SEEING WITH AN ETHNOGRAPHIC SENSIBILITY 161161CHAPTER 8
SEEING WITH AN ETHNOGRAPHIC SENSIBILITY
Explorations Beneath the Surface of Public Policies
ELLEN PADER
When I was a teenager I was fascinated by how people organized their home spaces. I was even
more fascinated that I could tell, with surprising accuracy, much about the ethnic background of
my friends simply by entering their homes. This was in the 1960s, before people commonly, and
self-consciously, set out to announce their ethnicity on their walls; at that time, people were as
likely to try to hide it in order to slip unnoticed into the great melting pot of America. This delight
in observing followed me to Kenyon College, where my intellectual endeavors vacillated among
studio art, art history, Medieval studies, literature, and psychology. I discovered The Hidden
Dimension by anthropologist E.T. Hall and was struck by his theories of proxemics and his con-
cept that our (culturally specific) attitudes toward space tend to thread through the fabric of
society. My senior paper tried to pull all these new ways of thinking together as I explored the
implicit cognitive influence of St. Augustine’s theories of beauty on the structures of both a Gothic
cathedral and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Here I was, doing a structural analysis, yet it would
be another five years, during my doctoral studies at Cambridge University in archaeology and
anthropology, before I learned the concept “structuralism.”
Like others of my generation, for me a Ph.D. in the social sciences meant that results were
only meaningful if full ≤ of numbers, chi squares, and cluster diagrams and had a statistical
significance of .05. Although there was something very seductive about artfully uncovering
elegant patterns in this manner, the relative trust in a scientific method and distrust of the
“art” of studying human behavior never sat well with me. I watched my scientist housemate
start an experiment by getting rid of the “noise.” Yet I found that the noise, the outliers that
blew away my 0.05 level of confidence, was where some of the most interesting information lay.
I felt an almost tangible beauty in the patterns, especially ones that outliers helped to fore-
ground; surely they were part of the story.
When I started teaching, to my surprise it was research methods that most inspired me, and,
often, the students as well. In whatever class I teach, from The Politics of Material Culture to The
Dynamics of Human Habitations, I incorporate an experiential, interpretive approach. For, without
seeing the role of their own and others’ positionality in how they see and think about the world
and their place in it, students might as well be wearing blinders. My greatest pleasure in teaching
comes from watching students get excited as they experience the “eurekas” of new insight. The
chapter for this book is an attempt to distill twenty years of teaching and a semester’s worth of
concepts into one chapter. It was both a challenge and my own personal “eureka.”