We’re nearing the end– only four weeks left in the semester! This week, we’ll talk some more about bias and perspective in ethnographic writing, and work on revising your drafts.  Please click here for a full overview of Unit 4. 

**If you would like feedback from me on your ethnography draft, please let me know! I will send comments to anyone who requests them at this stage.**

Optional Zoom Class: Monday, November 16, 10:50 am

Due Dates

Peer review reports (either for your partner’s essay or your own essay) are due by the end of the day on Wednesday, Nov 18.

Revised drafts are due by the end of the day on Sunday, November 22.

Goals for This Week

• Practice analyzing a draft and offering constructive feedback to the writer
• Practice receiving feedback
• Practice revising your writing based on feedback from others and from your own self-assessment
• Explore the ways in which “Othering” language can be used in ethnography and other genres of writing

Overview of Tasks

1. Write your way into the week
2. Read additional ethnographic examples and supplementary material
3. Respond to discussion questions
4. Fill out a peer review report for your partner OR yourself, if you do not have a partner or your partner did not send you a draft (due Wednesday)
5. Revise your draft (due Sunday)

Detailed Instructions

Step 1: Write Your Way Into the Week

Here are your thinking questions for this week! Please spend 5-10 minutes freewriting about them. You’re welcome to post your answers as a comment, or keep them private.

1. What do you remember from ALL of our previous units about how bias can be embedded in writing in subtle ways, such as word choice?
2. What examples of subtle prejudice, bias, or discrimination can you think of, where someone/something isn’t being explicitly prejudiced, but you know it’s there?  Especially in words– spoken words or in writing.
3. Has someone ever written or spoken about you (or a group you are a part of) in a way that made you feel displaced, alienated, or misunderstood? What about it made you feel that way? How could they have communicated the same thing in a more affirming, respectful way?

Step 2: Read Additional Examples

1. “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”  — This is a very famous (and fairly short!) ethnographic essay from the 1950s. I had to read it for class 3 different times in college.
2. “The Nacirema Revisited” — An examination of some other aspects of Nacirema culture, written in 2014
3. “The Sinister Techniques of Othering and How to Avoid Them”
4. “The Problem of Othering”

Step 3: Respond to Discussion Prompt

In a comment on this post, please respond to the following questions:

1. Does the Nacirema’s culture seem strange to you? If so, why, or what aspects of it seem particularly unusual? If not, why not?
2. How do you see techniques of Othering appear in your everyday life? How might they appear in writing?
3. What can we learn from these articles in terms of bias and perspective when writing about other people, groups, or cultures?

Step 4: Peer Review

Some of you may have the same peer review partners this unit as in Unit 3. Others may not– this is not because anyone has complained about their partners. I’m re-adjusting based on who said they will be able to give feedback in a timely manner, and based on what methods people prefer.

If you have a peer review partner, please exchange feedback and fill out a Peer Review Report for them. Send it to both your partner and to me.

If you do not have a peer review partner, or if your partner does not send you a draft by the deadline, you can peer review yourself. Please still fill out a peer review report, but about your own writing. I will be opening a submission link on Blackboard, or you can email it to me or post it here on the site.

Peer Review Reports are Due on Wednesday, to give your partner time to revise before the Sunday deadline for revised drafts.

Step 5: Revise Your Draft

And turn it in by the end of the day on Sunday!

As a reminder, instructions and the rubric are here.

Welcome to Week 12, the beginning of Unit 4! In this unit, we’ll build off of what we discussed in Unit 3 about bias and science writing and apply it to social science, particularly the genre of ethnography. Please click here for a full overview of Unit 4. 

Optional Zoom Class: Monday, November 9 at 10:50 am

Due Dates

Please fill out Peer Review Survey #2 (Step 1 for this week)  by the end of Wednesday, November 6.

All other work for this week is due by the end of the day on Sunday, November 8. However, I recommend you complete the reading and annotations/commentary earlier in the week, to give you plenty of time to write your first draft.

Goals for This Week

1. Learn about the history and purpose of the genre of ethnography
2. Learn about ethical issues in ethnographic writing
3. Apply what you learned to your own first draft of an imaginary ethnography.

Overview of Tasks

1. Fill out Peer Review Survey #2
2. Write your way into the week
3. Read my digital lecture on ethnography
4. Read and annotate/comment on examples
5. Conduct your own ethnographic research
6. Write a first draft of your imaginary ethnography
7. Send the first draft to me and to your peer review partner (if applicable)

Detailed Instructions

Step 1: Fill Out Peer Review Survey #2

Link above, and also here. This will help me make any necessary adjustments to last unit’s peer review groups.

Step 2: Write Your Way Into the Week

Here is your thinking question for this week! Please spend 5-10 minutes freewriting about it.

1. If someone was coming to stay with you, or was coming to spend the day with you at your workplace, and you wanted to explain to them in advance how things work in your home or at your work so that they would know what to expect and feel comfortable, what would you say?

Step 3: Read Digital Lecture on Ethnography

Click here to read!

Step 4: Read/Comment on Examples

Choose 2 of the examples from professional anthropologists (#1-3) and 2 of the examples from the student anthropologists (#4-7). Please leave annotations on Hypothesis as you go, focusing more on style, structure, and paying attention to the kinds of things the authors include in their writing.

1. Unarmed Militancy: Tactical Victories, Subjectivity, and Legitimacy in Bolivian Street Protest (professional anthropologist)
2. Using and Refusing the Law: Indigenous Struggles and Legal Strategies after Neoliberal Multiculturalism (professional anthropologist)
3. VITAL TOPICS FORUM Chronic Disaster: Reimagining Noncommunicable Chronic Disease (a collection of several shorter pieces by professional anthropologists)
4. Smile and Style: An Ethnographic Analysis of ISU’s Gamma Phi Circus (recent student ethnography of a college club)
5. Building Christ-based Relationships, Disciples, and Sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ at Illinois State University (recent student ethnography of a college club)
6. Who Needs a Man When You’ve Got a Gun? (student ethnography of women gun owners in the Midwest)

7. From ‘Taroosh’ to ‘Tom Jones’: Mediating ‘Local’ and ‘Global’ Queer Discourses through Filipino ‘Gay Lingo’ (student ethnography of the slang of gay Filipinos)

More student examples here, if you want to see more examples.

Please also answer the following questions in a comment:

1. How do these articles differ from the natural science articles in style, structure, and/or content?
2. From looking at these examples, how would you define the rules of writing a mini-ethnography?

Step 5: Conduct Your Own Ethnographic Research

Click here for step-by-step instructions. How you do it will depend on whether you choose to write an imaginary ethnography or a real-life ethnography.

Step 6: Write Your First Draft

instructions and rubric are here.

Step 7: Send Your Draft

Send your first draft to both me and your peer review partner.

Ethnography has two root words: ethno, and graph. Ethno means “race, culture, or people” — like in the sense of an ethnicity. Graph means “write” — telegraph, graphite, graphic, photography, phonograph, monograph, etc. So, ethnography literally means writing a culture.

Historically, ethnography is the primary genre used by anthropologists — scientists who study humanity as a whole. Biological anthropologists study human evolution and our physical bodies, cultural anthropologists study our cultures, linguistic anthropologists study our languages, and archaeologists study the belongings, buildings, and trash we leave behind.

“Ethnographic writing” refers to writing that may not be “an ethnography” but uses a similar approach. Ethnographic writing can appear in a variety of academic disciplines– education research, sociology, psychology, English, geography, history, and more.

Brief Anthropology History Lesson

The history of anthropology — like pretty much every area of study — is pretty interwoven with racism. Biological anthropologists (along with medical doctors) are responsible for some of the beliefs that people of different races are better or worse physically, or that their bodies make them better or worse mentally or emotionally. Anthropological research was used as a justification for a lot of horrible things.

Anthropology as its own discipline started in the 1800s, although people wrote “ethnographic” notes long before that. For example, Julius Caesar (Roman Emperor who lived in the B.C. era) wrote some ethnographic notes about the Gauls and other “barbarians” he met while conquering parts of Europe as a general.

So, cultural anthropology, the subfield that solidified what “ethnography” means in the modern sense, mostly took this form in the 1800s:

1. An economically privileged white man (maybe not rich, but certainly with financial advantages in life), originally from Europe but later also from the U.S., would travel somewhere “exotic” to find some people who aren’t part of European/Western culture.
2. He would live with them and talk to them and do stuff with them for a year or so, studying them and taking notes.
3. Then he would go home and write a book describing their culture. They became “his” people, and other anthropologists would have to go find someone else to study.

You might already be able to think of some of the ethical problems with this. Anthropologists often did not ask permission to come study people, or give much back to the community they were staying with. Even though anthropologists try to understand other people’s way of life from their own perspective, they often failed, either by accident or because they were judgy and thought Western culture was superior. They often took things back with them, to sell or donate to museums. Sometimes they tried to impose their own ways of life upon the people they were studying.

So, a lot of it wasn’t good. At the same time, the discipline of anthropology has accumulated a lot of information about the very diverse cultures of humanity, which means there’s a lot of data on how what Western culture considers “just human nature” or “the normal way to do things” is not normal or human nature at all. For example, the first ethnography to go mainstream (as opposed to just being read by other anthropologists) was Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (1928). People in the U.S. were really interested in this ethnography because Samoan teenagers didn’t exhibit many of the behaviors or moods associated with “just part of being a teenager.” They fought with their parents a lot less, for example, and seemed happy overall, as opposed to the stereotypical moodiness of American teenagers. Mead thought that this was because Samoan teenagers (at the time, at least) had a lot more freedom and trust than American teenagers, especially in the 1920s. It wasn’t controversial for them to have sex with each other. If they didn’t want to live with their parents, it wasn’t a big deal for them to go stay with a friend or another family member for awhile.

Modern Anthropology

While there are still plenty of ethical issues in the discipline of anthropology and in the genre of ethnography, anthropologists are by and large trying to recognize the racist and sexist histories of the discipline and reinvent their research practices.

Some key changes:

1. Many more anthropologists study parts of their own cultures. There are now lots of ethnographies of different aspects of mainstream U.S. culture. Usually, ethnographies no longer try to describe all of an entire culture, but will instead focus on a key area (like a particular town) or group of people. For example, the punk scene.
2. The discipline is more diverse — it’s not just white European and American men studying everyone else (although there is definitely a lot of improvement still to be made here).
3. Many anthropologists practice applied anthropology— that is, using anthropological methods to try to figure out how to help a community. (An example might be an anthropologist going somewhere where the opioid epidemic is really bad to talk to people and figure out what aspects of their life situations lead them to getting addicted to opioids and what other factors are contributing to their struggles.)Applied anthropology is often used to craft public service announcements or promoting other public health initiatives. For example, how can you convince _____ group of people to use condoms, if they don’t want to use condoms?  I think a good use for an anthropologist right now could be, “For people who don’t want to take coronavirus precautions like masks and social-distancing, why not, and what would convince them to do it?”
4. Many anthropologists work or volunteer at the place/with the people they are studying, as a way of being helpful and giving back to the community instead of just taking up time and knowledge and resources. For example, when David Valentine was researching the lives of trans people in downtown Manhattan in the 1990s, he was also working at the LGBT Center to help provide people with medical resources. Working at the LGBT Center gave him additional opportunities to meet and talk to people, but he was also making a positive impact.
5. Many anthropologists do collaborative research, where instead of just showing up and doing a study, they work together with members of the community. The anthropologist might ask, “What kind of research would you like to do?” or “What would you find it useful to have?” Sometimes this takes the form of oral history collections to preserve a community’s stories and lives, or language preservation, in cases when only a few people in a community still speak an ancestral language, so the language is at risk of dying out.

Back to Ethnography

So, just as the discipline of anthropology has a gross history but is evolving, so does the genre of ethnography. One issue with ethnography is that it is originally a scientific genre, with all the claims to “objective truth” that come with it. Another issue is that word choice and the author’s perspective can embed a lot of bias (usually negative) into the writing, just like we talked about with news writing. The anthropologist may not even realize they’re doing it.

One important change in ethnography is that now it’s much more common for anthropologists to talk about themselves, and explain their relationship to the people they’re writing about and their own position in society, and to reflect on how that might affect their perspective. Whereas an anthropologist back in the day might try to “fade into the background” of his ethnography and pretend he was just an invisible camera watching the people, a modern anthropologist might talk about who she is, her own emotional reactions to her experiences and what she thought about it. You can never fully escape your own bias, but by trying to be as honest and transparent about it as you can, you can help the reader to put the information in context.

Many college classes have “mini-ethnography” assignments. When I was in college, we all had to go to a restaurant near campus and conduct a mini-ethnography of the restaurant. We had to sit there for about an hour, eat some food, and observe everything that happened around us. What kinds of people came in? What kinds of things did they order? How did they interact with the employees? What was the vibe? Then, we went home and wrote about it.

So, the general process for an ethnography is:

1. Go to your “place” (place is in quotation marks because you could also do an ethnography of an internet community) and spend some time there. Observe how people act and interact, and what kinds of people are there. This is called your fieldwork.
2. Take notes on your observations, but don’t be weird about it
3. As soon as possible after your fieldwork, write down everything you remember noticing in as much detail as you can. These are your fieldnotes.
4. Write an article describing your findings.

An ethnography will often follow the same general form as a scientific article, but it’s less strict. You can say “I” and talk about yourself. You should still talk about your research methods, your results, and do a discussion of your results, but these sections can be mixed together more if you want. You should still try to be thorough, as objective as possible, and always back up your ideas with evidence. You should definitely write about any expectations you had that were wrong, or times when you had to revise your interpretation or opinion.  More on this in the assignment instructions!

Now, please click back to the Week 12 instructions page and check out some examples!

Welcome to Unit 4, our last “real” unit! After this, we’ll just be building your portfolios and doing a mini-project about a genre of your choice.

“Social science” is actually a super broad set of disciplines with many different genres and sets of writing expectations. Some social science writing looks very similar to natural science writing. Other examples and genres may not. In this unit, we’ll be focusing on ethnographic writing. I will write a digital lecture about what “ethnography” and “ethnographic” means for you to read during Week 12.

This unit will be quite short, since we’ll be building off of some of the principles of academic and scientific writing we already covered in Unit 3. Here’s an overview:

Week 12: Introduction to Ethnography, Writing a First Draft
Week 13: More on Scientific Bias and Genre, Revising
Week 14: Reflection/Finishing Up, Starting Portfolio

We’ll also be doing another round of peer review. Please fill out Peer Review Survey #2. 

Writing For This Unit

This unit, you will be writing only one major creation— an imaginary (or not) mini-ethnography. You will write at least two drafts of this mini-ethnography.

Grading/Checklist For This Unit

The Social Science rubric is worth 20% of your overall grade (this is 5% more than Units 1 and 2, and the same as Unit 3). It will be graded out of 20 points. This means that each thing is worth a little more than in the past units, because you have fewer things to do.

1. Annotations/Commentary (Week 12)– 2 points, completion
2. First Draft of Mini-Ethnography (Week 12) — 2 points, completion
3. Peer Review (Week 13) — 4 points, completion + thoroughness
4. Revised Draft (Week 13) — 10 points, see rubric
5. QuickStart Workshop 4 (past) — 2 points, completion
6. Unit Reflection (Week 14) — 5 points, see rubric

Total: 20 points = 100% for the unit
100% for the unit = 20% of your final grade.
**I will input all the math into Blackboard so you don’t have to worry about calculating what this means for you**

Extra Credit

There are still a number of extra credit opportunities this semester. Specifically, you can attend a Writing Center Workshop or make an appointment with them for a 1:1 discussion of your writing. I will receive a spreadsheet with an attendance record at the end of the semester, and will apply the points then to wherever will mathematically benefit you the most.