8.04 Methodological
Considerations
d) Interpretation of
Data.
There must be other
interpretations that can be made from my logbooks. As an example, people often
showed an interest in the dynamics of collective group working. Why do
collectives work well or fall apart? This is not something that I have analysed
here but my notebooks might be of interest to someone who was attempting to
make such an analysis.
The application of third
party theory as a method of interpretation of ethnographic data is seen as
politically suspect. Ethnographic data is seen as 'theory generating'.[1]
Theory generated from the subjects themselves on their own terms, is less
likely to impose the values of one culture on another. It should even use their
own words, expressions and ideas but not be bound by them.[2]
In this case many members of
Exploding Cinema are capable of expressing their position at least as well as
me and often do. Often this is done in a style closer to the underground idiom.[3]
The point in this case is not my skill at writing but more basically the will
to pull the complex whole together in a form that meets the demands of a
particular epistemic formation.[4]
What I want to claim for the
work? Not a generalisation about the way collectives work but rather a
generalisation about the value of such collective cultural production within a
wider frame. The participant observation was about generating an account that
was able to come to grips with complex social relations on a level that was
emotionally connected, as well as generating data from more detached quantified
methods like Content Analysis and from qualitative methodologies like Oral
History.
As I have noted one of the
classic observations of ethnography is the difference between what people say
and what people do. This can be extended to the gap between the documented
representations of their activity and what they actually did. The logbooks can
serve to fill gaps left by the group's own self documentation or to act as
checks on these types of representation.
For historians seeking to 'explain' the 'facts' of the French Revolution, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the effects of slavery on American society, or the meaning of the Russian Revolution, what is at issue is not, 'What are the facts?' but rather, how are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another. (Hayden White, 1986, p134)
[1] Agar (1996) p420
[2] Alison Clark expressed this view in a research seminar
at the Royal College of Art (1999) but is also commonly found in Nineties
ethnographic literature.
[3] Various writings are included in the archive
materials. An interesting attempt at a collectively made article, 'No Stars, No
Funding, No Taste', was published in Filmwaves 11, spring 2000. Collective members added paragraphs
and edits until the article was deemed complete. Arranged as if an interview by
a fictitious interviewer 'Molly Spartan'.