The sound & the fury (plus questions)

The sound: It was late afternoon.  I was in the middle of conducting an interview, recording the conversation with a small digital voice recorder.  Rain falling outside, in droves.  I could hear water rushing down the street.  The sound of water pouring from the roof.  Water dripping from here and there.  Clinking and clattering on the tin roof above.  Inside, one light in the corner of the room fought back the cold of the rain outside.  I was talking with a mother and her son amidst the incessant rain.  The sound of the rainfall wasn’t exactly overwhelming, just constant.  In the moment, it all sounded pretty nice.

The fury: When I finally checked the recording later that night, the rain made it almost impossible to hear the conversation.  The voices of mother and son were swept up in an auditory wrecking ball that sounded more like a tornado than raindrops.  The interview was still salvageable, but it was hardly a masterpiece of ethnographic audio.  Frustrating.

Read the rest on Savage Minds, here.

Writing Matters

If there's one thing that I think needs some more emphasis in anthropological training, it's writing.  I'm not talking about just grant writing, or proposal writing, but the whole craft (ie method) of writing.  Writing is, in fact, one of the primary methods of anthropology (and numerous other social science disciplines), but how often is it seriously considered a core part of methodological training?  Not all that often - it's almost as if everyone is magically expected to know how to write well, and that, so they say, is that.  Well, maybe there's another route to take.  And that's why I can appreciate Michael C. Munger's article on The Chronicle of Higher Ed "10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly."  It was posted in September of last year, and it brings up some good points and tips about writing...better.

One thing that I go for is the volume method, and I took this directly from my days as a photographer.  Someone once said that "Good writers write" and hence "good photographers make photographs," so the key to good photography is taking lots of pictures, just as the key to good writing is, yes, writing a lot.  Nobody ever got good at anything by dabbling every other month.  My good friend Tom, who taught me pretty much everything about photography that I know, also called this the TRASH CAN METHOD, meaning that it's important to take lots of pictures but also to realize that most of them are going to be crap and destined for the waste bins of history.  Volume is key: this means that it's important to work a lot.  But editing is also critical: this means that it's just as important to realize that most of what we create (whether photographs or paragraphs) are going to be seriously deficient and will need tremendous revision (or a complete restart).

It's all a big process, and the hardest part is getting used to plugging away, regardless of the bad paragraphs, false starts, out of focus images, poorly conceived ideas, or weak arguments.  Brett Weston, one of my absolute favorite photographers, once said that photography is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent sheer, brutal drudgery.  I think the same applies to writing.  Part of the difficulty is learning how to weather the bad streaks and lame attempts while finding ways to grab hold of the key ideas, discoveries, and moments of inspiration long enough to pin them down on paper (or Microsoft Word------------you know what I mean*) and create something that's actually heading somewhere.  The good ideas, it seems, arise from a sea of crap.  Plenty of fertilizer, I suppose, to pave the way for the future.  So goes writing: we all just have to keep tilling the mental fields, and eventually spring will show up.  Ok, I'm done with the metaphors for the day.


*This grammatical disaster is an inside joke that only a certain grammarian will appreciate.  

One word (and then some more)

So, one word has been keeping me busy for the last month or so: proposal.

That's pretty much all that I have been doing: writing a little, reading a lot, and writing some more. Funny how it can take so much time to jam information into one little document.

The methods section is especially difficult to frame out in a detailed sense, especially since the actual data collection is quite far off in the future. The proposal guidelines was some pretty specific information about how data will be handled--but the catch 22 is that any analytical methods necessarily depend on the ethnographic data, which doesn't really exist. I understand the reasons why reviewers want specifics...they want to make sure that people have a plan and know (somewhat) what they are doing. That makes sense. At the same time, sitting here two years in advance of the time when I will start really analyzing all of my (future) ethnographic data, it's a little difficult to predict how I will connect research question 2 with research question 4b. Just sayin.

In related news, I am putting photography in my methods section, even though that might not go over all that well with the powers that be (grant reviewers). We'll see how that works. What I find interesting is the fact that photography is (for some reason) still seen as something that is more subjective or less scientific than the written word. Didn't we move past that in the 1990s? I thought so, but apparently not. The ironic thing to me is that many ethnographers use photography and other visual tool in their work all the time--but they don't all include these tools in theoretical or methodological discussions. Interesting. This happens with photography all the time--ethnographers use cameras as supplementary tools without explicitly including them with the standard "tools" like participant observation, interviews, surveys, etc. Still, there are a lot of anthropologists who use visual methods--and use them quite well. The book "Righteous Dopefiend" by Phillipe Bourgois and Jeff Shonberg is just one example. Joao Biehl's "Vita" is another example. And there are tons of others.

Speaking of photography check out this link about the work of Susan Meiselas.

Reading update: I spend the last couple of weeks reading A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. Final analysis: some good ideas in there, but it's best to approach the book with a little humor. At least, that's what worked best for me. And that strategy makes sense, because D&G kinda use the book to mess with readers a bit (the chapter on "The Geology of Morals" is a case in point). I definitely found some good ideas in the book, along with plenty of really dense passages that I was not all that interested in trying to decode for secret, embedded meanings.

Lastly, how about this: