Kurs i kvalitative metoder, fjerde semester

Forår 2004

Ved Michael Whyte og Finn Sivert Nielsen

Gå til kursets hjemmeside


Forelesningsnotater til Michael Whytes forelesning
Strangers and Qualitative Methods  - 2/17/04


 I - Introduction

A. Simmel: basic structure of an idea  - oxymoronic?

1. social position of remoteness

2. permanent/categorical liminality

3. relationship of intimacy defined by distance

B. The stranger as ethnographer

1. participant observation as positioned
a. MW - kinship roles in Bunyole

2. experience as a fieldwork method (Tonkin)

3. participation: intimacy (Simmel) vs position (Tonkin)

C. The stranger as ethnographic subject

1. From a Danish position: integration, communitas/liminality, emotion/intimacy
fieldwork with ‘strangers’ in Denmark can end up simply reflecting the dominant host: stranger relationship. 

2. From another position: ethnographic challenge is to place oneself as ethnographer in other social positions

3. Limits to participation? how to study ‘strangers’ in social contexts where there are no strangers?
In other words, what do they do when you are not there?

 

II - Tonkin and Chagnon: the varieties of Participant Observation

1. oxymoron: cf military intelligence

2. general movement from participation in order to observe (Malinowski) to observation in order to participate (phenomenology...)
cf  L.  Holy (I Ellen, R.F. (ed) Ethnographic Research, London: Academic Press, 1984)

3. participating to observe:
a. Chagnon - fieldwork as a 0-sum game, a macho challenge
b. Experience as a mirror
     (cf Bernard Arcand's Cuiva studies or J.P. Dumont, The Headman and I)
c. Not sharing as symbolic key to Chagnon's Yanamamo studies - 'objective'?
     (my peanut butter - your hallucinogens)

4. experience (the introduction of subject-subject relationships): fieldwork as "experiential teaching of what 'social' means" (219)
a. What is, is known through action, through creating a positioned relationship
b. Cf. Chagnon: even his fieldwork experience is related to position - and personality

5. experience and validity: "If the anthropologist is in one sense the method, it follows that the age, sex and indeed the personality of the investigator will in some degree direct the findings" (221-2)
a. Sanjek and Finn's presentation of the ethnographic path.
b. Is the Chagnon article an adequate ethnographic path?

 

III - Simmel: the Stranger

1. The 'potential wanderer' who 'comes today and stays tomorrow'

2. Stranger who stays
a. Fixed within a social group but does not quite belong in the group
b. Position in group 'determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning'
     Who has? The point is symbolic of potential interaction - cf. the in-marrying husband for his wife's family forhold til (svigerfamilien)
c. Stranger as a form of interaction - cf Goffman! - in a liminal space
     (1) Strangers are part of (or a potential of) any group - 'an element of the group itself' - created by the process of boundary drawing (cf Lévi-Strauss).
     (2) Strangers are apart: 'his position as a full-fledged member involves being both outside it and confronting it'
     (3) Uncommitted yet apart - structurally indifferent, structurally objective
     (4) Indifference can become intimacy
     (5) Strangers cannot be individuals - embedded one's own society and history from the beginning

3. Experience, liminality and the stranger who moves on
a. Interrail intimacy – liminality of traveling together
b. Simmel: falling in love, first passion, total singularity/uniqueness - and estrangement breaks the uniqueness and allows generalization 

BUT:  (somewhat cynically) this ‘uniqueness’ of feeling is itself repeated in each experience; it ‘lasts’ because it is beyond the social – and therefore cannot endure

c. Intimacy, as a liminal state, is not socially specific

 

IV - Fieldwork and the intimacy of meeting the stranger

1. Moving beyond Simmel to explore liminality, Victor Turner's communitas (e.g.: The Ritual Process), the anthropology of emotion

2. Charles Lindholm; Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pukhtun of Northern Pakistan, Columbia UP: New York, 1982

3. Some fieldwork experience with strangers who move on may simply reflect the liminality of the situation – ‘unique’ and emotional rather than specific and socially positioned.  All participation, no observation. 

 

V - Summary - the paradoxes again

1. being an ethnographic stranger - the nature of fieldwork experience - intimacy and liminality

2. studying communities of strangers - focus on social positions and points of view -

3. Simmel's position is that of the host: relation of stranger to me, a member. 
a. Is the relationship symmetrical?  When?
b. How to study the 'stranger in her group' when one is oneself a stranger?