Ethnographic Fieldwork. Dr. Jan Blommaert
as we shall see.
Prior to fieldwork, several activities are required, and they can be captured under preparation and documentation. Preparation, of course, starts as soon as one begins research, develops an interest in a particular topic or field, and starts working on a proposal and a work plan. You read considerable volumes of theoretically and methodologically informative work, which is invaluable because it directs your gaze to particular aspects of social reality and sharpens your eyes and ears for particular phenomena and events. That is general preparation, and we need not dwell on it here.
But there will be a decision at a given moment that your research will include fieldwork – ethnographic fieldwork. And this decision has far-reaching consequences, because it places your work on a track which has its own requirements and peculiarities: you now have to subscribe to the general epistemological and methodological principles developed in the previous chapter. You have to adopt an ethnographic perspective on your work, and as we saw above, this includes a number of things and excludes a number of others. The result of your research will now not be a body of findings which can claim representativeness for a (segment of the) population, it will not be replicable under identical circumstances, it will not claim objectivity on grounds of an outsider’s position for the researcher, it will not claim to produce ‘uncontaminated’ evidence, and so on. It will be interpretive research in a situated, real environment, based on interaction between the researcher and the subject(s), hence, fundamentally subjective in nature,1 aimed at demonstrating complexity, and yielding hypotheses that can be replicated and tested in similar, not identical, circumstances. Ethnography produces theoretical statements, not ‘facts’ nor ‘laws’. That does not mean that your research will be a game without rules. The rules of ethnographic analysis are as strict and rigorous as those of statistics, and there are more things one can do wrong in ethnographic work than perhaps in any other branch of science.
Your preparation, thus, needs to be rigorous, and it needs to start from a particular way of imagining your object. The object of investigation is always a uniquely situated reality: a complex of events which occurs in a totally unique context – time, place, participants, even the weather, quarrels between the subjects and the ethnographer: you are always working in a series of conditions that can never be repeated. Even if events look completely the same (think of rituals such as religious services), they never are, because they are different events happening at another time.2 So the thing you will investigate will be a particular point in time and space, a microscopic social mechanism: people talking to one another in a village in West Africa, on the 24th of October 2009, a rainy day when Diallo, one of the interlocutors, had a stomach ache which made him flinch every now and then so that the conversation drifted from your favourite topic to that of health and remedies. This is mundane, trivial, seemingly completely irrelevant as a social fact.
It would be, were it not that we conceive of social events as contextualised and as ordered, not random. Whatever people do, they do in a real social environment on which all sorts of forces operate: culture, language, social structure, history, political relations, and so forth. Being a man or a woman, 22 years old or 47 years old, rich or poor – all of that makes a difference in any society, for everywhere we will see that such seemingly self-evident characteristics carry rich cultural meanings and have particular social features. There are societies, for instance, where a 22-year-old person would never consider contradicting a 47-year-old person; there are societies where this can be permissible when the younger one is male and the older one is female, and there are societies where this is the opposite. So here is a central insight: uniquely situated events are the crystallisation of various layers of context, micro-contexts (changeable, accidental, unpredictable contexts, such as foul weather, a power failure during a meal in a restaurant, your recording device refusing duty or the father entering the room just when a conversation with the children had turned into a juicy gossip session) as well as macro-contexts (historical, larger political, social and cultural ones, less changeable and more stable, hence predictable).
To illustrate the difference between these various layers of context: the fact that people speak, for example, Zulu is typically a macro-context. If it is part of their developmental trajectory, they cannot change it, and one will find many people with similar developmental trajectories (coming from the same region, born from parents speaking Zulu, belonging to a Zulu social network) speaking Zulu. A micro-context would be the fact that the Zulu speaker you meet during fieldwork might be particularly articulate, a fantastic storyteller and someone who is really good at establishing contacts on your behalf. The micro-contextual factors operate locally: they offer distinctions between Zulu speakers. Macro-contextual factors have wider scope: they offer distinctions between speakers of Zulu and speakers of Xhosa, Ndebele, Swahili and so forth.
Let us, for the sake of clarity, summarise this in a drawing:
Your object is a needle point in time and space, and it can only gain relevance when it is adequately contextualised in micro- and macro-contexts. This contextualisation explains why your object has the features it has and why it lacks others; it also allows you to see, in microscopic events, effects of macroscopic structures, phenomena and processes. When someone says ‘yes sir’, this is a microscopic, almost trivial thing. Context tells us, however, that this innocuous formula draws on enduring systems of power and authority in our society, as well as on gender roles and structures, ideologies of politeness and etiquette. The microscopic, trivial instance of using it now becomes something far richer: we see that the user of the phrase summarises a world of (macro-contextual) social rules and conventions in his/her innocuous, routinised utterance, and submits to it. He/she displays ‘conventional’ behaviour, that is, behaviour that exudes the dominant social structures and expectations. The event in itself does not tell us that; the contextualisation of the event does that.
The main task during your fieldwork preparation is, thus, to understand and study the possible contexts in which your object will occur, micro as well as macro. This will expand the range of recognisable things – not everything will be totally strange and unexpected – and lower the risk of asking the wrong questions and behaving totally out of order. It lowers these risks, but does not eliminate them, of course. If you intend to do fieldwork in a primary school in a country called Absurdistan, for instance, it is good to know
(1)That there are in effect such schools in Absurdistan.
(2)Some basic and general things about how such schools operate (do they have daily and full-day sessions, for instance? How large are the classes? Are they gender-separated? What is the language of instruction?).
(3)Whether there are regional divisions, or urban–rural divisions, that could be important foci of research (you cannot draw conclusions about ‘education in Absurdistan’ if there are very deep differences between education in different parts of the country – in Africa it is, for instance, good to keep in mind that outside the cities, many parts of many countries do not have any education provision to speak of).
(4)Some general things about the legal provisions for such schools, and about their institutional structure. (e.g. Are all schools state-controlled or is there a division between public and private schools? Is there a ‘secondary’ market for education – private tutoring, evening schools, commercial internet or correspondence courses, etc.?)
(5)General information about Absurdistan, its history, social structure, politics, major languages, media and so forth.
(6)The tradition of scholarship on education in Absurdistan, the major centres for research, and the major researchers, policy makers and authority figures in the field.
Therefore your preparation is about getting to understand what Bourdieu called the ‘field’ of education in Absurdistan: the whole complex of surrounding conditions in which a single school becomes part of a system and a society, including historical, social, cultural, linguistic, political backgrounds. It is an attempt at constructing ‘normal’, expectable and presupposable patterns, things you can reasonably expect to meet in the field. All these things matter; researching them pays off. If you would have overlooked point (1) above, for instance, you could find yourself in the embarrassing situation of not having a field to do fieldwork