{"id":2326,"date":"2014-09-10T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T12:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=2326"},"modified":"2014-09-10T16:13:54","modified_gmt":"2014-09-10T16:13:54","slug":"i-think-i-did-visual-ethnography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/i-think-i-did-visual-ethnography\/","title":{"rendered":"I think I did visual ethnography, maybe?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think I did visu\"4_1coke_man\"al ethnography\u2014or at least a homespun version of it\u2014but I just didn\u2019t know it. \u00a0When I was\u00a0a teenager I spent four summers with a group called Teen Missions International (TMI). TMI sends teams of teenagers around the world on mission projects; some of those projects are primarily construction while others are evangelistic. As a participant I had some pretty interesting cross-cultural experiences. And the more often I went, the better I became at documenting my experience. The fourth trip was to Papua New Guinea (PNG), a visual anthropologist\u2019s dream–some seven hundred distinct languages, and seven hundred different ethnic groups, complete with distinctive cultural practices.<\/p>\n

At seventeen I had no intention of sharing my \u201cresearch\u201d as a visual ethnography study. I didn\u2019t understand or consider what the practical, ethical, or methodological considerations were. But what I endeavored to do was capture the cultural distinctive of these tribal people so that I could effectively share my experience with supporters, friends and even in my public high school during a full assembly. The technology I used was an old Minolta camera, with three different lenses; photos only \u2013 alas, no video.<\/p>\n

As Sarah Pink indicates in \u201cDoing Visual Ethnography,\u201d[i] the photos should be understood reflexively. Each one took place at a specific moment in time; they depict knowledge, artifacts, and social relationships \u2013 in other words, they depict a unique world. Depending on their perspective, each viewer will see something different, different from the photographer and different from the participants in the study. She continues, saying \u201cThe meanings of photographs are contingent and subjective; they depend on who is looking, and when they are looking\u201d[ii]. Without \u201cgoing off\u201d on her postmodern love for ambiguity, she makes a great point.<\/p>\n

Our team lived for six weeks deep into the jungles of PNG, alongside tribal peoples, near the Sepik River. We were invited into their villages, into their spirit houses; we ate at their community pig roast, and joined them in their sing-sings. We traveled in long hand-carved canoes on the crocodile-infested Sepik River, we ate sago paste, a national staple (nothing but starch scraped out of a tree), and we ate fresh grubs. I took photos of everything. While I could tell a story with my photos, the audience didn\u2019t really experience what I experienced. I had my perspective on the culture, on what I found interesting, on how I interpreted such-and-such a practice, event, or artifact, but it was simply my view.<\/p>\n

We were more than tourists, so I could tell a story that was rich, culturally accurate, and would help my audience learn something of the tribal life along the Sepik River. But regardless of how accurate my visual communication might be, it doesn\u2019t communicate in realistic terms the same significance that I assigned to it. Each person who sees it interacts with their own unique knowledge. To offset this challenge, Pink indicates that a reflexive approach to analysis would focus on understanding the context in which the photographer or researcher finds themselves. The more we understand and accurately communicate the context, the more accurate our interpretation of the event. That sounds a lot like Hermeneutics to me.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on visual ethnography and the challenges involved in communicating a culture reminds me of an experience I\u2019ve had many times, but is still an enigma to me; I wonder if any of my fellow D Min. students have had a similar experience. I\u2019ve been blessed to live in many cultures, some for a short term\u2014a summer\u2014some for much longer, such as living in Thailand for five years. Here\u2019s what I don\u2019t understand: when I get back to my home country the interest of others in my cross-cultural experience is often tepid, merely polite, and in many ways seems shallow. I\u2019ve started out enthusiastic about sharing such experiences, but after many a cool response I\u2019ve learned to make responses brief and appropriate to a shallow interest. Why is that?<\/p>\n

Pink\u2019s book has helped me understand this a bit better. She concluded that \u201cvisual ethnography is not a method \u2013 not something that is \u2018done\u2019 but something that is happening in the doing, and the doing is ongoing as technology, theory, practice and life move forward in new ways.\u201d[iii] So my conclusion is similar: living in another culture isn\u2019t something that is \u201cdone,\u201d but it happens in the doing. Communicating it as something that is \u2018done\u2019 minimizes it, and it\u2019s received as such. Communicating it as \u201congoing,\u201d bringing people into the experience, that is the goal of Sarah Pink\u2019s \u201cDoing Visual Ethnography\u201d and it is my goal too.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[i] Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography<\/em>: 3rd<\/sup> ed. London: Sage, 2013.<\/p>\n

[ii] Ibid., p. 75.<\/p>\n

[iii] Ibid., p. 213.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think I did visual ethnography\u2014or at least a homespun version of it\u2014but I just didn\u2019t know it. \u00a0When I was\u00a0a teenager I spent four summers with a group called Teen Missions International (TMI). TMI sends teams of teenagers around the world on mission projects; some of those projects are primarily construction while others are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25,2,273,211],"class_list":["post-2326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-culture","tag-dminlgp","tag-pink-ve","tag-visualethnography","cohort-lgp5"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2326"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2346,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2326\/revisions\/2346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}