Searching for knowledge: method, gloss, and the failure of information :: Ethnography

I. Sketching KnowledgeI have a recurring nightm atomic number 18 that I am on my way to becoming a post-modern positivist. In thedark recesses of my inner sanctum, my constant justifications of the worth of inductive, nonhypothesisdriven,participatory, and emic-centered research finally give way under the pressure of graduatestudents dismissal of methods as unimportant and an all too often dismissal of anthropology by somegiven that its just anecdotes. These fears atomic number 18 backed by a frightening credit that I have colleaguesin other disciplines (i.e., critical geography, social work, and even sympathetic political science) whoappear to take our method more seriously than we do. Is anthropology ill-omened?This semester I am teaching ethnographic methods to a class of first year graduate students and Iam often struck by how stinging they are to know how it is done. But simultaneously, how difficult it isfor them to specify any concrete method beyond interviewing and observ ing. Often they are actually mostinterested in questions of logistics the real how is it done questions. How did you get a visa, where didyou live, how long did you stay, how did you afford it, did your partner come with you, were youinsured? And of course, a professor who has taught the course before advised me that I shouldnt preparelectures, but rather just tell stories. So I spend a lot of my time in this class state stories, (whichsatisfies my pedagogical fears over not knowing enough about method to cover 20 hours of course-time having had a significant part of my own training in the go out and do it approach), but also imploringthese anthropologists-in-training to think about what information they are interested in, and the best waysto get it. I tell them that we need to take data collection seriously, or at least we need to have a seriousthink about what allow answer our questions. However, some of them seem to think of it as busy-work.As they repeatedly tell me, one of th e dogmas of Malinowski-as-practiced dissertation fieldwork is your2questions will change once you are in the field, so why should they spend loads of time thinking abouthow to answer their original question? Also, some ask, doesnt this jeopardize the temperament of inductiveresearch? I believe in the necessity of the anthropological flexibility that these students are highlightingthrough their questioning of research preparation. However, it seems to me that some of them areconflating fixity and research design, rather than giving real consideration to particular methodological