Ethnologia Europaea

REFLECTIONS ON ORDERLY AND DISORDERLY ETHNOGRAPHY

Ethnography involves a series of competencies, methods, and theoretically anchored stances whose composition shift as they are moved from one context to another. This article works to delineate new ways of explaining the manner in which academics have tended to work with ethnographic practices in an attempt to produce illuminative cultural analyses. As part of this endeavor the text goes beyond the realms of the traditional classroom setting to examine the manner in which ethnography is used outside of the academy as a mode of expression, and it reflects upon the implications these movements may have for what is ultimately taught in theclassroom. While doing this, the paper proposes a need to rethink ethnography as compositional practice.

Drawing inspiration from the work of dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, this paper explores strategies for teaching about both the experience of race and the ethnography of race. Focusing specifically on ways to encourage students to explore the embodiment of race as it intersects with politics of power, strategies to use both within and outside the classroom are explored. Methods emphasize both in-classroom strategies, and those that take students beyond the classroom – and specifically – onto the bus. The setting is the United States, and here the bus has specific historical and cultural resonance. The strategies are transferable and widely applicable (with adjustments for cultural and historical context) to a variety of sites.

Autoethnography is a method of cultural research where you use your own experiences as a starting point or as examples of more general conditions. You are both the subject and the object of observation. Recently I tried a variant of this method in a Do-It-Yourself project, writing field notes while working as a home fixer with hammer, screwdriver and other tools. I also reflected on some differences and similarities between writing and DIY. The purpose of self-narrative experiments like this is to improve fieldwork and cultural analysis. By practising autoethnography you may learn more about the research process and become more conscious of what is going on when you are doing observations and interpreting them.

Over the last three years I have been doing the most irregular ethnography ever, from a position as a non-researcher in a regional innovation program in Norway. There is reason to believe that the demand for so-called applied ethnography is rising, and that increasingly cultural researchers will be offered opportunities to apply their academic knowledge in different practical situations. This article presents experiences of applied work in one particular case, raising discussions on how this challenges the classic role of the researcher. What happens when one is not only dealing with analyzing discourses and structures (culture as text), how things happen or not (culture as praxis), but when one is actually part of making things happen? In conclusion, I examine how wellclassic ethnographic methods work toward establishing solid knowledge-based praxis, at the same time as finding it uncomplicated to address the applied praxis field through rather disconnected discourses.

This article is a postanalysis of a culture-based regional innovation project with different partners in which “art and culture” and “experience” were supposed to inform the design of a new outdoor waterworld establishment in southern Norway. Through ethnographic fieldwork the surrounding maritime landscape was investigated as a possible resource for waterworld stories and artistic expressions in the establishment design. This design was nevertheless disregarded by the waterworld management and a more conventional playground theme was chosen. This article thus discusses the various reasons why a culture-based innovation project like this can fail. Traditional business routines can collide with an innovation project structure, but culture policy ideals on the meaningfulness of the arts might also be too abstract when materialised into a tourism business.

The reality facing applied ethnography today is one of popularisation at the cost of content. There is a potent risk of ethnography being replaced by less professional methods marketed under similar headings. This article therefore explores ways to develop the discipline further as well as the instruments necessary to improve application and communication. It goes on to argue that ethnography is a discipline that records and analyses human behaviour and should consequently be informed by other disciplines with a similar focus. The authors also actualise the necessity of ethnographers improving their knowledge about business administration as the studies they execute are increasingly in demand for informing long term product and business strategies.

Although using the past to explain or question the present remains part of ethnology’s self-image, ethnology has become a contemporary-oriented discipline. While we tend to emphasise the complexity of our own time, we risk representing the past as a series of single events with immutable meaning, reduced to a backdrop. This article attempts to discuss the practical implications of using ethnographic methods to describe and understand a lost world. Is it at all possible? Inspired by Barthes’s method for analysing three levels of meaning in the advertising image, and by Ricoeur’s metaphor of history as a map, I shall attempt to outline a method for performing ethnography in eighteenth-century Stockholm, using a notorious ball at the Royal Palace in April 1768 as anexample.

This article is concerned with the question of the ethnography of the invisible: multisensory research about domestic energy practices. In it I draw on existing and imagined research to outline an agenda for doing ethnography of domestic energy consumption practices. I will not be the first to use qualitative methods to research how people consume energy in their homes. Yet my aim is to further the methodological basis for such research by examining the implications of applying a theory of multisensoriality to understanding the co-constitution of the practices and places of domestic energy consumption.