Pandemic Ethnography
Welcome to the end of semester digital ethnography collaboratively produced by students in Cultural Anthropology 302: Fieldwork Methods. This class, a requirement for all Cultural Anthropology majors and also popular with students in other majors, is a rigorous introduction to the core methodology anthropologists utilize in ethnographic research: participant observation, or more colloquially, “deep hanging out.” Through participating, observing and talking to people in what is often an unfamiliar (to the anthropologist) “field site,” ethnographers explore what people do in particular social contexts and what meaning they give this behavior. In presenting their findings in written, visual and digital formats, ethnographers translate what they have learned to others.
In pre-pandemic semesters students in this class have conducted participant observation in and around Durham in field sites as nearby as local barber shops, cafes, tattoo parlors, churches, the court house, city hall and political rallies in downtown Raleigh, and as distant as the supernatural Devil’s Tramping Ground in Bear Creek, NC. Given the constraints of social distancing during Covid, we had to re-imagine our work this semester. We decided to tap into our identities as “native anthropologists,” (members of the social world under investigation) as Duke students to explore the ways this year of pandemic living has impacted different aspects of university life.
Digital Collaboration
Our collaborative digital ethnography is an example of some of the ways in recent years that anthropologists have begun to reinvent doing and presenting ethnographic research:
Digital Format: deciding to present our work as a website rather than collection of individually written papers allowed us to explore methods that could best capture and share the sensorial experience of life on a university campus during Covid. We experimented with photography, video and sound recordings and played around with creative ways to present our data, foregrounding elements other than written text. The digital format also allowed us to directly link to other resources available on the living, changing internet archive. This puts our work in direct conversation with the work of others as well as allows us to bridge the divide between research and action by offering our reader/viewers resources for becoming more involved with some of the issues explored on our website.
Collaboration: In a time of social distancing it is important to find new ways of creating shared experience. Academic work can be an isolating and lonely process even in the best of times, and even more so in a time of zoom classes and asynchronous learning. Collaborating together as a whole class to decide on the structure of our digital ethnography and then in teams of 3 to investigate particular aspects of Duke life allowed us to make this course a much larger shared endeavor. Whether discussing together at six feet distance in the classroom, working on the same website together online or taking a group (socially distanced) photograph for the Website banner, we have been present in each others learning experience. Our collaboration moved beyond the researcher-to-researcher relationship however. In striving to destabilize the power dynamic of ethnography in which the anthropologist “speaks for” the “informants,” we attempted to allow, as much as possible, our interlocutors to “speak for themselves.” This self-representation took the shape not only in quotes from interviews but in art work, day-in-the-life video journals and photo documentation of Covid work/life spaces.
