Episteme: A Miscellany for Anthro/Design Research Geeks

Dig We Must: Building One Blog is Better?

2009-05-08T20:01:00.000-07:00

We thought (okay, I thought) that it made sense to have a geek-theory blog and another blog that's a company blog, one that has shorter, more business-focused things on it.

A few folks think that's okay. Alright, maybe I'm the only one. So, little by little, the stuff on this blog is going over to the PacEth blog. I may put the theory stuff in here, and if there is time, shorter versions that don't go on and on and on in the PacEth blog.

As they say, Dig We Must.

Learning, Creativity, and Laughter

2009-05-02T13:57:00.001-07:00

How to structure an ideation session? How do you make ethnographic data useful in a design setting?

Biologists, engineers, and even those fence-riders, those anthropologists, who sit on the line between the humanities and the sciences, like to parse the world into its component parts. We (and I include myself in the fence-sitting crowd) like to take things apart. It helps us see how things work. We sort out what the parts are, we try to understand what is the same and what is different. We taxonomize and typologize. And when things are set in motion, we try to isolate one moment from the next, we try to inspect, document, or (in Spanish) precisar, to make clarity out of the murky water of lived experience.

Which is all well and good. Except when it gets in the way.

I was on day three of a three-day workshop that aimed to link ethnography and design. I'm an anthropologist: I know how to do ethnography and I have a fair idea of how to teach parts of it. I even enjoy doing it. But I'm not a designer, not a card-carring one. I do badly trying to build things (though I can put together things and sometimes make them work). Creating new things is something I wish I could do more easily; I wish I could improvise on the piano better. Seems that creating, dreaming, and thinking about what might be is different from documenting and analyzing what is going on.

So there we were, day three. I had to pull the mini-ethnography practice work together and we had to have the group ideate, create, design, and dream. I had a template (partly borrowed, partly invented, but mostly borrowed) that seemed to make sense. I called Hai (thanks to Skype) and told him I was worried. How much time should I allocate? How should I structure the ideation? Should I pull forward the specifications drawn from the problems and desires that the fieldwork students had encountered in their mini-fieldwork? We kicked some ideas around, and came up with a format: start with ideas. Let them flow. Add the specs and documentation and stuff later.

That seemed fine.

But when it was time to explain the task to the group, I fell back on the analytic, parting and sorting and picking-apart mode of the ethnographer in the early stages of analysis. I was listing all the steps they might follow, specifying where to put this or that insight or fact, how to draw it on the page, and how the groups might organize themselves.

Then one of the students provided me with a teachable moment. A student from Potosí, that most colonial and traditional of Altiplano mining towns, a linguist and semiotician, raised his hand.

"There is something you might want to add to this process," he said.

I was nervous enough, already. What did this guy from the Altiplano have in mind, I wondered?

"It should be fun. There should be smiles and laughter." The student's face shone with Boddhisatva light as he smiled.

Giggles began to bubble up from members of the group. I had been too damn serious. Ideation should be fun, getting new, goofy ideas should be happy stuff, not serious data-crunching. And without that ludic element, the ideas would not be as interesting, nor would there be as many of them.

What followed was a rather riotous hour and a half of sketching and brainstorming an specifying, and—best of all—laughter.

The richness and complexity of the results told me all I needed to know. Relax more. Laugh more. Learning requires that one lower what linguists call the "affective barrier." You can't be uptight and learn much. You have to ease up and laugh to create.

Systematizing the Fuzzy Front End: Innovation & Ethnography

2009-04-28T16:09:00.000-07:00

Hai Nguyen really should have facilitated this one, but he was entertaining visiting relatives from far away and couldn't join this gang in Bolivia.

What we managed to do over the course of three days was discuss and practice some of the basic business of ethnography. Having at least two anthropologists, a semiotics expert (semiotician?), a couple business researchers, and several economic development specialists in the room made it easy—and productive. What we did was send out teams to do a bit of ethnographic observation, documentation, and interviewing in places where micro-business was happening: market stalls, street-corner DVD sales, and the like.

Then, for the last four or five hours we spent together, the groups brainstormed product or service ideas within the contexts they had studied. They specified who the innovation was for, they sketched it, they outlined the design specifications or requirements for the idea, and they described what allied or additional products or services might devolve from their ideas. The result was a delightful demonstration of design built upon multi-disciplnary teams and fieldwork.

There are additional opportunities here and if we had more time we might have explored some of them. Collaborative work with the people who let us into their business lives would be one that comes to mind. The DVD sales guy is in contact with us (the design idea that came from learning about his job is above). Maybe something to connect these kids who not only sell DVDs but know and care about cinema can actually happen; and it may happen in some format that takes DVD and tosses it by the roadside--one result of our work is that this DVD merchant is now a VIMEO member. How long until he posts his first video, I wonder?

There is a great deal to say about production and reproduction, about design for and with end-users of products and services. The discussion about the ethics of design in a context of street-sales of products that are not quite legal were discussed at length. (Okay, these DVDs were pirates, but there is more to say about that). One of the interesting things about this group's work was the willingness to explore the implications of their work in a wider social and cultural context.

All of this happened in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, with a group of Bolivians from up high on the Altiplano, and some from down low on the Eastern Plains. The divisions in Bolivia, if they were present in our workshop, contributed to a diversity of perspectives that made the experience and the design work far richer than it might have been if everyone were from the same place. But, after all, this is Santa Cruz. Everyone is from somewhere else, here. . .

Pulchritude, Gay Sex, and Transforming Consumption in Bogotá

2009-04-23T10:36:00.001-07:00

At right, my Colombian colleague Monica Bursztyn, with an image of someone I wish were a mutual friend, but who is, in fact, some Bolivian model, in Simple, an art gallery where I spent three lovely days giving a workshop in ethnography and design. For the moment, I don't have any relevant images of Colombia, except the bottle of Yodora deodorant in the post below. Since this photo is about sex,and what I learned about Yodora includes something about sex, it will do well enough. In fact, I sort of like this image of La Monica peeking around the corner.

Now, enough foolishness. There are several things to say about Yodora, here. I'll pick one: its about what people in the trades (both anthropological and business) call consumer products, and how people use them and what this might say about our notion of "consumption."

I was invited to dinner by a fellow researcher, an economist and business guy who runs a small research shop in Colombia. I ended up cooking. This happens, sometimes when people feel comfortable, informal, and perhaps a bit insecure in their own culinary skills (at least that was one of the more interesting reasons given for the immediate acceptance of my half-kidding offer to cook dinner the afternoon before). So I cooked. Pasta; with a sauce of pleasant Mendoza Savignon Blanc and tomato and garlic and this and that of whatever seemed fresh.

In this Bogotá condominium, I was especially aware that what we were doing was far beyond the reach of most Colombians, most people in China, indeed, most people on the planet. But we did not enjoy the meal any less for this awareness. One tends not to feel too guilty about eating well when a good Savingnon Blanc is involved in more than the pasta sauce. That accounts for some of the levity in the kitchen and at the dining table. The rest I leave to the altitude of Bogotá.

After dinner, the conversation turned to consumer products, especially consumer products as they come to be understood and used by poor people.

We agreed, my host and hostess and I, that people who make consumer products are usually not very much aware of how these things are used. This is especially the case when consumers are poor people: Campesiños. Jente del campo. 农民 (nóngmín, peasants or farmers). This is because middle class people, managers, and corporate leaders don't often spend time hanging around in poor people's homes. Perhaps a few of them do, and certainly some of the people who make consumer products understand what life in that sort of home used to be like because they come from that sort of home.

(Which, by the way, suggests a rather interesting line of inquiry: how is it that some companies seem to know what is going on with the people who buy their stuff and may even care a great deal about such goings-on, while other's don't seem to give a shit. How many corporate executives come from a lower-class background, and what difference might that make?)

After dinner came coffee, panelitas de arequipa y coco (yummy), and the following exchange.
"Look here," my host said. "There was a time, maybe twenty years ago, when the borders were closed in Colombia and you couldn't import any perfumes at all. I worked with a guy who created imitations of famous American perfumes. That's another story. But this deodorant was used in those days by poor people and other people too."

He pulled his foot into his lap, removed his shoe, and to my delight and the mild revulsion of his lovely wife, off came his shoe and sock, and he rested his foot on the table.

"People would put the stuff on their feet. Other people would use it as a deodorant. See: it smells fresh. There wasn't much else in the market. But farmers used it for their feet. Let me show you."
My host (we shall call him Leonardo) got up from the table, and exclaimed, "Paga muy bien attención porque voy a enseñarle algo importante." Pay attention; I"m going to teach you something important.

He came back with this little tube of toothpaste, and started dabbing it on his feet. "Like this, they used it!" he said.

His wife covered her face with her hands. "Diós. Por favor, Leo. . . " she said (but she was laughing as hard as I was, by this time).

"Okay okay, then wait," Leo said and he got up and found this old jar of Yodora.

"So they'd use this." (The foot was on the table again) and not only for feet. Gay guys, they'd use it on their behinds. You know. When they wanted to screw."

I asked, "What? They did what?"

This conversation was moving in a delightfully silly and unabashedly frank direction. I'm thinking, 'These Colombians are not uptight like Angelinos, or Chileans. . . maybe this is that Latin openness to sexuality or something.' Maybe it was the Savignon Blanc.

"They used it for lubricant. What else?" he said.

By now we were all cracking up. So the questions might be, how is Yodora used now? How is it that products come to be used as they are intended by their manufacturers (as they almost never are). Is there no universally available and inexpensive lubricant, condom safe, that one can buy to use when having sex in rural Colombia? Is there? What? Or is it simply the case that people got along fine without such stuff for years but now that condoms are in the sex-picture, things are different?

A ton of human sexuality questions come to the surface, here, and it strikes me that there hasn't been much anthropological attention paid to the commercial stuff, the artifacts you have to buy, that go along with sex. That might be an interesting, and even an important, field of inquiry. Too often, people who care about HIV or human sexuality in general don't ask specific enough questions about what people actually do, and I don't know of much research relating human sexual behavior to the products people use when they are having sex. It would be interesting work, right? The book would sell, at least.

Which raises another question, a bigger one about the nature of what marketers, and now many anthropologists, call 'consumption.'

Are we trapped into thinking that you can't have human sexuality without "consuming" a product? It seems an odd thing to consider having sex as an act of consumption. Very odd indeed but it is the sort of notion that a lot of cultural critics would enjoy playing with. "Ah, the commodification of sex!" And the anthropologists would get ready to present another paper on the commodification of everything.

As David Graeber has pointed out (in an unpublished manuscript about consumption) we tend to assign a lot of things to the consumption category that don't belong there. Things like watching television of playing baseball. Or even having sex. There is a problem in doing this.

One problem is that these things have little to do with consumption and a lot to do with human sociability, human interaction and human delight, fun, production, and other things. Sport, for example (and sporting can mean several things, here).

The Yodora example, if nothing else, is just one more reminder that what we may want to call consumption is not consumption at all, but a re-invention, or maybe just an instrumentality, a tool to do something social: have sex, hang out with friends and feel that you don't smell bad. Or a discursive instrumentality: Yodora as a tool for after-dinner charla in Colombia.

Might it be useful to stop using the term consumption unless things are really used up or destroyed in their use? The idea of conservation of matter argues against using consumption incautiously because stuff that we buy is usually transformed through use and not destroyed at all. The Yodora cream runs out because it goes onto your skin and then is sweated off, or washed off, and it goes somewhere else, where someone or something else may have to deal with it. So following a product through its recycling and re-use, following Desjeux's (2001) product itinerary, is often enlightening for this very reason. We aren't consumers. We are transformers.

A lot of what Daniel Miller (1998) and others, like Appadurai (1986) and Desjeux have done, and we should be glad of this, is to point out how what we uncritically call consumption is rarely what it seems to be. It is almost never about buying into what the product's makers have in mind, and it is very often something rather creative, something conditioned by individual understandings, individual re-writings onto the meaning-board of a manufactured product. What else was Roland Barthes (1988) writing about when when he pointed out that authors don't simply communicate meaning to readers? Readers write their own meanings onto what they read. Simple enough. People make new meanings of the stuff they buy. This is a venerable idea, one that Nancy Munn (1986) writes about: value transformation through exchange, a helpful way way of looking at goods in exchange systems which does not, as far as I know, show up in Miller's work. (Daniel, tell me if I am wrong, here!)

But it seems anthropology is stuck in consumption mode. We are using up an idea that marketers handed to us. Anthropologists too often use words like consumption or commodity when those words really don't fit what people actually do. People don't consume, they transform.

Maybe we should be done with the word consumption when we are talking about economics, exchange, or products. What passes as consumption from the perspective of marketers is not really consumption at all. Consumption is about using up things, or destroying, potlatch-like, the goods that you have accumulated. David Graeber is right: a soccer match on a neighborhood playground in Bolivia is not consumption. Neither is watching television, nor is having sex. We use things that we have purchased to do these things. But does this mean people who buy stuff are co-opted, through their purchase, into in an ideology that descends from some corporate boardroom in some wealthy city? Are these people less human? Is their participation in a single and harmful kind of social system thus insured? Maybe, but if so, just how does this work, exactly?

Certainly a lot of products which people buy aren't worth a shit, many of them are down right harmful in the short and long run. Sometimes people find out about this and stop buying whatever they bought. Sometimes, the harm in buying and using something is not obvious, and sometimes it is obvious enough but people keep buying it anyway, often for rather complex reasons. Some of those reasons may include clever advertising. Other reasons may include our greedy stomachs or our faulty folk-sociology (enhanced by amoral advertising) about health and safety. Think of some fast foods, most Sports Utility Vehicles, and nearly (but not all) hand guns, which are often very bad for people in the long run.

But some things that people make, sell, buy and use are a great deal of fun and don't do too much damage. The point is that each instance (or context) in which a product is bought, taken home, used, re-used, interpreted, argued about, and passed on (to the next user or to the garbage can) can have rather different consequences from another product in another context.

What different sorts of products have in common in the patterned ways in which they are used and re-interpreted has not been much explored, except by archaeologists.These patterns are worth looking at.

I have a hunch that things we eat are are used and shared in rather peculiar ways that may not match the way lawn mowers or carpeting are bought and used. Some things are displayed. Some things are served at a table. Some things, like some kinds of underwear, are hidden. We need a vigorous contemporary archaeology and another look at material culture, here, as much as we need a theory of economic value. We may not need a theory of consumption at all.

So I don't think Daniel Miller has it right by using the term consumption all the time. Perhaps it is time to try replacing the term with transformation.

Our understanding of ourselves and our human relatives elsewhere in the world as we buy and sell and use stuff that we did not make with our own hands is just beginning. Taking an archaeological view, in which money can be seen as a very recent innovation and mass-manufactured and globally marketed goods as something even newer, we can forgive ourselves for not having adequate models for understanding what all is going on when we buy and use stuff. Stuff like Yodora.
It isn't enough to say, as some anti-consumption straw-woman might, "ah, that Yodora. There goes the commodification of human life, again!" But it doesn't make sense to simply say "there is again the creative power of consumption! See how people resist the corporate world by consuming Yodora to have sex!" Too many of us who study 'consumers' tend to do one or the other.
Using Yodora as a discursive tool, as an element in an informal, after-dinner salon, however, doesn't have anything to do with consumption at all, and everything to do with sharing a few laughs and getting to know the comfort levels of host, hostess, and guest with topics and behaviors that only show up among close friends, and after some good food and a little white wine.

The empirical question of what else Yodora is about requires some field data, and, among other things, some pharmacological data about what happens when Yodora use strays from the use indicated on the product's label and, for example, into the intimate lives of gay men in Colombia.

-----
Works Cited
Appadurai, A. 1986 The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (edited volume). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Barthes, Roland. 1988. Image, Music, Text. New York: MacMillan

D. Desjeux, 2001. La méthode des itinéraires comme méthode comparative appliquée à la comparaison intercutlturelle. (http://www.argonautes.fr downloaded 04/2009).

Graeber, David. n.d. Consumption. Unpublished manuscript provided by the author.

Miller, Daniel. 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.

Munn, Nancy. 1986 The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pulchritude, Gay Sex, and Transforming Consumption in Bogotá

2009-04-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

This sounds like a rather odd blog-title, but remember: I'm in Colombia, the place the created (or inspired) the likes of Gabriel García Marquez or that anthropologist whose writing seems intentionally obfuscatory and intends to be shamanistic poetic all at once, Michael Taussig.

I don't aim to be poetic, metaphysical, or especially artistic in part II of this post. But I want to write a bit about a dinner that I prepared in a very pleasant condo in Bogotá last night where I learned a bit about my lovely hosts, deodorant, gay sex, and the idea of consumption. Creation of pulchritude through consumption, perhaps? (What an ugly word that is, considering that it aims to signal beauty, right?)

The label on this (probably) 12 year old bottle of deodorant cream says "Pulcritud a toda hora con Yodora," beauty all the time with Yodora, which is where leave things for now.

Ethnographic Segmentation in Market Research (III of III)

2009-03-06T14:14:00.001-08:00

Toward Ethnographic (Contextual) Segments
Too often, the client's segmentation scheme reflect normalized abstractions rather than the evolving needs, tastes, and practices of real people.

For our India mobile phone client we proposed a rather different model.

At the end of the day, we wanted more time in the field than the client was willing to support (at least this time). But we think it would have been time well spent.

We suggested that our team identify ethnographic segments, drawn from observed patterns of practice and meaning within a particular strategic domain--in this case, the strategic domain was “basic” phone users (people who are buying inexpensive phones). We use male or female gender as a major sub-segment because of the continued importance of gender in structuring consumption in India and elsewhere.

Our ethnographic research--observation and secondary contextual research supporting user interviews and participant observation--was designed to identify patterns within a gendered basic-user target. Ethnographic segments would be identified on the ground, not pre-selected from a quantitatively derived market segment as is usually the case. (And as the client really seemed to want.) The contexts of use for both men and women within these segments would add a real-life dimension to our presentation to marketers and designers.

Using ethnographic segmentation (it might be more clear to simply call it segmentation by contexts, but what the heck) would help product design and marketing by discovering patterns within segments that are not static but can be dynamic and context-sensitive. Strategic decisions in our proposal would have focused on two or three broad cultural contexts of use, or to might have included include additional fine-grained contexts. We provided our client with this visual model of what we were trying to convey (Figure 1, above).

(Our prior work in India had suggested that day-parts and days of the week might have been important. Thus, within general culturally recognized use contexts, we might have paid attention to day of the week and time of day, something like 'Taking and making a business call during the day on Saturday' or 'Hanging out with phone in hand at a teashop' might have been our fine-grained contexts. These were examples we gave to the client, but only the fieldwork could have determine how useful these--or others we might have discovered--might have been.)

The moral(s) of all this is, or are:

• Design researchers don't sample only individual people. They sample contexts and people, both.
• Design researchers try to determine the range of contexts in which things are happening, in which products are used, or related needs or activities take place. Sample there.

Within these contexts, anthropologically-leaning design researchers find out what the meaningful sorts of people are who are part of the world in which these goings on are happening.

It makes sense, then to think about people after you have determined where you are going to go, which contexts you want to visit, and, in consultation with your client, which contexts will be the most strategic for the organization to understand and design around.

It isn't people alone. Its people and contexts that provide the meaning behind people's actions and desires.

Designers want meaningful scenarios that are rich in the local complexities of daily life, the complexities that people take into consideration when they decide to do this or that, to organize their lives or their thinking in one way or another, or even to buy a new ring-tone for their mobile phone or not.

Ethnographic Segmentation in Market Research (II of III)

2009-03-06T14:06:00.000-08:00

Theoretical Sampling

Theoretical sampling often seeks maximum variation rather than a "representative" slice of reality (Miles and Huberman 1994).

In other words, anthropologists (or any ethnographers, really) are interested in the systematic study of the contexts surrounding a particular consumer product or business practice. They want to flesh out the real-life meanings behind product choice, purchase, and use.
What is this meaning business, anyway?

Its more than words. Just ask a surrealist. (Or Foucault.)

Linguists, who are supposed to know something about meaning, are often asked to explain how one knows what a word means. Usually, their answer is that to understand what a word means, one should see how the word is used in ordinary speech (Ogden and Richards 1952). Understanding the context in which a word is used (and the contexts in which it may not be used) is the key to understanding its meaning(s). The same is true of IT products and services like mobile phones in India. Mobile phones are part of multiple contexts--home, work, family, street, train, and so on. And as they move from pre-sale to sale to delivery to use in a variety of contexts, and, finally, to disposal (or resale), what they mean and how they are used changes quite a bit.

To understand the range of meanings mobile phones may have for Indian people, or for any kind of people, you have to see them used in context.

If anthropologists find meaning in the contexts that surround what people do then why would the individual person be the unit of measurement around which to build a sampling design? Clients may ask, "How many people will you observe? What kinds of sampling frame will you design, and what kinds of people will fit into that frame?" Our answer is often "We don't know." That is hardly a satisfactory answer when one is trying to win a research contract.

Other Problems
So there is trouble in the sort of means-based statistical clustering used for determining market segments and, likewise, trouble in many client's expectations around sampling. The first kind of trouble lies in the selection of questions or question categories for the initial segmentation questionnaire. How can you know that the questions the client used were the right questions to ask? How did the client determine which dimensions of taste or practice to include or exclude, and what did they overlook completely?

The next trouble comes in selecting the factors for clustering. Which were the most significant? Usually they use those that are most significant in statistical teams but is a statistical norm--taken as a moment in time--the most strategic element to select from a moving target like the evolving use patterns surrounding mobile phones in India? Does the norm include the tail ends of the curve--the outliers, the users on the edges of the normal pattern? If the pattern is put into motion through time, the users at the edges--early adopters and adaptors--then the users--and contexts that surround--them who are at the edges of the normal curve most certainly should be included in design research.

Next: Toward Ethnographic (contextual) segmentation.

Works Cited Part II
Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman.
1994 Qualitative Data Analysis: An expanded Sourcebook. 2nd Edition. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Ethnographic Segmentation in Design Research (I of III)

2009-03-06T13:46:00.000-08:00

Sampling in Design Research: Toward Ethnographic Segments

What people say and what they end up doing is different. It’s not just important to speak to them but you got to spend a day in the life of the customer and observe them.” For understanding the customer better, Jain suggests new methods such as ethnographic studies and tools like calculating customer lifecycle value. — Dipayan Baishya, THE ECONOMIC TIMES (India), July 2005.

Anthropological research teams are more and more often called upon to produce research results for design teams. Usually, the team has to devise some sort of formal research plan for the client. And often, the client is working from a segmentation scheme derived from traditional, questionnaire-based quantitative research. These schemes are usually based on questions that make sense--strategic sense--to the client. Sometimes they reflect the ways that consumers or end-users actually organize themselves. But more often than not, they miss important kinds of variation.

We were working, recently, for a client like this. Actually, we were almost working for them. (They did not accept our bid.) They had a segmentation scheme that they used for their global mobile-phone marketing and design. They wanted to know more about the Indian market. And they wanted us to build our proposal around their segmentation scheme. While we not win the contract, we used the bidding opportunity to think a bit about why we were not happy with traditional segmentation schemes.

Traditional segmentation schemes are means-based, and like other means-based approaches (see Maltz 1994), they don't do a good job of providing the contextual data that help designers imagine design scenarios. And because they are based on what people say, they may be based on lies that people are telling, as Professor Jain suggests in the quotation above.
A psychologists might draw a sample of individual product users or buyers, and study patterns in individual desires, attitudes, values or behaviors about a product. An anthropologist would discover the range of contexts in which groups of people learn about, acquire, transport, store, exchange, use, and talk about a product. Its a significant different.

And more than that: an anthropologist would want to participate as much as possible in product use, and interview the people using it. That approach calls for a rather different kind of sampling. It calls for theoretical sampling.

Stay tuned!

Works Cited Part I
Maltz, Michael
1994 Deviating from the Mean: The Declining Significance of Significance. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 31(4):434-463.

Village Islands in the Metropol

2009-02-04T15:38:00.001-08:00

Urban spaces are probably impossible to really encompass if all you do is ethnographic work. You have to get away from the ground if you want to comprehend a place as large as a city. But if you do not spend time right on the ground, you will miss the local textures that make up the warp and the woof of a city, the web of meanings and relationships that are manifested locally but that extend outward (and often upward) in space and time.

Urban places everywhere come to surround older places, wrapping new urban meanings and movement around old structures and older residents.
Those red buckets hold noodles for a street vendor in a cun（村), a walled-village that has come to be surrounded by urban Guangzhou in southern China. It used to be an agricultural village; now its surrounded by new construction and the people inside it are mostly migrant workers, like these guys.

These recyclers have a couple of flat-bed-tricycles that they use to collect cardboard. The man on the left has a son who manages his farm plot in Henan. He goes home during planting season and during harvest, but the rest of the time he lives here. Right here. No roof, just a pallet and a space or two on the former village wall that hold a clothesline, a few handy bags of toiletries; there are plenty of food stands around for cheap eats. When it rains, he decamps to a spot under the overpass a few yards away. The weather is warm, the money is there for the work that he does, and he has a helper. The kid belongs to one of the food vendors; he is usually hanging out with these guys, a little brother, a 小第第。 Street life is open for all to see, friendly, fairly safe, nothing particularly shameful about living out of doors. You make family out of your neighbors, here, sometimes.

Los Angeles is different. Or is it? When you drive around Hollywood you see remnants of the corner store that once was surrounded by orange or lemon groves. How many old residents are here, along with the new immigrant workers from Mexico or the soon-to-be hopefull movie stars that come to town looking for work in "the industry." The street-life in Guangzhou makes these connections more visible here, where streets are for walking and not for driving, than it is in auto-centric Los Angeles, but it is probably there, nonetheless.

I drive by this old corner store, at Fountain and Las Palmas, all the time. But I don't get out and walk around. Its well past time that I did. I want to check my idea that this is, in fact, a hold-over from a quieter and less automotive time (if there ever was such a time in L.A.).

Google StreetView provided the photo to back up my head-note about it. Time to get a picture of my own, and see who lives nearby. I don't think its quite as empty as this photograph suggests.

Virtual Ethnography, Not Quite Ethano-graphy

2009-02-04T15:37:00.001-08:00

On a list-server I belong to (anthro-design) I read the following question: Much like word association. . . When you hear the following what are your first thoughts? Netography, virtual ethnography, online ethnography, remote ethnography, digital ethnography.

I suppose I'm jaded, but mucking about with this exercise gives me gas. We don't need more hyphenated ethnographies. But the idea of doing ethnography in and on and around the Interwebs is interesting. Dr. Wesch's work or Tom Bellanstorff's new book, Coming of Age in Second Life, (SL) come to mind. So I will chill out. For a second.

Jerry Lombardi, an anthropologist who knows what he is about, wrote this in response to the post on the list-serve:

"What a fun idea. Here are mine:
Netnography -- meaningless and also terrifically awkward, on a par with "webinar" :-) . We can see how the English language has fallen since someone coined "docudrama" and "Manwich".
Virtual Ethnography -- too slippery because it's impossible to know, without additional specification, what the modifier "virtual" is modifying -- the means, the setting, or the result
Online Ethnography -- research on activities and interactions that occur exclusively or almost exclusively on computer channels, like Second Life.
Remote Ethnography -- using computer channels as the main or exclusive way to gather data, with the participants in self-documentation mode at least some of the time.
Digital Ethnography -- meaningless, because unlike a phrase such as 'digital photography' it fails to specify what's digital and why the digitality matters

Then, I added a few to his list. Inter alia, they were:
Dream Ethnography: in which you do your ethnographic work while sleeping.
and my personal favorite,
Ethanography: in which you go to a fieldsite anywhere in the world, find the nearest bar, and order up plenty of the local ethanol product (in Chile, I'd try the Pisco), and spend your field time drinking and eating whatever bar-food is to be had. Then you go home and write up an ethanography.

I'm kidding (sort of). Here's the pont: People who study the web have a RL (real life) or two. They rely on their RL to generate new understandings (and practices) about SL.

Both domains inform one another, since we all have a foot (or toe or arm or body or avatar) in each one. Keeping it real reminds us that you have to buy the flipping computer first: that's what Dragon is doing, in the photo, after he quit the crappy job he had in Shanghai and bought a laptop to help him design his new business, a real one. He never, ever, answers my email. I'll give him a real phone call (on Skype. . . hmmmm).