Participant Observation and Fieldnotes

[Page 352]Participant observation – establishing a place in some natural setting on a relatively long-term basis in order to investigate, experience and represent the social life and social processes that occur in that setting – comprises one core activity in ethnographic fieldwork. Until recently, ethnographers restricted their interest in participant observation to such issues as the vagaries of establishing such a place, the need for empathetic immersion in the daily life and meaning systems of those studied, and the ethical and political issues arising with these efforts. But participant observation involves not only gaining access to and immersing oneself in new social worlds, but also producing written accounts and descriptions that bring versions of these worlds to others. Geertz's early insistence on the centrality of inscription in ethnography, calling attention to the fact that ‘the ethnographer “inscribes” social discourse, he writes it down’ (1973: 19), sparked growing recognition that the ethnographer is the scribe as well as the explorer and quasi-insider of both exotic and familiar social worlds.

By the 1980s, ethnographers increasingly recognized the centrality of these more mundane and unromantic writing activities for participant observation techniques and began to give close attention to ethnographic writing. Some of these efforts have focused on clarifying the presuppositions evident in polished (published) ethnographic accounts and monographs, proposing concepts ranging from ‘inscription’ (Geertz, 1973) and ‘transcription’ (Clifford, 1990) to ‘textualization’ (Clifford, 1986; Marcus, 1986) and ‘translation’ (Crapanzano, 1986) to depict the general character of ethnographic representation. A second strand of theorizing has sought to identify specific textual and rhetorical properties of ethnographic accounts. Richardson (1990a, 1990b) points to the centrality of ‘narrating’ in ethnographic writing: the ethnographer both elicits and records lay narratives as a primary form of field ‘data’, and then rewrites and reconstructs these narratives into polished ethnographic texts. Others address issues of how authority and authenticity are established in ethnographic texts (Atkinson, 1990; Clifford, 1983), the pervasive use of core literary devices such as synedoche and metaphor in ethnographic writing (Atkinson, 1990; Richardson, 1990b), and variations in voice in ethnographic accounts (Atkinson, 1990; Richardson, 1990b).

Only in the past decade or so have ethnographers moved beyond analysing the rhetorical strategies of finished ethnographies (and of some of the embedded fieldnote accounts they contain) to consider another, more mundane form of ethnographic inscription – the writing processes whereby a participating observer transforms portions of her lived experience into written fieldnotes. Ethnographers have begun to give attention to the character of fieldnotes as written texts, to variations in style and approach to writing fieldnotes, and to how to effectively train fieldwork novices to write more sensitive, useful and stimulating fieldnotes.1 The recent ‘discovery’ of fieldnotes is ironic, for it can be argued that writing fieldnotes, rather than writing finished ethnographies, provides the primal, even foundational moments of ethnographic representation: for most ethnographic monographs rely upon, incorporate and may even be built from these initial fieldnotes.

[Page 353]This movement has been advanced by several key works. Van Maanen's Tales of the Field (1988) explores the differences between extended fieldnote accounts written in ‘realist’, ‘confessional’, and ‘impressionist’ styles. Sanjek's edited volume Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology (1990a) provides a collection of symposium papers examining ‘what anthropologists do with fieldnotes, how they live with them, and how attitudes toward the construction and use of fieldnotes may change through individual professional careers’ (1990b: xii). In The Ethnographic Imagination (1990), Atkinson provides close analyses of various rhetorical and textual devices common to ethnographies, giving special attention to several extended fieldnote extracts (pp. 57–63). The latest edition of the Loflands’ Analyzing Social Settings (1995) includes a lengthy chapter on ‘Logging Data’, which examines both observing and writing fieldnotes as well as conducting and writing up interviews. And finally, in Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (1995), Emerson, Fretz and Shaw offer an extended treatment of the processes of writing fieldnotes from first contacts in the field to producing final ethnographies.

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