SEEING WITH AN ETHNOGRAPHIC SENSIBILITY 173grips with policies regulating “appropriate” comfort levels—physical, as well as emotional, moral,
and cultural—in domestic settings. A fundamental question for understanding current attitudes
and practices concerning occupancy standard preferences is: What is the origin of these ever-
changing measures of health, safety, comfort, convenience, and morality that justify such people-
to-space ratios? Perhaps more significantly, what is their legacy? The answer requires historical,
sociocultural, and political analyses that explore such questions as how domestic space use and
other daily practices reflect cultural patterns that themselves encourage or discourage certain
ways of perceiving the world and one’s place in it.
Although participant-observation led me to the housing density research question with which
I started, reading historical sources with an ethnographic eye enabled me to sort out the processes
by which certain household densities came to be construed as physically, emotionally, and/or
morally unhealthful crowding in policy, law, and popular attitudes. It granted me the privilege of
seeing through new eyes to ask new questions. I learned that although the specific ways in which
people A or B tend to organize space, set up power relations, or cook and eat their food cannot be
transferred wholesale to some other people with whom they share those practices, each insight
leads to new questions that are transferable.
One of many lessons I took away from this experience was that the ways I get my data and the
types of data I seek critically influence the questions I ask and the subsequent answers I receive,
and vice versa. Policies and priorities can only be as good as the questions asked and the assump-
tions underlying those questions. It is essential that a researcher (whether academic or policy
analyst) not assume that etic, predefined categories provide an adequate explanation from which
to pursue future research or policy. Census categories such as gender, ethnicity, income, and so
forth might hide as much as they elucidate in some research contexts, while survey questions
derived from the researcher’s own experience and reading with no emic content might tell more
about the researcher than the population being researched.
A researcher need not go to Mexico or another country to develop an ethnographic observa-
tional sensibility. It is quite possible to hone one’s own senses by reflecting upon life in one’s
own locale. For me, these reflections focus on my parents’ working hard, as did many first- and
second-generation Americans in the post–World War II years (and since), to ensure that my
sibling and I each had our own bedroom while we were both still in elementary school—and
certainly our own beds, unlike their own childhood circumstances. It wasn’t until after my
participant-observation fieldwork in Mexico and Los Angeles that I even thought to ask my mother
about sleeping arrangements in her growing-up years in Manhattan; somehow, I had implicitly,
and mistakenly, assumed that when my mother and her brother were children, as with my father
and his siblings, my grandparents must have had an apartment with more than the one bedroom I
had always known them to have. There simply wasn’t a cognitive slot in my brain to imagine that
any way of organizing sleeping and living spaces other than the one with which I grew up could
be normal or even preferred. I had not yet acquired the appropriate knowledge to think these
thoughts. I didn’t even know there was a question here to ponder.
When I shared a cabin in sleep-away camp with ten other girls or a dorm room in college with
a roommate, I implicitly felt that these were situationally appropriate living arrangements, but not
arrangements that would feel right in a home. Of course, I knew families in which the children
shared bedrooms when I was growing up. I remember one friend with five siblings. They were
middle class and lived in my neighborhood; the four girls slept in one bedroom, the two boys in
another. But their mother had an accent and was a refugee from Nazi Germany, so that seemed to
make sense somehow; they were different. Other friends shared bedrooms too, but I always found
an “excuse”: They had too little money or too many children for the size of the local houses and