Notes on ethnographic writing Notes on ethnography & historiography Dr. Linda C.H. LAI

Why ethnography? Ethnography emphasizes The empirical dimension The empirical dimension as social cultural processes The empirical dimension as perceptible details Material culture in the everyday domain and daily routine The making of portraits of human agencies The researcher's being there The accumulation of details to form documents for future interpretation The mediation effect of the tools of observing and recording

Why ethnography? Revisionist views in historiography (the writing of history): The French Annales School: ordinary mass and 'longue duree‘ (long duration) History for differences (Cultural Studies and Media Studies) History from the bottom up (Peter Burke) History of the everyday life (Alf Luedtke): fragments and miniatures The rising importance of narrative theories in historiography: more cross- breeding between history and literature, the shift from documentary model to interpretive model to the making of knowledge premised on the use of language THE PRACTICE OF ETHNOGRAPHY HAS A STRONGER LINKAGE WITH HISTORIOGRAPHY...

Tales of the Field: Writing as a representational form Realist tales: one observes a lot watching…, highlighting the experiential author, documentary style in reporting and interpretive omnipotence Confessional tales: to gain understanding, look at what the practitioners of a field do…; demystifying fieldwork or participant-observation Impressionist tales: to attend to the poetic dimension of a situation in additional to facts and accurate accounting; poetry can be historical, precise, objective; to highlight the episodic, complex, and ambivalent realities often ignored by realist tales

Tales of the Field: Writing as a representational form Critical tales: to account with a Marxist edge, with a concern for representing social structure seen and experienced through the eyes of disadvantaged people… Formal tales: to build, test, generalize, and exhibit theory Literary tales: to explicitly reveal the borrowing of fiction-writing techniques to tell the story; a mixture of a sense of what is noteworthy and a narrative sense Jointly told tales: dialogic and polyphonic authority in fieldwork representations; researcher + researcher // researcher + informer (fieldworker + native)

Tales of the Field: Writing as a representational form Reference: Van Maanen, John (1988): Tales of the Field: on Writing Ethnography. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Multiplicity of visual ethnography Archiving Homes (Kelly Yang and Sylvia Lui) http://archivinghomes.weebly.com/index.html

Multiplicity of visual ethnography Read Chapters 1 + 2: Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography