Day after day, we are bombarded with survey evidence about the lives and the times of our fellow citizens. This, we are told, is how the unemployed regard benefit fraud, how the Scottish middle class react to the idea of independence, what black youths feel about the police’s use of stop and search. But much of this evidence is collected over a short period of time by professional pollsters who have little sense of the context in which they ask their tick-box questions.
Ethnography is a necessary supplement and often an important antidote to this form of research. It takes time: several of the researchers on our shortlist, for example, had spent two to three years studying, and often living within, a specific culture or subculture. It also allows questions to arise during the course of the research rather than being pre-programmed. So when Howard Parker embarked on his classic ethnographic study of delinquent youth in Liverpool (View from the Boys: A Sociology of Downtown Adolescents, 1974), he was faced by the official assumption that the young people in his sample were persistent offenders, hardened and even dangerous delinquents. Only after two years of hanging around with the boys was Parker able to conclude that this was far from the case. The boys’ offending was “mundane, trivial, petty, occasional, and very little of a threat to anyone except themselves”.
In a very similar manner, Heidi Hoefinger’s Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia: Professional Girlfriends and Transactional Relationships (2013), one of the studies shortlisted for the award, began from the common belief that encounters in the so-called “sex bars” of Cambodia would be entirely cash-based and essentially sleazy. Only after spending long periods of time talking to the women who worked in the bars and their male clients was she able to show that the relationships fashioned in the bars also had an important emotional component. Another stereotype had been exploded…
But the award is not only an affirmation of the significance of ethnography. What also prompted the five-year agreement between the BBC and the BSA was a wish to recognise the personal qualities that are needed in someone who is prepared to leave their family and friends to spend extended periods of time in a culture that will be uncomfortable, alien and, at times, downright dangerous. We all happily dip into different cultures: watch the skateboarders going through their paces under the Royal Festival Hall, check out the street style of the Rastas at the Notting Hill Carnival, wander through Chinatown during the New Year celebrations. But this is a far cry from suspending our own cherished values and embracing those of others for months and even years.
I wonder if ethnography gets less attention these days because we live in an era where:
1. We want research results more quickly. In comparison, surveys can be quickly administered and analyzed.
2. The big data of today allows for broad understandings and patterns. Ethnographies tend to be more particular.
3. We like “scientific” data that appears more readily available in surveys and experiments. Ethnographies appear more dependent on the researcher and subjective as opposed to “scientific.”
At the same time, there are other social forces that would promote ethnographies including more humane and holistic understandings of the world (particularly compared to the sterility of multiple-choice questions and quick numbers) as well as needing more time to study complex social phenomena.
Legally Sociable 