EGOS 2013 Paper Development Workshop New Ways of Writing Organizational Ethnography
On “Becoming the Phenomenon”-based Ethnography (BPbE) Towards an Ontology of Becoming
Chiara Bassetti, Ph.d.
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Via Alla Cascata, 56/C - I 38123 Trento
chiara.bassetti@loa.istc.cnr.it
+39 0461 281361
Department of Sociology and Social Research University of Trento
Via Verdi, 26 - I 38122 Trento
chiara.bassetti@unitn.it
+39 0461 314853 Abstract
Starting from the ethnography on the world of dance that I carried out as the basis for my Ph.D. dissertation, I discuss the tacit and embodied dimension of everyday life and interaction, on which common-sense knowledge heavily rely. In addressing the epistemological and methodological problem of the invisibility of common sense knowledge, I propose a research methodology – i.e., “Becoming the Phenomenon”-based Ethnography (BPbE) – aimed to avoid the un-reflexive use of membership knowledge, and consciously, knowingly and reflexively exploit the ethnographer's lived experience as an heuristic tool. Being BPbE based on an ontology of becoming, I discuss the process of acquiring – as an adult ethnographer and in an observed way – an embodied competence, an habitus, and contrast the proposed method with other autoethnographic ones. Finally, I focus on techniques for writing/reporting ethnography able account for the corporeal and tacit dimension of everyday life.
Keywords
Common-sense knowledge, Membership knowledge, Embodied knowledge, “Becoming the Phenomenon”-based Ethnography, Autoethnography.
It is often said that the ethnographer undergoes an initiation to a social world. It is generally less clear what kind of initiation should be and what kind of ethnography should result from that. Different ethnographic traditions present different opinions on such regard, and the matter is particularly relevant with reference to that composite group of ethnographic styles which goes under the name of autoethnography. There are four main issues at stake, to me. Two of
them fall under the problem of what kind of ethnography one should pursue, and have been at the centre of a relatively recent debate in the ethnographic community (e.g. Anderson 2006; Atkinson 2006; Delamont 2007; Hughson, 2008; Sparkes, 2000). They regard the role of the ethnographer's self and that of the other research subjects (or field members). The other two, on which various scholars have recently focused as well, even though from diverse perspectives (cf. further), have to do with the kind of initiation one should seek, and concern, on the one hand, the ethnographer's membership status within the researched field, community or (sub)culture, and, on the other hand, the role of bodily experience and tacit embodied knowledge in doing ethnography.
The first issue regards the autobiographical aspects of ethnographic research and the reflexivity ethnographers should exert upon their own experience. From this point of view, I definitely agree with Paul Atkinson (2006) when he says that “the autobiographical has been an element in the ethnographic imagination for almost as long as social scientist have been engaged in such work” (2006, 401), and “the kind of reflexivity implied by autoethnography has been recognised as central to the ethnographic enterprise for many years” (2006, 400). Such an enterprise, moreover, “is always, in some degree, autoethnographic in that the ethnographer's self is always implicated in the research process” (2006, 403). That is to say: initiation to social worlds and self-reflection on that constitute key elements of ethnography1, and, I would add, inevitable aspects of fieldwork.
However, there are forms of autoethnography (e.g. Ellis and Bochner 2000; Alsop 2002; Markula and Denison 2005) for which initiation could have been undergone by the researcher years before the decision to write about that, and fieldwork seems to be superficial (cf. also Gans 1999; Delamont 2007). This has to do with data collection, and the difference, borrowing from Gary Alan Fine (1999, 534), lays between “the intensive labour of field research” and “the armchair pleasure of ʻme-searchʼ”. It is not that I maintain that one should not (reflexively) exploit his/her own experience as an heuristic tool. On the contrary, as we shall see, I believe it constitutes a fundamental research resource, in both “traditional” ethnography, as Atkinson pointed out, and, more explicitly, (analytic) autoethnography, as Leon Anderson (2006) illustrated. However, it is my contention that, in order to avoid the use of pre-reflexive – thus “invisible” – knowledge, the ethnographer's experience should be observed, “written” and reflected upon while taking place, on an ongoing basis. What is interesting is the ethnographer-as-fieldworker's experience, more than the ethnographer-as-author's one, and the former should be co-occurrently and vividly accounted, instead of ex-post remembered.
Furthermore, and this leads us towards the second issue, such a personal experience is anyway not enough for the ethnographic endeavour. This regards the ways in which the autobiographical element should be treated, so to speak, in order to produce a relevant ethnography. Quoting Atkinson again, “the personal is political, but the personal does not exhaust or subsume all aspects of 1 More than half a century ago, Charles Wright Mills maintained that “[t]o be able to trust yet to be
skeptical of your own experience [...] is one mark of the mature workman. This ambiguous confidence is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit” (Wright Mills 1959, 1999).
the political” (2006, 403). Whatever the ethnographer's status within the field – and, therefore, whatever the kind of experience s/he makes of the latter – (cf. further), a good ethnography should be self-reflexive but not self-referential and self-absorbed; putting one's experience in dialogue with the other field-inhabitants' one is fundamental. In distinguishing between analytic and evocative autoethnography, Anderson characterises the former not only as reflexively attentive “to one's position in the web of field discourse and relations” (2006, 385), but also as “adequately engage[d] with others in the field” (ibid., 386). “Solipsism and author saturation in autoethnographic texts are symptoms” of failing to do so (ibid.), he states. Moreover, he rightly adds, “ethnographic reflexivity, which has been treated at times [...] as a purely subjective phenomenon, is more appropriately understood as a relational activity” (ibid.).Therefore, we should not renounce to analytical purposes in the name of an absolute subjectivism (Hughson, 2008).
The third issue concerns the ethnographer's status in the field. Anderson posits as the first key feature of analytic autoethnography the “complete member researcher” (CMR) – following the definition of Patricia and Peter Adler (1987, 67-84) – and contrasts such status with that of “more detached participant observers” (Anderson 2006, 383). Within a general agreement with Anderson's (2006, 379-382) treatment of the topic, I think some considerations are needed. First, participant observation (PO) and “observing participation” (OP), borrowing the term from Löic Wacquant (2000), should be employed together. On the one hand, this has to do with the second issue mentioned above, and should serve avoiding those “simplistic notions of understanding a phenomenon by ʻbecoming the phenomenonʼ (Mehan and Wood 1975, 227)” of which Anderson (2006, 381) worries. On the other hand, this also means to characterize OP more precisely and rigorously. As the first issue was supposed to point out, what Adler and Adler (1987) named “opportunistic” CMR is not an adequate status for the (auto)ethnographer. “Convert” CMR, as defined by Adler and Adler (1987) and Anderson (2006), is closer to the (auto)ethnographer's status I shall defend here, but still too broadly understood, to me.
Becoming a complete member should be a clear, motivated methodological choice – preferably, one taken during the research design phase. “Becoming the phenomenon” (Mehan and Wood 1975)2 should be a research method one purposively chooses to employ (alongside other ones, as I said) – a method with its own epistemological reasons, heuristic power and objectives. Such epistemological motives, moreover, mainly rests on the ethnomethodological principle of “unique adequacy” (Garfinkel 1977, 61-68; Garfinkel and Wieder 1992, 82-184), which, though not recalled by Anderson, lays at the foundations of the CMR idea itself.
What I shall propose, on this regard, is to move a step forward with respect to both Anderson's analytic autoethnography and Garfinkel's unique adequacy requirement: by radicalising the latter through directing analytical attention on becoming alongside of being/belonging, my proposal is to pursue a research which is conducted by, and reflexively focused on, not as much the 2 Mehan and Wood distinguish “becoming the phenomenon” from “peripheral” (Horowitz, 1983;
ethnographer-as-member, but rather the ethnographer-as-becomer, or, more precisely, the ethnographer-as-becoming-member.
The last issue I want to engage concerns the role of lived experience and embodied knowledge – and their tacit nature – in everyday life and, therefore, everyday ethnography. In one of his rare methodological reflections, Erving Goffman (1989), focusing on the fieldworker's experience, talks of “bodily attuning”. Paul Willis, interviewed by Roberta Sassatelli and Marco Santoro, moves a further step towards the importance of bodily experience, and argues:
ethnography must come back to that problem, about these living, warm and sensorial bodies, about the palpable sensations which allow us to feel that something shared and some form of cultural production deep-rooted in the senses exists (Willis, in Santoro and Sassatelli 2008, 258)
As the interviewers underline, ethnographic imagination “is the only one that can grasp the suppressed and implicit elements of everyday life” (Santoro and Sassatelli 2008, 247), the tacit dimension of ordinary experience. Wacquant's (2000) research on prizefighting clearly took up such a challenge. Sarah Pink's (2009) proposal for a “sensory ethnography” goes in a similar direction. John Hockey and Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson (2009) ask “for research attention to be paid to the phenomenological ground of ‘doing work’, especially in relation to the sensorium” (ibid., 232), “in order to offer insight not only into the individual’s meaningful working embodiment but also into the ways in which workers share embodied experience” (ibid., 233). The ethnographer's task is to grasp with her/his own body the ways in which ordinary experience is collectively organised and provided with meaning. If it is true that “(t)he issue for the body is always to know under which particular set of cultural understandings, or material underpinnings, ‘this body’ is to arrange itself” (Munro and Belova 2008, 98), then we should acknowledge that the ethnographer needs not only to “be there” and observe, but also to feel and live with her/his own body that set of cultural and material conditions.
From this point of view, the radicalisation of the ethnomethodological principle of unique adequacy that I am proposing goes in the direction of a shift from the requirement of an embedded perspective to the requirement of an
embodied one. The acknowledgement of the embodied nature of sensemaking
and understanding, indeed, asks for a method aiming to study the ethnographer's initiation (becoming) not only to new beliefs, narratives and social discourses, but also to new practical abilities and know-how, new
habituses (Bourdieu 1979, 1980) and new ways of being-in-the-world
(Merleau-Ponty 1942, 1945). Acquiring – as an adult, “reflexively reflexive” (Bourdieu 2001) ethnographer – a new practical, embodied (set of) competence(s) and a new corporeal schema (Merleau-Ponty 1942, 1945; cf. also Crossley 2001) provide with particular analytic opportunities. As Nick Crossley (2007) underlines, moreover, doing fieldwork in contexts of bodily, practical teaching/learning presents several advantages.
In the first instance the teaching and learning process tends to throw the principle embodied in a body technique into relief. Because the student doesn’t always ‘get it’ the teacher is forced to find ways of making ‘it’ more explicit. [...] And researchers therefore have a greater chance of ‘getting it’ too. [...] Secondly, this helps to
emphasize the point that body techniques are both technical and bodily. They are revealed as [...] embodied forms of knowledge and understanding because what matters is the ability to do them. [...] Thirdly, this process can reveal interesting aspects about the corporeal schema and thus the embodied agency of the ‘body subject’ [...] the inability of novices to detect errors in their own technique and the necessity for teachers or other students to point this out reveals the limits of the corporeal schema, at the individual level, and the necessity that it be completed by feedback from others. It thereby reveals the social nature of the corporeal schema. (Crossley 2007, 88-89)
By engaging with the above-mentioned issues, the present article aims to be a methodological contribution to the contemporary ethnographic debate. On the basis of the multi-sited, ethnomethodologically oriented ethnography that I carried out on the world of western theatrical dance, I shall present and discuss what I call “Becoming the Phenomenon”-based Ethnography (BPbE).3 The focus on this methodology is taken as the centre for reflecting on the role of tacit and embodied common-sense knowledge in doing and writing ethnography. In particular, I shall present BPbE as a way to avoid the reflexive and un-observed use of membership knowledge (Have 2002, 11) as well as the mis-interpretation and imaginary-driven analysis (Becker 1998) arising from the researcher's being a stranger (Schutz 1944) to such a knowledge.
Within a phenomenological and ethnomethodological perspective, the first section presents the theoretical framework that lays at the basis of the ontology of becoming that I am proposing, and addresses the epistemological and methodological problem of the so-called “invisibility” of common-sense knowledge. The second section illustrates the context, data and methods of the BPbE I conducted. The third and forth sections discuss the advantages I found provided by such methodology, and present techniques and strategies for, respectively, fieldwork and “deskwork” (writing/reporting ethnography) that proved to be useful in my research experience.
Tacit, embodied, “invisible” common-sense knowledge
In facing the “problem of knowledge intersubjectivity”, Schutz (1945, 1953, 1970) proposed the so called “general thesis of the reciprocity of perspectives”. According to the latter, people are able to interact because, for practical ends, they avoid to interrogate themselves about what is taken-for-granted: it is this tacit dimension, more than a specific set of norms and values – and this is Schutz's main critique to Parsons – that “keeps together” society.
The tacit, taken-for-granted dimension of social life has a lot – though not all – to do with the body and its ordinary lived experience. The latter and the practical application of common-sense knowledge, moreover, are inseparable, if not analytically, since they both are concerned with a body in relation to a world in which it acts and is used – habituated – to act. “Vision is a thought
subordinated to a certain field, and this is what is called a sense”
(Merleau-Ponty 1945 [2003, 251-252]). “The sensor and the sensible do not stand in relation to each other as two mutually external terms, and sensation is not an 3 Other examples of what I call BPbE are Wacquant's (2000) and Sudnow's (1979) researches.
invasion of the sensor by the sensible” (ibid., 248). Furthermore, far from being completely idiosyncratic, subjective or inaccessible, embodied knowledge – given its actual transmission during and through social interaction (dance teaching/learning is just but one example), as well as its being socially regarded as meaningful in various contexts (just think to the notion of sprezzatura) – is more shared and mutually accessible than not. This is one of the most fundamental layers of interpersonal interaction, and a one that ethnography should not overlook.
Corporeality, therefore, is fundamental in both – and simultaneously – the construction of self and the interaction with the other-than-self. This is something that Cooley (1902) already noted, when talking of a “pre-verbal sense of self”. (Symbolic) Interaction is not an exclusively verbal activity. Each body, in fact, in a determinate context and phenomenal field, presents itself with some perceptible properties to which meanings – and moral values – are immanently associated, on the basis of a common-sense, tacit knowledge on which we rely everyday in order to (locally) organise and order the (intercorporeal) world and its experience. “C'est le postulat de la correspondance ou du parallelisme entre le ʻphysiqueʼ et le ʻmoralʼ qui est au principe de la connaissaince pratique”, Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 51) wrote. In the same period Goffman published two articles (1976, 1977) on gender: as Sassatelli (2010, 47) argued, if gender is not conceivable as a role, in Goffman's theorisation, it is precisely because it expresses itself through embodiment, “through signs and symbols that are directly anchored to our bodies. And our bodies [...] speak of us in a way we can not easily resist, and even through our resistance”. Finally, the context, and the expectations it too helps to actualise, have a role in this: meanings, indeed, are anchored not only to the body, but also to the situated world in which, at any given moment, that body is.
It is through this way that the social dimension of everyday life takes shape (or “takes bodies”, so to speak), because moral norms, representations and categories comes embodied and interactionally practised in front of us (and by us) everyday. People we meet, indeed, have inscribed on their body their memberships4, and inevitably show their embodied history. And this is something that we can't help to see – or, better, perceive, sense – and immediately tie to some meaning, category, symbolic form, etc. At the same time, this tacit dimension penetrates each particular body, installing itself in that body as an habitus, as dispositions to acting, perceiving and understanding.
le schèmes de perception et d'appréciation dans lesquels un groupe dépose ses structures fondamentales s'interposent dès l'origine entre tout agent et son corps parce que les réactions ou les représentations que son corps suscite chez les autres sont elles-mêmes engendrées selon ces schèmes [...] L'expérience pratique du corps [...] engendrent les schèmes fondamentaux [... et] est sans cesse renforcée par de réactions au corps propre engendrées selon le mêmes schèmes. (Bourdieu 1977, 53-54)
If common-sense bases on and in the body its own classification, categorisations and expectations – that is, its way to organise and order the 4 Not (just) as a cultural text superposed to a “natural” matter, but (especially) as the perceivable,
world and its ordinary experience – then such common-sense must be embodied by members in its potency of perception and understanding as much as action and sensemaking. Such a sensemaking inevitably involves and invests one's own self too, so that we should also talk of identitymaking, as the process through which we everyday make sense of our own selves, thus precisely developing and constructing day-by-day a sense of self. Judgement criteria and categories change over time and among different societies, but in everyday situated interaction the body is never something indifferent for identity – no matter, and rather precisely because of, its fluidity and being an ongoing process. This is so despite the great deal of effort that western culture put into separating Mind – as the place of self, consciousness, reflexivity and identity – from the body. The criteria on which sensemaking, identymaking and understanding are based are difficult to verbalise, partly for the above-mentioned effort itself, but are not at all irrelevant. What we use to call “sixth sense” is nothing but our habitual, pre-reflexive, tacit knowledge of the world. But it is knowledge, and the ethnographer must reach it in an observed way.
There is a further problem. Common-sense knowledge, or membership knowledge, is not only difficult to grasp as mainly tacit and embodied, but also tricky to analyse given its being both an implicit research tool – we all are social beings, ethnographers do not constitute an exception – and an explicit research topic (Zimmerman and Pollner 1971). The issue goes under the name of the
problem of the invisibility of common-sense knowledge, a problem that could
be applied, as also Wacquant (2009, 2013 forthcoming) argued, to the habitus as well. This means that it is necessary to make common-sense explicit and to avoid both its un-reflexive, un-observed use and the mis-interpretation deriving from being strangers to it. The underlying principle of the solution I propose,
i.e. BPbE, is equal and contrary to Garfinkel's one concerning inverting lenses.
With lenses, Garfinkel argues, “practices that have become embodiedly transparent in their familiarity – in the familiarity of a skill – now become esaminable again” (Garfinkel 2002, 211). In order to observe and analyse naturally occurring activities, and to do so more “naturally”, in a manner of speaking, than by using inverting lenses and thus subverting ordinary experience itself, “becoming the phenomenon” – such a phenomenon being one's becoming itself, one's ongoing embodied history – could be a good method for obtaining “esaminable” data on practical learning, embodiment, interaction and identity.
Research context, data and methods
The paper is based on the multi-sited ethnographic research on western theatrical dance – particularly, modern and contemporary dance – that I carried out for three years (2006-2009) as a basis for my Ph.D. dissertation.5 The research empirically took place mainly in Italy, but I also spent three months at the Department of Dance of the University of California Riverside, and attended 5 The research was funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research within the PRIN 2006
theoretical as well as practical courses. Besides interviewing dancers and participating in diverse festivals, fairs and other events all over the Italian country – in Milan, Florence, Parma, Rome, Torino, Verona, just to name a few – I conducted prolonged fieldwork at three major venues.
In Trento, I spent an overall period of 24 months with the Club La
Fourmie Dance School and Dance Company. It is about a peripheral reality in
the national field of theatrical dance, but central in the considered town and, more generally, the considered Region. The Club, particularly in the persons of the Art Director and the School Director, constitutes the central node of the network of private schools and independent, small companies of the territory. During the time I spent on the field, the directors succeed in making increasingly stable, promoting and having publicly funded the regional federation (Federazione Trentino Danza). Moreover, the Club represents an important point of reference for individual aspiring dancers of the territory (and not only) thanks to the summer school they organize every year, that gathers teachers and choreographers coming from various countries and expert in different dance styles. Finally, it is worth noticing, that teachers, company dancers and experts students of the Club are generally well connected with people belonging to other, more central realities of the Italian dance field, and a good number of them moved from Trento to more prestigious academies or companies, in Florence or Rome for instance, during my fieldwork.
The second principal site of research, where I spent 11 months, was the
Corpocorrente Dance Company of Mantua, with the connected Officina delle Arti Dance School. Such realities are more centrally located in the national field
than the above mentioned ones, and present a network of relations that is definitely denser, more prestigious, and more internationally oriented. It not by chance that the company – which I also had the opportunity to follow in
tournée – can boast two choreographer, one of which is a very famous French
professional, while the other one, serving as Art Director, was dancing in New York before she stopped performing and came back to Italy. Neither it is by chance that the two choreographer together with the two directors of the school organized, precisely during the time I spent on the field, the first edition – that has been then followed by other ones on a yearly basis – of the three-days festival Mantovadanza. The festival, in which I also participated as a dancer, during the opening parade, and as the presenter of the various theatre performances, gathered professionals, aspiring dancers and dance enthusiasts from all over the country, as well as internationally renown teachers, choreographers, companies and performers.
Finally, I spent 8 months with the Abbondanza/Bertoni Theatre-Dance Company, based in Rovereto. The company and the two choreographers that give it the name, are quite famous in Italy and, though at a lesser degree, abroad. In this case, however, I almost exclusively participate in an advanced theatre-dance course run by Antonella Bertoni in collaboration with the Association Universidanza.
Summing up, as you can see in Table 1, I conducted prolonged PO with two dance companies (OC), and the related schools (OS), as well as, though occasionally (mainly during festivals), more than a dozen international
companies. Furthermore, for the first time in my life, I attended courses and stages, and I took part in shows and performances as an active participant of the considered world (OP), so as to start from my personal experience for understanding the meaning of becoming (and then being) a dancer and, more generally, of acquiring a practical mastery, a visceral knowledge, a new habitus and a new identity. Throughout fieldwork, alongside with jottings and fieldnotes, I gathered about 70 hours of video-recordings. Such data have been transcribed and annotated accordingly to the procedures of Conversation Analysis (e.g. Sacks 1972; Heritage 1984; Have 2009; Schegloff 2007), and then analysed accordingly to the principles of ethnomethodologically oriented video-analysis (cf. e.g. Heath et al. 2010).
Participant Observation
(OC & OS) Participation (OP)Observing Video-rec. & Transcr.(VT)
Club La Fourmie, Trento 12 months 24 months 70 hours
Corpocorrente, Mantua 11 months 5 hours
Abbondanza/Bertoni,
Rovereto 8 months
Stage Borghini, Mantua 1 week
Stage Huggins, Tesero 1 week 1 week
Festivals, fairs, etc. 7,5 months (tot.) 5 months (1 festival)
Table 1: Fieldwork activities and material
There is a second category of data, consisting in a series of in-depht interviews (n=25, about 37 hours of audio-recording) that I conducted with various professionals which, at the time, were working (also) in Italy. They were dancers as well as teachers, choreographers and maîtres de ballet; expert in different styles ranging from modern to contemporary dance, hip hop to classical ballet, musical to theatre-dance, etc.; employed in theatre and/or television, cinema, music and advertising industry. Such data has been the basis for a) content analysis, mainly focused on the characteristics of the field and the labour market; b) discourse analysis, concerned with the recurrence of words, lexical roots, metaphors and the like, especially in relation to the verbal description of bodily experience; and c) narrative analysis, focused on the interviewees' biographical and identitarian construction (cf. e.g. Atkinson 2006, 161-64; Riessman 1992), with particular respect to their artistic path, career choices and trajectories, and ongoing relationship with their own body.
Finally, I mapped, so to speak, the Italian dance field. I gathered the basic structural data that define the quantitative dimensions of the profession and mark out the boundaries of the occupational community, as well as information regarding the labour market, the agencies of recruitment, the ways in which activities, roles, hierarchies, etc. are organised. I carried out secondary analysis of statistical data collected from Istat, Siae and Enpals6. By gathering 6 Respectively, the Italian National Institute of Statistics, the Italian Society of Authors and Editors, and
information from less institutional sources as well, I also produced a series of databases. Three of them concerns professional dancers, companies and schools. The other ones regards realities that constitutes, respectively, a) the institutional field (associations, foundations, festivals, contests, university programmes, etc.), b) the commercial field (specialised firms, web sites, magazines, printed and multimedia editions, etc.) and c) the imaginary field (novels and tales, paintings and sculptures, movies, television programmes, advertising, etc.).
Fieldwork: learning to (be a) dance(r)… in a field of practitioners
In this section I intend to illustrate through various examples the principal features and connected advantages of the choice I made to employ BPbE. As I mentioned, BPbE is not “simply” about putting oneself, one's own body, personality, social situation, etc. in the midst of the set of contingencies of a particular social field (Goffman 1989) – and, I would add, phenomenal field (Merleau-Ponty 1942; Garfinkel 2002). This is characteristic of the ethnographic endeavour at large. BPbE is about a) explicitly putting at the centre of the research one's own practical and corporeal (as well as theoretical, moral, discursive) learning, one's lived initiation to a social world, that is, one's process of becoming member, and b) to consciously, knowingly, reflexively and “sceptically” exploit one's own lived experience as an heuristic tool.
A first example could be the following. I had been surprised about how much I hated my body in the dance practice room, how much I saw it fat, flabby and clumsy in that mirror, while usually I feel at ease with my body, and see it, in the mirror of my bedroom, slender, well toned and elegant enough.
Honestly, I ask myself how the hell it came to my mind to got myself into such a situation. […] When I look at it, I do not regard my dancing body reflected into the mirror as something aesthetically beautiful […] I do not even regard my body as ready to be exhibited onstage. On the contrary, I feel particularly fat and “puffed”. [07-05-09 OP]
This concerns self-representations and, more specifically, the sense of self and the relationship with one's own body. Such a relationship can not be reduced to a static image, a “représentation subjective [...] qui serait constituée pour l'essentiel à partir de la représentation objective du corps produite en renvoyée par le autres” (Bourdieu 1977, 53). What clearly emerged from the research, in fact, is that self-representations do not consist of images, but a feeling about one's own embodied self that is based and substantiated in a complex set of simultaneously sensory, cultural and contextual elements which, in their mutually affecting each other, remain pre-reflexively entangled and non-separated in ordinary life.
A different, interconnected example consists of the experience of how my own body was “received” and interpreted – or made socially intelligible and accountable – on the field, as well as from the field back in broader society and various social fields. For instance, just for appearing as it does and being in some context/frame/place (a backstage, a dance fair, a stage, a dressing-room, a
dinner with famous dancers and choreographer, a university department of dance, etc.), my body allowed me in various situations to pass as a professional dancer in the eyes of both the professionals and the general audience of aspiring dancers, practitioners and spectators. At an halfway point along my fieldwork, once reached a certain familiarity with dance knowledge, languages and representations, I started to consciously and voluntarily manipulate my self-presentation in determinate contexts, such as a fair entrance, or a dance show's stalls, aiming to explore classification criteria of common-sense knowledge and to test the relative efficacy of different identitarian performances (e.g. Goffman 1959; Butler 1990, 1993). This means that, like Agnes (Garfinkel 1967), I have consciously undertaken an activity of passing.
What made me pass as a professional dancer in the eyes of that mother tonight, what made her touch her daughter's arm and say “Look, there's a ballerina!” while I was crossing the stalls to reach my seat [in the theatre] has been not only a chignon in my hair, nor even a well-toned slender body half-hidden under a long tunic (fully in keeping with dancers' habit consisting of having their body un-exhibited as much as possible outside the stage and the practice room), but also a certain posture and deportment, a certain way to walk, a certain way to look ahead, a certain way – simultaneously made of familiarity, with the place (the theatre), and purposively ill-concealed strangeness, for the situated position I was taking (the stalls instead of the stage) – to cross the stalls. [08-07-21]
A part from the obvious advantages in terms of access, the more or less voluntary passing helped to reveal the tacit criteria on which social classification in general – and that of the professional dancer in particular – is based, and the ways in which such common-sense, tacit criteria, as both Elias (1939) and Bourdieu (1979) had excellently shown, are connected to a) situated context and phenomenal field, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, b) corporeality, the latter being understood i) in “static” terms, what is usually defined physical appearance, ii) in “dynamic” terms, meaning bodily conduct in (inter)action (ways of moving, walking, grasping, breathing..., gesture, eye-playing, proxemics, etc.) and iii) in its relation with objects (e.g. points shoes, or an energetic bar appearing from a sport bag, but also dress and accessorises in general, etc.) and iv) persons, or other bodies, of the considered world. My corporeality and the ways in which it interacted in and with the dance world and its (central as well as peripheral) inhabitants, therefore, allowed me to analyse, starting from my own experience, the practical application of such common-sense criteria.
The third point I want to touch upon concerns the mutual relationship of OP and PO, which, I maintain, are mutually enhancing activities. In the case at hand, for instance, my bodily immersion in dance – and learning itself of the latter – have benefited from the fact that the analytical attention was focusing on it7, as well as from the parallel, everyday observation of that same activity enacted by others. Listening to the descriptions of steps and movements that I was not yet taught to do, looking at their exemplar demonstration by the teacher/choreographer, and their repeated execution by the students/dancers 7 That has been clear also in the case of Sudnow (1978), who learned to play jazz music on the piano
coupled with the teacher/choreographer's corrections, as well as writing and reflecting about all this, allowed me not only to acquire a propositional knowledge of the ratio underlying such movements, but also to visually embody them, and then to incorporate them bodily too by irresistibly trying performing at home and, eventually, during lessons. The latter, on the other hand, would have not happened if I would have not been conducting OP as well: nor the curiosity and desire of an early learning; nor the drive to change my body and improve my dancing skills; nor, clearly, the institutional learning itself would have taken place.
I keep devoting at least 20 minutes to dance exercises almost every evening. […] Recently, I have also started to enact some exercises that the teacher makes expert students do, and some the choreographer makes company dancers perform. [07-01-31 OP].
When, looking at my moving body in the mirror, I realize I'm not “clean”, I got nervous and angry, there's no other way to describe it. I got the urge to stop and repeat the movement one hundred times. And I found myself thinking of ways for practicing dance more often and intensively. [07-05-14 OP]
PO and OP, moreover, were both improving my capability of – theoretically, practically and experientially – considering complex movements configurations as monads, as kin(aesth)etic unica, and such an ability turned out to be essential in learning to dance and in dancing. On the other hand, though refusing the un-reflexive use of the culturally specific knowledge and know-how that I was increasingly acquiring, that same ability has favoured the understanding of the considered reality. For instance, in order to comprehend what does it mean that, as dancers use to say, for properly performing a (sequence of) movement you will eventually need “to feel it”, my observed personal experience has been fundamental. In its absence, I would have thought such “feeling” notion to be part of dance community's folklore, so to speak, while it is about an actual, learnable capability. As I mentioned, however, personal experience alone is not enough. To convince me about that “feeling” skill, my experience of it had to be triangulated not only with dancers' narrations about it, for example during interviews, but also with my direct observation and detailed analysis (the latter based on fieldnotes as well as video) of the process of learning-to-perform dance movements, during classes, and specific choreographic sequences, especially during rehearsals (cf. Bassetti 2009a, 2011, 2013 forthcoming).
We can now posit the following question: Who is the ethnographer to the ethnographer? I have considered myself-as-aspiring-dancer as a sort of privileged informer, as someone who was in the field, was experiencing it and was part of it – who had the same participative status, and similar experience, of the present others – but, differently than them, was able to communicate to me her bodily, sensorial, sensual, kin(aesth)etic feeling in a non-mediated way. For myself-as-ethnographer, myself-as-aspiring-dancer was one among other informants and research subjects, although one to which the former had extraordinary access. My lived experience, as I have tried to illustrate, has been extremely important, particularly in order to understand corporeal, embodied and tacit aspects of everyday ordinary life. However, it would not have been
enough by itself: other voices – the ones of other participants of the studied world – were needed, a social feedback and, thus, a sort of response from/in the
observed (interaction with the) world in which such an experience was
grounded.8 This way of regarding one's own “voice” and experience constitutes an important difference between BPbE and other (auto)ethnographies.
It follows, moreover, that members' voices should be “captured” and reported into fieldnotes as directly as possible (cf. also Emerson et al. 2001, 364) – together with the ethnographer-as-becoming-member's one. This leads us to another research technique that I employed during fieldwork, and that I call “instant” Conversation Analysis (CA). It occurs simultaneously with taking jottings on the field, and is particularly useful in the absence of audio/video-recording instruments. It consists of writing down relevant pieces of talk – and, more generally, interaction – during or immediately after its unfolding, and to do so by using CA notation (Jefferson 1984). In this way, the voices of the participants in the setting could be more accurately recorded, not only regarding their content, but also their form, their expressive, experientially appreciable characteristics. In my research on dance, instant CA, of which you have some examples in the following excerpts, helped, among the rest, in accounting for specific rhythmical aspects of talk.
The choreographer [...] observes the dancers performing the sequence without music. Hither and thither, he works as a prompter. He does so: verbally, by naming the step/movement; and/or vocally, by uttering some syllables – e.g. «ia: pa: stra pa (0.1) e ta (.) e ta (.) e tim (.) e ba» – in order to give the tempo; and/or bodily, by executing and emphasising some movements. [08-02-29 OC].
[The choreographer] repeats what the dancers have to think about while performing: «The arm falls (.) up (.) the arm falls (.) up (.) the arm falls (.) up». They perform again and succeed. «O::h, I've found the k↑ey for opening your door! (0.3) Again!» [08-01-22 OC]
I recognize some limits of practicability of this technique: those related to the very activity of taking jottings, that each field, and each situation, allows (or not) at different degrees (cf. e.g. Emerson et al. 1995, ch. 2); those regarding the fact that such an activity is usually easier during PO than OP; and, finally, the necessity of a certain familiarity with CA notation. However, instant CA has proved useful in two respects at least. First, by allowing to grasp fine-grained aspects of the situated action in interaction, it provides richer and more accurate data. Second, this technique is actually quicker – and, therefore, easier to “insert” in the flow of action that characterises fieldwork, especially in highly dynamic contexts like the considered one – than other ones, such as summarizing or using free indirect speech.
Deskwork: reflexive, experientially meaningful accounts
The work of the (auto)ethnographer consists not only of accessing the tacit understandings of practical knowledge through practice itself (O'Connor 2007), but also of making explicit everyday – through the equally practical work of 8 On this cf. also Emerson and Pollner (1988).
analysing data and writing/reporting ethnography – the details of his/her socialisation to a new social world and the learning of new ways of bodily and sensuously inhabiting it. This calls for the acknowledgement of the necessity of experimenting with a range of representational and analytical strategies (Anderson 1999; Hockey and Allen-Collinson 2009, 230). Indeed, as Wacquant (2009, 17) stated, it is pointless to propose a corporeal sociology, sustained by practical initiation, if what one tries to uncover concerning the sensory-motor magnetism of the universe under investigation ends up vanishing in writing. Therefore, it is important to find ways to account for the experiential aspects of the situated context, for the tacit, usually unnoticed and not easily “verbalisable” dimensions of (embodied) action and interaction.
In the first instance, fieldnotes should be as much vivid, detailed and attentive to the experiential, sensori-motor, kin(aesth)etic dimensions of everyday life as possible, and they should remain visible as such in ethnographic monographs or essays, instead of being mixed with the inevitably selective, resumptive, reflective, reconstructive descriptions, comments and analysis that characterise ethnographic writing. On the one hand, this “excerpt strategy” (Emerson et al. 1995, 179-181) frames fieldnotes as accounts of the past, of a time close to the events in the field, thus making the ethnographer adopting “a stance towards the reader which says, ʻhere is what I heard and observed, and here is the sense that I now make of itʼ” (ibid., 181). In so doing, furthermore, the ethnographer's voice remains discernible from those of the research subjects (cf. also Atkinson 1990) – her/his own one as becomer included, in the case of BPbE. On the other hand, “[b]y presenting vivid characters who speak in their own idioms” – and instant CA is really helpful on this regard – “the ethnographer creates an engaging text which invites the reader not only to think about the argument, but also vicariously to experience the moment” (Emerson
et al. 2001, 65). Inserting excerpts of more direct communication, which enters
the mundane and situated details of everyday experience, could bring the audience experientially closer to the studied reality. Moreover,
excerpt strategy allows for maximum presentation of unexplicated details [...] containing more than the ethnographer chooses to discuss and analyse, such excerpts give depth and texture to ethnographic texts, contributing to readers' tacit understanding. (ibid., 366)
Secondarily, I think it is necessary, especially in analytical writing, to “mess up”, in a manner of speaking, with words and concepts in order to express and report bodily lived experience. The western vocabulary of thought, impoverished by centuries of mind/self-body dichotomy's kingdom, is definitely something that we need to refresh, if we really want to overthrow such a regime. Messing up with words/concepts means exploiting linguistic tools as something useful and malleable, instead of sacred and immutable, and playing with lexical roots, signs, symbols, etymologies, neologisms, “lexical puzzles” and the like. Consider, as just but one example, the use I made here of “kin(aesth)etic”, in the attempt to convey the entanglement of kinetic, kinaesthetic and aesthetic dimensions involved in dancing.
Thirdly, I am convinced that the ethnographer-as-author should try to mix diverse writing genres, and choose accordingly to the local aim. This is
about the style of argumentation, and is something on which various scholars reflected (e.g. Van Maanen, 1988; Dal Lago, 1984; Richardson, 2000a, 2000b). Giving my small contribution to such debate, I believe that analytical writing could be enriched and its deepness increased not only thanks to the already mentioned excerpt strategy, nor only by sustaining analysis through descriptive accounts, but also by exploiting narrative and evocative literary strategies. When, for instance, one has to account for the innumerable and variegate hitches, emergent issues and local problems that may happen – and usually happen – in the hours prior to a stage performance, and for the ways in which a composite group of people, who belong to diverse professional communities, situatedly negotiate and deal with the unexpected, a narrative style could do the job. When, instead, it comes to express and convey the experiential and emotional status(es) in which those who are going to perform onstage find themselves in those same hours, evocative, metaphoric, even poetic writing is probably the best choice.
These strategies help to produce experientially meaningful accounts, and, I believe, they do not doom ethnography to loose in analytical power. However, one should exert a strong control on him/herself as author, and remember that evocative or narrative writing primarily serve to illustrate and sustain specific analytic insights. In other words, literary strategies should be means, not ends when it comes to the scientific endeavour. The latter, indeed, cannot completely coalesce with literature, since literature and research have different ways of telling versions of reality and, above all, have different methods for extrapolating such versions from the world they inhabit.
So far, I have considered verbal strategies. However, I think it is necessary to integrate verbal accounts with non-verbal ones – at least visual ones. This concerns both data gathering and dissemination; the aim is to provide the researcher, first, and then the reader with a larger ensemble of data. As for data gathering, the ethnographer can collect materials as various as flyers, magazines, photos, video-recordings and so on. S/he can also directly insert some of them in fieldnotes, and the same s/he can do with drawings and other graphical representations, as we shall shortly see. There is more, however, and this concerns especially dissemination: the researcher's ability to create images is fundamental in order to enhance scientific communication (Lynch and Edgerton 1988; cf. Latour 1986; Lynch and Woolgar 1988), especially towards experiential meaningfulness. (Ensembles of) Images of various kind could be usefully employed for descriptive, documentary (but cf. Ball and Smith 2001), exemplifying or analytical ends. I shall now briefly consider some non-verbal representational strategies – ranging from drawing to photography, to various kinds of visual composition – that proved useful in my research experience.9
A first strategy I employed consists of integrating verbal descriptions with graphical representations of bodily doings (e.g. Figg. 1-7). Despite my scarce ability at drawing, this has allowed me to grasp what we can call “moving 9 I shall not consider, here, schemes, maps and graphical models that I largely employed and that
significantly enhance scientific communication but are not directly related to the experiential meaningfulness of the latter.
memories”, and to consider “units” of bodily doing as monothetic monads, like myself-as-aspiring-dancer was learning to do on the field, and like dancers – as well as all of us, although not concerning dancing – do everyday. This means reporting in fieldnotes something that has a form as similar as possible to the one that the reported event/phenomenon has actually taken on the field for (that is, from the point of view / in the lived experience of) those involved. When the ethnographer is directly involved, as in BPbE case, such a strategy could be more easily and proficiently accomplished.
As for photographic material, a single photo can be able to return complex configurations of object, persons, actions, etc. in a way that the linearity of verbal description does not allow – and the difference could easily be the one between the audience being experientially captivated or getting bored. The reportage, as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (1942) had shown, can be an invaluable tool in order to analyse and hypertextually account for the detailed, tacit and embodied aspects of everyday life, making the latter visible for the audience too. Consider, in Figure 8, another example of photographic composition. It is a collage of photos taken at a dance fair that I created for giving an idea of the contemporary outcome of the process of femininization that western theatrical dance has undergone since the XIX century10. The figure
a) documents, at least partially, and b) represents, even if selectively and briefly,
by sketching, the fair; at the same time, it c) exemplifies femininization by highlighting such a phenomenon through contiguity starting from a situated, actual occasion; finally, it d) makes the observer understand through the very cognitive action s/he would have unconsciously activated in order to “read the scene” if s/he would have been there – i.e., detecting bodily differences, especially gender-related ones.
Ensemble of images of diverse origin, furthermore, could variously serve other purposes. Goffman's grouped pictures in Gender Advertisements, for instance, provide multiple exemplifying instances of each category he presents, so making its underlying, common plot to emerge from comparison and difference. When the phenomenon for which the composition is supposed to account consists of a process, a changing through time, the ensemble could take the form of a series, or a synoptical frame, where each image occupies a point in time. For instance, in order to provide an account of the evolution of the representation of the dancer and the art of dance in the collective imaginary, I created compositions as various as the following: selected paintings grouped by author and artistic period; printed advertisements presented in chronological order; selected movie posters grouped on the basis of the both thematic and chronological categorization resulted from the analysis of about 200 movies.
Another example is constituted by the collages that I assembled in order to show the double bound of dancers' practice wear with gender and dance style (see Figg. 9-12). The images that compose the collages are mostly “found”, instead of “produced”, on the (virtual) field: they derive from dance websites, forums, online shops and so on. The collages, nevertheless, are researcher-generated, and the intent is ideal-typical description rather than documentation. In this case as well, moreover, there is a sort of concordance, or 10 On such a process cf. e.g. Burt (1995), Adams (2005).
congruence between the way in which the observer cognitively acts in order to make sense of the presented “scientific figure”, on the one hand, and, on the other one, of the world as s/he everyday experience it.
Finally, I regard video-recordings as a very important research tool, for data gathering as well as analysis and (scientific) communication. On the one hand, the use of video data allows the researcher to observe again, so to speak: it offers the opportunity of “coming back” on the field in an experientially similar, even if not identical, way, and noticing new details through repeated scrutiny and the exploitation of various technological functions, such as slow- and stop-motion. On the other hand, video-recordings allow to make the others observing and vicariously experiencing. It helps in sharing with the audience a complex configuration of acting people, objects, spaces, rhythms, etc., as well as in making recognisable detailed aspects of inter/action.
When multimedia contents are not a practicable way for dissemination, one can find various solutions. Recently, Heath et al. (2010), drawing on their own as well as Goodwin's works, listed some of them in their book on the use of video in qualitative research. My own solution has been that of storyboards (see Figg. 13-15), “subtitled”, so to speak, with the CA transcription of the simultaneous talk, when it is the case. Figure 13, for instance, served as an example of what I called Isolation, a “move” by which teachers and choreographers frame their upcoming demonstration (cf. Bassetti 2009b); Figures 14-15 illustrate the choreographic creative process, and its improvisational yet recursive and “modificational” nature (cf. Bassetti 2013): they represent a dancer improvising a choreographic sequence, first, and then repeating it while simultaneously trying some modifications.
Epilogue
At the beginning of this article, I posed a couple of questions. What kind of “initiation” the ethnographer should undergo? And what kind of ethnography should result from that? To answer, I started by acknowledging the experiential and embodied nature of sensemaking and understanding, and the relevance of the tacit dimension of everyday social life, with particular respect to common-sense knowledge. I also underlined that the body in interaction is fundamental for the ongoing construction and performance of identity, and not simply as (self-)project (cf. Giddens 1991), the lived body is also the locus of the experiencing self and one's tacit knowledge of the world and oneself.
Such aspects of social life, as well as the membership knowledge they involve, ask for, and develop, should be reached and grasped by the ethnographer, but this is not an easy task. Common-sense knowledge, in fact, is largely tacit and embodied, we said, habitual; therefore – and moreover – it is used pre-reflexively, often by the ethnographer too. To overcome such problems, and to be able analyse such a knowledge and its ordinary practical exploitation and (re-)production, I propose to adopt an epistemological stance that one may define as ontology of becoming, and a methodology that chooses as a central heuristic instrument the ethnographer's – observed at length,
accounted for in detail, reflected upon and adequately triangulated – lived experience of changing and, so to speak, re-socialization.
BPbE, by mixing traditional PO with OP, directs particular and specific – yet not exclusive – attention to the day-by-day process of initiation of the ethnographer-as-becoming-member of the studied community; on her/his changing way to experience the world, her/himself and her/his body; on the membership knowledge s/he is acquiring and embodying, and how so; on the effect of all this on his/her self, self-presentation and self-narrative. My answer to the initial questions, indeed, is basically the following: rigorous and lived auto/ethnography – that is, “reflexively reflexive”, analytically and theoretically oriented, experientially meaningful ethnography, equipped with a well surveilled ethnographic self, in dialogue with his/her (changing) self as well as with the other members of the field.
Finally, when it comes to account for the experiences that the ethnographer undergoes and observes, it is my contention that we are in need of representational techniques and strategies, both verbal and not, in order to preserve the sensuous, lived character of our being there, and to provide experientially meaningful accounts. “We need more, not fewer, ways to tell of culture” (Van Maanen 1988, 140). As for verbal ones, I found instant CA in jottings, kept visible in fieldnotes and their excerpts, a useful tool. Moreover, I would recommend a kind of ethnographic writing that, in its analytical aim, neither worships concepts and words, rather creatively plays with them, nor is afraid to exploit evocative and narrative styles when they could enhance communication. As for non-verbal strategies, besides collecting diverse materials on the field, such as photos and video-recordings, it is important to produce visual accounts by creating and/or composing drawings, graphical representations, photographic reportages, collages of images of various kind, as well as storyboards.
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Visual appendix
Figures 1 Figure 2 Figure 3
Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6
Figure 9 Figure 10
