Goulet.pdf

(WallPaper) #1
Millie Creighton

ally about life, typically about other people’s lives as we in our lives
interact with them and theirs. In other words, to some extent, John
Lennon’s commentary on life applies to ethnographic research find-
ings: they are sometimes (perhaps often) something that happens to
one while one is busy making or pursuing other plans.
In the three cases discussed below I verged from the initial research
plan, if only for a while, when a new avenue of action or thought was
somehow—unexpectedly—introduced by the person with whom I was
interacting. I allowed myself to accept this change of focus, rather
than believe my job was to get them back “on topic.” Becoming the
“bad ethnographer” I probably got a few less specific facts about the
specific objectives I had set at the beginning. If I had insisted on be-
ing the “good ethnographer,” however, it would have meant my miss-
ing the opportunity to gain much larger insights in my cultural area
of study. In each case, the insights received related to issues of groups
that might be designated as “minorities” in Japan, which was not
the specific object of the specific research being pursued at that spe-
cific point. However, the findings contributed greatly to my own un-
derstandings of these issues and would later fit into a larger body of
work on these topics and future writings. Perhaps there is a place and
time for being not only the good ethnographer but also the good bad
ethnographer.


Story # 1 : Research Interviews or “Bring Extra Notebooks” Advice

I begin my stories from the field, with echoes of advice from Radcliffe-
Brown, now elevated to ancestral status in the founding of anthropo-
logical inquiry. He is reported to have given his students this advice
on doing fieldwork: “Get a large notebook and start in the middle
because you never know which ways things will develop” (quoted in
Rubenstein 1991 , 14 , and Wolcott 1999 , 33 ). When I first ran across
this statement, I was surprised because I had actually been doing some-
thing of this nature as a practice that came from lengthy research expe-
rience. A caveat I would add to this advice is always take extra note-
books along for when you think things are over, they are not. This
practice might have been born after the following incident.

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