|
P. J.
Cushing 2003 2.0 A Statement on Method “Simply take yourself, in all your singularity, importance, complexity,
and love—and multiply.” Annie Dillard (1999:47) 2.1 A protean
project
Describing
human experience is a formidable task, and the reflection of novelist Annie
Dillard points to the risk of misrepresentation when a writer loses track of
the distinctiveness of individuals in the process of generalizing. General
accounts and large numbers can lead to a loss of perspective and “compassion
fatigue… At what number do other individuals blur for me? Vanish?” (Dillard 1999:131). The ethnographic methods I employed were designed to
hold onto both sides of the story: the lives and creative agency of particular
caregivers, as well as broad patterns in their collective response to the
L’Arche cultural system. I observed and examined how the caregiving services
are organized in L’Arche, and how caregivers behave in their natural settings,
but also asked the caregivers individually about their perceptions and
experiences of daily life in the homes. Eventually, I set this data within a
broader operational context using secondary sources from a literature review in
chapters 3 and 4. In this chapter, I discuss the
original and eventual research design for the project, and key issues that I
encountered in the process. Section 2.2 traces the trajectory of the project
from my original inspiration to the early negotiations for a research site and
subsequent shifts in my focus. In section 2.3 I discuss my principal method,
participant observation, and three key themes that orient my approach to
anthropological fieldwork. The discussion in section 2.4 turns towards defining
and evaluating the specific methods I used and their place in the overall
research design and chronology. The final section (2.5) addresses two concerns
that emerged over the course of my fieldwork: the ethical issue of obtaining
informed consent for research from people with intellectual disabilities, and
problematic aspects of conducting research in one’s own culture. Ethnographic
fieldwork is a highly variable research method. My aim in discussing issues I
faced at this site is to make the strengths and weaknesses of the process
transparent. 2.1.1 A brief theoretical orientation
My primary theoretical approach in
this ethnography is interpretive anthropology, combined with some aspects of
symbolic interactionism, and critical ideas from feminist and post-modern
theory regarding reflexivity, representation, voice and fieldwork that respects
the people being studied, not objectifies them. These latter critical ideas are
further elaborated in section 2.3.2. A straightforward starting point
for defining the goal of anthropology is: “to describe and explain the
regularities and variations in social behaviour,” or cultural description, and
this is accomplished primarily through ethnography (Spradley 1980:13). An ethnographer attempts to describe and analyze
“the meaning of actions and events to the people we [anthropologists] seek to
understand” by studying “what people do, what people know, and the things
people make and use;” cultural behaviour, cultural knowledge, and cultural
artefacts (Spradley 1980:5). Geertz (1973b) defined culture as a socially
established (shared) system of meaning “in terms of which people engage in
social action” (Nanda 1994:56). Spradley suggests that culture can be explicit (what
people can tell you) or tacit (what they know intuitively but most can not articulate),
but either way, “culture is the acquired knowledge that people use to interpret
experience and generate behaviour” (1980:6-7). So in this minimal definition,
culture is learned and shared. Many developments in theory since
the early 1980s have challenged the definition and usefulness of the concept of
culture for building cross-cultural understanding. In the post-colonial period,
feminists and post-modernists in particular have challenged anthropologists to
reflect critically on issues related to power asymmetry in the ethnographic
process: voice, representation, inclusion and exclusion, exotifying and
essentializing difference, and the objectification of research subjects (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and
Fischer 1986; Abu-Lughod 1991). A full review of these issues is beyond the scope of
this thesis, but I discuss those arguments that are salient to my project in
section 2.3.2 on “partial knowledge.” For now, I briefly outline the main idea
of interpretive anthropology. Symbolic interactionists posit
that cultural meanings derive from social interaction and thus they “seek to
explain human behavior in terms of meanings” (Spradley
1980:8). Interpretive anthropologists believe that “human
behaviour is symbolic: It has meaning—it signifies something—to those who
engage in it” (Nanda 1994: 56). To understand these cultural meanings an
anthropologist observes people in their natural settings since “it is through
the flow of behaviour, as social action, that culture is articulated” (Nanda 1994: 56). Interpretive anthropology moves away from a view of
cultures as “abstract systems” and encourages a focus on the often “messier,”
but fruitful approach, of examining “the experience
of being a member of that culture” (Marcus
and Fischer 1986) [i].
This approach has helped promote an understanding of culture as
multi-dimensional, differentially shared among its members, and as dynamic, not
static. In this thesis, I show how the L’Arche cultural environment has
undergone many changes and continues to change in response to both internal
efforts and externally imposed conditions, and also show intra-group
differences in perspective and experience among assistants. The interpretive paradigm fostered
many questions about the effect of inherent human biases on fieldwork and
interpretations, power asymmetries in our relations with “the other,” and what
implications these suggest regarding research objectivity (Nanda 1994: 36). In attempting to grapple with these questions,
anthropologists’ professional self-awareness and reflexivity have been
heightened. Reflexivity in ethnography means being aware of and accountable for
the effect of your personality, culture and feelings on your research and
analysis (ibid:37). Throughout this chapter I use reflexivity to
elucidate how I enacted the interpretive approach. This discussion provides an
overview within which the rest of the more specific sections below operate. 2.2
Negotiating the topic and field site
The
general idea for this ethnography grew out of my previous research and
experiences, but changed once I chose a research site and began my fieldwork.
In this section, I trace the trajectory of the project from my original
inspiration, to the early negotiations for a research site, and finally the
proposal and agreement struck with L’Arche. The multi-sited fieldwork lasted
just over a year, and in the end comprised many research methods and sites of
engagement, under the organizing approach of participant observation. Methods
are elaborated in section 2.3.1 on participant observation and in 2.4 on
research design. The topic for this
project originally grew out of my interest in questions about how people change
themselves, why they want to or think they should, and what cultural beliefs
are at play in helping to direct how they think they should or could change. In
previous ethnographic research, I examined similar questions about personal
change through applying the rites of passage model (Turner 1964) to self-narratives that I co-produced with students,
before and after their three-week experiential wilderness courses at a school
where I worked, called Outward Bound (Cushing
1997a, b). Since Outward Bound’s primary objective was to
promote personal development, I was interested in how their local cultural
belief system encouraged and supported people towards that end. I examined
three dimensions of the efficacy of the program in encouraging personal change:
the content or nature of change, intensity or degree, and longevity[ii].
Many students experienced positive short-term effects like greater confidence,
empathy and openness, but afterwards, even those who indicated that they were
trying, seemed to find sustaining these changes very challenging. Based on interviews three months
post-course, I argued that there were five contributing issues to this problem,
and one of those is the most salient to the origins of the present ethnography[iii].
Briefly, one key issue was the lack of a compelling motive to sustain the
change(s); their own desire was simply not enough to inspire them to the extra
effort required off-course to overcome blocks such as peer pressure and absence
of support. One student, Jeremy, who was
still trying at the time of the post-course interview, disclosed that he was
tired of letting his mom down with his delinquent behaviour, how he was
desperate not to end up stuck in his hometown, and how much he wanted to do something
more with his life than attend house parties. The source of those ambitions is
less relevant here than the role they played in bolstering his desire to
sustain his changes. These comments represent a set of broader, long-term, and
partly other-oriented concerns that seemed to be buoying his spirit and
providing him with a meaningful rationale for continuing to make an effort to
grow. This insight led me to consider whether Jeremy’s situation was common. My
initial research problem for this study was the following: Are personal change projects enhanced or
prolonged when interwoven with relational
and existential goals, or guiding
purposes? I wanted a research site where I
could delve further into this question. I was particularly interested in whether
a person’s goals for being involved with social
change or social good projects could have a spin-off positive effect on their
capacity to develop and sustain personal
changes in everyday life. My personal agenda was the hope that if I could
illustrate this relationship, it would provide a compelling motive for people
to get more involved in volunteer and community work. L’Arche met my research
needs since its philosophy endorses both a socially progressive approach to
caregiving, as well as the importance of caregivers’ growth towards maturity. I
first learned of L’Arche in 1998 in a fortuitous conversation with a friend,
Ann Osler, who is a long-time associate and supporter of the Daybreak
community. After a series of inquiries, I was
invited by the community to dinner at one of their eight homes in October 1998.
My nervousness was alleviated by Russell, an elderly core member, who gave me a
house tour replete with detailed stories of his family tree and his connections
within the church! A young assistant included me in dinner preparations, and
later one of the long-term assistants shared her thoughts and suggestions about
researching personal transformation based on her experience in L’Arche. The
casual, comfortable manner and tone of the evening allayed my concern about
feeling uncomfortable in a religious community. Over the next two months, I met
and discussed options for the project with two long-term assistants, Matthew
Marosszeky (Human Resources) and Carl MacMillan (Development and Outreach).
Both men helped me to understand more about the organization, and about being
sensitive to protecting the privacy of the people with intellectual
disabilities in their homes. Together we developed a mutually beneficial plan
by combining my research objectives with questions that were of interest to the
community. For example, L’Arche communities nationally were interested to know
more about assistants’ reasons for working there, in order to assist their
incipient recruiting efforts. Given the research site, I developed
other goals, such as understanding the fields of intellectual disability and
caregiving, and how L’Arche was situated within them, as well as how their
position might influence people’s decisions to become a caregiver there. These
factors are elaborated in Chapter 3. Carl and Matthew’s prime concern was to
minimize the disruption my presence would cause to people’s home lives, and
achieve an acceptable balance between individuals’ privacy and my ability to
access various people and situations in L’Arche. They obtained approval for my
proposal (see Exhibit 2.2) from community council, which allowed me to be
trained as an assistant and to be able to participate actively in the homes in
that capacity part-time. I was given a bedroom upstairs in the Big House, which
also houses the community’s main office. I was officially “connected to” one of
the regular community homes, Shalom House,[iv]
which means that I was there for most meals, social activities and caregiving
tasks. Assistants are always connected to a particular home, which facilitates
familiarity with care routines and interpersonal connections. I lived at
L’Arche four to five days a week, and at my home for the rest. It was agreed
that taking regular days away would help prevent me from becoming overly drawn
into the needs of the community at the cost of the research. Initially, the
time was split between two days to be scheduled as an assistant, and two to
three days for interviews, surveys, observation of meetings, assisting on
committees, and field notes. I was trained as an assistant in
how to spend social time with core members, do personal care and health/medical
routines, household chores, and other outings like church, shopping or going
for coffee. After a few months, I shifted a greater share of my time towards
those aspects of the research that involved less active household
participation, such as interviews, and so reduced my in-home assistant
commitment to roughly one day. Still, since I took all meals with Shalom House,
I continued to spend considerable time there in a less active form of
participant observation, and simply for fun. I was also involved in committees
and meetings outside the home in order to help out, but also to be involved in
different aspects of community life for observation purposes. My formal
interviews began after a few months once I had established a familiarity with
community life. Finally, I was given permission to do short-term, comparative
fieldwork in eight other Canadian L’Arche communities that differed from
Daybreak in various ways (age, size, region, language, and orienting religion)[v].
After a short time living in the
community, I was aware that some assumptions of my research problem did not
jibe with how the assistants understood and acted in their world. Assistants on
the Shalom House team were especially helpful in pointing out my assumptions
about them, their lives and what was important to them that were inaccurate as
far as they were concerned. Although I initially resisted their direction, with
greater experience in the community I came to see the relevance of their
insights through findings which surprised me. One surprise came around key
terms like personal change and social good. Several interviewees for example,
insisted (though not in so many words) that the personal change that they were
most proud of was learning to “be myself” or getting back to “my old self,” or
even learning to be content just “being” or being alone. None of these squared
with the typical terms of personal change literature with their additive or
developmental notions. Another insight around change was that it seemed to
happen almost as a side-effect, or requirement of other goals and practices.
Some explanations implied that while in retrospect
they felt they had grown or changed as an assistant, at the time, the issue and
the process of change had been painful and not something that they had sought. It is not uncommon for
anthropological definitions to be derived in an ongoing, inductive manner, as
new information from informants and insights arises from fieldwork (Barrett 1996:220) (see for
example Pool 1991). For example, assistants resisted my inference that
they were sacrificing self-interest to do this socially beneficial work;
instead, they insisted that they received as much as they gave up. This is not
to say that I took their statements about what they do and why only at face
value, which would be naïve. But participant observation and social engagement
revealed that these were not merely image-oriented claims; they reflected
important aspects of the moral order and theology of L’Arche, and of the
processes of everyday life there. Although I continued to gather
information on personal change and the cultural construction of disability, I
eventually broadened the scope and nature of my research questions to include
why assistants chose to be in L’Arche, and what their experience there was
like. I could access both their reported experience in interviews, as well as
observe their conduct and experiences firsthand. Although also concerned with
individual assistants’ experiences in L’Arche, I became interested in patterns
to their collective response to the process of socialization into this new
sub-culture: What specifically did people respond to, or resonate with in the
messages and daily practices of L’Arche? What did it mean to them to be there,
and to live according to the theology of L’Arche? In his classic discussion of
religion as a cultural system, Geertz supports this genre of research on the
meanings and symbols that comprise religion, in addition to the common focus on
religious behaviour (Geertz
1973c:125). He argues for more detailed, empirically-grounded
analyses of how sacred symbols
actually accomplish the mediation of meaning in people’s daily practice, that
allows religion to “miraculously” achieve “an aura of factuality” about its
particular ethos and worldview[vi] (ibid:89-90). To loosely adapt Geertz’s phrase, in retrospect, I
wanted to examine how people in L’Arche produced their faith or belief in
L’Arche theology and approach to care, as
they practiced it (ibid:114). 2.3 Orienting themes and method
There are many ways to conduct
fieldwork and to construct ethnography. The extended and extensive nature of
fieldwork, and participant observation in particular, mean that there are
innumerable small decisions and judgements made by the ethnographer every day
regarding what kinds of observations to include or exclude and how to interpret
differential responses of the subject group towards the ethnographer. In an
attempt to make the process more transparent, I define my main methodological
approach, participant observation, and outline three themes that animate and
orient my personal approach to this method. I conduct fieldwork under the
assumption that all knowledge is partial, which implies that a researcher’s
perspective is but one among many possible ones. As such, I try to remain
consciously open to persuasion by what informants believe and tell me about
their worlds and how to make sense of them, albeit with a critical awareness.
Through experiential learning I was exposed to a similar process of
socialization into the unique L’Arche ethos as the assistants. This facilitated
an understanding of how they experience L’Arche as a “moral order,” not simply
an agency (Kleinman 1995a: 117). 2.3.1 Participant
observation in the field
Fieldwork
is “the firsthand, systematic exploration of the variety of human cultures by
anthropologists” and ethnography is a written account of that exploration,
usually about one particular society or group (Nanda
1994:23). Although sometimes used interchangeably, “All
participant observation is fieldwork, but not all fieldwork is participant
observation” (Bernard 1994:137). In other words, people can be doing fieldwork, that
is, going into the field to gather data and observe, without being
participants. Fieldwork and participant observation both include a range of data
collection methods (interviews, checklists, questionnaires, etc.), and is
largely open-ended and inductive. Fieldwork concerns how people act and talk in
their natural settings. Although
participant observation is a “foundation of cultural anthropology” (Bernard 1994:136), there are different ways of describing its nuances
and key features. Below, I include several variants. Bernard and Spradley
specify degrees of participant observation, and evoke a sense of how it differs
from regular observation, while Barrett names the analytical elements of the
process. They are paraphrased except where there are quotation marks. A participating observer
goes to the field, hangs around, listens and talks to people like nurses, but
does not do the work of a nurse. An observing
participant becomes qualified to do
what his or her subjects do, like become a jail guard, then actively does the
same things as them, (part-time) while also observing. Subjects should be
informed of your research (Bernard
1994:138-9). The four levels of participation
are: passive (spectator), moderate (disengaged role), active (do what they do),
and complete (go native, or research where you are already a native).
Non-participative fieldwork could involve observing at a distance, email, or
interviews (Spradley 1980:58-62). The active participant seeks to do
what other people are doing, not merely to gain acceptance, but to more fully
learn the cultural rules for behaviour. Active participation begins with
observations, but as knowledge of what others do grows, the ethnographer tries
to learn the same behaviour (Spradley
1980:60-1). From the time of Malinowski
onwards, anthropologists have proceeded in the same rough fashion: gathering
data, getting hunches, checking them out, generating tentative hypotheses,
rejecting them as contradictory data emerge, arranging their data into
categories, searching for themes and patterns, and conducting comparative
research (Barrett 1996:215). My dominant mode in the field was
as an active or observing participant, but at different times I was also
engaged in the other modes, with the exception of “complete.” In a recruiting
meeting, or in the home for example, I was actively participating and had a
role and responsibilities to fulfill. When I attended an all-assistants meeting
in a new community however, my involvement was moderate, since I usually did a
presentation of my project at the meetings, but was otherwise simply observing
and remained disengaged from the meeting issues. In all of these modes, a
participant observer attempts to become “explicitly aware” of the environmental
details and behavioural patterns that people tune out in regular life (Spradley 1980:55). I also engaged in all of the
grounded, analytic activities that Barrett insists need to be an integrated
part of the fieldwork. Since this was my first major project as a full-time,
long-term, participant observer however, I do not think I used the reflection
tools as adequately as I could have to narrow my topic down while still in the
field (Barrett 1996:190). I invested substantial time and energy in gathering
data about a wide variety of situations, which was fruitful, and also a way for
me to give something back to the community. In retrospect, I see that this
broad perspective and empirical breadth came at the cost of depth and focus in
the latter half of the fieldwork. My notes at the mid-way point of fieldwork
reveal that I was considering the change in focus, but I did not formally revise my questions, and
redesign my methods to ensure adequate data would be gathered on the new
questions. Fortunately my field was not far away and I was able to have several
additional interviews and informal conversations with research participants
during the writing stage. Simply
asking people for their own account of what they believe and do and why, can
also be highly instructive and I did this extensively in interviews as I
outline in section 2.4.4. Still, if conducted thoughtfully and ethically,
participant observation can yield rich and different kinds of data. Participant
observation produces an unusually wide variety of data types and helps a
researcher develop an intuitive understanding of a culture and form “sensible”
questions (Bernard 1994:140-43). Research shows that 35-50% of what informants report
about their behaviour is not true (Bernard 1994:114)! Since people usually try
to present their best selves in self-narrative or self-report, methods that
track actual behaviour provide a
different perspective (Wikan
1995:265). Participant observation helps illuminate “the
difference between what people say they do, feel, and think, and what kinds of action
they take.” (Nanda 1994:29). My
final point about participant observation relates to ethics and privacy. If the
description of this method thus far sounds potentially intrusive, that is not
inaccurate. All of the authors I have discussed here mention the necessity of
subtle deception and obfuscation of aims that many ethnographers engage in, in
order to put their subjects at ease and achieve access to “back stage”
information. Ethnographers have an ethical responsibility to disclose research
intentions to their liaisons and participants, and I did this regularly in
homes, interviews and group meetings. When the written report includes elements
of analysis that are not explicitly part of the original proposal for the
research, as is my case, it seems reasonable to at least discuss the changes
with the liaisons. My liaison has read the entire thesis and others in
leadership at L’Arche have read different parts during the writing process,
including the final draft. All interviewees were given an opportunity to review
the thesis and provide feedback generally and for passages where they have been
quoted. Participants were invited to input on both my accuracy and
interpretations (see survey[vii]
in Exhibit 2.4). Since they have encouraged me to write honestly about their
organization, it has been a constructive process so far. 2.3.2 Representation and multiple, partial, situated
perspectives
“Ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial—committed and
incomplete.” (Clifford
1986:7) With that famous dictum, Clifford
urged ethnographers to take certain limitations of fieldwork and writing
seriously. The crises of representation, realism and difference in the
discipline are forcing each anthropologist to consider how they are positioned
in the field through personal history and commitments, and how that
circumscribes what they see and choose to focus on. An anthropologist “seeks
and highlights, notices this but not that” (Peacock
1986:66). Methodologically, I tried to mitigate this
mono-perspectival tendency by incorporating different ways to participate and
observe in the community, and interviews with a range of people in different
L’Arche communities. This is not to imply that I established an all-knowing perspective;
I occupied a grounded, partial position along with others, and was implicated
in their world through relations and professional commitments[viii].
Although having multiple experiences and perspectives does not guarantee better
understanding, it does nourish critical insight by bringing to light
counter-examples, internal conflicts of interest, and the actors’
interrelations, which can in turn, illuminate “what is at stake for particular
participants” (Kleinman 1995a:98). Cultures or particulars? Difference or similarity?
In this section, I review issues
of representation that I tried to mitigate in the field, or which emerged in
the field. These issues often begin with questions about how to define, study
and represent the cultural. One polemic against the traditional anthropological
sense of culture argues that it tends to exaggerate inter-cultural differences
and down-play intra-cultural differences by presenting cultures to have
“homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness” (Abu-Lughod
1991:154). Indeed ethnographers have seemed reluctant to show
differences, disagreements, and change among members of a cultural group[ix].
Instead, Abu-Lughod calls for ethnographers to attend to the equally important
project of finding similarities and common ground on which to build
cross-cultural understanding (Abu-Lughod
1991:154). I tried to follow this orientation in my writing.
For example, in Chapter 5 on assistants’ motives for joining L’Arche, I try to
present them as individuals and whole actors, so that parts of their lives and
beliefs might resonate with the reader’s own experiences. Further, I try to
de-mystify L’Arche in Chapter 4, by dealing with the particulars of Vanier’s
journey to founding L’Arche, and revealing the familiarity and universality of
his hopes and fears, rather than reifying him and L'Arche. Abu-Lughod’s
solution for how to enhance attention to cross-cultural commonalities instead
of differences is “ethnography of the particulars” that takes as its subject
the changing lives of particular people and relations, in particular places and
times (Abu-Lughod 1991:149). Two factors inhibited my ability to construct the
whole thesis as an ethnography of particular people in particular situations within
the culture in the evocative way that she did (Abu-Lughod
1993). When my analytical focus shifted away from the
self-narratives of change at the writing stage, I found that the data I had
gathered on other areas of daily life did not include enough detail on the
movements and challenges of one or two assistants in one community to write
thick, multi-scenario accounts of the same people. Since there are fewer roles,
and varieties or classes of experience in L’Arche than in a full-scale ethnic
group such as she studies, I feel that my broader account is not therefore
weak. Still, an analysis that more systematically separates out the particular
experiences of short-term and long-term assistants, a sort of “class” analysis,
could yield interesting insights. Part of the reason that I did not
gather detailed particulars was my perceived conflict between gathering
detailed ethnographic particulars about two or three people and respecting
their privacy—a privacy, I hasten to add, that they had the power to insist on.
I was never unaware that the community could easily ask me to leave if some
assistants felt that my inquiries were inappropriate[x]
(see also Pool 1991:68). I was thus grateful to my housemates for agreeing to
let me partake so intimately in the ups and downs of their home life, even
though this compromised their privacy—a sensitive concern in L’Arche[xi].
Barrett’s research suggests that this feeling of vulnerability among subjects
of qualitative research is not uncommon or unfounded (1996:197). I thus made a
conscious effort not to track all
daily movements and challenges of my housemates while still attending to
patterns in use of time, core member-assistant interactions and decision-making
processes[xii]. Partial and co-constructed truths
Anthropologists’
privileged role as representatives of “the truth” about those they study has
been robustly challenged. Criticism has been levelled at the “culture as text”
metaphor and the inference that anthropologists are better positioned to “read”
that local text, than the locals themselves. Post-modern and feminist theorists
point out how the textual metaphor obscures the fact that power asymmetries
mean that cultural knowledge is differentially shared and understood within the
cultural group, and that therefore anyone in it, including the anthropologist,
can only ever speak from their own positioned, and thus inevitably partial
perspective (Clifford 1986; Narayan
1993:678). New metaphors emerged to “reconceptualize cultures
as fields of overlapping and juxtaposed discourses” which emphasize that
anthropological discourse is one among many possible partial truths, and is not
superior to a particular native’s
angle (Lambek 1991:47). Proponents of this more modest role for ethnography
insist that it be “self-conscious, serious partiality” not relativistic (Clifford 1986:7). The ethnographic voice can contribute to the
polyphony through the fresh perspective and different, if equally resilient,
commitments and interests it brings to bear on issues than locals hold. These partial truths were also
revealed to be co-constructed with
informants, rather than “discovered” solo by the anthropologists’ cleverness.
Notions of accuracy and a single truth are misleading because they ignore
diversity of locals’ and informants’ perspectives. They also falsely assume
that segments of cultural knowledge are “there, ready in the natives’ head to
be called up and expressed in discursive statements” and “collected” (Pool 1991:70, 75-6) (see also
Tyler 1986). Instead, some have suggested ways to be clearer
about how ethnography results from an ongoing co-production of cultural
knowledge about how a particular group of people makes sense of themselves and
others (Fabian 1990; Pool 1991:75-6). Dialogical anthropology and multi-vocality have been
proposed as ways to redistribute authorial power and improve ethnographic
texts’ capacity to convey cross-cultural understanding. While such formats are
not perfect, they do evoke a sense of the fieldworker’s position, her native
concepts, confusion, relationships, and management of conflicting data (Pool 1991:72-3). I am drawn to the rich
possibilities of multi-vocal projects. It is worth noting that doing so is not
always solely up to the anthropologist. I tried to share power in my fieldwork,
and it was often fruitful, but a few factors worked against realizing it as
fully as I had hoped. Most assistants were very busy and it would have been
impossible for one of them to spend extensive hours with me, answering
questions and co-interpreting interviews, like a typical “key informant.” While
there were about three people with whom I did have extended discussions
informally about the community and my research during and after fieldwork, they
did not have access to the interview material. In addition, while most
assistants were highly amiable, co-operative and informative, they are not
members of an oppressed group, yearning to have their voice or their story
heard. They thus had less at stake to motivate them to be highly involved in my
project than perhaps an indigenous person whose rainforest is being destroyed,
or a psychiatric patient who wants to explain the iatrogenic effects of
institutionalization. I therefore tried to spread out discussions of my many
questions and theories among a handful of assistants whom I considered
insightful and honest, so as not to overwhelm any one person. I did initiate a collaborative
writing project with six women assistants and four core members that began with
a jointly-conceived format that would minimize my mediation of their voices to
produce a polyphony of experiences in one article. I would provide the
necessary background and weave their independently-conceived and written
sections together at the end[xiii].
While the assistants were enthusiastic and encouraging, it became clear that
they did not want to actually write
their own sections. Competence was not the issue; they were all
university-educated. They simply wanted to share their stories, and have me
write them up with any necessary context and interpretations. They seemed
genuinely unconcerned about giving up control to me (when I mentioned it),
since they knew me, we had agreed on the theme, and they could edit the written
product. Informants are not necessarily interested in, or ready to commit time
to such collaboration (Barrett
1996:195). Other researchers (Acker
et al. 1983:429) found that “they could not avoid assuming the
privileged position of experts. In fact, the women in the project” insisted on
it (Barrett 1996:196). The article was published with explicit reference to
assistants’ contribution but no pretence to multiple authorship (Cushing and Lewis 2002). 2.3.3 Openness and
engagement in the field
“After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it
resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or
another and to the extent possible, of the knower’s straying afield of
himself?” (Foucault
1990:8) The
choice of participant observation for this research was not an accident; it was
a way to get underneath a superficial understanding of the life of assistants
in L’Arche. I felt that fieldwork and interviews alone would not allow for
that. I also wanted to experiment with what I perceived to be key advantages of
participant observation over other forms of research: its iterative, or
open-ended nature, and its attempt to translate deep, experiential
understanding of a cultural system into analytically useful insights. Jackson
proposes that ethnography is unique because it involves the “turbulent merger”
of different kinds of knowledge: rational inquiry and intense, engaged
experience[xiv] (Jackson 1995:170). Initially, I hoped that
participating would improve my analysis, but I did not imagine how it could connect me to the people I was
interviewing (Mohanty 1989). Nor did I consider how I might grow (other than in professional skill), or learn from
people in the field. Once at L’Arche however, I did become close to a few
people there, and certainly grew, and became personally invested in the overall
project of the communities. When I cried in a meeting where I learned that
three of my housemates would be leaving the house, I felt that perhaps I had
become too involved and might lose
perspective. Other researchers, however, suggest that forgoing objective distance
and becoming engaged, vulnerable and open to personal change in the field is
vital. It moves an anthropologist beyond relativism and “sentimental charity”
to genuine understanding (Mohanty
1989:10-16; Jackson 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1992:24; Narayan 1993:680). The surrender to engagement and
experience did not necessarily feel more comfortable or safe, especially as I
still had to negotiate multiple identities in the field such as researcher,
caregiver, consultant, critic, and friend. Remaining in character as a
“researcher” does afford one a certain safe distance from questions that one
does not want to answer, relationships that entail responsibilities and
challenges to one’s credibility. Becoming a participant in community life opens
you up to all of these. One assistant from another house who had a rudimentary
sociology background, came to our house for dinner more than once, insisting
that I explain my hypotheses and methods in detail, only to (supposedly
playfully) suggest that I must have
other hidden agendas about “stereotyping” them. Being open to changing both my
research ideas, and in some ways, myself, was at times also arduous, exhausting
and disorienting. This disorientation followed by
re-orientation was important to ensure that I didn’t overlook things that
seemed familiar to me given that I was doing anthropology “at home.” It pushed
me to become aware of at least some of my false assumptions. One such example
arose in an informal conversation about personal change with Raoul, a
short-term assistant. To summarize, I had assumed that all assistants came to
L’Arche with an idea about one or more ways in which they might like to grow.
Raoul disagreed based on his own experience; he insisted that he could not have
planned to work on particular things at L’Arche because he did not know enough
about it. It was only after living there that he could seriously assess how
this environment and work could assist him to grow. While this did not
necessarily apply to every assistant, his thoughts certainly problematized my
assumptions around personal change and motives. 2.4 Research
plan and discussion of fieldwork methods
“Life in the field is itself fragmentary, not at all organized around
familiar ethnological categories such as kinship, economy, and religion.” (Tyler
1986:131) This ethnography is the fruit of a
myriad of research settings and tools. As was described through section 2.3, I
hoped to experience, observe and listen to people talk about different types of
activities in the communities, and the diverse ways that people choose to
engage in them, and the meanings they associate with them. In this section, I
outline those elements and tactics of the research design that were planned, as
well as unanticipated opportunities for particular sorts of inquiries that
emerged in the field. The elements were designed to achieve a balance between
assistants’ explanations of their experiences and their (diverse) perceptions
of the meanings of symbols and processes in L’Arche, and what I could observe
was actually happening on a day-to-day basis. Below, I outline the main
elements of this multi-sited, polyvalent approach and their chronology. I begin
with a chronology of the entire fieldwork period for perspective, followed by
two sections on participant observation in and outside of the home. I close
with a discussion of the formal interviews conducted with assistants in all
communities. 2.4.1 Fieldwork
chronology
The principal component of this
ethnography was an extended period of participant observation with one L’Arche
community, Daybreak. This time was complemented, however, by shorter stays in
eight other communities across Canada with the main aim being to test some of
the insights gained in one community to see if they were applicable to various
L’Arche settings. The latter component was strongly endorsed by my liaisons at
L’Arche given their awareness of regional variations as well as other axes of
difference amoung the communities. The total fieldwork time stretched
just over a year beginning in February 1999. My primary research site and home
base was at the original and largest L’Arche community in Canada, Daybreak,
which has a section in Toronto, Ontario with four homes and the original
section north of Toronto with eight
homes. I lived in the northern section of Daybreak for almost nine
months in total, with visits and interviews in the southern section (see
Exhibit 2.1). The balance of fieldwork time was spent organizing and travelling
to seven other L’Arche communities across Canada for approximately one week
each. In them, I observed the diverse ways that the L’Arche mission can be
enacted and lived, which helped to strengthen the research relevance. I was
also able to test and re-work certain insights that I had developed at
Daybreak. These communities varied in size, (from three to eight homes, with
two to six core members in each home),
in age of community (10 to 30 years), and in regional ways (government
regulations and funding, language, cultural and religious differences). The
particular flavour of each community is also strongly influenced by the
individuals that comprise them, from core members and assistants to the leader.
The eight communities that I
visited in addition to Daybreak included: Ottawa, and Toronto, Ontario; Trois
Rivières and Hull, Quebec; Wycocomagh (Cape Breton) and Antigonish, Nova
Scotia; Burnaby, British Columbia; and Calgary, Alberta. These short-term
visits occurred after I had lived at Daybreak and were opportunities to refine
my theories and test their relevance in different L’Arche settings. Prior to
the visits, I worked with the directors and their assistants to arrange
interviews with a variety of people and to set up a schedule of attending
different meetings, prayer services, social events and also house visits during
my time there. I lived in the communities and took most meals in the homes,
including socializing, cooking and clean-up afterwards. I attended their
all-assistants or community meetings in order to introduce the research,
solicit feedback, and openly signal myself as a researcher, not just a guest. I
also attended a sample of house and team meetings, and community events in each
community depending on their schedules. The core components of these visits
were the formal interviews that I conducted with people whom the community
leaders worked with me to choose and invite. The five categories of people I
wanted to interview were: the community leader, one to two long-term
assistants, a short-term assistant (one to two years), a board member and a
former assistant. |