What is Ethnography?

What is Ethnography?

Archived GoFundMe Update on IEEPI Study

Thank you all for your incredible generosity! I am very happy to share my first update. I've really been looking forward to these updates, because they let me geek out a bit about a project that I'm really passionate about while also letting you know in more detail exactly what it is that you are investing in.

It seems only fair that I begin these updates with a very blunt question: what will I actually be doing in this fieldwork?

Ethnography is a broad range of methods used by anthropologists to comprehend the communities that we work with. Our goal as anthropologists is to create a kind of empathetic understanding of all of the contextual factors in the cultures and environments that we are working with. This is important because no matter how open-minded a researcher may be, they are still bringing their own life experience and biases to the field. Even if I renounced my US citizenship, burned all of my money, moved to a new community, took a new name, and lived there for the rest of my life, I would still have grown up in a way that is different from the community that I’m working with, with different challenges and nuances. Being able to step out of my own worldview and into that of my research partners is something that Harry West calls “Ethnographic Sorcery” (2007).

There is a sort of magic to it. To tap into that magic is, in large part, the skill of anthropology. This will be massively reductive, but ethnography usually involves at least these two methods: interviews and participant observation. Interviews are easy enough to understand, at least in concept. Of course, there’s a way to make a good interview, but I’m not going to get that granular. Participant observation, on the other hand, essentially means living in and amongst the community that you are studying, so that you can get as close to a first-hand experience as possible of the sorts of contextual factors that influence behavior. If, for instance, I were to study leatherworking in Japan, I might actually become an apprentice leatherworker in Japan. This is where the ethnographic maxim of “being there” comes in. Authority is established by being in context through participant observation.

I imagine you may be saying, “That’s all well and good, but how do you do participant observation with astronauts? Do you go to space?!”

You’d be right to ask..and the answer isn’t necessarily “no.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, anthropologists grappled with the same kind of question. How could we conduct our fieldwork without endangering our research partners? We couldn’t risk our own health or that of vulnerable contacts (refugees in my case), and that was even if travel was allowed to begin with! International travel bans were widespread, and ethics committees were extremely reluctant to allow in-person fieldwork of any kind. We all needed to get creative. For me, that meant shifting my focus from “refugees in a designated geographical space” to “refugees in digital space”. I asked questions like, “How are social media and Zoom chats replacing in-person socialization?” I worked in English-learning classrooms online, and I participated in social media campaigns run by refugees to alter narratives about their conditions.

I also developed experimental techniques, like having my contacts create works of art that expressed how they felt and who they perceived themselves to be. This form of non-verbal communication opened up new possibilities for conveying information without the limitations of languages or my contacts’ limited vocabulary.

So, let’s come back to Ethnography in Space. My research goal in this project is to understand how the process of simulating prolonged emergencies in space in a space-like environment alters the astronauts’ identities over time. That means comparing identities before and after the mission, so I’ll interview them–both before and after the mission. I will ask them direct questions like, “why do you want to be an astronaut?” and “what are you feeling about the mission?”, but I will also be asking them questions about their life, their friends, their hobbies, all of the things that make up who they are and how they see themselves. The comparison of before and after will be a starting point.

The meat of the study though, lies in having them create journals while they are on the mission. Their internal and interpersonal observations, their thoughts, and the wandering marginalia, doodles, and sketches that they create in these journals will be as close to being inside of their heads as I can possibly get. By giving them full expressive and creative license, and allowing them an infinite outlet, I can see the gradual and tiny changes from day to day, highlight themes, and notice trends between astronauts.

Now, all of that can be done remotely. It would be neat to talk in person, but I could effectively conduct all of that research from across the planet. It would certainly save me a bunch of money.

I need to be in person because–as I’m sure you are likely thinking–that’s not enough. Asking questions, and reading journals, that’s all well and good, but how do I really understand what they are going through? How do I feel the conditions that are changing these astronauts? To do that, I have to go on the mission with them.

An analogue mission has the wonderful benefit of not being in the vacuum of space. Now, I can’t actually sleep and eat and drink with them in the mission, I’m not an astronaut. But I can be on the same island as them, in the bunkhouse-turned-mission-control-room. I can watch them through a live feed and experience the emergencies as they happen, only a few miles away. I will be in and among other researchers who are conducting their own studies as part of mission control, which will allow me to understand the tiny influences of the project as a whole on the astronauts. If you are imagining a big chrome and glass room with a ton of people with headsets staring at a big screen at NASA, you’re on the right path. Just imagine the REI version of that.

By being at mission control–being part of mission control–I won’t just be reading about the mission, I will be a part of the mission. The emotional and psychological distance is closed and the empathetic bond is created. It is one thing to read about Ethnographic Sorcery, and another thing entirely to perform it.

I also recommend watching this 2-minute summary of ethnography: