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“Anyone Can Do Ethnography?”: Ethnographic Knowledge Production and Reflection from the Perspective of “Boundary Work”
WANG Min
Chinese Journal of Journalism & Communication ›› 2025, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (11) : 27-45.
PDF(1640 KB)
PDF(1640 KB)
“Anyone Can Do Ethnography?”: Ethnographic Knowledge Production and Reflection from the Perspective of “Boundary Work”
As an important social science research method and inscription, ethnography has been increasingly widely used in interdisciplinary fields, but it also has problems such as unclear methodology, opaque data, and low replicability and testability of research, which have led to constant questioning of its authenticity, professionalism and authority. Based on this, this paper, from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and the theoretical framework of “boundary work”, sorted out the three turning points of ethnographic knowledge production over the past century, and critically examined how ethnographic knowledge production constructed and negotiated its legitimacy under the theoretical tension between positivism and “phenomenology-hermeneutics”. It focuses on analyzing the rewriting of the core method of face-to-face direct observation of ethnography by technological mediation in the digital age. It argues that ethnography should pay more attention to the mediation mechanisms and relationship generation of digital society and culture, and construct a research framework of new intersubjectivity and human-machine combination mediated by “data/technological objects”, responding to the challenges of contemporary data practice to phenomenology at the epistemological level.
Ethnography / boundary work / knowledge production / mediation / phenomenology
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\r\nThe relative novelty of digital ethnography as a research methodology, along with the challenges that it moves to classical understandings of fieldwork, participation and representation, results in a repertoire of professional illusions through which digital ethnographers justify their work when confronted with the disciplinary culture of anthropology. This essay is based on the author’s reflexive experience of researching digital media use in China, and updates Gary Alan Fine’s 1993 article “Ten Lies of Ethnography” by identifying three lies of digital ethnography. Illustrating each of these lies through an archetypal figure – the ‘networked field-weaver’, the ‘eager participant-lurker’ and the ‘expert fabricator’ – this article argues for the need to confront methodological illusions and embrace the tensions behind them as useful heuristics for conducting ethnographic research on, through and about digital media.\r\n
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Qualitative researchers often refer to the sites they study as a ‘field’ and the work they do there as ‘fieldwork’. Setting both terms in inverted commas implies that their meaning stretches beyond clean categorisation of places or methods. Taking the example of ethnographic research during the coronavirus pandemic, I argue that embracing this excess meaning opens new research perspectives when fieldwork gets disrupted. As a more hopeful intervention into a debate currently focused on lost access, immobility and professional frustration, this article puts forward alternative readings of ‘fieldwork’ as a relational and emergent process in which proximity and knowledge production are bound to sensitive research practice more than to physical (co)presence. By tragic serendipity, I argue, COVID-19 has the potential to normalise such readings against the traditional gold standard of fieldwork as extended (and often expensive) research stays in places far-away from ‘home’.
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Although fieldwork is the foundation of robust ethnographic inquiry in physical settings, the practical methods have never fit comfortably in digital contexts. For many researchers, the activities of fieldwork must be so radically adjusted, they hardly resemble fieldwork anymore. How does one conduct “participant observation” of Twitter? When identities and cultural formations are located in or made of information flows through global networks, where are the boundaries of “the field”? In such global networks, what strategies do we use to get close to people? What might count as an interview? This essay discusses the persistent challenges of transferring fieldwork methods intended for physically situated contexts to digitally-mediated social contexts. I offer provocations for considering the premises rather than the procedures of fieldwork. These may not be seen on the surface level of method but operate at a level below method, or in everyday inquiry practices. I suggest that a practice of reflexive methodological analysis allows for more resonant and adaptive fieldwork suitable for studying 21st century networked communication practices and cultural formations.
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This article builds on long-term anthropological fieldwork among young Muslim women in a social housing area in Copenhagen. It explores how morality, modesty, and gender- and generational relations become reconfigured in the ways in which young women use the Smartphone and social media to navigate their everyday lives. I focus on love and marriage, the imperatives of appearing cool among peers, and keeping the family’s honour intact through the display of virtuous behaviour. Building on Bourdieu’s writings on the split habitus, I introduce the term composite habitus, as it underscores the aspect of a habitus that is split between (sometimes contradictory) composite parts. The composite habitus of the young women is more than a hysteresis effect (where disposition and field are in mismatch and the habitus misfires), as the composite habitus also opens up to a range of possible strategies. I present examples of how intimate and secret uses of Smartphones have played out and show how social media have allowed for multiple versions of the self through managing public and secret relationships locally and across long distances.
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