researchers can seek to identify symbols and meanings in order to gain understandings of how social actors act in and make sense of social worlds. Such ethnographic work assumes an immersion in the social world in order to make sense of that world from the perspective of the actors themselves. Interactionism is one of the major perspectives or set of perspectives within sociology. There are a variety of versions of interactionism; for ethnography the interactionism associated with Erving Goffman (1959, 1963, 1967, 1969) has been particularly influential. Goffman himself did not explicitly identify himself as an interactionist (Fine and Manning, 2003). However, his work on the purposive construction of the self through active impression management – the presentation of self – highlights the ways in which people describe their actions and how they ‘perform’ the self. Goffman likened this to performance and drama; this dramaturgical approach is concerned with how social actors purposively act in different situations and how they make sense of those actions in terms of meanings. Performativity remains a key concept in contemporary ethnography.
The influence of symbolic interactionism on ethnography is most obvious in relation to the ways in which we describe ethnography itself as an interactional process. We ‘do’ ethnography; doing ethnography is an act in itself – reliant upon and constructed through interactions between the ethnographer, the field of study and social actors with/in the field. There is here a focus on participation – with the researcher being a participant in and within the setting in order to uncover and make sense of meanings. There has been considerable debate on the extent to which ethnographers can and should participate in the field of study (Adler and Adler, 1994). This is often expressed as a continuum from ‘complete participant’ on the one side through to ‘complete observer’ on the other (see Chapter 5 for a longer discussion of the role of the researcher in ethnography). For our purposes here it is worth noting that interactionism makes visible the importance and impact of researcher engagement in the field and the significance of interaction for the ethnographic process itself.
Ethnography has also been influenced by, and in turn has influenced, the theoretical work of ethnomethodology (Pollner and Emerson, 2001). Ethnomethodologists are particularly concerned with the understanding of social life at the micro-level and through uncovering meaning in the close and detailed study of interaction. Ethnographic approaches are also used in order to pay close attention to social life at this micro-level. Both ethnomethodology and ethnography are situated within the interpretive social sciences, and are concerned with understanding the life worlds of social actors in the context of their setting. While the two perspectives have had different followers and have not always been aligned, they have nonetheless ‘grown older together … where once clearer boundaries have become blurred’ (Pollner and Emerson, 2001, p. 118). Ethnomethodology, like ethnography, has had a wide disciplinary appeal, including from within sociology and discursive psychology, and has been particularly concerned with the ways in which reality and social order are constructed and maintained through interaction. Ethnomethodologists have a particular interest in language – including spoken words and conversations, but also sounds, gestures and body language. There is an interest in the sequencing of language, alongside spatial and temporal contexts; and thus in how social actors work together to construct and maintain social order, and at times to change that order in nuanced and subtle ways. So, from an ethnographic perspective, there is a resonance and shift from a preoccupation with culture or society itself towards the techniques through which interactional realities are maintained; how people use and identify social cues, what is said and left unsaid, how reciprocal relations are shaped and reinforced, and what methods people use used to persuade each other of society and the shared sense of order. Ethnomethodologists have used and developed ethnographical approaches in order to collect what might be identified as naturally occurring interactional data, such as conversations and other language encounters (Silverman, 2011). The analysis of these encounters has helped to uncover techniques through which social actors develop and perform shared understandings, persuading each other of the society of which they are parts. There has been considerable debate about ongoing similarities and differences between ethnomethodology and ethnography (Atkinson, 1988), within a context of recognition that dialogue between the two is ethnographically valuable, expanding the appreciation of ‘the depth, limits and complexity of its own practices and those of the persons or groups comprising its substantive focus’ (Pollner and Emerson, 2001, p. 131).
Feminist ethnography
Like qualitative research more generally, ethnography has also been shaped by, and has helped to define feminist scholarship and research practice. The dialogue between feminism and ethnography can be situated within feminist critiques of social science and social research more generally. There have been nuanced understandings of the ways in which the ideologies of gender have structured the social relations of research, alongside considerable philosophical debate about the gendered nature of knowledge (Harding, 1987; Ramazanoglu and Holland, 2002). Feminist theorists have critiqued some of the established assumptions that have underpinned social scientific inquiry, calling into question underlying perceived dichotomies – such as objectivity/subjectivity and rationality/emotionality – as well as repositioning and restating knowledge as grounded, local, partial and temporally situated. Such insights have led to a feminist research agenda and to a recasting of feminist social research – where the conditions of knowledge production are critically acknowledged and accounted for, where issues of power are recognized in the research process and in relation to research production, and where epistemology and ontology are central (Letherby, 2003). As Stanley has eloquently described, ‘feminism is not merely a perspective, a way of seeing; nor even this plus an epistemology, a way of knowing; it is also an ontology, a way of being in the world’ (1990, p. 14).
It is now widely accepted that feminist research methods can incorporate a wide variety of approaches, both quantitative and qualitative; as Letherby (2003) notes, feminists can count as well as quote. It is certainly not the case that some methods are more inherently feminist than others, and feminist scholars have used a variety of approaches to empirical work and knowledge creation. Within that general context, feminist researchers have used and developed ethnographic approaches to reveal women’s standpoints (Farrell, 1992; Langellier and Hall, 1989) and have debated the representation of feminist ethnography in and through the production of texts (Behar and Gordon, 1995; Clough, 1992). Feminist anthropologists, for example, have engaged in an epistemological and methodological project towards establishing a distinctive feminist ethnography (see Jennaway, 1990; Schrock, 2013; Walter, 1995). Abu-Lughod (1990) posed the question as to whether there can be a feminist ethnography, and if so what that might look like. This included a focus on the ways in which feminist ethnography might enable exploration of the relationship between feminism and reflexivity, troubling the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, and considering the power in and of writing. Abu-Lughod spoke of an ‘unsettling of the boundaries that have been central to its identity as a discipline of the self-studying other’ (1990, p. 26). Jennaway similarly argued that postmodern discourses in ethnography borrowed from and emerged out of feminist preoccupations and articulations, including a move towards egalitarian relations of textual production, more dialogic and collaborative approaches and a ‘move away from systems of representation which objectify and silence the ethnographic other’ (1990, p. 171). Reflecting on the methodological imperatives of feminist ethnography in contemporary times, Schrock (2013) identifies the importance of representation (both its benefits and detriments) and ethical responsibility towards the communities where researchers work and study.
Postmodernism
The postmodern turn in social science provides a methodological backdrop for contemporary ethnography, influencing the methodology and practice in a number of ways (Fontana and McGinnis, 2003). In simple terms, postmodernism represented a rejection of an objective reality and science, in favour of a more complex, nuanced, multi-layered understanding of the social world. Postmodernism, which can be taken as a movement influenced by and influencing a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches – including
