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Kimberley ColesEthnographic Reform: A technical turn

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Commentary

LAW, CULTURE

AND

THE HUMANITIES

Corresponding author:

Kimberley Coles, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Redlands, Redlands, CA.

E-mail: [email protected]

Law, Culture and the Humanities

8(3) 398408 The Author(s) 2010

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Ethnographic Reform: Atechnical turn

Kimberley ColesDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Redlands

AbstractThis article explores a recent technical turn an interest in the interrogation of the technical

means through which the world becomes and is arranged in ethnographic practice through

discussion of three key methodological challenges found in recent ethnographic fieldwork:

collaboration, linguistic competence, and temporal immersion. In alliance with posthumanist

perspectives and through an interest in the techniques and practices of knowledge production,

what at first blush appear as limitations are becoming resources for new sets of questions and

approaches. Ethnographic reform requires rethinking the traditional relationships between

ethnographer, empiricism and information, and the subjects and objects of data.

KeywordsTechne; ethnographic practice and methodology; actor network theory; knowledge production;

epistemology

A technical turn has introduced new subjects and objects of inquiry to ethnography, and

has led to renewed epistemic reflexivity within ethnography itself. In the following

article, I examine this technical turn an interest in the interrogation of the technical

means through which the world becomes and is arranged (e.g., bureaucratic, mundane

of mundane, pragmatic, organizational) and discuss its impacts on ethnographic prac-tice. The technical turn in ethnography, which has found affinities with scholarship

using Actor Network Theory and/or within Science and Technology Studies, has

allowed ethnographers to reinterpret and re-examine their own technical ends and

means, those pragmatic tools such as immersion or language acquisition through which

ethnographic knowledge becomes. This interrogation of ethnographic tools and assump-

tions leads to problematizations of ethnography and its ontology and epistemology

of data. How then are contemporary ethnographers thinking about data and the data

gathering process? What are their relations with knowledge and practices of knowledge

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Coles 399

production, their own and those of their informants? How far are ethnographers from a

Malinowskian base, and what methodological and/or analytical innovations have

resulted from fitting dear concepts and tools to new configurations of being and of

knowing?

Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close

to a native village while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight. 1

Bronislaw Malinowski, in the opening chapter ofArgonauts of theWestern Pacific

(1922), his first widely read work, advances the method of participant-observation.

His discussion of ethnography begins with the sentence above, one that seeks to cap-

ture the reader into the emotional, pragmatic, and intellectual life of the intrepid

anthropologist. Concerned with scientific legitimacy, Malinowski devotes the entirety

of the chapter to detailing the principles and techniques of ethnographic fieldwork. He

likens his efforts to other scientific endeavors and justifies his discussion of method

vis--vis the necessity of transparency of data and data collection to the scientific

method. As befits a scientist (and a new field trying to find its place), no one would

dream of making an experimental contribution to physical or chemical science without

giving a detailed account of all the arrangements of the experiments.2Ethnography

has moved a long way from Malinowskis context. The myth of ethnographic practice

as a holistic, objective, neutral science has been shattered, and ethnography has

expanded its interpretive arenas and geographic locales. But, ethnographers as a

whole, and anthropologists more specifically, still hue closely to his method and thestrategies and techniques he championed. Malinowskis formulation of participant-

observation as the most effective means to discover and illuminate the natives point

of view, his relation to life, and his vision of the world remains strong. 3

The Malinowskian method has acted as a steady base for ethnography despite and,

indeed, through challenges and critiques. This base is the substance of ethnographys

technical character: the tools and techniques through which ethnographers collect data

and understand their inquiries. More and more ethnographers, however, are finding that

it is difficult to get at the emic perspective embedded deep within the ethnographic sen-

sibility. Rather than understanding the inability to utilize ethnographic tools as disfunc-tion however, the recognition of the limits and vagaries of information and quests for

knowledge can open ethnography up to new lines and modes of inquiry. Difficulties in

approaching the social as an empirical given are at the heart of the technical turn, and

have had wide-ranging, cascading effects on how ethnographers think about the tools by

which they attempt to access the socio-cultural.

The social and cultural as empirically given has only been challenged relatively

recently. Ethnographers in the 1990s were experimenting with novel spaces and topics of

work, but, as Bill Maurer argues, few were questioning the form of ethnographic

1. Bronislaw Malinowski,Argonauts of the Western Pacific(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1961

[1922]), p. 4.

2. Malinowski,Argonauts, p. 2.

3. Malinowski,Argonauts, p. 25.

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400 Law, Culture and the Humanities 8(3)

fieldwork.4Maurer applauds the application of ethnography to new locales, such as the

non-geographic or multiply geographic, but he gives an ovation to the destabilization

work undertaken by scholarship grappling with societal instability. Dramatic social

upheaval led to the collapse of our informants understandings of the world, he argues,but it also undercut the stability of our own taken-for-granted categories of social, politi-

cal, economic, and legal analysis. Crisis provoked epistemological reflexivity and

unseated any ethnographic practice that would claim a privileged closeness to the mate-

rial, real relations on the ground that traditionally formed anthropologys special claim to

knowledge.5In the last decade, with innovation and experimentation as well as conster-

nation and contention, ethnography has seen more and more of this categorical collapse

and epistemological reflexivity as it subjects sense-making and knowledge practices

themselves to ethnographic inquiry. In the next sections, I trace some paths that knowl-

edge disruption has taken within ethnographic practice, beginning with disruptions found

in the field. I follow with a brief primer of Actor Network Theory, which has assisted

ethnographers to rethink and recast information and their relationship to it. Finally, I

highlight two works that exemplify innovations in what I have termed ethnographic

reform, the technical manner through which ethnographic data becomes and emerges as

descriptive and analytical objects.

I. Ethnographic limitations and a deficit framework

Two particular tools of knowledge production dear to the ethnographic heart linguistic

ability and temporal immersion stand out as constitutive of ethnographic empiricism.Ethnographers, rightly, often wield them as mechanisms through which new, more intri-

cate and intimate knowledge can be generated in comparison to other social scientific

and humanistic fields. In my own fieldwork within a post-war democracy promotion

intervention, critics, including ethnographers, used them to explain why international aid

workers were ignorant and unable to grasp the reality of the local post-war context. The

world of international aid is marked by low local language skills and high professional

mobility. Its easy to remark that interventions are often based on superficial knowledge.

This is certainly not wrong, as numerous ethnographers have long argued, particularly in

relation to colonial and development encounters. There are excellent reasons to demandlinguistic excellence and temporal embeddedness in a specific locale, and of course they

have long been mainstays of ethnographic practice.

Ethnographic authority is still built primarily on the basis of being there. Good

ethnography requires both rapport and immersion. In my own early fieldwork interac-

tions, as a novice ethnographer, I naturally dedicated myself to my nascent language

skills and to setting up a long-term presence in the community. I soon realized that there

was a profound mismatch between my method and my site, and within my larger episte-

mological frames. The rapport that I was seeking to build relies on temporal, spatial, and

4. Bill Maurer, Please Destabilize Ethnography Now: Against Anthropological Showbiz-as-

Usual,Reviews in Anthropology32 (2003), pp. 15969.

5. Maurer, Destabilize Ethnography, p. 167.



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Coles 401

linguistic assumptions, none of which held in my locale. Hypermobile events and infor-

mants disrupted spatial and temporal continuities in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina.6

There was little temporal continuity to tap into during my research within the interna-

tional aid community and their interventions in elections and democracy promotion. It isdifficult, even in retrospect, to pinpoint twelve consecutive months in which electoral

activities would have been visible. The subjects of international electoral administration

simply did not exist in Bosnia-Herzegovina in a continuous period. A traditionally-

defined rapportwas difficult in the highly mobile and unstable environment. Although

called a community, their durable social ties to each other were weak. What exactly

formed the basis of this purported international community? Informants would appear

for two weeks, six weeks, two months, or six months, and then return to where they came

from (i.e., countries in Europe and North America) or move on to another electoral or

humanitarian aid project (e.g., South Africa, East Timor, Cote dIvoire, Haiti). Some

would return for the next election, others would not. Furthermore, few electoral aid

workers could converse at even a minimum level in any of the local languages, in part

because of structural commitments to hypermobility. English was the common language

used in professional settings, but was the native language of only a small percentage. While

many aid workers were fluent or comfortable in English, the range of communicative skills

was wide. Neither temporal immersion nor linguistic embeddedness in Serbo-Croatian or

the successor languages (i.e., Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian) would assist in the develop-

ment of the sought-after rapport or in the collection of data, let alone good data.

Attempts to infuse new meanings into being there have been partially successful.

Although graduate students report that the Malinowskian frame figures prominently intheir fieldwork anxieties surrounding the crucial catalyst of rapport, many scholars are

now analyzing new ways of inhabiting the field in ways that do not require what Anne

Beaulieu has recently called co-location.7Co-location, an extended period of time in one

place, theoretically allows for the incorporation of the researcher into the society under

examination, the development of trust and rapport, and thus, the associated truthful and

intimate knowledge gained through the process of moving from outsider to insider (as

much as possible). When I was in the field on my rather incongruous research trips

(19972000), I ran into another PhD student who complained, upon hearing that I was as

mobile as my informants, that her advisor wouldnt let her leave her village during her12 month sentence. When I met her, I was on my way to a conference in Poland having

just left the Croatian coast where I had taken some R&R with colleague-friend-infor-

mants. While contextually dependent, rapport need not be defined in alliance with tem-

porality and cannot be in cases of distributed or intermittent phenomena. In this students

case, she found the villagers more mobile than she! What are the options for intimacy,

dwelling, or collaboration as replacements for a temporally and spatially defined rap-

port? Erica Bornstein and Beaulieu have recently argued for new modes of inhabiting the

6. Kimberley Coles,Democratic Designs: International Interventions and Electoral Practice in

Post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).

7. Anne Beaulieu, From Co-Location to Co-presence: Shifts in the Use of Ethnography for the

Study of Knowledge, Social Studies of Science40.3 (2010), pp. 45370.

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field.8 Beaulieu proposes co-presence as an epistemic strategy for ethnography as it

decenters the notion of space in favor of an expansive interactive field which may include

co-location and face-to-face interactions but also incorporates and embraces textuality

and inscription, infrastructure, and mediated settings, such as e-research or socialnetworking.9

My concern is how tools such as immersion affect an ethnographers abilities to col-

lect, create, and record data objects. In my research case, it is easy to criticize the inter-

national aid community on their language skills or lack of familiarity with Bosnia, and to

think that, if only, they knew the local languages better, if onlythey got to know Bosnia bet-

ter, then . The same set of anxieties could be cast upon my own ethnographic persona if

onlyI learned Bosnian, then I would really know what was happening, if onlyI stayed in

one place for a long time, I would really understand . This valid critique within some

contexts obscures important questions about the dynamics and emergence of knowledge

and information. It is thus important to resist the temptation to work within what I term

a deficit framework. For example, why (or when) is language not relevant to aid work-

ers? What ideologies or meanings does not-knowing service? What are the limits of

information? The ethnographic critique of language can, unintentionally, limit our inter-

pretive ability to understand the dynamics of the social. Their lack of language skills and

short temporal tenure are deficits, but only because of ethnographic claims that these

tools are important to the process of knowledge production, and ethnography continues

to work on enrolling allies into these commitments. Is it possible to focus on what actors

dont know rather than on what they do know, or on how they are navigating uncertainty

and assembling certainty? If in our quest for the quotidian and lived experience, we arewary of what our informants know and we give weight to ignorance and unintelligibility,

what are the implications for interviews, casual conversation, and our own sense of the

validity of our data? It means careful attention to how people state fact and wield evi-

dence. What does a fact look like what form does it take? What does evidence look

like? Is it form, practice, phenomenology? In the case of my co-presence in Bosnia, I

became aware of a disjunction between power and knowledge through fieldwork, in part

because I was acutely aware of my own knowledge limitations but realized (eventually)

that my quest for knowledge often came up blank. However, I was often in good com-

pany. I expected experts to know something, or be striving to learn it. Furthermore,sometimes there was no possibility of definitive information. But there was information

that they did not want, did not seek, and/or did not see. Consequently, I began to pay

attention to information and knowledge flows and claims, and question my own gather-

ing desires and triangulation tendencies. A danger of triangulation is the quest to really

get at the social situation at the expense of seeing how the social is being put together,

often haphazardly, across and through scales, elements, and processes.

On the surface, wallowing in uninformation is neither efficient nor effective. The abil-

ity to gather data in the Malinowskian tradition relies on an ability to communicate and

rapport within a community, but also on the assumption that information is out there.

8. Erica Bornstein, Harmonic Dissonance: Reflections on Dwelling in the Field,Ethnos72.4

(2007), pp. 483508; Beaulieu, From Co-location to Co-Presence.

9. Beaulieu, From Co-location to Co-Presence.



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Coles 403

However, we need to think about the tools that produce knowledge or assist in the

production of knowledge, whether it is our knowledge or their knowledge, be they

notepads and pens, bureaucratic embeddedness, rapport, sociality, or learning/not learn-

ing along with the people inhabiting the field. Having a toolkit is perhaps what is needed being able to pull out an appropriate tool for the situation at hand, and being flexible

enough to have a repertoire of tools and techniques at the ready. Using the wrong tool

may simply be inefficient or it may lead a researcher down other engaging paths.

However, it can also lead to a misunderstanding of the dynamics of everyday life.

Mistaking a lack of information as a deficit, for example, (and thus seek out the

source of the real information so as to fill in the gaps) may miss a point that these are

realities of modernity. The information may not exist, but if it does, it still may not

matter and it may not even be missed. The technologies of knowledge production that

international actors utilized, for example, rested upon practices deeply inflected with

uncertainty, unintelligibility, superficiality and hearsay; what elsewhere I termed

gloss.10Gloss deeply informed international sense-making of both democracy and

Bosnias changing relations to democracy. Gloss was part and parcel of the establish-

ment and determination of coherence and reliability, not a bump or obstacle on the

road to truth.

This approach offers a different lens on information and the relation of ethnographic

research interlocuters to information. Maybe they dont have it, maybe they dont want

it, maybe they dont have access to it, or maybe they are figuring it out. Perhaps, as

Annelise Riles argues, people, such as the Japanese bankers she encountered, sometimes

seek to unwind their knowledge in the face of its catastrophic failure.11 They disavow theutility of information, replacing it with, in Riles case, real-time economic machinations.

Rather than searching for an empirical reality that may not exist or may not matter, recent

ethnographic reforms make possible the embrace of uncertainty and failure, seeing them

not necessarily as obstacles but as part of the process of arranging and assembling the

social world. They too are ways of knowing. In a moment when information is fetishized

and made paramount for claims of modernity, attention to the social and material produc-

tions of truth as well as to the limits of knowledge is a commitment to a processual and

contingent sociality.

The explicit doubling located within the ethnographic move of making explicit theforms and practices of sense-making has led Tom Boellstorff to wonder what a nonsensi-

cal analytical anthropology would look like.12Could a nonsensical analytical anthropol-

ogy focus on that that doesnt and cannot make sense, such as the noise and intractable

unintelligibility described by Jim Ferguson or contemporary wars as described by

Carolyn Nordstrom, or engage actively with uncertainty, ignorance, and unintelligibility?13

10. Coles,Democratic Designs, pp. 279.

11. Annelise Riles, Real time: Unwinding technocratic and anthropological knowledge,Ameri-

can Ethnologist31.3 (2004), pp. 392405.

12. Tom Boellstorff, Crafty Knowledges,PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Re-

view31.1 (2008), pp. 96101.

13. James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the

ZambianCopperbelt (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1999); Carolyn Nordstrom,



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How might it be possible to analyze moments and situations where either there is no

sense to make or where no sense-making is occurring? Fergusons answer is to read the

production of noise (i.e., unintelligible signals) as a social practice, arguing in his case,

for an ethnographically informed analytic of noise that takes seriously both the fact thatsignifying actors might have social reasons not to establish a bond of communication but

to rupture it, and the way that stylistic messages take on a social significance whether

they are understood or not through a social process of construal of the partially

unintelligible.14In the case of international election administration, ethnographic meth-

ods can illuminate electoral information, content, and meaning, but they can also probe

the productive nature of gloss. Noise, uncertainty, and ignorance were not obstacles to

democratic practice, but constitutive of it.15

II. The technical turnAlthough often encountered first as obstacles in fieldwork settings, as highlighted in

the prior section, issues with approaching the social have transformed into new tools

through ethnographic alliances, innovations, and critical perspectives, allowing for a

deeper probing of the processes and practices of knowledge production, of the technical-

ity or techne of the research process, and also more broadly toward sense-making. Turns

toward technicality have occurred along a few lines, but one of the most influential has

been through critical interaction with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and through

taking up theoretical and methodological insights developed through Actor Network

Theory (ANT).16Others have generated syntheses of STS and ANT, and I point readerstowards them.17The technical turn in ethnography particularly picks up a few key tenets:

1) the inability to presume the social and thus the need to analyze how the social becomes

or emerges, 2) the necessity of not privileging human actors at the expense of non-human

actors when analyzing associations and relations, and 3) remaining close to practice and

Shadows of War:Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century

(Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004).

14. Ferguson,Expectations, p. 210.

15. Coles,Democratic Designs.

16. See Bruno Latours scholarship more generally, but recently, Reassembling the social: an

introduction to Actor-network theory(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

17. Barbara Czarniawska, Commentary: STS Meets MOS, Organization16 (2009), pp. 155

60; Dave Cowan, Karen Morgan, Morag Mcdermont, Nominations: An Actor-Network

Approach, Housing Studies 24.3 (2009), pp. 281300; Ron Levi and Mariana Valverde,

Studying Law by Association: Bruno Latour Goes to the Conseil dEtat, Law & Social

Inquiry33 (2008), pp. 80525; Robert Oppenheim, Actor-network Theory and Anthropol-

ogy after Science, Technology, and Society,Anthropological Theory7.4 (2007), pp. 47193;

AndrewPickering, Asian Eels and Global Warming: A Posthumanist Perspective on Society

and the Environment,Ethics & the Environment10.2 (2005), pp. 2943; Annelise Riles, A

New Agenda for the Cultural Study of Law: Taking on the Technicalities, 53Buffalo Law

Review(2005), pp. 9731033; Mariana Valverde, Authorizing the production of urban moral

order: appellate courts and their knowledge games,Law and Society Review3 (2005). See

also The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rdedition (2008).

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Coles 405

process. As a (new) ethnographic base, these tenets make new analytics possible and

open up spaces for new technologies and actors in the processes of ethnographic research.

Posthumanist perspectives, such as those developed in STS and ANT, bring into focus

a mutual becoming between the human and nonhuman.

18

This posthumanism (alsoreferred to as postsocial) is a shift away from a Durkheimian model of the social as a

separate reality that can explain externalities.19

Following precedent from Gabriel Tarde

and Ludwik Fleck, posthumanism seeks to undo the basic split, the disciplinary dualisms

and divisions of labor, between the world of things and the world of people. 20A postso-

cial approach thus stresses the erroneousness of a nature/society divide for understanding

the world of human interactions.21Here, we get to the real substance of ANT the inter-

est in interactions, dynamics, becoming, making, processes, associations, assemblages

and flows. There is no assumption of stability or externality. Importantly, it does not

privilege humans or persons in its study of interactions. Rather, it grants agency to the

nonhuman, treating things (e.g., artifacts/artefacts, tools, theories, machines, documents,

technologies, devices) as actors in dynamic networks that produce the world and truths

about the world. The effect of this recognition of the material are new analytics on the

ways in which human and nonhuman actors assemble the world. For example, within

legal settings, scholars have begun to analyze legal objects such as the case file, Conflicts

doctrine, judicial review, and housing allocation nominations agreements as embedded

in actor networks where the legal item or tool is considered to actively interact with and

translate information along chains or flows of associations and connections. For each

example, the analytical interest is in the process through which knowledge is made, and

the role of the object as an actor or mediator in the process of knowledge articulation andagreement. In the case of Conflicts, for example, Riles explains that Conflicts knowledge

has taken the form of metaphor. In her essay she traces the transformations of technosci-

entific metaphors and demonstrates their consequentiality for the rise of Realism and

Realist interpretation as truth. She continues tracing how the metaphor of law as a tool

literally became a tool itself through subtle transformations in form and performative

character.22

If the technical turn invites us to query the actors and associations through which

things get done and become known, then it stands to reason that tools should be scruti-

nized. The character of the tools matter.23Tools have an agency within the processes andpractices of knowledge production. In the traditional domains of STS, these tools and

technical matters might be a Bunsen burner, a software database, a Petri dish, a fish tank,

or a lab group. In other domains, such as law, a tool might be a theory, a regulatory pro-

cess, a document, or a territorial/jurisdictional boundary. Tools enable humans to know

certain things, and the tools we use determine what and how we know.

18. Pickering, Eels.

19. Levi and Valverde, Studying Law; Pickering, Eels.



22. Riles, New Agenda, p. 22.

23. Riles, New Agenda, p. 7.



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III. Ethnographic techne

Challenging the form of data and of knowledge production is at the center of new modes

of ethnographic inquiry, and this, like all knowledge, is done in tandem with nonhumantechnologies. Reflexively then, the technical turn can be applied to the process and prac-

tice of ethnography itself, in particular assisting in the rethinking of the epistemological

relations between researcher and researched, the objects being researched and their ana-

lytical maneuvers, as well as the work that ethnography performs. Traditionally, ethnog-

raphers have been cast as those seeking out knowledge. Informants, on the other hand,

have long been rhetorically and symbolically set up as those with the knowledge that we

want. Not withstanding the consequential critiques of this labeling and its effects, there

continues to be an uneasy and uneven relationship in how ethnographers perceive their

counterparts despite acknowledgement of multivocality, the processes of exchange and

dialogue in ethnography, and the politics of academic/professional authorship. In pub-

lished articles, most anthropologists characterize those who appear in their texts by

social markers such as occupation, gender, age, nationality, and individual identity con-

structions. However, methods books still use the terms informantandsubject liberally.

Regardless of genre, a dichotomy is in place between the researcher and the researched,

with the effect of minimizing the ability of researchers to account for the analytical work

done by the objects of ethnographic inquiry. Recent ethnographic scholarship, however,

suggests the productivity of re-evaluating the relationship of informants to knowledge

and knowledge production. This new approach arises out of the current epistemic reflex-

ivity within ethnography. This is a reflexivity directed not towards the recognition thatone occupies a particular and contextualized subject position, but a reflexivity toward the

form and process of knowledge and its production, deployment, and ontology. This

allows for a new relation with ethnographys traditional subjects the informants as

well as an opening up of the role and place of informants. Ethnography is no longer about

a particular group of people and their culture. The centrality of individual and groups

remains however; what is shifting is how ethnographers regard their relationship to the

social. Are individuals and groups external to the social or a way to access the social and

understand how the social comes to be? The difference in these last questions hinges on

whether ethnographic informants are considered repositories of knowledge or as knowl-edge producers. This is the crux of shifts in ethnographic form: how does ethnography

relate to knowledge as a process and what attendant effects are there on ethnographic

form and practice?

George Marcus suggests collaboration as a new trope for condensing a whole com-

plex of new challenges of anthropologys key method, one which references a working

relationship with multiply situated subjects on matters, concerns, and projects that reflex-

ively overlap and enjoin subjects and researchers.24 The changing relations between

researcher and researched moves beyond the 1980s critique of subjectivity, representa-

tion, and overt norms of research practice. Collaboration references a shift from anapprentice, one who acts a basic learner of culture in community life, to a collaborator

24. George E. Marcus, The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthropologys Signature

Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition, Cultural Anthropology23,1 (2008), pp. 78.

http://lch.sagepub.com/http://lch.sagepub.com/http://lch.sagepub.com/http://lch.sagepub.com/http://lch.sagepub.com/http://lch.sagepub.com/


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Coles 407

working with counterparts on a shifting terrain of knowledge production where the

knowledge may be mobilized into different networks.25

A description of ethno-mining evokes this new ethnographic collaborator. In ethno-

mining, a joining of ethnography and database mining, researchers and researchedengage in iterative and mutual analytic work. As Anderson et al. describe it, ethno-mining

co-creates data with participants.26

Analytic entanglement is not an obstacle, but a

designed and deliberate exercise in shared interpretive inquiry. In their case, they use semi-

automated collection of behavioral data to create a shared artifact data visualization

through which meaning can be co-constructed as the researched and researcher interpret

together the data visualization. As a result, they create findings in partnership rather than

discovering findings, such as personal motivations or individual needs. The data visual-

ization analytic partnership acts as a powerful tool through which the visual representa-

tion of quantitative numbers engenders qualities, opening up collaborative conversations

on relations and interactions.

Anderson et al. tracked peoples interactions with computing devices (e.g., mouse

movements, key clicks, application use, device location, etc.) in order to explore the rela-

tions between computer usage and temporality. The visualizations created were, in their

words, evocative and complex. That is, interpretation was necessary in order to make sense

of the colors, density markings, and bars. A decision to leave the data visualization in its

rawest state allowed for maximal interpretive space, a space in which narratives could be

created through the joint interpretive process. They report that participants and researchers

would tack back and forth in trying to find the right perspective to tell a particular story.

This interpretive space/ambiguity generated multiple complimentary and competing narra-tives through looking at a brief segment of a persons busy life via an alternative analyti-

cal device. Anderson et al. found that middle class Americans were able to get beyond the

dominant and stagnant discourses of being busy through this cojoined analytical practice

where each was moved to figure out what the visualization actually referenced. The cre-

ation of an alternative space (beyond quantitative minutia and beyond observations and

interviews) in which interpretive frames are negotiated and re-negotiated opens up rela-

tional possibilities between the traditional researcher and researched, and modifies the

form of ethnography. Crucially, ethno-mining re-evaluates who and how knowledge is cre-

ated by collapsing knowledge production binarisms, whether researcher:researched or datagathering:data production.

The work of Chris Kelty in Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Softwarealso

demonstrates ethnographic reforms.27Kelty envisions his informants, not necessarily as

partners as Anderson et al. do, but at a minimum as interlocutors. His informants are

producing analytic and reflective statements; they too are figuring it out. In this way,

Kelty pulls together a mixed media collage of ethnographic material with the effect of

conceiving and treating informants as knowledge producers rather than as knowledge

25. Marcus, Ends of Ethnography.

26. Ken Anderson, Dawn Nafus, Tye Rattenbury, and Ryan Aipperspach, Numbers Have Quali-

ties Too: Experiences with Ethno-Mining,EPIC (2009), pp. 12340.

27. Chris Kelty, Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software(Durham, NC: Duke Uni-

versity Press, 2009).



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repositories. Ethnographers are not limited to interviews (and concomitant notes or

transcriptions), fieldnotes, photographs/video, and documents/policy papers. The com-

municative and interactive elements interlocutors put together as they navigate their

world demonstrate the flux and contingency of knowledge. In Keltys case, his treasuretrove of material included digitally archived discussions, flights, collaborations, papers,

software, articles, news stories, history, old software, old software manuals, reminiscences,

notes, and drawings.28 His geeks were obsessively creating, analyzing, and archiving their

roles. This is not unique to geeks however. What are the mediums through which people

translate and articulate their interactions as they go about, in concert with other actors,

using and producing knowledge?

Keltys epistemological reflexivity is an instance of a new order, one that acknowledges

and submits to critical inquiry ethnographic knowledge production and the process through

which things become. Rather than assuming that things exist and are discovered, Kelty and

others are joining together to demonstrate how things emerge and become in open-ended

fashions; in this way, fieldwork itself can be viewed as the heterogeneous assemblage that

exists prior to a coherent object. As he notes in the Introduction to his ethnography,

the ethnographic object of this study is not geeks and not any particular project or place or

set of people, but Free Software and the Internet. Even more precisely, the ethnographic object

of this study is recursive publics except that this concept is also the workof ethnography,

not its preliminary object. I could not have identified recursive publics as the object of the

ethnography at the outset, and this is nice proof that ethnographic work is a particular kind of

epistemological encounter, an encounter that requires considerable conceptual work during and

after the material labor of fieldwork, and throughout the material labor of writing and rewriting,

in order to make sense and reorient it into a question that will have looked deliberate and

answerable in hindsight.29

Ethnographic reform, along the lines of Anderson et al. and Kelty, are directed toward

expanding the variety and possibility of analytic actors beyond the lone ethnographer.

IV. Figuring the socialEthnography need not be a method for documenting and analyzing the real, that empiri-

cal stuff out there in the real world. More and more ethnographers are discovering and

admitting that the social is not out there to find, but is actively figured out and assembled

by a heterogeneous group of actors. This suggests that ethnography should not simply

seek information, as data is not given but achieved, but be informed by the process of

figuring it out. Ethnographic reform as gestured toward here expands analytic oppor-

tunities to subjects, a myriad of forms and types of subjects, and is epistemologically

reflexive and iterative within analytical space. Ethnographic reform leads ethnographers

to overtly recognize the shifting, emergent, and contingent terrain of the real, one thatthey are enmeshed with rather than external to.

28. Kelty, Two Bits, p. 21.

29. Kelty, Two Bits, p. 20.


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