Blog for Anthro 104, Fall 08, UMass Amherst

. During my last Anthro 104 lecture, someone asked, “how much pre-determined focus does an ethnographer enter the field with?”  And, on the spot, I gave my “wide open” ethnographic approach telling about one of my best ethnographic interviews, the one where I opened with, “Why journalism?”, and then this guy went on talking for 90+ minutes and, because of the open-endedness of that one question, he took me down paths that had never occurred to me.   I think this answer was OK, but I didn’t really feel satisfied with it because I should have said something more about theory, about the analytic framework with which I come to the field.  Also, I should have mentioned my goals in learning about the changing journalistic models and mass media styles of post-socialist, post-war Croatia.  So, later I was thinking of nice little analogy that T. H. Eriksen talks about in our textbook (29).  He writes:

The choice of a precise topic for investigation … is an important part of the preparation for fieldwork. One should, at the very least, know if one is interested in, say, resource management or child-raising before embarking on fieldwork. Otherwise one will end up knowing too little about everything rather than knowing enough about something. Godfrey Lienhardt (1985), borrowing an analogy from Geertz, has compared the relationship between theory and ethnography to an elephant-and-rabbit stew. What is required, says Lienhardt, is one elephant of ethnography and one rabbit of theory. The art, as he sees it, consists of bringing out the flavour of the rabbit.

That’s a great analogy for me – I asked, “Why journalism?”, as I went after the elephant. But, yes, I had an idea of where I’m going with this line of inquiry as I try learn about the journalistic milieu and I have some theory in mind that helps me to figure out what to do with this elephant. With seasoning, you’ll recognize the rabbit.

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