings" about those studied and their routine activities. Producing a
14
fieldnotes in ethnographic research
writing fieldnotes and ethnographic practice
15
record of these activities as close to their occurrence as possible preserves their idiosyncratic, contingent character in the face of the homogenizing tendencies of retrospective recall. In immediately written fieldnotes, distinctive qualities and features are sharply drawn and will elicit vivid memories and images when the ethnographer rereads notes for coding and analysis. Furthermore, the distinctive and unique features of such field-notes, brought forward into the final analysis, create texture and variation, avoiding the flatness that comes from generality.
The Importance of Interactional Detail
Field researchers seek to get close to others in order to understand their ways of life. To preserve and convey that closeness, they must describe situations and events of interest in detail. Of course, there can never be absolute standards for determining when there is "enough detail." How closely one should look and describe depends upon what is "of interest," and this varies by situation and by the researcher's personality, orientation, and discipline. Nonetheless, most ethnographers attend to observed events in an intimate or "microscopic" manner (Geertz 1973:20—23) and in writing fieldnotes seek to recount "what happened" in fine detail.
Beyond this general "microscopic" commitment, however, our specifically interactionist approach leads us to urge writers to value close, detailed reports ofinteraction. First, interactional detail helps one become sensitive to, trace, and analyze the interconnections between methods and substance. Since the fieldworker discovers things about others by interacting with them, it is important to observe and minutely record the sequences and conditions marking such interactions. Second, in preserving the details of interaction, the researcher is better able to identify and follow processes in witnessed events and hence to develop and sustain pro-cessual interpretations of happenings in the field. Field research, we maintain, is particularly suited to documenting social life as process, as emergent meanings established in and through social interaction (Blumer 1969). Attending to the details of interaction enhances the possibilities for the researcher to see beyond fixed, static entities, to grasp the active "doing" of social life. Writing fieldnotes as soon and as fully as possible after events of interest have occurred encourages detailed descriptions of the processes of interaction through which members of social settings create and sustain specific, local social realities.
Reflections: Writing Fieldnotes and Ethnographic Practice
Ethnography is an active enterprise. Its activity incorporates dual impulses. On the one hand, the ethnographer must make her way into new worlds and new relationships. On the other Jiand, she must learn how to represent in written form what she has come to see and understand as the result of these experiences.
It is easy to draw a sharp contrast between these activities, between doing fieldwork and writing fieldnotes. After all, while in the field, ethnographers must frequently choose between "join(ing) conversations in unfamiliar places" (Lederman 1990:72) and withdrawing to some more private place to write about these conversations and witnessed events. By locating "real ethnography" in the time spent talking with and listening to those studied, many ethnographers not only polarize but also discount writing notes as a central component of fieldwork. "Doing" and "writing" should not be seen as separate and distinct activities, but as dialectically related and interdependent activities. Writing accounts of what happened during face-to-face encounters with others in the field is very much part of the doing of ethnography; as Geertz emphasizes, "the ethnographer 'inscribes' social discourse; he writes it down" (1973:19). This process of inscribing, of writing fieldnotes, helps the field researcher to understand what he has been observing in the first place and, thus, enables him to participate in new ways, to hear with greater acuteness, and to observe with a new lens.
While ethnographers increasingly recognize the centrality of writing to their craft, they frequently differ on how to characterize that writing and its relation to ethnographic research. Some anthropologists have criticized Geertz's notion of "inscription" as too mechanical and simplistic, as ignoring that the ethnographer writes not about a "passing event" but rather about "already formulated, fixed discourse or lore"; hence, inscription should more aptly be termed "transcription" (Clifford 1990:57). "Inscription" has also been criticized as being too enmeshed in the assumptions of "salvage ethnography," which date back to Franz Boas's efforts to "write down" oral cultures before they and dieir languages and customs disappeared (Clifford 1986:113). Indeed, ethnographers have suggested a number of alternative ways of characterizing ethnographic writing. Anthropologists frequently use "translation" (or "cultural translation") to conceptualize writing a version of one culture that will make it comprehensible to readers living in another. Clifford (1986) and Marcus (1986) use the more abstract term "textualization" to refer to the generic pro-
16 fieldnotes in ethnographic research " '
cesses whereby an ethnography "translates experience into text" (Clifford 1986:115). And sociologists, notably Richardson (1990), describe the core of ethnographic writing as "narrating."
In general, however, these approaches conflate writing final ethnographies with writing ethnographic fieldnotes; thus, they fail to adequately illuminate the key processes and features of producing fieldnotes. Yet, each approach has implications for such contemporaneous writing about events witnessed in the field. First translation entails reconfiguring one set of concepts and terms into another; that is, the ethnographer searches for comparable concepts and analogous terms. In a sense, while writing fieldnotes an ethnographer is always interpreting and translating into text what she sees, even when writing notes for herself. Of course, in composing the final ethnography, the writer not only translates concepts but also a whole way of life for a future audience who may not be familiar with the world she describes. Second, narrating often aptly characterizes the process of writing a day's experiences into a fieldnote entry. However, not all life experiences are well represented as cohesive i stories: a narrative could push open-ended or disjointed interactions into a coherent, interconnected sequence. Thus, while many fieldnotes tell about the day in a storytelling mode, recounting what happened in a chronological order, most entries lack any overall structure which ties the day's events into a story line with a point. As a result, the storytelling of fieldnotes is generally fragmented and episodic. Finally, textualization clearly focuses on the broader transformation of experience into text, not only in final ethnographies, but especially so in writing fieldnotes. In deed, such transformation first occurs in the preliminary and varied writ ings in the field. Moreover, these fieldnotes often prefigure the final texts!
In sum, the fluid, open-ended processes of writing fieldnotes resonate with the imagery of all these approaches. Never a simple matter of in scribing the world, fieldnotes do more than record observations. In a fun damental sense, they constitute a way of life through the very writing choices the ethnographer makes and the stories she tells; for, through her writing she conveys her understandings and insights to future readers unacquainted with these lives, people, and events, In writing a fieldnote. then, the ethnographer does not simply put happenings into words. Rather, such writing is an interpretive process: it is the very first act of textualizing. Indeed, this often "invisible" work—writing ethnographic fieldnotes—is the primordial textualization that creates a world on the page and ultimately shapes the final ethnographic, published text.
chapter two
In the Field: Participating, Observing, and Jotting Notes
MASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA Fakiilía sociálních studií Joštova iO 602 00 BRNO CŠD
Ethnographers ultimately produce some sort of written account of what they have seen, heard, and experienced in the field. But different ethnographers, and the same ethnographer at different times, turn experience and observation into written texts in different ways. Some maximize their immersion in local activities and their experience of others' lives, deliberately suspending concern with the task of producing written records of these events. Here the field researcher decides where to go, what to look at, what to ask and say, so as to experience fully another way of life and its concerns. She attends to events with little or no orientation to "writing it down" or even to "observing" in a detached fashion. Indeed, an ethnographer living in rather than simply regularly visiting a field setting, particularly in non-Western cultures where language and daily routines are unfamiliar, may have no choice but to participate fully and to suspend immediate concerns with writing. A female ethnographer studying local women in Africa, for example, may find herself helping to prepare greens and care for children, leaving no time to produce many written notes. Yet in the process of that involvement she may most clearly learn how women simultaneously work together, socialize, and care for children. Only in subsequent reflection might she fully notice the subtle changes in herself as she learned to do and see these activities as the women do.
Field researchers using this style value relating naturally to those encountered in the field; they focus their efforts on figuring out—holisti-cally and intuitively—what these people are up to. Any anticipation of writing fieldnotes is postponed (and in extreme cases, minimized or
18 in the field
avoided altogether) as diluting the experiential insights and intuitions that immersion in another social world can provide.' Only at some later point does the ethnographer turn to the task of recalling and examining her experiences in order to write them down.
But the ethnographer may also participate in ongoing events in ways that directly and immediately involve inscription. Here the field worker is concerned with "getting into place" to observe interesting, significant events in order to produce a detailed written record of them. As a result, participation in naturally occurring events may come to be explicitly oriented toward writing fieldnotes. At an extreme, the field worker may self-consciously look for events that should be written down for research purposes; he may position himself in these unfolding events to be able to observe and write; and he may explicitly orient to events in terms of "what is important to remember so that I can write it down later."
Both modes of participation have strengths and drawbacks. The former allows an intense immersion in daily rhythms and ordinary concerns, increasing openness to others' ways of life. The latter can produce a more detailed, closer-to-the-moment record of that life. In practice, most field researchers employ both styles at one time or another, now participating without thought about writing up what is happening, now focusing closely on events in order to write about them. Indeed, the fieldworker may experience a shift from one mode to another as events unfold in the field. Caught in some social moment, for example, the field researcher may come to see deep theoretical relevance in a mundane experience or practice. Conversely, a researcher in the midst of observing in a more detached, writing-oriented mode may suddenly be drawn directly into the center of activity.3
In both styles, the ethnographer writes fieldnotes more or less contemporaneously with the experience and observation of events of interest, in the spirit of the ethnographer who commented, "Anthropologists are those who write things down at the end of the day" (Jackson 1990b: 15). In the experiential style, writing may be put off for hours or even days, until the field researcher withdraws from the field and, relying solely on memory, sits down at pad or computer to reconstruct important events.3 In the participating-to-write style, writing—or an orientation to writing—begins earlier, when the researcher is still in the field, perhaps in the immediate presence of talk and action that will be inscribed. The ethnographer may not only make mental notes or "headnotes"4 to include certain events in full fieldnotes, but he may also write down, in the
making jottings: how, where, and when 19
form of jottings or scratch notes, abbreviated words and phrases to use later to construct full fieldnotes.
Furthermore, in both styles field researchers are deeply concerned about the quality of the relationships they develop with the people they seek to know and understand. In valuing more natural, open experience of others' worlds and activities, field researchers seek to keep writing from intruding into and affecting these relationships. They do so not only to avoid distancing themselves from the ongoing experience of another world, but also because writing and research commitments more generally may engender feelings of betraying those with whom one has lived and shared intimacies. Ethnographers who participate in order to write, in contrast, pursue and proclaim research interests more openly as an element in their relationships with those studied. But these field researchers too experience moments of anguish, of uncertainty about whether to include intimate or humiliating incidents in their fieldnotes. Moreover, they often become very sensitive to the ways in which the stance and act of writing are very visible to and can influence the quality of their relationships with those studied.
In the remainder of this chapter we focus on a participating-in-order-to-write fieldwork style which confronts writing issues directly and immediately in the field. This style brings to the fore the interconnections between writing, participating, and observing as a means of understanding another way of life: this approach focuses on learning how to look in order to write, while it also recognizes that looking is itself shaped and constrained by a sense of what and how to write. In examining these issues, we initially consider choices confronting field researchers in deciding how, where, and when to make jottings in field settings. Next we offer suggestions on what to observe when participating with an eye to writing fieldnotes. We then present illustrations of actual jottings made in different field settings and discuss a number of considerations that might guide the process of making jottings.
Making Jottings: How, "Where, and "When
In attending to ongoing scenes, events, and interactions, field researchers take mental note of certain details and impressions. For the most part these impressions remain "headnotes" only. In some instances, the field researcher makes a brief written record of these impressions by jotting
20
tn the field
making jottings: how, where, and when
21
down key words and phrases. Jottings translate to-be-remembered observations into writing on paper as quickly rendered scribbles about actions and dialogue. A word or two written at the moment or soon afterwards will jog the memory later in the day and enable the fieldworker to catch significant actions and to construct evocative descriptions of the scene. Or, more extensive jottings may record an ongoing dialogue or a set of responses to questions. Particularly when learning a new language, the ethnographer should jot key expressions and terms.
Through trial and error field researchers evolve distinctive practical styles for writing jottings. An initial choice involves the selection of writing materials. Many fieldworkers use small notepads that fit easily in pocket or purse. Others prefer even less obtrusive materials, using folded sheets of paper, to record jottings about different topics on specific sides. Writers also frequently develop idiosyncratic preferences for particular types of pens or pencils.
Field researchers actually write jottings in different ways. It is time-consuming and cumbersome to write out every word fully, and many fieldworkers develop their own private systems of symbols and abbreviations. Some even learn a formal transcribing system such as shorthand or speedwriting. These procedures not only facilitate getting words on a page more quickly; they also make jotted notes incomprehensible to those onlookers who ask to see them and hence provide a means for protecting the confidentiality of these writings.
Field researchers must also decide when, where, and how to write jottings. Far from simply mundane matters, such decisions can have tremendous import for relations widi those in the field. The researcher works hard to establish close ties with participants so that she may be included in activities that are central to their lives. In the midst of such activities, however, she may experience deep ambivalence: on the one hand, she may wish to preserve the immediacy of the moment by jotting down words as they are spoken and details of scenes as they are enacted; on the other hand, she may feel that taking out a note pad and writing jottings will ruin the moment and plant seeds of distrust. Participants may now see her as someone whose primary interest lies in discovering their secrets and turning their most intimate and cherished experiences into objects of scientific inquiry.5
Nearly ail ethnographers feel torn at times between their research cormriitments and their desire to engage authentically those people whose worlds they have entered. Attempting to resolve these thorny relational
and moral issues, many researchers hold that conducting any aspect of the research without the full and explicit knowledge and consent of those studied violates ethical standards. In this view, local assistants must be understood as collaborators who actively work with the researcher to tell the outside world about their lives and culture. Such mutual collaboration requires that the researcher ask permission to write about events and also respect people's desire not to reveal aspects of their lives.
Other field researchers feel less strictly bound to seek permission to conduct research or to tell participants about their intention to record events and experiences. Some justify this stance by insisting that the field researcher has no special obligations to disclose his intentions; all social life involves elements of dissembling, as no one ever fully reveals all his deeper purposes and private activities. Other researchers point out that jottings and fieldnotes written for oneself as one's own record will do no direct harm to others. This approach, of course, puts off grappling with the tough moral and personal issues until facing subsequent decisions about whether to publish or otherwise make these writings available to others. Finally, some advocate withholding knowledge of their research purposes from local people on the grounds that the information gained will serve the greater good. Researchers, for example, can only describe and publicize the conditions under which undocumented factory workers or the elderly in nursing homes live if they withhold their intentions from the powerful who control access to such settings.
Many beginning researchers, wanting to avoid open violations of trust and possibly awkward or tense encounters, are tempted to use covert procedures and to try to conceal the fact that they are conducting research or to wait until they leave the field to jot notes. While these decisions involve both the researcher's conscience and pragmatic considerations, we recommend as a general policy that the fieldworker inform people in the setting of the research, especially those with whom he has established some form of personal relationship. In addition to making these relations more direct and honest, openness avoids the risks and likely sense of betrayal that might follow from discovery of what the researcher has actually been up to. Concerns about the consequences—both discovery and ongoing inauthenticity—of even this small secret about research plans may mount and plague the fieldworker as time goes on and relations deepen.
Of course, strained relations and ethical dilemmas are not completely avoided by infonning others of one's research purposes. While participants may have consented to the research, they might not know exactly
22 in the field -|
1
what the research involves or what the researcher wiE do to carry it out.6 g ■ They might realize that the fieldworker is writing fieldnotes at the end of the day, but they become used to his presence and "forget" that this writing is going on. Furthermore, marginal and transient members of the setting may not be aware of his research identity and purposes despite conscientious efforts to inform them.
By carrying out fieldwork in an overt manner, the researcher gams flexibility in when, where, and how to write jottings. In many field situations it may be feasible to jot notes openly. In so doing the fieldworker should act with sensitivity, trying to avoid detracting from or interfering with the ordinary relations and goings-on in the field. If possible, the fieldworker should start open jottings early on in contacts with those studied. If one establishes a "note-taker" role, jotting notes comes to be part of what people expect from the fieldworker. Here it helps to offer initial explanations of the need to take notes; an ethnographer can stress the importance of accuracy, of getting down exactly what was said. I People often understand that such activities are required of students and, therefore, tolerate and accommodate the needs of researchers who, they -f believe, want to faithfully represent what goes on. When learning a new language in another culture, the field researcher can explain that she is writing down local terms in order to remember them. By saying the word * as she writes, people might offer new terms and become further interested in teaching her.
Although taking down jottings may at first seem odd or awkward, after a time it often becomes a normal and expected part of what the field-worker does. In the following excerpt from a Housing and Urban Development [HUD] office, the office manager and a worker jokingly enlist the fieldworker as audience for a self-parody of wanting to "help" clients:
Later I'm in Jean's office and Ramon comes up and waxes melodramatic. Take this down, he says. Jean motions for me to write, so I pull out my notepad. "I only regret that I have but eight hours to devote to saving" . . . He begins to sing "Impossible Dream," in his thick, goofy Brooklyn accent. . . . "Feel free to join in," he says. ...
Here, the ethnographer and his note-taking provide resources for a spontaneous humorous performance.7
Yet even when some people become familiar with open writing in their presence, others may become upset when the researcher pulls out his pad and begins to write down their words and actions. Ethnographers
making jottings: how, where, and when 23
may try to avoid the likely challenges and facilitate open, extensive note-taking by positioning themselves on the margins of interaction. Even then, they may still encounter questions, as reflected in the following comment by a field researcher observing divorce mediation sessions:
I tried to take notes that were as complete as possible during the session. My sitting behind the client had probably more to do with wanting to get a lot of written notes as unobtrusively as possible as with any more worthy methodological reason. While taking copious amounts of notes (approximately 50 pages per session) did not seem to bother the clients, a few mediators became quite defensive about it. One mediator wanted to know how F "decided what to write down and what not to write down." At staff meetings this same mediator would sit next to me and try to glance over to see what I had written in my notebook.
Given the delicacy of this and similar situations, fieldworkers must constantly rely upon interactional skills and tact to judge whether or not taking jottings in the moment is appropriate.8
Furthermore, in becoming accustomed to open jotting, people may develop definite expectations about what events and topics should be recorded. People may question why the fieldworker is or is not taking note of particular events, and they may feel slighted if she fails to make jottings on what they are doing or see as important. Consider the following exchange, again described by the field researcher studying divorce mediation, which occurred as she openly took notes while interviewing a mediator about a session just completed:
On one occasion when finishing up a debriefing, . . . [the mediator] began to apply some eye make-up while I was finishing writing down some observations. She flashed me a mock disgusted look and said, "Are you writing this down too!" indicating the activity with her eye pencil.
Open jotting, then, has to be carefully calibrated to the unfolding context of the ongoing interaction.''
Open jottings not only may strain relations with those who notice the writing; jottings can also distract the ethnographer from paying close attention to talk and activities occurring in the setting. A field researcher will inevitably miss fleeting expressions, subtle movements, and even key content in interactions if his nose is in his notepad. Taking open jottings is not always advisable for other reasons as well. In some settings the fieldworkers participation in ongoing interaction may be so involving as to preclude taking breaks to write down jottings; in such instances, he
24 in the field
may have to rely more upon memory, focusing on incidents and key phrases that will later trigger a fuller recollection of the event or scene. For example, in a setting where only a few people write and do so only on rare occasions, an ethnographer who writes instead of participating in an all-night village dance may be perceived as failing to maintain social relationships—a serious offense in a close-knit village.
As a result of these problems, even ethnographers who usually write open jottings may at other times make jottings privately, out of sight of those studied. "Waiting until just after a scene, incident, or conversation has occurred, the ethnographer can then go to a private place to jot down a memorable phrase. Here it is often useful for the fieldworker to adopt the ways members of the setting themselves use. to take "time out" or "get away." Fieldwofkers have reported retreating to private places such as a bathroom (Cahill 1985), deserted lunchroom, stairwell, or supply closet to record such covert jottings. Depending upon circumstances, the fieldworker can visit such places periodically, as often as every half hour or so, or irnmediately after a particularly important incident. Other researchers avoid all overt writing in the field setting; but immediately upon leaving the field, they pull out a notebook to jot down reminders of the key incidents, words, or reactions they wish to include in full fieldnotes. This procedure allows the fieldworker to signal items that she does not want to forget without being seen as intrusive.
An ethnographer may write jottings in ways intermediate between open and hidden styles, especially when note-taking becomes a part of her task or role. Those in the field may or may not know explicitly that the fieldworker is writing jottings for research purposes. In one instance, for example, a student in a law office who was asked to take notes during client interviews used the assignment as an opportunity to take down research jottings. This student reported that while she did not make explicit when she wrote jottings, both the attorney and clients knew of her research. Though many activities do not so easily lend diemselves to writing jottings, fieldworkers can find other naturally occurring means to incorporate jottings. For example, fieldworkers often learn about settings by becoming members. For the fieldworker who assumes the role of a novice, the notes which as a beginner he is permitted or even expected to write may become the jottings for his first fieldnotes.
Strategies for how, where, and when to jot notes change with time spent in the field and with the different relationships formed between fieldworker and people in the setting. Even after the ethnographer has
making jottings: how, where, and when 25
established strong personal ties, situations might arise in fieldwork when visibly recording anything will be taken as inappropriate or out of place; in these situations, taking out a notebook would generate deep discomfort to both fieldworker and other people in the setting.10 One student ethnographer studying a campus bookstore who had grown quite friendly with bookstore workers—with whom she had spoken openly about her study—nonetheless reported the following incident:
One of the younger cashiers came up to me after having seen me during two of my last observation sessions. She approached me tentatively with a question about me being a "spy" from the other campus bookstore or possibly from the administration. Trying to ease die situation with a joke, I told her I was only being a spy for sociology's sake. But she didn't understand the joke, and it only made the situation worse.
Sometimes people may be uncomfortable with a jotting researcher because they have had little experience with writing as a part of everyday life. Especially in oral cultures, watching and writing about people may seem like a strange activity indeed. In other instances, people have unpleasant associations with writing and find jottings intrusive and potentially dangerous. On one occasion an elder in a Zambian village became very hesitant to continue speaking after the ethnographer jotted down his name on a scrap of paper, simply to remember it. She later learned that government officials in colonial times used to come by and record names for tax purposes and to enlist people into government work projects.
Finally, even with permission to write openly, the tactful fieldworker will want to remain sensitive to and avoid jotting down matters which participants regard as secret, embarrassing, too revealing, or which puts them in any danger. In other instances, the people themselves may not object and in fact urge the researcher to take notes about sensitive matters. Even though she thinks they may be embarrassing or bring them harm if they were to be made public, the researcher might take jottings but then later decide not to use them in any final writing.
All in all, it is a defining moment in field relations when an ethnographer takes out a pad and begins to write down what people are saying and doing in the presence of those very people. Therefore, fieldworkers take very different approaches to jottings, their strategies both shaping and being shaped by their setting and by their relationships. Hence, decisions about when and how to take jottings must be considered in the
26 in the field
context of the broader set of relations with those in the setting. In some situations and relations, taking open jottings is clearly not advisable. In
■4
others, fieldworkers decide to take jottings but must devise their own unique means to avoid or minimize awkward interactions that may arise as a result. When deciding when and where to jot, it is rarely helpful or possible to specify in advance one "best way." Here, as in other aspects of fieldwork, a good rule of thumb is to remain open and flexible, ready to alter an approach if it adversely affects people.
Participating in Order to White
Deciding whether or not to make jottings presupposes some sense for what to observe and write about in the first place. But in the flux of their field settings, beginning students are often hesitant and uncertain about what they should pay attention to as potential issues for writing. We have found a number of procedures to be helpful in advising students how initially to look-in-order-to-write.11
First, ethnographers should take note of their initial impressions. These impressions may include those things available to the senses—the tastes, smells, and sounds of the physical environment, the look and feel of the locale and the people in it. Such impressions may include details about the physical setting, including size, space, noise, colors, equipment, and movement, or about people in the setting, such as number, gender, race, appearance, dress, movement, comportment, and feeling tone. Recording these impressions provides a way to get started in a setting that may seem overwhelming. Entering another culture where both language and customs are incomprehensible may present particular challenges in this regard. Still, the ethnographer can begin to assimilate strange sights and sounds through writing about them.12
Furthermore, this record preserves these initial and often insightful impressions, for observers tend to lose sensitivity for unique qualities of a setting as these become commonplace. Researchers who are familiar with the setting they study, perhaps already having a place in that setting as workers or residents, have lost direct access to these first impressions. However, such fieldworkers can indirerrlv spek to r^i-all (-b^ir i-mm
participating in order to write 27
Second, field researchers can focus on observing key events or incidents. Fieldworkers may at first have to rely on their own experience and intuition to select noteworthy incidents out of the flow of ongoing activity. Here, for example, the fieldworker may look closely at something that surprises or runs counter to her expectations, again paying attention to incidents, feeling tones, impressions, and interactions, both verbal and nonverbal.
Similarly, field researchers may use their own personal experience of events that please, shock, or even anger them to identify matters worth writing about. A fieldworkers strong reaction to a particular event may well signal that others in the setting react similarly. Or a fieldworker may experience deeply contradictory emotions—for example, simultaneously feeling deep sympathy and repulsion for what he observes in the field. These feelings may also reflect contradictory pressures experienced by those in the setting.
To use personal reactions effectively, however, requires care and reflection. Many beginning ethnographers take note of such experiences, but tend to judge the actions of people in the setting, for better or worse, by their own rather than the others' standards and values. Prejudging incidents in outsiders' terms makes it difficult to cultivate empathetic understanding and to discover what import local people give to them (see chapter 5). The field researcher should be alive to the possibility that local people, especially those with very different cultures, may respond to events in sharply contrasting ways. For example, an ethnographer in a Chokwe village may react with alarm to an unconscious man drugged by an herbal drink in a trial-for-sorcery court, only to realize that others are laughing at the spectacle because they know he will soon regain consciousness.
Yet fieldworkers should not go to the other extreme and attempt to manage strong petsonal reactions by denial or simply by omitting them from fieldnotes. Rather, we recommend that the ethnographer register her feelings, then step back and use this experience to increase sensitivity to the experiences of others in the setting. Are others in the setting similarly surprised, shocked, pleased, or angered by an event? If so, under what conditions do these reactions occur, and how did those affected
28
IN the field
Third, field researchers should move beyond their personal reactions to an open sensitivity to what those in the setting experience and react to as "significant" or "important." The sorts of actions, interactions, and events that catch the attention of people habitually in the setting may; provide clues to these concerns. The field researcher watches for the sorts' of things that are meaningful to those studied. Specifically: What do they stop and watch? What do they talk and gossip about? What produces I strong emotional responses for them? "Troubles" or "problems" often generate deep concern and feelings. What kinds occur in the setting? : How do people in the setting understand, interpret, and deal with such J troubles or problems? Such "incidents" and "troubles" should move the: field researcher to jot down "who did what" and "how others reacted." '■■ Since a researcher in an unfamiliar setting often pays close attention to '■; others' actions in order to imitate and participate, she can augment! her learning by writing down what others do and how they respond. A: follow-up strategy that we strongly recommend is to talk to those in-.;: volved and those witnessing the incident about their impressions.
In this way, the field researcher attends not only to the activities local people engage in but also to the particular meanings they attribute to these activities. She seeks and discerns local knowledge and meanings, not > so much by directly asking actors what matters to them, but more m-.. directly and inferentially by looking for the perspectives and concerns . embedded and expressed in naturally occurring interaction. A field researcher, for example, might give close attention to evaluations and dis- : tinctions made by members in the course of their daily activities. By way of illustration, those in a work setting may regularly contrast "good" : workers and "bad" workers. By noting such distinctions, the researcher-learns something about what matters to those in the setting. In addition, : by attending closely to how, in conversation, people apply these disrinc- :. tions to particular workers, the fieldworker may learn how these reputa- : tions become resources used to find meaning.
In this sense, the ethnographer is concerned not with members' indigenous meanings simply as static categories but with how members of settings invoke those meanings in specific relations and interactions. This requires, then, not just that the ethnographer describe interactions, but
that thf» rr.n.«l-»l- ■ •     " ■
participating in order to write
29
different workers as "good" (or "bad") and may do so by invoking different evaluative criteria. Indigenous meanings, then, rarely hold across the board but rather reflect particular positions and practical concerns that ed to be captured in writing fieldnotes.
When first venturing into a setting, field researchers should "cast their nets" broadly; they should observe with an eye to writing about a range of incidents and interactions. Yet forays into a setting must not be viewed as discrete, isolated occasions that have little or no bearing on what will be noted the next time. Rather, observing and writing about certain kinds of events foreshadow what will be noticed and described next. Identifying cine incident as noteworthy should lead to considering what other incidents are similar and hence worth noting. As fieldwork progresses and becomes more focused on a set of issues, fieldworkers often selfconsciously collect a series of incidents and interactions of the "same type" and look for regularities or patterns in them.
Even when looking for additional examples of a similar event, the field researcher is open to and indeed searches for different forms of that event, for variations from or exceptions to an emerging pattern. Beginning field researchers are often discouraged by such discoveries, fearing that exceptions to a pattern they have noted will cast doubt upon their understanding of the setting. This need not be the case, although noting differences and variations should prod the field researcher to change, elaborate, or deepen her earlier understanding of the setting. The field researcher, for example, may want to consider and explore possible causes or conditions that would account for difference or variation: Are the different actions the result of the preferences and temperaments of those involved or of their different understandings of the situation because they have different positions in the local context? Or the ethnographer may begin to question how she decided similarity and difference in the first place, perhaps coming to see how an event that initially appeared to be different is actually similar on a deeper level. In these ways, exploring what at least initially seem to be differences and variations will lead to richer, more textured descriptions and encourage more subtle, grounded analyses in a final ethnography (see chapter 7).
In summary, ethnoexaohic attention involves balancing two HifFwnf
30
in the field
the ethnographer becomes more sensitive to the concerns and perspectives of those in the setting. She increasingly appreciates how people have already predescribed their world in their own terms for their'own purposes and projects. A sensitive ethnographer draws upon her own reactions to identify issues of possible importance to people in the setting but privileges their "insider" descriptions and categories over her own "outsider" views.
Two Illustrations of Jottings
In order to convey how field researchers actually write and use jottings, we provide two illustrations. Both focus on scenes, observed actions, and dialogue rather than on evaluation or psychological interpretation. The two researchers approach interaction in their settings in very different ways, noting different sensory and interpretive details.
"they're not very good"
The following jotted notes focus on meeting a would-be promoter of Spanish-language rock music in a club:
Jorge = at table doesn't introduce me to anyone
now only speaks in Spanish
chit chat — who's playing
"they're not very good" — apology
These jottings preserve a number of incidents in the club, including where Jorge is seated and the fact that he has switched to Spanish after having previously spoken English. A general sequence of events is kid out: Jorge does not introduce the observer, who has come in his company; there is general conversation ("chit chat"); someone (not specified here) asks "who's playing" (presumably the name of the band is given, but is mentally marked as easily remembered and not recorded); someone (not the field worker!) makes an evaluative comment about the band, and the observer notes her sense that this remark was an "apology" (for having brought her to this club), thus providing interactional context for interpreting its import.
jottings as mnemonic devices 31
"you can call his doctor"
"The following jottings concern a woman who is seeking a temporary estraining order against her two landlords, one of whom is not present in the courtroom. The landlord who is present disputes the woman's testimony that the missing landlord is "well enough to walk" and hence could have come to court:
you can call his doctor at UCLA and
he can verify all this
I just don't call people on the
telephone — courts don't operate that way —
it has to be on paper or
(in person)
These jottings represent a fragment of dialogue between the landlord defendant (the first two lines) and the judge (the last four lines; see chapter 3 for the full fieldnote written from this jotting). The jotting reflects an interest in the judge's insistence on legal procedure: he as judge ("courts") will not independently investigate litigants' claims; rather, litigants are responsible for presenting any evidence in the courtroom. Note that only spoken words are recorded; specific speakers are not indicated but can be identified by content or from memory. The words represent direct quotes, written down as accurately as possible when spoken; an exception occurs in the last line, where the observer missed the judge's exact words ending this sentence (because of jotting down the preceding dialogue) and inserted a paraphrase "in person" (indicated by parentheses).
Jottings as Mnemonic Devices: What Words and Phrases?
Each of the jottings in the previous illustrations is "a mnemonic word or phrase [written] to fix an observation or to recall what someone has just said" (Clifford 1990:51). As preludes to full written notes, jottings capture bits of talk and action from which the fieldworker can begin to sketch social scenes, recurring incidents, local expressions and terms, members' distinctions and accounts, dialogue among those present, and his own conversations.
Making jottings, however, is not only a writing activity; it is also a mind-set. Learning to jot down details which remain sharp and which
32
in the field
easily transform into vivid descriptions on the page results, in part, frorn envisioning scenes as written. "Writing jottings that evoke memories requires learning what can be written about and how. We have found the following recommendations helpful for making jottings useful for producing vivid, evocatively descriptive fieldnotes.
First, jot down details of what you sense are key components of observed scenes or interactions. Field researchers record immediate fragments of action and talk to serve as focal points for later writing accounts : of these events in as much detail as can be remembered. The field re- ; searcher studying Spanish rock music, tor example, jotted that the promoter she accompanied to a club "now only speaks in Spanish" while lie had spoken English in their prior, less public contacts. She also wrote i down a key direct quote—"they're not very good"—along with the term" "apology" to remind her of the context and meaning of this remark.
Second, avoid making statements characterizing what people do that ! rely on generalizations. Many novice field researchers initially tend to jot down impressionistic, opinionated words which lend themselves better ::: to writing evaluative summaries than to composing detailed, textured de- : scriptions. For example, it is problematic for a field researcher to charac- ; terize the way someone works as "inefficient." Such cryptic, evaluative jottings are likely to evoke only a vague memory when the fieldworker later on attempts to write a full description of the social scene. Such jot- : tings also convey nothing of how people in the setting experience and evaluate worker performance. Similarly, jottings that a probation officer : "lectures about school" and that a youth is "very compliant—always . agrees" during a probation interview are overly generalized; such sum- . mary statements are not helpful for writing close descriptions of how probation officer and youth actually talked and acted during a particular : encounter.
Third, jot down concrete sensory details about actions and talk. Field researchers note concrete details of everyday life which show rather than tell about people's behavior (see chapter 4). By incorporating such details, jottings may provide records of actual words, phrases, or dialogue that the field researcher wants to preserve in as accurate a form as possible. It is not enough, for example, to characterize an emotional outburst simply as "angry words." Rather the ethnographer should jot the actuallv siwkn
jottings as mnemonic devices
33
Jotting these words should evoke recall not only of the details about what happened but also of the specific circumstances or context involved: who v/as present, what they said or did, what occurred immediately before and after, etc. In this way jottings may be used to reconstruct the actual order or sequence of talk, topics, or actions on some particular occasion.
Beginning ethnographers sometimes attempt to identify motives or internal states when recording observed actions. Having witnessed an angry exchange, for example, one is often tempted to focus on the source or reason for this emotional outburst, typically by imputing motive (e.g., some underlying feeling such as "insecurity") to one or both of the parties involved. Such psychologized explanations, however, highlight only one of a number of possible internal states that may accompany or contribute to the observed actions. Anger could, for example, result from frustration, fatigue, the playing out of some local power struggle, or other hidden factors; the ethnographer who simply witnesses a scene has no way of knowing which factors are involved.13
Field researchers do not ignore emotions; they may well note feelings such as anger, sadness, joy, pleasure, disgust, loneliness, but they do so as such emotions are expressed and attended to by those in the setting. For example, in describing the emotional consequences of routinely "having to say no" to clients coming to a HUD office in desperate need of housing, an ethnographer wrote the following:
Laura to me, slouched down on her desk, head in hands: "Sometimes I just don't feel like helping people, you know? You have to say no so often. That's a big part of this program. It gets to you psychologically. (How?) I didn't study psychology, but it affects you" (rolling her eyes).
Here the ethnographer writes not to explain why this HUD worker experienced or reported these emotions (although she herself points to a feature of her work—"You have to say no so often"), but to highlight how she expressed her feelings. He does so not only by direct quotation in her own words but also by providing vivid details of her body posture ("slouched," "head in hands") and by noting her accenting eye movements.
- When witnessing social scenes, then, the ethnographer's task is to use
34
IN THE FIELD
process of writing textured, detailed descriptions of interactions rather than of individual motivation.
Fourth, jot down sensory details which you could easily forget but' which you deem to be key observations about the scene. Jottings arc ; devices intended to encourage the recall of scenes and events in die construction of some broader, fuller fieldnote account. Since jottings must > later jog the memory, each field researcher must learn which kinds of i details they best remember and make jottings about those features and ! qualities they easily forget. Thus, fieldworkers come to develop their own ; jotting styles reflecting their distinctive recall propensities, whether visual, -kinetic, or auditory. Some focus on trying to capture evocative pieces of • broader scenes, while some jot down almost exclusively dialogue; others I record nonverbal expression of voice, gesture, movement; still others note I visual details of color and shape. Through trial and error, field researchers < learn what most helps them to recall field experiences once they sit down i to write up full notes.
Jottings may serve more generally to remind the ethnographer of what ; was happening at a particular time, in this sense providing a marker S around which to collect other remembered incidents. For example, one 5 field researcher teaching in a Headstart Program described a series of ma- -s dents that occurred while supervising children playing in a sandbox. In- j eluded in her jottings but not in her full fieldnotes was the phrase, "Three 5 new bags of sand were delivered to the sandbox." In discussing this scratch v note later she commented: "I don't think it is so important as I would i: want to include it in my notes because I think it is just—I wrote it down to remind me more what the day was like, what was happening."14
Fifth, jottings can be used to signal general impressions and feelings, ■:■ even if the fieldworker is unsure of their significance at the moment. In ' some cases, the ethnographer may have only a vague intuitive sense about ^ how or why something may be important. Such feelings might signal a key element that in the future could enable the field researcher to see ■; how incidents "fit together" in meaningful patterns. For example, at another point the ethnographer in the Headstart Program made a jotting about a student, "Nicole showing trust in me," which she decided not to : write up in her full notes: "It was just an overall feeling I had throughout the day; ... at that noinr wlipn T ^„      — t
WRITING AND ETHNOGRAPHIC MARGINALITY
35
e point Nicole got on the swings without her shoes on and asked me for a ^" h It W her that 1 would push her after she went and put her shoes on. Nicole an(j j0Oked at me. I repeated my statement, telling her that I would save PaUS£ •    for her while she was gone. Nicole then got off of the swing and put
her swing
j^er shoes on. When she came back to the swing, I praised her listening skills and ve her a hug. I then gave her a push. I found this incident to be a significant accomplishment for Nicole, as usually she doesn't listen to the teachers.15
Having thought about whether or not to write this jotting up as full notes rnade this student sensitive to the issue of "trust." The jotting later acted as a stimulus to observe and write up a "concrete event" involving such "trust."
In summary, by participating in a setting with an eye to making jottings, an ethnographer experiences events as potential subjects for writing. Like any other writer, an ethnographer learns to recognize potential writing material and to see and hear it in terms of written descriptions. Learning to observe in order to make jottings thus is keyed to both the scene and to the page. Ethnographers learn to experience through the senses in anticipation of writing: to remember dialogue and movement like an actor; to see colors, shapes, textures, and spatial relations as a painter or photographer; and to sense moods, rhythms, and tone of voice like a poet. Details experienced through the senses turn into jottings with active rather than passive verbs, sensory rather than analytic adjectives, and verbatim rather than summarized dialogue.
Reflections: Writing and Ethnographic Mahginality
While a primary goal of ethnography is immersion in the life-worlds and everyday experiences of a group of people, the ethnographer inevitably remains in significant ways an outsider to the worlds of those studied. Immersion is not merging; the field researcher who seeks to "get close to" others usually does not become one of these others but rather continues to be a researcher interested in and pursuing research issues, albeit in close proximity to the ordinary exigencies of life that these others experience and react to (see Bittner 1988; Emerson 1987).16 The ethnographer, then, stays at least a partial stranger to the worlds of the studied, despite rL^«,—     —----- ------— -r .i   •    ■ —
36
in the field
writing and ethnographic marginality
37
There were times when I wanted to be free to listen to other individuals talk or to watch their activities, but friends and acquaintances were so "distracting" corn ing up and wanting to talk that I wasn't able to. Also, there was this concern on my part that, as I got to know some of the staff people better, their qualities human bemgs would become so endearing that I was afraid that I would lose my sociological perspective—I didn't want to feel like in studying them, I was exploiting them.
Field researchers respond to these tensions in a variety of ways. Some try to maintain a detached, observational attitude even toward people whom they like and respect, seeking to keep research commitments somewhat separate from personal attachments.17 Others find themselves unable to sustain an invariably watching, distancing stance toward people they are drawn to and toward events which compellingly involve them. These ethnographers then take time out, either implicidy or self-consciously, by not observing and/or writing fieldnotes about selected portions of their field experience while continuing to do so about other portions. And: finally, some ethnographers may decide that the relationships they have formed in the field are more valuable and enduring than any research product, and eventually they come to abandon entirely the project as research activity.
But the ethnographer remains a stranger as long as, and to the extent that, she retains commitment to the exogenous project of studying or understanding the lives of others—as opposed to the indigenous project of simply living a life in one way or another. When living in a village on a long-term basis, the ethnographer may feel drawn into daily, intimate relations as a neighbor or perhaps even as a part of a family. On theses occasions she may participate "naturally"—without a writing orientation or analytic reflection—in ongoing social life. But on other occasions, she participates in local scenes in ways directed toward making observations and collecting data. Here her actions incorporate an underlying commitment to write down and ultimately transform into "data" the stuff and^ nuances of that life. In this way, efforts to observe in order to write about shared experiences and witnessed events induce a distinctive ethno^ graphic stance. In this sense, we can suggest that the ethnographer's strangeness is created and maintained exactly by writing fieldnotes; such notes reflert and r^li?^ t-Ki* ci^^lUr ,-T^~ —— ~_:„--~--ii-- .-- -
hen the fieldworker ceases simply doing what other people are doing n 1 begin5 openly writing about these doings. In this sense, overtly writ-yi jottings is a critical, consequential ethnographic activity, publicly pro-lainiing and reaffirming fieldworkers' research commitments and hence their status as outsiders, as persons in the setting who have clearly deline-ted tasks and purposes that differ from those of members.19 Writing down jottings not only reminds ethnographers of their marginal social standing in settings but creates it as well, increasing immediate feelings of isolation and alienation.
It should come as no surprise, then, that many ethnographers, both tudents and experienced practitioners, feel deeply ambivalent about jottings. Jottings interfere with their interactions with people in the field; they create difficulties in interacting with others while at the same time observing and writing down what is happening. Indeed, students who come back from the field without jottings usually report that taking jottings on the spot would have made others uncomfortable. These students, then, directly experience the distracting, alienating consequences of jotting notes.
Most ethnographers, however, try to balance and juggle these tendencies, sometimes participating without immediate thought about writing down what is occurring, sometimes temporarily withdrawing to some private place to write covert jottings, at other times visibly jotting notes. Several practical writing conflicts arise from these opposing pressures. The inclination to experience daily events either as a "natural" participant or as a researcher shows up in writing as shifts in point of view as well as in varying kinds of details considered significant for inscription. Even where and when to jot notes depends on the persons involvement at a particular moment as a participant or observer. Whether a researcher-as-neighbor in the village and researcher-as-intern on a job, the tension between the present-oriented day-to-day role and the future-oriented ethnographer identity appears in the practical choices in writing both jottings and more complete notes.
In sum, in most social settings writing down what is taking place as it occurs is a strange, marginalizing activity, marking the writer as an observer rather than as a full, ordinary participant. But independently of the
38
in the field
chapter three
be for this reason that some ethnographers try to put writing out of mind entirely by opting for the more fully experiential style of fieldwork. But this strategy puts off rather than avoids the marginalizing consequences of writing, for lived experience must eventually be turned into observations and reduced to textual form.
_
Writing Up Fieldnotes I: From Field to Desk
After hours participating in, observing, and perhaps jotting notes about ongoing events in a social setting, most fieldworkers return to their desks and their computers or typewriters to begin to write up their observations into full fieldnotes. At this point, writing becomes the explicit focus and primary activity of ethnography: momentarily out of the field, the researcher sits down to the task of turning recollections and jottings into detailed written accounts that will preserve as much as possible what she noticed and now feels is significant.
In this chapter, we are concerned with the processes of writing up full fieldnotes; we focus on how ethnographers go about the complex tasks of remembering, elaborating, filling in, and commenting upon fieldnotes in order to produce a full written account of witnessed scenes and events.
At the Desk
Writing up fieldnotes requires a block of concentrated time. Incidents that span a few minutes may take the ethnographer several hours to write up; she tries to recall just who did and said what, in what order, and to put all that into words and coherent paragraphs. Indeed, an ethnographic maxim holds that every hour spent observing requires an additional hour to write up. Over time, fieldworkers evolve a rhythm that balances time spent in the field and time writing notes. In some situations, the field researcher may put a cap on time devoted to observing in order to allow
40
from field to desk
at the desk
41
a substantial write-up period on leaving the field. Limiting time in the field in this way lessens the likelihood that the fieldworker will K u get what happened or become overwhelmed by the prospect of hours of ' ■■ composing fieldnotes. For beginning ethnographers, we recomnimd, when possible, leaving the field after three to four hours in order to lvgiu writing fieldnotes.
In other situations the fieldworker might find it more difficult to withdraw for writing. Anthropologists working in other cultures generally spend whole days observing and devote evenings to writing. Field ie searchers who fill roles as regular workers must put in a full work d n before leaving to write notes. In both cases, longer stretches of obseiva-tion require larger blocks of write-up time and perhaps different strategic for making note-writing more manageable. For example, once having described basic routines and daily rhythms in the first sets of notes, the ethnographer who spends hours in the field may focus subsequent note-* on significant incidents that occurred throughout the day. At this stage longer periods spent in the field may in fact prove advantageous, allowing greater opportunities for observing incidents of interest.
Alternatively, the field researcher with regular workday responsibilities may find it useful to designate certain hours for observing and taking jottings, giving priority to these observations in writing up full fieldnotes Varying these designated observation periods allows exploration of different patterns of activity throughout the day. Of course, while using this strategy, the fieldworker should still write notes on important incident^ that occur at other times.
Perhaps more crucial than how long the ethnographer spends in the field is the timing of writing up fieldnotes. Over time, people forget and simplify experience; notes composed several days after observation tend to be summarized and stripped of rich, nuanced detail. Hence we strongly encourage researchers to sit down and write full fieldnotes as soon as possible after the day's (or night's) research is done.
Writing fieldnotes immediately after leaving the setting produces fresher, more detailed recollections that harness the ethnographer's involvement with and excitement about the day's events. Indeed, writing notes immediately on leaving the field offers a way of releasing the weight of what the researcher has just experienced. It is easier to focus one's thoughts and energies on the taxing work of reviewing, remembering, and writing. In contrast, those who put off writing fieldnotes report that
with the passage of time the immediacy of lived experience fades and writing fieldnotes becomes a burdensome, even dreaded experience.
Often, however, it is impossible for an ethnographer to find time to write up notes immediately upon leaving the field. Long or late hours, for example, may leave him too tired to write notes. Under these circumstances, it is best to get a good night's sleep and turn to writing up first thing in the morning. Sometimes even this is impossible: a village event may last through several days and nights, confronting the anthropological researcher with a choice between sleeping outside with the villagers or taking time out periodically to sleep and write notes.
Whether written immediately or soon after returning from the site, the fieldworker should go directly to computer or typewriter, not talking with intimates about what happened until full fieldnotes are completed. Such "what happened today" talk can rob note-writing of its psychological immediacy and emotional release; writing the day's events becomes a stale recounting rather than a cathartic outpouring.1
Ethnographers use a variety of different means to write up full notes. While the typewriter provided the standard tool for many classic ethnographers, some handwrote their full notes on pads or in notebooks. Contemporary ethnographers strongly prefer a computer with a standard word processing program. Typing notes with a word processing program not only has the advantage of greater speed (slow typists will soon notice substantial gains in speed and accuracy), but also allows for the modification of words, phrases, and sentences in the midst of writing without producing messy, hard-to-read pages. And fieldnotes written on the computer are easily reordered; it is possible, for example, to insert incidents or dialogue subsequently recalled at the appropriate place. Finally, composing with a word processing program facilitates coding and sorting fieldnotes as one later turns to writing finished ethnographic accounts.
The researcher who has been in the field for a long period and has limited time immediately afterward for writing full fieldnotes has several alternatives. First, he may make extensive, handwritten jottings about the day's events, relying on the details of these notes to postpone writing full fieldnotes, often for some time.2 Secondly, she may dictate fieldnotes into a tape recorder. One can "talk fieldnotes" relatively quickly and can dictate while driving home from a field setting. But while dictation preserves vivid impressions and observations immediately on leaving the field, dictated notes eventually have to be transcribed, a time-consuming, expen-
42 from field to desk
—
sive project. And in the meantime, the field researcher does not have ready access to these dictated notes for review or for planning her next steps in the field.
In summary, beginning ethnographers should not be surprised to experience deep ambivalence in writing fieldnotes. On the one hand, after a long, exciting, or draining stint in the field, writing up notes may seem a humdrum, extra burden; on the other hand, writing fieldnotes nuy bring expressive release and reflective insight. Having seen and heard in triguing, surprising things all day long, the fieldworker is finally able >-(> sit down, think about, and relive events while transforming them into a permanent record. Writing fieldnotes may bring on an outpouring of thoughts and impressions as the writer reviews and re-experiences the excitement and freshness of the day's events.
Stance and Audience in Writing Fieldnotes
Sitting down to write full fieldnotes involves a turning away from the field scene toward "getting it down on the page," toward the worlds of research and writing. In making this turn, the field researcher does not grapple simply with what to write down; she also decides how she is going to present and convey what she has seen and observed. While some of these decisions are relatively straightforward, others are more implicit, ■>■■! arising from the particular stance adopted in writing fieldnotes, that is, from the author's orientation toward and attitudes about the topic 01 people studied. Whether her stance is primarily influenced by a theoretical position within a discipline or by her personal, moral, and politu.i! commitments, the ethnographer expresses this fundamental stance in a distinctive tone which can be heard and sensed in specific writing chutes throughout her fieldnotes.
At a fundamental level, a researcher's stance in fieldwork and note ■ writing originates in his outlook on life. Prior experience, training, and commitments influence the fieldworker's stance in writing notes; these influ-ences predispose him to feel, think, and act toward people in more or less patterned ways. Whether it be from a particular gender, social, cultural, or intellectual position, the fieldworker not only interacts and respond-to people in the setting from that orientation but also writes his fieldnol es by seeing and framing events accordingly. The effects of this fundamental stance appear in fieldnote writing in subtle ways: these range from how
stance and audience 43
■: he identifies with (or distances himself from) those studied and thus writes about them sympathetically (or not), to the kinds of local activities which (jtaw his attention and result in more detailed descriptions, to the way he prioritizes and frames certain topics and thus writes more fully about any events he sees as relevant.
By self-consciously recognizing his fundamental orientation, the fieldworker may be able to write fieldnotes that highlight and foreground issues and insights made available by that orientation. This recognition may also make him more sensitive to the ways his orientation shapes key interactions with others. For example, in writing up fieldnotes about a school for gays and lesbians, one heterosexual male often wrote about the ways students pressed him to reveal his sexual orientation and watched for his responses to their jokes and teasing. But an openly identified gay male researcher in the same field-site became sensitive to how students "sexualized" stories about their experiences as they constructed gay identities in everyday talk. Indeed, he then began to ask and write about students' talk about sexual activities, as in the following fieldnote:
"Wait," I said, internipting his story. "Where was this?" "Over by Circus Books," Adam said. "And what was he doing?" I asked as I leaned forward smiling slighdy. "He was cruising," Adam said. . . . "What's that?" I asked. . . . "It's a meeting place," answered John. "And this is at a bookstore," I said sounding a bit confused. "Yeah," they both said reassuringly.
The more the field researcher acknowledges those factors influencing his fundamental stance toward people in the setting, the more he can examine and use the insights and appreciations opened up by this stance in fieldnote writing. Furthermore, he can better guard against any overriding, unconscious framing of events—for example, by avoiding evaluative wording or by focusing on members' views of events.
As fieldwork progresses, the researcher's stance toward people and issues may change. As she learns through interactions with individuals in the setting to look at activities, events, and issues in new ways, she may adjust her prior views and reorient herself vis-a-vis others. Having readjusted her stance toward people in the setting, she will more frequently write fieldnotes in ways which not only highlight members' views but which also reveal her ongoing resocialization. Over time, a fieldworker's personal views and theoretical commitments often change; her stance in writing fieldnotes shifts as she more frequently comes to see and respond to events as members do.
44
from field to desk
stance and audience
45
Another key component determining the stance expressed in written fieldnotes is intended or likely audience. How a field researcher writes about observed events is linked to often unacknowledged assumptions about whom he is writing for. We first consider anticipated actual readers and then turn to the subde but significant relevance of more diffusely envisioned audiences.
Under most circumstances, a researcher writes fieldnotes immediately for herself as a future reader. This absence of an actual reader allows the researcher to write in relaxed and shifting styles, moving from stance to stance, from audience to audience without worrying (at that point) about consistency or coherence. In this sense, fieldnotes should be written "loosely" and flowingly. If and when fieldnotes are shown to another reader—usually in a more comprehensive paper or article—the field researcher can at this time take control of this process; she can select, focus, and edit any notes before making them available to others. As future reader of her own fieldnotes, the researcher anticipates a detailed reading in order to code and analyze the notes for a paper or article.
Fieldnotes are also written differendy depending upon how far in the future the field researcher projects himself as reader. Student field researchers, for example, may write notes for themselves as readers in the near future—e.g., at the end of the quarter or semester when working on a final paper. Experienced ethnographers envision themselves as readers in a more distant future, recognizing that notes should include detail ^ and background sufficient for making sense of them several years hence, when the immediacy of the field experience has faded.
In practice, however, the researcher-writer may have in mind actual readers other than herself. Student researchers in particular must ordinarily submit their fieldnotes to an instructor and write notes for that reader. Similarly, field researchers in team projects (Douglas 1976) will write notes to be read by co-workers and colleagues. Here field researchers may self-consciously write with actual readers in mind, producing accounts explicitly oriented to these others' knowledge and concerns. One common effect of writing with such readers in mind is to include more details of background and context to make fieldnotes more accessible. The ethnographer should nonetheless try to maintain a loose, flow-
pher's stance in writing fieldnotes involves trying to convey something about the world she has observed to outside audiences made up of those who are unfamiliar with that world. In this sense fieldnotes are ultimately intended for outsiders of one sort or another. Indeed, it is in this respect that fieldnotes differ from a personal diary: fieldnotes are not merely the personal reactions of the writer, intended to heighten self-awareness and self-insight; they are more fundamentally accounts framed and organized to be read by some other, wider audience.
Many ethnographers envision and write for a professional audience, forming their fieldnotes with eventual publication in mind. These sorts of notes may need some polishing and smoothing, but the writing is intended to be comprehensible to other professionals who are unfamiliar with the people and customs being written about. To the extent that the researcher-writer is self-conscious about writing for an ultimate, broader audience, notes will be richer; they will provide more background, context, and detail.
This is not to say that fieldnotes in "raw" form would be immediately comprehensible to professional or other outside readers. Fieldnotes are an accumulating body of writings in which the sense of later portions will depend upon what has been written earlier. People or events described in earlier notes, for example, need not be described in later ones. And indeed, just who the people are in particular incidents may not be evident to outside readers because of abbreviated names and lack of socially identifying information.5 Only with filling in and contextualizing would such a fieldnote actually become comprehensible to someone other than the writer. Thus, accumulating fieldnote entries have an open-endedness which allows for new information and insights and an unfinished in-progress quality which calls for editing later on.
In writing fieldnotes most ethnographers probably shift between self and professional others as envisioned future audiences. When writing in the first person about one's own direct involvement in field events or when reflecting on one's emotional reactions or intuitions about next steps to take in the field, for example, the ethnographer may assume that these accounts will only be read by and hence need only to be comprehensible to oneself. In contrast, when writing up an event that was deeply
46
from field to desk
the process of writing up
47
ened salience when the field researcher self-consciously prepares texts for wider audiences. For writing fieldnotes involves a series of intrii >h* moment by moment choices in abstracting and processing experience. 1 These choices involve not only what to look at and perhaps jot down-but also for whom and hence how to write up full fieldnotes. For student r'i ethnographers, this audience is usually an instructor who reads and comments on fieldnotes, although more ultimate audiences—e.g., proti sional readers in one's own discipline—may also have an influence even it this point. These intended and anticipated audiences and the theoretical commitments they reflect linger as an influential presence over every ethnographers shoulder.
In that initial writing, the field researcher concentrates on a remembered scene more than on words and sentences. Focusing too soon on words produces an internal "editor" that distracts attention from the evoked scene and stops the outpouring of envisioned memory. The goal is to get as much down on paper in as much detail and as quickly as possible, holding off any evaluation and editing until later. As one student commented at one point in her process for writing up notes: "I might just type this in and go back later on and decide that's not exactly how I wanted to word that or that's not exactly the way that I was feeling at that time, but for now, I just like to get them down and then go back over."
In writing up, ethnographers strike a balance between describing fully and getting down the essentials of what happened. As one student said strueerlina to describe an inci
The Process of Writing Up
At first glance, writing up may appear to be a straightforward process to the fieldworker. It may seem that with sufficient time and energy, she can simply sit down and record her observations with little attention to her writing process. While having enough time and energy to get her memories on the page is a dominant concern, we suggest that the fieldworker can benefit by considering several kinds of writing choices. In this section we discuss "purposes and styles," "recalling in order to write," "turning jottings into full fieldnotes," "multiple voices and points of view," and "reaf-time and end-point descriptions" as these influence the process of writing.
Multiple Purposes and Styles
Ethnographers have multiple purposes in writing their fieldnotes, and these aims shape their choices and styles of writing.6 The most urgent purpose is to record experiences while they are still fresh. Thus ethnographers write hurriedly, dashing words "down on the page"; their notes read like an outpouring, not like polished, publishable excerpts. Knowing that a memorable event fades and gets confused with following ones as time passes, a fieldworker writes using whatever phrasing and organiza-. tion seems most accessible, convenient, and do-able at the time. She need not worry about being consistent, and she can shift from one style, one topic, one thought to another, as quickly as the fingers can type.
Here I'm going to stop and go back later because I know what I'm trying to say but it isn't coming out. ... So there's a little more to it than that, but I have to think about how to say it, so I'm just going to leave it. When I write my field-notes, I just try to get it all down and I go back through and edit, take time away from it and then come back and see if that's really what I meant to say or if I could say that in a better way, a clearer way.
Fieldworkers may write down all the words that come to mind and later choose a more evocative and appropriate wording. Many writers produce a first round quickly, knowing that they will make additions, polish wording, or reorganize paragraphs at some other time. Thus, in that first rush of writing, finding the absolutely best word or phrase to persuade a future audience should not be of such concern that it slows down the flow of getting words to paper.
All in all, while ethnographers develop a variety of styles and strategies for writing fieldnotes, we encourage initial writing that is as spontaneously organized as conversation about a day's experiences, with changes in topic and focus that reflect shifts in the writers attention; as varied in language and sentence patterns as the voices of individual speakers; and as unevenly and loosely phrased as the hurried flow of writing dictates. Such writing sounds quite unpolished because fieldnotes in-the-making are not yet edited for readers.
After "getting it down" ethnographers can give more attention to other purposes for writing fieldnotes. After finishing a day's entry, a fieldworker may quickly reread what he has written, fining in with additional phrases and comments as he does so.7 Such additions may describe
48
from field to desk
an experience as fully as possible; reflect on and express the field researcher's sense of the meaning or import of that experience; or self-consciously try to persuade an envisioned, future reader to see that experience in a particular way.
These different purposes and additions may produce even more marked stylistic shifts in a set of fieldnotes. Getting it down results in' ,i loose, sporadic flow of writing; reflecting and making sense leads to an entry with comments and questions; imagining an interested reader wh6 wishes to know more encourages longer and more vividly detailed notes.
Recalling in Order to Write
Ethnographers seem to rely upon a few standard ways of recalling ami organizing the day's events when writing full fieldnotes. One strategy is" to trace one's own activities and observations in chronological order, recalling noteworthy events in the sequence in which one observed and experienced them. Another strategy is to begin with some "high point" or an incident or event that stands out as particularly vivid or important, to detail that event as thoroughly as possible, and then to consider in some topical fashion other significant events, incidents, or exchanges. Or the ethnographer may focus more systematically on incidents related to specific topics of interest in order to recall significant events. Often ethnographers combine or alternate between strategies, proceeding back and forth over time in stream of consciousness fashion.
As emphasized in the previous chapter, field researchers do not always produce abbreviated, jotted accounts of what happened in a setting prior to sitting down to write full fieldnotes. Under these circumstances, recalling witnessed events for writing begins from memory alone. Here the ethnographer may simply pick some starting place—a key incident, the beginning of her day in the field—and begin writing. Or she may start by reviewing the day, event by event, and make decisions at each point as to whether this or that is noteworthy. Finally, in beginning the writing-up session, the fieldworker may employ any of these procedures to develop a listing or outline of events and topics to be covered.
Writing fieldnotes from jottings (or from a listing of topics developed in preparation for writing) may follow a different course. Particularly if the jottings are extensive, they can be used to organize the fieldnotes: the fieldworker simply turns to the start of that day's jottings and moves
the process of writing up
49
through in the order recorded, filling in and making connections between ' tted segments on the basis of memory. In this sense, jottings anchor the writing process, providing a link back to the field. Ethnographers thus rc.fy upon key words and phrases from their jottings to jog their memories. The issue, however, is not simply that, with jottings to rely on, fieldworkers can remember "everything." Rather, they can feel more secure about their ability to recall and to write about those scenes they found noteworthy while in the field.
Turning Jottings into Full Fieldnotes
producing full fieldnotes from jottings is not a mechanical process. The fieldworker must construct something out of these bits and pieces of information together with the recollections of events, incidents, and experiences they inspire. The description that results must make sense as a logical, sensible series of incidents and experiences, even if only to an audience made up of the fieldworker herself.
In writing fieldnotes from jottings, the ethnographer moves back and forth between these jottings and the fuller, richer recollection of the events that occurred. To appreciate these processes, note the contrasts in content, texture, and comprehensibility between the initial jottings and the full fieldnotes concerning the court hearing on a requested temporary restraining order in the landlord-tenant dispute.
Jottings:8
[case number] Snow, Marcia Thomas
atty
■ AIDS Mike Murphy legal guardian
are you prepared to proceed against the one individual — (both) massive doses of chemother(apy) I don't think he's ever going to come in
here
I know he's well enough to walk — came in (returned heater) — when?
s
50 from field to desk i
you can caii his doctor at UCLA and -\
he can verify all this
I just don't call people on the
telephone — courts don't operate that way — it has to be on paper or (in person)
Mr. M returned my heaters — was walking
Let me be clear
You dont want to proceed against only one of these individuals? I want to proceed against (no, but) — if he is his guardian both — but
unravel it
Dept 10 —J(udge) Berkoff Ms. S, hold on just a
Full Fieldnotes:
Marcia Snow has longish, curly, dark brown hair, in her 20s, dressed informally in blue blouse and pants. No wedding ring, but with a youngish looking guy with glasses. Robert Thomas is in his 40s, light brown hair, shaggy mustache, jacket with red-black checked lining.
Judge begins by asking RT if he has an atty; he does, but he is not here. He explains that his business partner, Mike Murphy, who is also named in the TR.O, is not here today; he has AIDS, and is very ill. "I'm his legal guardian," so I can represent his concerns. J asks MS: "Are you prepared to proceed against the one individual?" MS answers that she wants the order against both of them. RT then explains that MM has had AIDS for three years, has had "massive doses of chemotherapy," and adds: "I don't think he's ever going to come in here." J asks MS if from what she knows that MM is this sick. MS hesitates, then says: "I know he's well enough to walk." I saw him walking when he returned the heaters that they stole. J: When was this? (I can't hear her answer.) RT: He's had AIDS for three years. He's very sick. "You can call his doctor at UCLA and he can verify this." J: "I just don't call people on the telephone: Courts don't operate that way. It has to be on paper" or testified to in person. RT repeats that MM is very ill, that he has to take care of him, and he is not getting better. But MS again counters this, saying again: "Mr. Murphy returned my heaters—he was walking then. . . ."
J then iooks to MS, asking: "Let me be clear—you don't want to proceed against only one of these individuals?" MS: "No, I want to proceed against both. But if he is his guardian," then I can go ahead today with it. J agrees to this, saying he will let another judge "unravel it," and assigns the case to Dept. 10, Judge Berkoff. MS and RT turn to leave, but J says: "Ms. Snow, hold on just a minute until the clerk has your file." MS waits briefly, then gets file and goes out with the guy with her.
the process of writing up 51
Compared to the highly selected, partial, and abbreviated jottings, the full fieldnotes tell a coherent, step-by-step story of what was observed in the courtroom. Most of this story consists of details that have been filled in from memory. The brief "background" of the case provided by the jottings, for example, has been fleshed out into relatively full descriptions of the two litigants (but not of the judge or other regular courtroom personnel). In addition, the notes tell a story about one specific topic—the problems arising from the absence of a co-defendant, the questions the judge raises about this absence, and a sequence of responses to this problem by the petitioner and defendant. The story, however, is missing key elements (for example, the fact that this case involves a tenant-landlord dispute) and contains elements of unknown meaning (for example, Mar-cia's comment about how the absent defendant "returned the heaters that they stole").
Also consider the handling of direct quotations in moving from jottings to fieldnotes. Only those words actually taken down at the time are placed in quotes; a portion of the direct speech missed at the time is paraphrased outside the direct quotes. Thus, the jotted record of the judge's remark, "it has to be on paper or (in person)" is written in field-note form as: '"It has to be on paper' or testified to in person." As a general practice, speech not written down word for word at the time should either be presented as indirect quotation or paraphrased (see chapter 4).
In general, writing fieldnotes from jottings is not a straightforward remembering and fining in; rather, it is a much more active process of constructing relatively coherent sequences of action and evocations of scene and character (see chapter 4). In turning jottings and headnotes into full notes, the fieldworker is already engaged in a sort of preliminary analysis whereby she orders experience, both creating and discovering patterns of interaction. This process involves deciding not simply what to include but also what to leave out, both from remembered headnotes and from items included in jottings. Thus, in writing full fieldnotes, the ethnographer may clearly remember or have jottings about particular incidents or impressions but decide for a variety of reasons not to incorporate them into the notes. The material may seem to involve matters that are peripheral to major activities in the setting, that members appear to find insignificant, or that the ethnographer has no interest in.
However, in continuing to write up the day's fieldnotes or at some later point in the fieldwork, the ethnographer may see significance in
52
from field to desk
jottings or headnotes that initially seemed too unimportant or uninterest-ing to include in full fieldnotes. The student ethnographer who, in writ-ing full notes, had initially passed over a jotting about the "delivery of three new bags of sand" to the sandbox at a Headstart Program (chapter 2) saw relevance and meaning in this incident as she continued to write up and reflect on the day's observations:
Now that I'm thinking back, when we got the sand, it was a really hot day so that actually that jotting did help me remember because it was so warm out that Karen, the teacher, said that the children could take their shoes off in the sand box. This became a really tough rule to enforce because the children aren't al-lowed to have shoes off anywhere else. They would just run out of the sand box and go into the parking lot and so it was a really tough rule to enforce. And I have an incident about that.
In the comments made here, the student comes to appreciate (and construct) a linkage between the three new bags of sand included in her jottings and what she sees as significant issues of rule enforcement and ": control in the setting; with this appreciation, she decides to incorporate the delivery of the sand as an incident in her notes. Moreover, this focus on enforcement and control leads her to review her memory for "relevant" events or "incidents"; here she recollects "an incident about that," signaling her intent to write up this incident in her notes.
In light of the ways "significance" shifts and emerges in the course of writing notes and thinking about their import, we encourage students to write about as many of these "minor" events as possible, even if they seem insubstantial or only vaguely relevant at the moment. They may signal important processes relevant to other incidents or to emerging analytic themes in ways the ethnographer may only appreciate at some later point. Even when writing the story of one rather cohesive event, writers should include apparendy tangential activities and comments, for they may turn out to provide key insights into the main action.
Multiple Voices and Points of View
In writing fieldnotes, an ethnographer not only remembers and envisions a scene; he also presents that scene from a selected angle which highlights some of its features more than others. This angling results in part from theoretical concerns of the researcher's discipline; it also results in part
the process of writing up
53
8,
1
_ !
£-0m the nature of his participation in the field—for example, from his inevitably selective positioning and from identifying with certain members' experiences. In writing, the ethnographer thus reconstructs memo-—es,—-prompted by jottings and headnotes—which privilege certain observational perspectives and certain members' experiences over others.
The selective tendencies of field participation and memory construction are supplemented by the fact that ethnographers, like all writers recounting events, must unavoidably tell their story through a particular "point of view." By convention, "point of view" refers to the written perspective on events, i.e., through whose eyes events are seen as well as through whose voice they are described. Point of view refers to the perspective through which the story gets told, through whose view the characters, actions, setting, and events will be presented to the reader. Although authors have developed varied and complex ways to tell a story, the most general distinctions are between first-person, third-person, and omniscient points of view (Abrams 1988:144-48).
The First-person Point of View
A first-person mode "limits the point of view to what the first-person narrator knows, experiences, infers, or can find out by talking with other characters" (Abrams 1988:146). In fieldnotes, the first-person "I" telling the story is the ethnographer himself. Since this perspective most readily encourages the writer to recount his own experiences, responses, and commentary as well as the actions and talk of others, we suggest that an ethnographer often write in the first person. In writing fieldnotes in the first person, the researcher presents the details he saw, experienced, and now remembers from his own perspective and in his own voice.
Writing in the first person is particularly effective when the ethnographer is also a member of the group she is studying. Seeing incidents through her eyes allows us to see an insider's view of actions, as filtered through her concerns as an ethnographer. In addition, the first-person point of view allows the ethnographer to present the natural unfolding of experience as seen from her participant's viewpoint.
The following fieldnote, written in the first person, illustrates these qualities. In this excerpt, an observer employed in an upscale eyeglass establishment recounts an upsetting incident of sexual harassment by one of the owners of the store:
64
from field to desk
the process of writing up
55
About halfway through the day, I am standing in the front section with Richard, one of the owners, and A], the manager, who's on door duty. I reach down to get a sunglass to try on and say, "Oooo, these are great," as I pull out the plastic stop-sign shaped frames. Richard mutters something like "no" to tell me that they wont be good on me. I notice that they are Lunettes, the manufacturer of WO glasses, and am surprised that I've never seen these and that Richard is so quick to judge the result. I put them on and ask Richard, "What do you think?" He looks at me and says, "You've got really great tits, don't you." I think he has said, "You've got really great taste, don't you," so I say, "Yeah, these are great," as I look at myself in the mirror. (I also believe that when I don't have my glasses on and I can't see, that I also cannot hear. I have reconstructed Richard's words as he said them, from his next clarifying statement, and did not just put in my interpretation.) I look at Richard. He says, "They're really great tits." I utter a low "Huh?" (I now go back to his first statement in my mind, and understand that I had misheard his suggestion of my great taste in eyeglasses. Maybe on some level I heard him correctly the first time, but recast it as something else; denial restores equilibrium.) He continues, "Really firm and high—really firm," gesturing at this point with his hands like he's feeling breasts. I am stunned and cross my arms across my chest. (I did this unconsciously, as it wasn't until Richard's next line that I had realized I had done this gesture of protection.) He continues, "You cover yourself up." He folds his arms: "Never seen you get shy before." He then puffs up his chest as if to strut (as if to show me what I usually do, or what he expects me to usually do). "That's not appropriate," I say softly.
By writing in the first person, this ethnographer not only can present what the offender, Richard, said and what she said and did in response; but also she can reveal how she felt and thought about her experience: "I am stunned. . . ." In this instance of abusive remarks inserted into an otherwise innocuous conversation, the ethnographer's expression of her feelings of withdrawal and self-protection reveal, more fully than any mere record of his words ever could have, how truly distasteful and offensive his remarks were to her. Were it written in the third person, the fieldnote would have lost her insider's view—her inner thoughts and feelings changing as the incident unfolded. Nor would the fieldnote have revealed the way the owner's insistence in repeating the offensive remark transforms her earlier hearing of the comment and causes her "to cross my arms across my chest" in a "gesture of protection." This insistent repetition accentuates and makes the offensiveness of these remarks pointed and unescapable.
Moreover, by using the first person, the fieldnote can portray both the author's experience as a member and her reflections as a writing ethnographer. For example, she reconstructs and presents her experience of sexual harassment so that we see how she initially experienced it as a salesperson
tiilking to the store owner—mishearing him to say, "You have great taste," a remark more appropriate to their work relationship and to presenting glasses to customers. But we also hear her commentary on her experience, inserted in an aside as she writes the fieldnote, on why she initially misheard his offensive comment: "Maybe on some level I heard Jiim correctly the first time, but recast it as something else; denial restores equilibrium."
The Third-person Point of View
Although such first-person fieldnotes allow the researcher to express her thoughts and feelings well, the primary aim of ethnography is to describe what others are doing and saying. Writing in the third-person point of view is particularly effective for conveying others' words and actions. We suggest that the ethnographer write many of his fieldnotes from this perspective to report what he sees others doing and saying.
Writing fieldnotes from the third-person point of view does not demand that the writer entirely avoid first-person pronouns or invariably absent herself from her fieldnotes. Within primarily third-person field-note accounts of others, the writer can include herself as a participant-observer in the scene and insert her own responses in first-person asides, bor example, in observing and participating in the mukanda rituals (initiations for boys) in Kabompo District, Northwest Province of Zambia, Rachel Fretz often wrote fieldnotes which described the activities of others.9 These descriptions are primarily third-person accounts, though she occasionally inserts her first-person perspective. In the following excerpt, for example, she looks out at what others are doing and occasionally inserts "I" statements in recounting moments of active participation and in describing her responses.
That afternoon we heard the women and children hollering as though a lyishi had come and we [another researcher and I] ran down [to the center of the village] with our cameras. It was Kalulu, the rabbit mask. He is a small, lithe figure dressed in a grass skirt and grass shirt around his neck. On his arms and legs he wears the usual fiber costume, a net-like fitted body "overall," and his mask is a small red and white painted face with two large cloth ears. He calls out a nasalized, "Wha, wha." It sounds like a child's cry. He hopped around the yard and half-ran toward the children. Then the Headman told the women to dance with him; so D, his daughter, called some women and children together and they turned their backs toward the Rabbit, Kalulu, and sang and danced. . . . Now and then Kalulu rather listlessly chased a woman or child. And then all of a sudden, he used his small
66 from field to desk
switch and ran right up to a girl and switched her. The children ran away shrieking and the Rabbit ran over to J's house. Shortly it came back.
And then it seems that the Headman called John over and gave him some directions because after that John went and found Kianze, the eight-year-old girl who lives with N (she's her grandchild) and grabbed her firmly by the arm and held on and dragged her screaming over toward Kalulu, the Rabbit, who reached to catch her.
She ran screaming in the other direction and John went after her again and grabbed her and pulled her toward the Rabbit. Kianze, looking over her shoulder, seemed thoroughly terrified and screamed and screamed with tears running down her face. (I felt horrified as I watched.) This time the Rabbit swatted her and she ran still screaming into her house. And the mask ran after her and entered the house. But she managed, I was told later, to hide under a bed.
Then, Kalulu ran after Jinga and he caught her and picked her up in his arms. Jinga screamed too, but she did not seem so terrified and did not cry. Someone said later that N [her grandmother] yelled at him to get her back, for the mask had started to carry her down the path toward the mukanda camp.
Around this time, I noticed that Ana [the other young girl] had disappeared, (Someone said she ran out into the bush and hid.) It seemed the Rabbit thought she was hiding in her house, for he started to chase her mother, Nyana, who ran swiftly into the house and slammed the door shut. Since it was a solid wooden door which she held shut, the Rabbit could not push it open. ...
(Truly, Kalulu Rabbit is a trickster who plays and dances and then turns on people.) The next day I asked John why he grabbed Kianze and Jinga; he said it was because they were supposed to go to school, but that they just left home but did not actually go into the school every day. After a while, the mask ran off down the mukanda path and I went home, still shocked by the mask's treatment of the two girls.
Although the ethnographer in writing these fieldnotes focuses primarily on others—the masked dancer, the screaming girls, the grandmother—she occasionally includes her responses to the frightened girls as "I" remarks inserted within her description. Had she quoted the outcries of the young girls and of the grandmother calling for someone to rescue her granddaughter, she could have augmented the sense of seeing the chase from a more immediate, close-up position. However, since she was doing her research in the Chokwe language in a multilingual area and these particular people were speaking Lunda and Luvale, she could not provide direct quotes. Thus, her descriptions report their actions, screams, and what others speaking Kichokwe told her. Indeed, ethnographers should only write what they actually see and hear others do and say; they should write as reported speech what others repeat to them. ,,
the process of writing up 57
When an ethnographer tracks closely the activities of one person for a period of time, he can write from a focused third-person perspective in which he limits his descriptions to what that member saw, did, and said. Field researchers may self-consciously write from the point of view of a person direcdy involved in the scene or action. They may do so by describing an event from that person's actual physical location, by selecting details the person seems to notice, and by including the person's own words describing the event. For example, in telling about a fight between parents from the child's point of view, a writer might not only narrate using many of the child's words but also describe only those details a child might notice, such as the loud voices, tiireatening movements, and the large size of those fighting. Though the researcher might make inferences about thoughts and feelings, he would base them on observable facial expressions, gestures, and talk, and describe these from the child's perspective.
Use of the focused third person in writing often enables the field researcher to more fully sense an individual member's outlook and to pursue questions and issues of interest to that person. For example, while studying traditional healing methods in an African culture, the researcher might track the activities of a healer for a day: going with him to make his medicines, sitting beside him as he treats his patients, and resting with him after his duties (cf. Yoder 1982). By staying closely involved in one member's activities and then describing what that person pays attention to, does, and says, the ethnographer is more likely to get a sense of his perspective. However, the researcher should not attribute motives or try to depict what the healer is thinking; rather, the writer limits her fieldnotes to what she observed the healer do and actually heard him say. Indeed, verbatim quoting, along with accompanying gestures and facial expressions, is one of the most effective means of portraying a person's views.
Clearly, the field researcher who actually takes different observational positions and participates empathetically with different people can more effectively write from different focused third-person perspectives and document the multiple voices in the setting.10 For example, in writing notes on a check-out line in a grocery store, the fieldworker might describe activities, at different times, from the position and perspective of the checker, the bagger, a customer being served, and customers waiting in line. Members' voices and views most clearly are heard by faithfully recording their accounts and dialogues.
58 from field to desk
The Omniscient Point of View
An ethnographer can also write in the third person but adopt an omniscient point of view. In this point of view a writer assumes "privileged access to the characters' thoughts and feelings and motives, as well as to their overt speech and action" (Abrams 1988:145). Ethnographers who write from this point of view use an "objective" tone and style to report events as "realist tales" (Van Maanen 1988). In adopting this all-knowing stance, the writer can freely move from one time and place to another and readily shift between characters. Indeed, with an omniscient perspective a. writer may describe not only characters' observable movements and talk but also their innermost thoughts, feelings, and motivations. And because this point of view positions the writer as a detached observer above or outside events, she then can depict characters and actions with near-divine insight into prior causes and ultimate outcomes.
Had the fieldworker studying mukanda rituals in Zambia taken an omniscient perspective, she would have recounted the intense and frenzied dancing, druniming, and singing of the whole village throughout the prior night. Then she might have described the feelings of the young boys—perhaps fear and excitement—waiting to be rushed at dawn into the camp for circumcision. Certainly, the masked figure dancing to the dmrnrning would also have drawn her attention, and she would have described his raffia costume and the black-and-red decorations on the mask. From her unlimited perspective, she also might have described the circumcision taking place in the boy's camp out in the bush, with the fathers, brothers, and uncles attending. (Her descriptions of this gender-delineated, all-male place would have had to be based on interviews.) Next, she might have turned to the mothers, other women, and children, back in the village, to report not only the singing and the ritual pouring of water on the mothers' heads, but also to describe their thoughts— whether nervousness or joy—as they waited to hear from the camp leader that their sons had been successfully circumcised.
This ethnographer, of course, did not actually write her fieldnotes in such an omniscient manner, although she did describe many of these ritual actions as she saw them or as others reported them to her. Indeed, it would have been practically impossible to have written an omniscient account of every aspect without having devoted many hours to interviewing people about events she was unable to witness directly and about their thoughts and feelings about these matters. Moreover, an interaction-
the process of writing up 59
ist and interpretive stance generally militates against using an omniscient perspective in writing fieldnotes. An omniscient style produces fieldnotes that: merge the ethnographer's participatory experience with reports from others; conceal the complex processes of uncovering the varied understandings of what an event is about; reduce and blend multiple perspectives into accounts delivered in a single, all-knowing voice; and ignore the highly contingent interpretations required to reconcile and/or prioritize competing versions of the event."
Combining and Varying Points of View
Regardless of the point of view assumed in writing fieldnotes, conscientious ethnographers always keep their writing circumscribed by what they saw and heard, sticking to actual details they witnessed and to actual accounts they received. Thus, whether the author takes a first-person, a third-person, or an omniscient point of view, the writing inevitably comes from that ethnographer's experience; she inevitably represents her knowledge and understanding of others' experiences. But the degree to which the researcher becomes involved in people's doings implicitly shapes the perspective from which she can write about some incidents. Involvement allows the writer to write from a "near" perspective and to present details as seen by a member and, by quoting, to present a member's voice. In contrast, even when writing in the first person, a physically or emotionally "distant" perspective often results in more generalized descriptions presented in a reportorial tone of voice.
Fieldnotes can also move from one perspective to another, in part because the researcher constantly shifts her attention between self and others. Fieldnotes should balance sensitivity to people's experiences of events with self-conscious awareness of the observer's own perceptions and reactions to these others. This shifting back and forth readily shows up in changing voices and points of view.
On the one hand, the field researcher attends to and writes about what events mean to members. He gives special attention to routine events that occur frequently in that setting; even if people take these events for granted and show little explicit interest in them, such events occupy a great deal of their time and energy. The ethnographer also attends to issues or incidents that seem of special interest or significance to members; the goal is both to discover what such issues are and to discern the specific meanings that members attach to them. In writing with this intention, the
60
from field to desk
fieldworker often uses a limited third-person point of view and frequently quotes members so that their voices can be heard.
On the other hand, the ethnographer cannot neglect her own involvement in observed scenes, in making the observations, and in writing them up. We expect an ethnographer's presence to be not only seen but heard in the day-to-day descriptions. Thus, the goal is not merely a picture of the daily life and concerns of others, but rather a picture of this life and these concerns as seen, understood, and conveyed by the ethnographer. Here, for example, the ethnographer includes features and occurrences that are unexpected, that stand in contrast with what she is used to, or that generate strong emotional reactions. In writing such fieldnotes, she often writes in the first person because she focuses on her reactions to events and people. Including herself in the interactions, she quotes both herself and others.
In sum, while an ethnographer writes particular segments from a single point of view, the fieldnotes as a whole shift. The fieldworker moves from describing events observed at one position, point in time, and perspective to descriptions constructed from other points of view.
"Real-Time" and "End-Point" Descriptions
In writing descriptive accounts, ethnographers face an additional choice: whether to describe an event "in real time" from a perspective of incomplete or partial knowledge, or to describe it from some end point of more complete knowledge.
In real-time descriptions, the writer seeks to characterize events using only what is known at discrete points as the event unfolds; thus, the writer tries to avoid using information that will ultimately come out but as of yet is not available for describing what happened at those prior moments. By way of illustration, consider the way in which the following description of approaching a skid row mission excludes key meanings until they are actually discovered by the writer:
The whole area around the Mission, including the alley, was dense with people, more so than the surrounding blocks. Probably eighty percent of these people were black; about ninety percent were male. People lay, sat or stood all along the aqua colored walls of the Mission. . . . The people on the left-hand side of the door gave the impression of being in line: they all were standing at fairly uniform distances, and the same people were standing in line throughout the several hours
the process of writing up
61
I was around the Mission. When I later read the Mission's literature, I realized that these people were likely waiting in line for the privilege of spending the night in the Mission. The literature noted that "sleep tickets" were given out at 12:30 pm and that the line formed early. Interesting, there were many more people in back of the Mission in what I perceived to be the lunch line than were in the sleep line.
This real time account preserves the writer's experience of seeing an assemblage of people and not quite knowing what they were doing. That they were "in line" is not initially used to characterize the scene, but is presented as an in-process discovery; some effort is made to specify initial grounds for describing these people as "in line," e.g., "uniform distance," continuity over time. The later discovery of the "purpose" of these activities—to get a "sleep ticket" allowing one to spend the night in the Mission—is explicitly described; only then is this assemblage characterized as "the sleep line."
In contrast, field researchers may also describe events by making full use of what they ultimately came to know and understand about them. This procedure incorporates "facts" or understandings subsequently established in order to describe or characterize what was going on at earlier stages. In describing a formal business meeting in this way, for example, an observer would from the very start of the notes describe participants by name and position, even though she had only come to learn these matters over the course of the meeting.
In general, this procedure for writing about events uses understandings obtained only at some "end point" as a resource for describing what happened at earlier moments. In observing new scenes, we often use what we ultimately come to know to describe events and meanings that we had initially not understood or had understood partially or incorrectly. Indeed, observation involves continuous processes of such retrospective re-interpretation, as the observer shapes into more definitive form what at some earlier point had been hazy, ambiguous, or downright confusing {Garfinkel 1967). Written ethnographic descriptions may also incorporate such retrospective reinterpretations. A fieldworker observing on a bus, for example, may note that a "crazy woman" boarded and talked to the driver.. If this woman's "craziness" only became apparent as she talked to the driver and other passengers, it represents an evaluation inferred from an ongoing course of interaction; to characterize her as "crazy" from her initial appearance in the scene obscures these processes and strips the written account of any consideration of how her disorientation became
62
from field to desk
"writing" and "reading" modes
63
visible to the observer. On the other hand, it might have been that her presenting appearance and initial demeanor made this passenger's "crazi-ness" evident "at a glance" to the fieldworker (and presumably to any culturally competent member of American urban society). In this case to characterize this person as "crazy" right from the start raises an issue of adequate description rather than of retrospective interpretation; "crazy" is a highly evaluative term that should be accompanied by some description of whatever observable features led to such a judgment in the first place. In general, descriptively effective fieldnotes will enable a reader to distinguish initial understandings from retrospective reinterpretations.
Some retrospective reinterpretation of this sort is practically unavoidable. For many purposes, we are not interested either in the initial interpretations an observer made of people based on woefully incomplete information or in just how the observer figured out who and what these people were and what they were doing. Yet there are times and occasions when the field researcher may want to preserve initial understandings— however misguided—and the actual process of determining meaning.
One such occasion is when the ethnographer wants to highlight the natural unfolding of experience. For example, the account of the sexual harassment incident presented earlier in this chapter uses the owner's subsequent comment to reconstruct the writer's actual hearing of his first abusive comment as "what he must have said." This tactic compels the writer to backtrack to explain how such a "mishearing" could have occurred, thus emphasizing the separation and contrast between "what actually occurred" from "what the observer/writer experienced." An alternative would have been to present the incident exactly as experienced: report the owner's first comment as "you've got really great taste, don't you?"; then indicate how his second comment, "you've got great tits" transformed the previous hearing. This descriptive procedure would allow the reader to share the observer's shock in ways that more closely reflect the temporal unfolding of the experience.
An ethnographer may also want to minimize the degree of retrospective reinterpretation in order to highlight his own processes for determining meaning. To return to our earlier example: if a fieldworker were interested in how participants in a business meeting come to figure out who the others present are, then he might focus on describing just how he came to figure out these identities, writing the notes in a way that preserved the initial lack of definiteness in these matters. These descriptive procedures allow the reader to share at least part of the observer/
writer's actual experience of discovering meaning. It also brings the observer/writer to the center of the process of establishing meaning and hence "de-objectivizes" the description; a description of how a "sleep line" outside a skid row mission came to be discovered as such shows the observer/writer to be an active interpreter of the social world.
In summary, whether writing in "real time" in order to reveal the process or in an "end-point" storytelling mode, the writer learns through writing about her experiences. In the process of writing up, an ethnographer assimilates and thereby starts to understand an experience: she makes sense of that moment by intuitively selecting, highlighting, and ordering details and by beginning to appreciate their linkages with or contrasts to previously observed and described experiences. In these respects, writing fieldnotes is more than a process of remembering and getting it down. Rather, writing fieldnotes promotes learning and deepens understanding about what has been seen and heard in the field.12 Especially when learning an entirely unfamiliar way of life, researchers benefit from writing about their experiences, for through writing they learn to understand what may seem, at first, unusual and overwhelming. Indeed, ethnographers often want to write because they realize that writing is a way of seeing, that a lived experience is not only preserved but also is illuminated through writing about it.
Reflections: "Writing" and "Reading" Modes
To characterize fieldnotes as descriptions initially conveys the prospect of simple, straightforward writing. But once we recognize that description involves more than a one-to-one correspondence between written accounts and what is going on, writing fieldnotes raises complex, perplexing problems. Descriptions are grounded on the observer/writer's participation in the setting, but no two persons participate in and experience a setting in exactly the same way. Moreover, there is always more going on than the ethnographer can notice, and it is impossible to record all that can be noticed. Description inevitably involves different theories, purposes, interests, and points of view. Hence, fieldnotes contain descriptions that are more akin to a series of stories portraying slices of life in vivid detail than to a comprehensive, literal, or objective rendering.13
The ethnographer, however, needs to avoid getting drawn into the complexities of fieldnote descriptions while actually writing fieldnotes.
64 from field to desk
She must initially work in a writing mode, putting into words and on paper what has been seen and heard as quickly and efficiently as possible. In this text-producing mode, the ethnographer tries to "get it down" as accurately and completely as possible, avoiding too much self-consciousness about the writing process itself. She stays close to the events at issue-rekindling her excitement about these events, getting on with the task of inscribing them before memory fades. The writing ethnographer tries to "capture what is out there," or more accurately, to construct detailed accounts of her own observations and experience of what is "out there." At: this point, too much reflection distracts or even paralyzes; one tries to write without editing, to produce detailed descriptions without worry about analytic import and connections, to describe what happened without too much self-conscious reflection.
Only subsequently, once a text has actually been produced, can the ethnographer really step back and begin to consider the complexities which permeate fieldnote descriptions; only with fully detailed fieldnotes can the ethnographer adopt a reading mode and begin to reflect on how these accounts are products of his own often implicit decisions about how to participate in and describe events. That is, only with full notes in hand does it make sense to view these writings as texts that are truncated, partial, and perspectival, products of the ethnographer's own styles of participating, orienting, and writing. It is at this point that the ethnographer can begin to treat fieldnotes as constructions, to read them for the ways they create rather than simply record reality.
One key difference between initially working in a writing mode and subsequently in a reflexive reading mode lies in how the ethnographer orients to issues of "accuracy," to "correspondence" between a written account and what it is an account of. In the moment of writing the ethnographer must try to create some close correspondence between tfie written account and his experiences and observations of "what happened." The immediate task in writing fieldnote descriptions is to create a detailed, accurate, and comprehensive account of what has been experienced. But once notes have been written, this correspondence criterion may lose salience. "What happened" has been filtered through the person and writing of the observer onto the written page. The resulting text "fixes" a social reality in place, but in a way that makes it difficult to determine its relationship with realities outside that text. Readers may attempt to do so by invoking what they know from having "been there" or from experience with a similar reality. But readers are heavily con-
"writing" and "reading" modes 65
strained by what is on the page; they usually lack any effective means of gaining access to "what actually happened" independendy of the written account. In such a reading mode, then, self-conscious, self-critical reflection on how writing choices have helped construct specific texts and textual realities becomes both possible and appropriate.