Ethnography
To take photographs. Taking is a form of extraction. I collect light, pulling the stories of others through my lens, trapping it in a form that I can hold in my palm. I can then carry this anywhere and show it to the world. I am wary and cognizant of the colonial history to which this very act pertains. My rituals in these spaces are linked to practices I learned when introduced to ethnography while studying anthropology.
When I take photographs of the dead am I disturbing or exploiting their rest?
I debate the tensions this presents. My photographs are an act of remembering, and I must respect their agency not to be remembered.
As an art and anthropology student, one of the most formative readings I was assigned in college was Hal Foster’s 1995 essay, The Artist as Ethnographer? Foster discusses a social turn in contemporary art by articulating artists’ rising envy of ethnography, and how they take on a similar role to social scientists, adapting such methodologies into their practices. I became enchanted with the idea of how these two disciplines intersect with their shared emphasis on close looking. However, ethnography carries the baggage of a colonial project that has a long history of violence, blindness, and extractive approaches to community-based work.
One of the things that attracted me to ethnography was its adoption of an intense ethic of self-reflexivity. In the late 1960s and early 70s feminist and anti-colonial thinkers challenged the field to look inward. This prompt of reflexivity spurred a completely new understanding of how socially and community-engaged work might continually evolve. Most importantly was the recognition that the positionality of the researcher is always entwined with its understanding of its subject and the balance of power within this relationship must continually be questioned. Like art, ethnographic research sits in a grey area where form, theory, and practice are always in flux. Within my own work, I have found that conversations around ethnography have only opened possibilities and new opportunities for rethinking what art can be and might do. I find it beautiful that this discipline can have the capacity to continually unravel, picking up new questions that allow it to unlearn and relearn. I use ethnography’s controversial past to consider alternative methodologies for studying place, working with community, the politics of representation and abstraction, and the accessibility of my work for different audiences. This has led me to investments in collaboration, reciprocity, deep listening, and an ethic of slowness.
Burial Sites borrows many of these lessons and methods from ethnography. I adopt Clifford Geertz’s term “deep hanging out” as a way of describing what I do in a cemetery. Deep hanging out is an ethic of participatory research that prioritizes the immersion of a researcher in informal settings for an extended period. For example, I would spend hours in the cemetery walking around or sitting on benches. This commitment to lingering longer than perhaps felt necessary allowed me to encounter things I did not expect. As I traveled, I lived alongside locals as best I could by renting apartments and staying with host families rather than hotels or hostels. I learned best practice techniques for gathering oral history from guides produced by folklorists. I interviewed historians, crematorium technicians, artists, architects, public officials, cemetery tour guides, and visited graves with families to whom they belonged. These conversations added context to how I understood these places, but I never recorded them with the intention of placing them in an archive or sharing them publicly. These conversations did not need to become a tangible product. They existed only as a temporary relationship of learning and exchange.
If this is a project of ethnography, all the data I collect is abstract and subjective. It is not information I seek; it is something else without concrete edges. I cannot interview the voices of ghosts with a tape recorder. I fill any gaps of knowledge with my senses, trusting the emergent qualities of this process. While I do not abide by any strict methodology, Sarah Pink’s ideas within Sensory Ethnography have been a guiding light for my work. Pink emphasizes the significance of embodiment within research and the possibilities that come from valuing the smell, taste, touch, sound, and vision that one experiences in a place. Another form of close connection. Valuing these sensations as a form of knowledge multiplies the results of this research as well.
The text of Burial Sites is an important supplement to the photographs within this project. My critique of sensory ethnography is that if one is reliant on senses alone it can erase important context. Therefore, within this writing I have tried to incorporate strategies of autoethnography, pointing to the ways in which my personal experience has connected me to the cultural, political, and social understandings of the places featured in my project. To engage with autoethnography is to recognize my ideas are positioned from myself but are not always about myself. I also do not claim that my work speaks for anyone but myself. I also adopt filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s idea of speaking nearby. To speak nearby is a form of intimacy that allows for me to become close to something without objectifying it. It is open-ended, vulnerable, and self-aware, sitting in its own tensions. This is another way of positioning this work as anti-colonial and challenges the history of ethnography.
To take photographs. Taking is a form of extraction. I collect light, pulling the stories of others through my lens, trapping it in a form that I can hold in my palm. I can then carry this anywhere and show it to the world. I am wary and cognizant of the colonial history to which this very act pertains. My rituals in these spaces are linked to practices I learned when introduced to ethnography while studying anthropology.
When I take photographs of the dead am I disturbing or exploiting their rest?
I debate the tensions this presents. My photographs are an act of remembering, and I must respect their agency not to be remembered.
As an art and anthropology student, one of the most formative readings I was assigned in college was Hal Foster’s 1995 essay, The Artist as Ethnographer? Foster discusses a social turn in contemporary art by articulating artists’ rising envy of ethnography, and how they take on a similar role to social scientists, adapting such methodologies into their practices. I became enchanted with the idea of how these two disciplines intersect with their shared emphasis on close looking. However, ethnography carries the baggage of a colonial project that has a long history of violence, blindness, and extractive approaches to community-based work.
One of the things that attracted me to ethnography was its adoption of an intense ethic of self-reflexivity. In the late 1960s and early 70s feminist and anti-colonial thinkers challenged the field to look inward. This prompt of reflexivity spurred a completely new understanding of how socially and community-engaged work might continually evolve. Most importantly was the recognition that the positionality of the researcher is always entwined with its understanding of its subject and the balance of power within this relationship must continually be questioned. Like art, ethnographic research sits in a grey area where form, theory, and practice are always in flux. Within my own work, I have found that conversations around ethnography have only opened possibilities and new opportunities for rethinking what art can be and might do. I find it beautiful that this discipline can have the capacity to continually unravel, picking up new questions that allow it to unlearn and relearn. I use ethnography’s controversial past to consider alternative methodologies for studying place, working with community, the politics of representation and abstraction, and the accessibility of my work for different audiences. This has led me to investments in collaboration, reciprocity, deep listening, and an ethic of slowness.
Burial Sites borrows many of these lessons and methods from ethnography. I adopt Clifford Geertz’s term “deep hanging out” as a way of describing what I do in a cemetery. Deep hanging out is an ethic of participatory research that prioritizes the immersion of a researcher in informal settings for an extended period. For example, I would spend hours in the cemetery walking around or sitting on benches. This commitment to lingering longer than perhaps felt necessary allowed me to encounter things I did not expect. As I traveled, I lived alongside locals as best I could by renting apartments and staying with host families rather than hotels or hostels. I learned best practice techniques for gathering oral history from guides produced by folklorists. I interviewed historians, crematorium technicians, artists, architects, public officials, cemetery tour guides, and visited graves with families to whom they belonged. These conversations added context to how I understood these places, but I never recorded them with the intention of placing them in an archive or sharing them publicly. These conversations did not need to become a tangible product. They existed only as a temporary relationship of learning and exchange.
If this is a project of ethnography, all the data I collect is abstract and subjective. It is not information I seek; it is something else without concrete edges. I cannot interview the voices of ghosts with a tape recorder. I fill any gaps of knowledge with my senses, trusting the emergent qualities of this process. While I do not abide by any strict methodology, Sarah Pink’s ideas within Sensory Ethnography have been a guiding light for my work. Pink emphasizes the significance of embodiment within research and the possibilities that come from valuing the smell, taste, touch, sound, and vision that one experiences in a place. Another form of close connection. Valuing these sensations as a form of knowledge multiplies the results of this research as well.
The text of Burial Sites is an important supplement to the photographs within this project. My critique of sensory ethnography is that if one is reliant on senses alone it can erase important context. Therefore, within this writing I have tried to incorporate strategies of autoethnography, pointing to the ways in which my personal experience has connected me to the cultural, political, and social understandings of the places featured in my project. To engage with autoethnography is to recognize my ideas are positioned from myself but are not always about myself. I also do not claim that my work speaks for anyone but myself. I also adopt filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s idea of speaking nearby. To speak nearby is a form of intimacy that allows for me to become close to something without objectifying it. It is open-ended, vulnerable, and self-aware, sitting in its own tensions. This is another way of positioning this work as anti-colonial and challenges the history of ethnography.
Foster, Hal. “The Artist as Ethnographer.” Essay. In The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Hanging out: Clifford Geertz.” The New York Review of Books, August 26, 2020. https:// www.nybooks.com/ articles/1998/10/22/ deep-hanging-out/.
Pink, Sarah. Doing Sensory Ethnography. Sage, 2015.
Chen, Nancy N. “Speaking Nearby:” A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh–Ha.” Visual Anthropology Review 8, no. 1 (1992): 82–91.