Getting People to Talk on Ethnographic Interviewing

Originally posted 10/13/09 12:40pm:
The Illinois Institute of Technology's Gabe Biller and Kristy Scovel created an introductory video on how to conduct an ethnographic interview. It features Dori Tunstall who teaches Design Ethnography at the University of Illinios Chicago and Colleen Murray of Jump Associates along with a host of IIT folks. We will watch this great video in class. I also want you to watch it a second time by Tue Oct 16th. I found this 33 minute video on the blog http://eskar.dk/andreas/blog/?p=313

You can also learn more about "extreme user research" mentioned in the video.



Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy on Vimeo.

Notes on Writing about C&C Ethnographies

WE ARE LEARNING ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN ETHNOGRAPHER; TO DO ETHNOGRAPHY

Thought I should compile some notes on your C&C essays that you all can learn from. Want to use crowd-sourcing of feedback more often.

1. OVERALL: You should think about what these essays are demonstrating that anthropologists need to learn, do, and think that combats ethnocentrism and what actions did this involve to conduct and write a great ethnography.
2. How does the author use terms (emic explanations) to reveal the native beliefs and core values? How does he use anthropological or etic terms to do the same? What methods did he apply to learn the emic explanations? How effective was he/she?
3. Rather than writing a book report about how YOU reacted to the reading or what you remember about the "story" write about what's being revealed to you about conducting fieldwork, participant-observation and ethnography.
4. Don't waste paper putting the biblography on a separate page and strictly follow the format given.
5. Always refer to authors by their LAST NAME. You will never find a reference to an article by DAVID. No need to add titles like professor or "Dr."

ABOUT SAPIR-WHORF ESSAY BY THOMSON

1. A student wrote: "Not to take these readings literally but I think we should consider the fact that we do make very instinctual decisions as we speak". Consider that this is NOT instinctual but LEARNED. It is cultural not in any way biological. Notice how we even use language AGAINST language when we evoke "biology" (VERY instinctual). This means we didn't learn it. It's in us - like DNA.
2. Here is an exemplar model of description and critical thought: "My attention was captured as I tried to disentangle the "whys" in the way the Bushmen treated /ontah and his deeds. ...How can an ox look like a sac of bones to most villagers and, at the same time, be perceived as the largest, fattest game to "whitey". As I read on, I laughed in confusion....Are the !Kung playing a joke on a poor man?..."Insulting the mean" (http://www/slideshare.net/PaulVMcDowell/kung-san-of-the-kalahari-desert) was a way to prevent a young hunter rom becoming arrogant and dominating. My embarrassment ...was being ethnocentric (Kottak, 37).
3. HERE IS ONE I EDITING ALONG THE WAY: "In chapter 4 of Mirror of Humanity, Kottak writes about how Americans simplify the shades of color from teal, blue-green, hunter green and so on into one label “green” (CITATION MISSING: Kottak, p. ??). There isn’t any difference between the way that so called “advanced civilizations” use language and the way extinct (??? Who said anything about extinct dialects? What are these??) and lesser (Whose language is lesser?? Watch it1 Your ethnocentrism is showing!) used dialects use language. Thus, every language has its own ways of distinguishing the same phenomena; therefore each language is effective (WC—word choice--affective refers to feelings and emotion) for the group of people that use it. [GREAT POINT]
4. Another exemplar model: "Whorf argues that English speakers think in past-present-future (Thomson, 115). Thus, our lives operate accordingly. We hurry to catch the train, the bus or to work. Accurately, we are catching the time that our language teaches us. It can come, pass, or never be back. When we build a building, we measure the progress by designating different stages of being finished on specific days....We think and do any possibilities throught he way we measure time through language (or the way language measures time)....The words we use to describe the world are all we know about it [learned through enculturation and it differs from other cultures--not for better or worse]. Our imagination is also restricted by the lexicon we use (Kottak, 70).

Are these useful and explain why if you can. PLEASE POST A COMMENT for practice.