Narrative Ethnography

In this lecture, I  briefly covered four important trends of qualitative research within the ethnographic methodology, which are (i) multi-sited ethnography, (ii) global ethnography (iii) narrative ethnography and (iv) auto ethnography which has grown within social-cultural anthropology in the last three decades.
After talking briefly on the new research trends citing examples from some representative authors, I have gone to my own researches on land acquisition, campus anthropology and my experiences of working at Vidyasagar University to explicate these new trends of qualitative research, wherein I have used a variety of qualitative data sources to build up my ethnographic cases which could also be placed within these new trends.

My papers and a power point presentation which represented some of the ethnographic styles or combinations of more that one styles are also uploaded for the interested scholars and students.

Comiskey Park, the home of the Chicago White Sox, closed its gates for the last time on September 30, 1990, after a glorious eighty-year reign as "the world's greatest baseball palace.  I attended that event as both a social researcher engaged un an ethnographic project and as a son seeking to reconnect with the memories of and feelings for his father.  In the recording and analysis of the stories of those in attendance that day, the social researcher within me began to recognize and understand a physical "reality" of memories and the symbolic importance these physical realities serve as "bridges" to the past.  In the writing, the ethnographer soon came to appreciate and more fully explore the reflexive properties and possibilities of ethnographic research.  As a son, I confronted, in part through my research activities, a variety of emotions regarding my father, his death, and my previously unaddressed grief.  The son and the researcher each began to understand the role old Comiskey Park had played in my relationship with my father.  This article, a brief but emotionally faithful piece of self-reflection, is written more by the son than the researcher.  It is my farewell to my father.

Media and public discourses have indulged such middle class demands for distinction and distance. They celebrate the good Naples, with its traditions, wittiness and spectacular sunny landscape against the bad, poor and delinquent Naples. They put the respectable against the criminal. They grant la gente perbene political, moral and intellectual citizenship, while denying people like Anna—e malament (the bad people)—a recognition of their ability to think, to be reflective, to be critical and aware.

My first step towards carrying out research in the neighbourhood I had grown up and left over ten years ago meant more than simply crossing a boundary between la gente per bene and the so-called malament. I also had to question the political and moral legitimacy of such a distinction, and recognise how the violence of inequality and exclusion in Naples is both narrated and enforced through these categories.

Since the Civil Right Movement in the United States, African Americans and other diverse students have forged through “integrated” educational systems to terminal graduate degrees. Some studies suggest racial integration in U. S. schools made White participants less prejudiced toward others, although the data showed that after schooling, many Whites again lived (and still do) in segregated neighborhoods with separation in places of employment, churches, and social groups (Wells, Holme, Revilla, & Atanda, 2004). One diverse participant in this study asked whether, after decades of integration, there has been any real progress, citing excellent educational experiences with all Black teachers within the all Black schools where he grew up. Is it truly progress for diverse students when they are bussed across town to be treated as minorities in mostly White schools? More diverse students do graduate from college; however, the diversity rate of professors is still abysmal. This study reports the contextual experiences of three African American (one an administrator) and one Latina faculty member with decades of experience in the public educational system and as they engaged in the culture of higher education struggling with a moral multiculturalism—whether worldviews (therefore free speech) could be morally determined and whether they as diverse faculty truly belong and are truly respected.

If  language--and by extension all aspects of human communication including images--has more to its mission than description of some (so-believed) authenticity that exists outside it but instead is itself a veritable action, then it stands that language when spoken or images when presented are at least in part each their own referent and, therefore, authentic, an original document, a presentation rather than a re-presentation.  Also, if images are actions, then it follows that a theory of images forms part of a theory of action, much as a theory of speech is constitutive of a theory of action, as John Searle noted almost thirty years ago, while expanding upon the work of his professor, J. L. Austin.  Furthermore, it stands that a theory of speech together with a theory of images--both in the form of theories of action--must also compose a significant part of a theory of human communication; communication as action.  Finally, it seems necessary to suggest that if we have the term speech acts to use when referring to the activities of speech utterances we need to coin a term to do the same for the activities of image instances, a term that would name and, therefore, circumscribe the observed phenomenon and at the same time illuminate its active nature.  I would like to propose the term image acts with which to do that.