Foolish about Subjectivities

From: Bill Barowy (wbarowy@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Nov 27 2001 - 07:08:42 PST


More interjection -- but as usual, the xmca issue touches upon something I have
been thinking about, and so i post mostly to make sense to myself. Occasionally
there is some resonance with xmca'ers and it's great. So just hit delete, this
could be long. I have been quite foolish.

The impressions i have of subjectivity relate at my earliest times as being
opposed to objectivity, and this comes from studies in philosophy, cognitive
science, but mostly from constructivist writers, who put constructivism in
tension with positivism. The essence of human interpretation with regard to
sensory experiences, selectively uptaking those experiences based upon the
state of the human, is where I place subjectivity. This is in opposition to
objectivity (positivist) in that realms such as physics developed instruments
that would better enable one to make the same observations of nature as
another, lessening or eliminating the subjectivity of the observer. (You may
read here a sense of how I now think of objectivity as an intersubjectivity,
and I think you will be right.)

So my dilemma has been with ethnography and my adopted mission -- coordination
of my work with chat. I learned from a cultural anthropologist, who introduced
 me to xmca, that ethnography is about local observation of cultures, that one
has to put aside one's own ways of thinking and observe and write field notes,
getting into what is happening, and conducting interviews to understand how
those happenings are interpreted locally in the culture. Emic/Etic
distinctions loom large. Standard stuff from an anthropology textbook, it is
about getting into the subjectivities of the culture, and I think Phil is right
that it is about roles, as one's role can be expected to shape one's
interpretations of events. The role of the researcher is to abandon his/her
cultural biases and record as best as possible the accounts from within the
culture. As an example, I've found a paper on the web at URL:

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~simsuz/papers/ete.pdf

that deals with the misconceptions of ethnography. I've pulled out a section
that addresses one misconception.

[start quote]
Claim: "The field notes and the analyses are all based on the researcher’s
interpretation and theoretical background. How do you know that some one else
doing the same study will come the same conclusions?"

Subjectivity is a fact of life. Since eliminating it or controlling for it is
not possible, the researcher must take into account of subjectivity and
personal impact on the site during data collection. The goal is to make
note-taking and analysis as transparent as possible. When writing field notes
(or "accounts" or "memos"), the researcher must take care to separate direct
observations from labels or generalisations. Rather than recording "A and B had
a fight", the observer must record all the evidence that led to this
impression, for example, their body language, what they said, and even events
before and after this fight. Field notes need to be objective and thorough
because they will serve as the raw data for later analyses. During analysis and
write-up, the researcher is free to use any philosophical or theoretical
approach, provided these and other personal biases are acknowledged and the
conclusions are supported by the field notes. The raw data, the context of the
study, and the researcher’s personal context taken together provide the
transparency necessary for another researcher to draw the same conclusions.

[end quote]

So the process is partially one of separation in time -- that detailed
microgenetic observation goes on first and then analysis. And this is
problematic from my point of view -- that an observer can totally abandon
his/her cultural bias and make "transparent" observations. One contradiction
lies within perception being under the control of the investigator, that the
investigators culture may be held in suspense. (I recall a long frustrated
exchange on xmca in which Naoki Ueno was trying to convince me otherwise.) A
second contradiction is that the observer can record all that is observable,
and this is just not possible, witness the exercise in which everyone in a room
is asked to record an event, and one gets many accounts (and interpretations).
I am drawn towards thinking that one cannot help but shape observation with
theory, if not only at the level of selecting this action to record over that
(especially under severe time constraints, or where actions is thick and
dense), but also in chosing any particular setting or context over another in
which to make observations.

And in complete foolishness I'll go even further to describe how, using the
finnish school of chat, I pay attention to, and record for a partial set of
examples, how actions are mediated by artifacts, what artifacts are present in
a setting (including their physical layout), what are the encodings in
artifacts (i.e. texts that may include "rules" such as policy statements), who
is present, what are their roles, and I take time to get a sense of the
"surrounds" that influence the setting from "without" the setting. Interviews
inform of the accounts of participants, including their goals. THIS, by rules
of the above quote is NOT ethnography, which is what I have been calling it,
and THAT is the source of my foolishness.

But maybe there's good company to be had -- if one reads Strauss:
[start quote]

Data collection never entirely ceases because coding and memoing continue to
raise fresh questions that can only be addressed by the gathering of new data
or the examination of previous data. Theory-guided data collection often leads
to the search for -- or quick recognition of -- valuable additional sources of
data... (strauss, 987, p27)

[end quote]

What Strauss is leading to is how the emergence of theory (of course coming
from a grounded theory approach) guides later observation. This is not
ethnography either, is it? But suppose one is building upon the theories of
others? In this situation, it is not only the short term development of ones
own theory of locality that guides data collection, but the longer term
development in which one is more like a morphing cog in the evolution of the
machinery. I raise this point of course because I am coordinating my
observations (and participation) with chat. But in a larger sense, the rules of
ethnographic observation come from a particular theoretical perspective that
has been in development for some time -- and embedded in that perspective is
the view that cultural conditioning shapes what one takes up in experience. So
the rules, based upon this (meta?)theoretical understanding, in concert with a
(meta?)theoretical objectivist stance, appeal to one to record details, to
shuck off one's cultural biases in observation. And THAT is a deep primary
contradiction in theory, materialized in the mediation of observation by
theory. That, according to the first quote, there can be "direct observations"
while simultaneously there can be no eliminating or controlling for
subjectivity is foolish. Or rather, I was foolish for trying, forgetting the
development from S--R to S--X--R.

=====
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]

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