Kansatieteen päivien ohjelmassa on kolme etnografiaa eri näkökulmista avaavaa keynote-luentoa. Tässä luentojen abstraktit:
Billy Ehn, Umeå universitet
Surprises of Everyday Life. Ethnographic Experiments in Cultural Analysis of the Inconspicuous.
For some years Orvar Löfgren and I have been doing cultural analysis of rather elusive phenomena in everyday life. We have tried to catch what is going on when people are waiting for something or somebody, when they are occupied by usual jobs, for example morning makeup, and when they are away in private fantasies. These inconspicuous activities in fact turned out to be more eventful than we had expected.
In our study we have experimented with a wealth of different materials and techniques, a kind of bricolage method combining observations and interviews with autoethnography, informal surveys, spontaneous conversations, fiction, films, media, Internet, archive studies, contemporary art, and other research as sources of information. One of the results is the book The Secret World of Doing Nothing (2010).
This kind of unbridled ethnography makes the researcher more flexible to get usable materials. It gives you tools to detect the secrets of the infra-ordinary, the parts of social life that are so familiar that they have become almost invisible. Furthermore, the bricolage method encourages an experimental writing in different styles to capture the ephemeral.
Tiina-Riitta Lappi, University of Jyväskylä
What/How is Ethnography in Ethnological Research?
In recent years ethnography as a method and methodological approach has become quite popular in varying disciplinary fields. In accordance with the popularity of ethnographic approach goes the fact that the ways ethnography is applied in different disciplines and even by researcher’s working within the same discipline are numerous. Sometimes ‘ethnography’ is used as a synonym for all qualitative research in general, while other times it may be understood as just one method amongst many others. In many disciplines ethnography as a methodological approach has been “discovered” quite recently. A lively discussion has emerged reflecting mostly on what ethnography is and how it is used in different fields of research while epistemological issues have not been in the focus of attention. In ethnology, ethnography as a method and methodology often appears to be so central and self-evident that it does not even raise any particular questions to be discussed. It easily goes almost unnoticed and fairly unproblematized. In my lecture I will explore ethnology’s ethnographies and what I call ethnographical knowledge. This paper addresses ethnography’s essentiality in carrying out research and in theorizing the production of knowledge in ethnology.
George Marcus, University of California, Irvine
Experiments in Contemporary Ethnographic Research
This lecture is a personal career reflection on creative, collaborative engagements with the ethnographic method at the core of social/cultural anthropology. Moving from the "Writing Culture" debates of the 1980s, to the emergence of "multi-sited ethnography" as a key response to globalization in the 1990s, I probe certain aspects of the contemporary formulation of anthropological projects of research in complex, transnational project spaces--sometimes labelled assemblages --that has been of key interest to the Center for Ethnography, founded at the University of California, Irvine, in 2005. Conditions of collaboration and design processes have been two influences, among others, that have shaped the conduct of classic fieldwork methods in the present. I am interested in experimental thinking in both the teaching and conduct of this venerable and increasingly popular research modality with which anthropology has long been identified.
