SEEING WITH AN ETHNOGRAPHIC SENSIBILITY 167Defining the appropriate use and allocation of rooms in a home is no different. Since attitudes
tend to thread through the fabric of society (E. Hall 1966), how domestic space is organized
becomes a clue to underlying sociocultural patterns and ways of thinking, as are decisions about
how to cook a meal, allocate power, plan a ritual, or allocate authority by age, gender, individual
attainment, and so forth. The knowledge we draw on calls upon our common sense, “that wonder-
ful, cultural construction of the ‘naturally’ apparent” (Hummon 1989, 220). The job of a participant-
observer is to explore and deconstruct what it is that makes one person’s ways of doing, thinking,
and saying feel so second nature and so goes-without-saying that the person doesn’t usually bother
to question them, while at the same time making someone else’s ways feel wrong.^3
Accounts from the ethnographic literature provide specific instances of the process whereby
the invisible taken-for-granted can be made explicit and visible. Katherine Newman’s ethno-
graphic fieldwork (Newman 1999), for one example, took place in New York City public housing
projects. She hung around the projects, got to know some of the people better than others, and
asked questions about people’s behaviors or choices, especially when they did not make sense to
her immediately.
A particularly intriguing episode occurred one summer. A low-income woman chose to spend
her poverty-level wages on an air conditioner for her apartment and a Nintendo video game for
her children. Why would she purchase these luxuries when she was having trouble affording
basic food, clothes, and the like? Students in my first-semester graduate urban planning seminar
had a range of responses when I asked their reactions to the woman’s choices. For some students
her choices meshed with their expectations that single mothers in the projects were irresponsible
and had to be taught to have more appropriate priorities. Others believed that everyone has a right
to pleasure and comfort and that it was, in part, the fault of the media for promoting Nintendo and
other such games as “hipness” barometers. Despite a range of responses, no one came close to
what Newman reported the mother as saying: In the summer when school is out and child care or
camp is too expensive, having a cool apartment and something for her kids to do keeps them
safely inside, off the streets and out of trouble while she is at work.
Many of us reading this example will never have had to deal with this mother’s quandary:
How do you work away from home and keep your children safely out of the streets, with their
gunshots and gangs, during the hot summer months? Reading this interpretive ethnography pro-
vides a new question for policy makers and analysts to ask: What strategies do people develop to
keep those they love safe in an unsafe environment? Parents of modest means do not have the
same choices my professorial salary allows me. But loving their children as much as I love mine,
they have to be more creative and make compromises I could not comprehend without the in-
sights afforded by participant-observation. Thus, new understandings need not derive solely from
one’s own fieldwork; it is obviously impractical and impossible to do participant-observation
research in the multitude of environments for which analysts design policies. Reading another
researcher’s interpretive analysis of the realities of negotiating daily life as undertaken by people
with experiences different from one’s own can be an acceptable proxy.
Other examples focus less on visibility than on “hear-ability.” Discourse analysis explores the
role language plays in how people come to categorize their social world and make the “cultural”
seem “natural” in daily use. When two of these seemingly natural, neutral, and invisible discourse
strategies are brought together in a policy-relevant context, the participants often are unaware
that they are approaching the same situation using fundamentally different styles of decision
making. How might this disparity affect their ability to collaborate? And perhaps more signifi-
cantly, how does it affect the ability of the less-dominant discourse style to even be heard? The
anthropological subfield of sociolinguistics (e.g., Briggs 1986) examines such questions.