Ethnography and participant observation

From the more anthropologically minded Ethnography of Communication and its descendants Language Socialisation and Community of Practice theory comes the time-tested method ofparticipant observation. In short this means that the analyst becomes a part of the group he or she is studying, participating as well as possible in their practices for a longer period of time, while also observing and documenting their activities in as many ways as possible (Saville-Troike 1989).

The procedure is still a standard part of most anthropological research projects.

By its unsystematized scanning of information through direct participation and observation of the object of study, it serves the role of basic method which other techniques with clearer targets may build upon (Pelto & Pelto 1978, 69).

Participant observation comes in many degrees, however, from researchers participating as little as possible in the practice observed, to researchers involving themselves fully in community life.

In my case I used a form of participant observation in the village field work. I participated in various ways in the household where I lived for 5 weeks, by sharing their meals, helping with washing clothes and dishes, fetching water in the river, and taking part in other easy chores.

In the larger village context I attended social occasions such as vaccination campaigns, official holidays, parent meetings, a marriage feast and a gathering to comfort a mother whose child had died during the night. I observed what was going on as well as I could without a full mastery of the language, noting incidents and physical conditions around me in my field journal and describing procedures I saw others do. I often taped episodes which seemed interesting, a practice which made my host family and the nearest neighbours quite familiar with the camera.

In the school observations I used a much more withdrawn role, sitting mostly in a back corner of the class room and observing without actively taking part in teaching or interaction generally. As I got more experience in recording class room interaction, I changed place, putting myself in front of the class instead. Though the students were then constantly reminded of my presence and presumably might act differently, I found it important to be able to observe more directly their interaction with the teacher, and back of class did not offer a good enough vantage point. I took extensive notes of classroom activity, noting start time of each change in activity, and specifics of what was going on. It is however impossible to note quickly enough to get everything said, and so recordings were indispensable for a more detailed study of language use. Though the teachers and students of course recognised my camera as such, I took care not to show them the built-in view screen on the camera, so as to stop them from getting too occupied with their own appearance on this little ‘TV’. It is of course possible that the teachers to some extent ‘played to the camera’, though my general impression was that they behaved as they would normally do, in the large majority of cases.

Besides direct classroom observations, I spent many breaks chatting with the teachers, taking part in their conversations. This was both a source of data to me, and a way of getting acquainted with the teachers, or, rather, for them to get acquainted with me as a benevolent person, not out to criticise them. One should beware of the standard ’white man’s’ role, or maybe I should say Norwegian role, which is so willing to give ‘helpful’ advice, whether asked for or not. It was a problem to get time to note at least some of the conversations down, as it seemed strange to make long pauses for me to write down interesting things. Still, some valuable points of view and observations came from these discussions, giving me ideas on what to look for next or meshing in with other information.

The observer’s paradox

The well-known observer’s paradox is the problem of observing something one is part of and still get what one may call authentic data. By being there, however inobtrusively, the observer changes the original situation. By not being there, the situation is presumably not changed, but neither will any observation be made (Labov 1972).

A totally passive observation as if through a glass wall is hardly possible in ethnographic research, and would probably become a source of error in its own right. The ‘researcher-free’ condition of observation is impossible to obtain.

Seeing this, it is better to make clear one’s role and possible impact on the data, than hiding it. Participant observation is a research method which is, or should be, open about the presence of the researcher in the data.

In some cases the researcher’s person can become a resource. As an example

3.2. COLLECTING DATA

I can use my experience in classroom observations. As I intended to influence the data as little as possible, I did not actively take part in classroom interaction in any way, I did not act as an assistent teacher or played at being a student. I sat quietly in my corner, taking notes and occasionally video-taping. This detached attitude could be hard sometimes, when for example students tried to strike up a whispered conversation with me, or when teachers physically punished students.

Still, there were instances when the teachers themselves noted my presence in class, using it to goad students to perform better in front of a visitor studying schooling. In other cases the simple rules of polite social interaction overrode my effort of unintrusiveness, as when the whole class rose and chorused ‘Good morning, Madam!’ as I entered a classroom (see the beginning of Chapter 7).

Such incidents came to be data in its own right, giving me important insights.

My experience with the observer’s role in this project also showed me how my own person, my very presence, could set off some chain of activity which would not otherwise have happened.

For example I actively worked to have sessions of Nizaa story-telling in the main Nizaa school of the area, and taped these sessions. I did this partly to see how Nizaa children in a normally French school environment would react to the use of their own language in class, and partly because it was very much in line with my former role as protagonist of the Nizaa language. That role is not only a mask I put on to explain my presence as researcher in Galim, but an important part of who I am. When given the opportunity —I discovered that ‘National culture’

was part of the curriculum and opened up for the use of local storytellers— and having the necessary storytelling person close by me, I jumped to the possibility of doing it.

These sessions did turn out to be a rich source of data, of which only a fraction is used in the present study. However, the storytelling sessions also have another side pertinent to the question of a researcher’s presence in a community—we easily become agents of change. To have my research assistent tell Nizaa tales in three different classes, with the happy support of the teachers and taped by the European researcher, is an act which is quite likely to enhance the status of that language and that culture in the area. I rather hope so in this case; but if this particular transgression of the anthroplogist’s code of conduct did not harm anybody, the researcher should always be aware of how her acts may influence, not only the data in a research project, but the very community she is studying.

A somewhat different example comes from the two sessions of gameplaying which I organised in the little village where I stayed for my fieldwork (see 3.2.1 on page 66). Though the children often played different games by themselves in the evenings, these occasions were different. As they took place in the courtyard of a compound instead of some open place off a village street, they came to be carried out in the presence of adult women who conceived of these sessions as

part of my work to record authentic Nizaa life. These women then actively guided their children in how to perform the games, as they themselves had played them when young. There is no doubt that the games were played somewhat differently on these occasions with the double distorting factors of a white person filming the action and mothers and aunts correcting and showing how to do the game.

On the other hand I got data of direct adult-child teaching situations which would otherwise have been hard to come by. By looking at the differences between the games as played by the children and how they should have been played according to the mothers, I was also able to see something of the changes taking place in the local peer culture. Again data influenced by the researcher are not necessarily worthless, they only require awareness of what the influences are.

There is an inherent danger in the genre of anthropological descriptions of exotic cultures, or maybe any culture, diagnosed by the use of the present tense.

The group in questionislike that, theybehaveso-and-so, theydosuch-and such.

It is as if they were living in a vacuum, without changes or variations whatsoever.

This is of course quite misleading: any group will have a history and be in constant interchange with its surroundings, and most knowledge and socalled belief systems will be socially distributed. The use of the ‘eternal present’ is a gross oversimplification. In fact, it often leads to ‘essentialism’, the idea that there is some unchangeable inner core in people, so that by attaching a label identifying them, we know something substantial about them. This translates easily into an idea of no matter what a person does or says, their label of an ethnic or racial identity is seen as causal to certain behaviours (Gutiérrez & Rogoff 2003). I have tried to avoid the use of the ‘eternal present’, while still describing relevant commonalities and cultural traits of the Nizaa.

Both to show what data some description is based on and to be frank about how my own presence influenced data, I make extended use of ‘research anecdotes’

from my field journal in my presentation of data in the analysis chapters. By telling of things that I myself witnessed, I can exemplify and enrich the analysis.

By stating that these cases are indeed based on such and such observations, I avoid the danger of too widesweeping generalisations. I cannot say that all Nizaa would do likewise as some individual or group that I saw act in a given situation, but this individual or this groupdidact like that, and that observationdoescount for something (Rogoff 2003, 83). The solution to the observer’s paradox lies in the open use of things happening around the researcher’s person, because such incidents can also tell us about the contigencies of a situation.

Building trust, shaping a role

A last point about participant observation as staying within a group for a longer period of time is that quality interaction with the community studied is needed.

3.2. COLLECTING DATA

The researcher must endeavour to build trust, if she wants to see people behave as they would normally do. She must have enough trust from people to get truthful answers when she wants to check for correct understandings of observed phenomena, and she must try to get as much as possible an insider’s view of things.

To do this, the researcher must have some role to play in the community while she is there, so that others can make sense of her presence and choose how to act (Agar 1996, 105). To explain my project in close detail to Nizaa parents and the teachers at the schools would probably not have worked very well, not the least since I at the time had not completely clarified my own main research questions.

Still, I had to present myself and my research in some way, also because those studied have a right to know that they are observed, and why. I thus built partly on my own earlier role as a person interested in the Nizaa language, trying to learn it and to use it to make books in Nizaa. Many people knew that in my former role I had visited a number of villages to speak of the necessity of learning to read and write Nizaa and to develop Nizaa as a written language. In my new role as researcher, I tried to come across as a person that still cared about the future of the Nizaa language, though I had no formal ties to the Nizaa Litterature Center anymore.

At the same time I spoke of my interest in schooling, to some extent framing it as looking for an answer to the question of why the Nizaa have been so slow to embrace education, something which has puzzled educators and others for many years. I tried to be clear on my general support for formal schooling, agreeing with teachers and other informants alike that it was important for the children to go to school and to learn French. Fortunately I was able to present my work and my goals on a meeting for all the headmasters of the area at the district school inspector’s office, in addition to speaking with individual headmasters at their schools. At that occasion I also made clear to them that I was not going to use their real names in my work, saying that though I had no plans of slandering their work, one never knows what other readers elsewhere might think, and it is customary to anonymize informants in this way to protect them.

The positive attitude to formal schooling had to be tempered by a ready acceptance of people who for some reason chose notto send their children to school, so as to open the possibility for them to tell me why. I was not in a position to judge, though I expressed my interest in the how’s and why’s.

A special problem was how to handle recordings and observations of children.

According to standard protocols for the use of human subjects for data collection, I should obtain permission from parents and if possible from the students themselves before starting such a project (Gonzalez-Marquez, Becker & Cutting 2006, 74). This turned out to be practically impossible in the Cameroonian context. I asked first permission of the school headmasters to come into classes

and observe, starting with the school closest to my living quarters. I was readily admitted after explaining my goals along the lines sketched out above.

When I asked about how I would get permission from the parents, however, the headmaster just scoffed: if he as headmaster had given his blessing to research going on in his school, what could the parents say? He thought it completely unnecessary to ask them. I did, however, present myself at parent meetings at all the three primary schools in Galim, and at a parent meeting in the smaller village of Mipom, giving at least some parents (fathers) an idea of what I was going to do.

I have also anonymized names of children in and out of classes, and other people, in the present study.³

Trust is finally often built not on whatever explanation a researcher might give of her project and ideas, but simply by living with people on an everyday basis.

My earlier year-long work in the area was somewhat helpful here, though a great number of people I met on my fieldwork had never seen me before. This was not enough by itself, though, I still had to build trust on the basic level. Partaking in social events, giving a helping hand by transporting a sick child to the clinic in Galim, eating the food I was served without complaints and often with relish, all of these were acts which over time made people feel that they knew me somewhat and could trust me. From one point of view I clearly stayed too short to really get into every aspect of their lives. On the other hand, I think I made a good enough start to use the data I collected with some confidence.