Keywords

The term ethnography can be traced back to the ancient Greek éthnos (foreign people) and graphé (writing). A description of a foreign society presupposes two things: First, people who are engaged in ethnography must be mobile in order to have come into contact with foreign societies to begin with. Second, they require media such as writing, drawing, images, etc., in order to record their observations. The oldest ethnographies are travelogues, some of which had already been composed in ancient Greece: The geographer Skylax, the merchant Pytheas von Massalia, and the historian Herodotus reported on their journeys to the Near East. In the fourteenth century, the Muslim scholar Ibn Battûta wrote about his travels to Mekka, India, and China. Marco Polo’s reports of his travels in China—the authenticity of which, by the way, was doubted at the time because there were too few marvelous creatures described in them—are of course well known. Equally disputed was the travelogue of the German adventurer Hand Staden, who journeyed to Brazil in the sixteenth century with Portuguese conquerors and was supposedly held captive there by cannibals.

Later, ethnographic reports were written by missionaries, who explored indigenous societies in order to Christianize them. It was not until the nineteenth century that such investigations would be liberated from missionary ambitions, thus clearing a path for actual anthropological research. In the late nineteenth century, ethnography became a sociological and anthropological method. The American anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, who spent many years during the 1880s with the indigenous Zuni tribes in New Mexico, was one of the first to write ethnographic reports in the social scientific sense (1988). The actual foundation of the method as such is ascribed to the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who conducted long-term field work on the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea in the 1910s (1932).

5.1 The Foreign Worlds Next Door and Defamiliarization

The ethnographic method was also developed around the same time, in the early twentieth century, by the Chicago School of sociology—although here the encounter with the foreign took place not on the far-off Trobriand Islands but just next door (Deegan 2009, pp. 11–25, 119–164). Robert E. Park, on of the founders of the Chicago School, said to his students:

You have been told to go grubbing in the library, thereby accumulating a mass of notes and liberal coating of grime. You have been told to choose problems wherever you can find musty stacks of routine records based on trivial schedules prepared by tired bureaucrats and filled out by reluctant applicants for aid or fussy do-gooders or indifferent clerks. This is called “getting your hands dirty in real social research.” Those who counsel you are wise and honorable; the reasons they offer are of great value. But one more thing is needful; first hand observation. Go and sit in the lounges of luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and the slum shakedowns; sit in the orchestra hall and in the Star and Garter burlesque. In short, gentlemen, go to get the seat of your pants dirty in real social research. (Park, cited in Prus 1996, p. 119)

It is not by chance that Park calls on his students to go out to the luxury hotels and to the emergency shelters in the slums. In the late nineteenth century, migration led to a great degree of urbanization and pluralization of society, particularly in the northeast of the USA, but also in other major centers. Cities like Chicago and New York developed into gigantic metropolises in the span of a few decades. But it was not only the quantitative dimension of these urbanization processes that was new. The influx of immigrants also altered society qualitatively. It undermined the cultural dominance of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) in the northeast. The predominantly Protestant society was now confronted with Jews from Ukraine, Catholics from Ireland and Italy, and Germans, who were thought to be beer-guzzling atheists. To this day, the China Towns and Little Italies in Chicago, New York, and other major cities bear witness to the exoticization of society from within that was just beginning then. The next side street could lead to another world.

The emerging Penny Press showed interest in this social pluralization. It “discovered what was close at hand, but at the same time deviant and curious, as newsworthy material” (Lindner 2007, p. 19). Reporters began to investigate mortuaries, bordellos, factories, and slaughterhouses. Jacob A. Riis (Harper 2012, p. 24 ff.), who emigrated to New York from Denmark, exemplifies this development. The police reporter, who is regarded as the founder of social photojournalism, took pictures of subcultural lifeworlds in Lower Manhattan in the 1880s, which first appeared as illustrations in newspaper and were later published in the photography book How the Other Half Lives (1997). Riis shows social realities that are geographically close but culturally far away. His work consists of ethnographic lifeworld analyses, mapped spaces and photographic portraits of street boys, Chinese opium smokers, bohemians, and Jews. Riis was however not only an ethnographer, but also a social reformer. His aim was to point out social grievances.

Even more radical were the “girl stunt reporters” who published social reportage in major American daily newspapers in the late 1880s. On commission from the papers, they went undercover to the prisons, factories, and poorhouses of large cities and reported on the abuses there. Elisabeth Cochrane, writing under the pseudonym Nellie Bly, was the most famous representative of this women’s movement. In 1887, she had herself admitted to a New York psychiatric clinic. Her report, Ten Days in a Mad-House (Bly 2009)—which revealed inhumane conditions and triggered a political scandal—helped develop the participatory, covert practice of undercover research. Lindner points out the reciprocal influence of urban reportage and ethnography (2007, p. 115): Both thematize the foreignness that is found next door; both are explorative and based on experience. This development was anticipated by reporters in the nineteenth century and not taken up by the social sciences until some decades later.

Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess of the Chicago School of sociology understood the metropolis as a laboratory in which human behavior could be investigated (Park and Burgess 1967, p. 1). Within the Chicago School milieu, the primary concern of study was societal marginality: thieves (Sutherland 1989), migrant workers (Anderson 1998), ghettos (Wirth 1998), slums (Zorbaugh 1929), vice (Reckless 1969), ethnically mixed marriages (Adams 1975), or the Italian quarter in Boston (Whyte 1981). Just as in investigative journalism, research was conducted by going undercover. Frances R. Donovan, for instance, worked as a sales girl in a department store for 2 months and wrote a report about it (1988). This tradition was continued by others, such as James P. Spradley, who wrote—among other things—about urban itinerants and alcoholics (1999), the deaf (Spradley and Spradley 1985) and barmaids (Spradley and Mann 1975). The immersive approach was also followed by Loïc Wacquant, who spent several years training at a boxing gym on the South Side of Chicago (2006).

Ethnography aimed to map the processes through which people created their world (Dellwing and Prus 2012, p. 53). The main focus of ethnography is: “What people do, what people know, and the things people make and use” (Spradley 1980, p. 5). Fundamentally, ethnography is an empirical process that involves linguistic, mental, visual, sensory, and corporeal aspects (Pink 2015, p. 26 ff.). To investigate ethnographically means collecting data by exposing oneself—that is, one’s own body—to the unpredictable influences of another lifeworld (Coffey 1999, p. 59 ff.; Goffman 1989, p. 125). In contrast to ethnographic field work in anthropology, design ethnography usually takes place in the context of one’s “own” society. We do not have to travel like Malinowsky to the Trobriand Islands in order to experience the foreign. A “journey” to a nursing home, or a Thai boxing club, or a hole-in-the-wall bar will lead us to an adventure around the corner.

In this context, George E. Marcus poses the question of whether lifeworlds can still be conceived of as closed, microscopic entities at all, as in Malinowski’s work. Marcus proposes a multi-sited ethnography, which follows ensembles of people, things, metaphors, scripts, biographies, and conflicts that circulate globally (1995, p. 106 ff.). This may be illustrated with reference to a research project I conducted together with the designer Bitten Stetten on landmine victims, disability, and creative practices in Angola (Müller 2016). The energetic Kuduro music produced, sung, and danced in the mussequeFootnote 1—the slums in Luanda—is a mixture of western Techno and Angolese Kilapanga and Semba. The long fingernails, rhinestone earrings, and knee socks with flip-flops that we observed on young Kudoro dancers in Sambizanga (a musseque in Luanda) (Stetter 2016, p. 90) are not an isolated phenomenon, but can be read in a global context. Here, elements of a global pop culture are mixed with Angolan culture. Many young people in Angola have a smartphone and a Facebook profile. They know the football stars from Madrid and Barcelona. They are connected with students in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. Because socialization still continues to occur in microsocial contexts, however, societies still develop differently as before. This is why a globally uniform culture has not emerged (Tilley 2009, p. 267). Consumer goods and global brands are inculturated, adapted, and imbued with new meanings. For this reason, globalization leads not to uniformity but rather to transformation.

In her understanding of ethnography, Sarah Pink links knowledge gained from field work with individual experience. She defines ethnography “as a process of creating and representing knowledge or ways of knowing that are based on ethnographers’ own experiences and the ways these intersect with the persons, places and things encountered during that process” (Pink 2013, p. 35). When we are familiar with a lifeworld, it is all the more challenging not to classify things prematurely and instead to observe the familiar with a phenomenological gaze, which is also referred to as “defamiliarization” (Bell et al. 2006).

5.2 Focused Ethnographies and Design Anthropology

A fundamental distinction may be drawn between classical and focused ethnography (Knoblauch 2006). Classical ethnography in the tradition of the Chicago School is characterized by long-term immersion in the field, openness, and description of impressions and experiences. Focused ethnographies are practiced in applied fields such as architecture (Cranz 2016), business and marketing (Salvador et al. 1999), Human Computer-Interaction (HCI) (Bannon and Bødker 1991; Nardi 1993; Suchman 1987) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) (Crabtree et al. 2009; Hughes et al. 1994, 1995; Shapiro 1994). In contrast to the knowledge-oriented classical ethnographies, the goal of focused ethnography consists in the implementation of a new technology, a system design, and artifact, a building, etc. While classical ethnographies are intensive in terms of time and experience, focused ethnographies are data-intensive. Technical recording devices are used to gather detailed data from specific lifeworlds within a relatively brief period of time (Knoblauch 2001, p. 130). Accordingly, these data-intensive approaches are also known as “wired ethnography” (Knoblauch 2001, p. 127). In business contexts—for instance, innovation management—ethnographic investigation can take as little as a single or even half a day (Salvador et al. 1999, p. 36).

In the 1980s, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California produced Workplace Studies: Lucy A. Suchman intertwined cultural anthropology with engineering in her dissertation, Plans and Situated Actions: The problem of human-machine communication (1987), in which she argued that human behavior cannot be determined by machines but that it arises in situ. Suchman introduced into technological discourse the ethno-methodological concept of situated action, which posits that actions deviate from plans. One of the findings is that human action does not conform to what the engineers conceived but rather follows from specific situations.

In the 1980s, there were some collaborations between anthropologists from the USA and design researchers from Scandinavia (Bloomberg and Karasti 2013, p. 87), where participatory design research had already developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as visionary social models and new technologies began to receive more attention (Bjerknes et al. 1987; Kensing and Greenbaum 2013, p. 27 ff.; Mareis et al. 2013). Alison J. Clarke notes that starting as early as 1968, anthropological approaches had already entered into design discourses, which had previously been oriented strongly on industrial productivity (2016, p. 71). This is the environment in which participatory Action Research arose (Blomberg and Karasti 2013; Reason 2004; Reason and Bradbury 2008). At that time, designers were conducting workshops with users, testing new technologies, developing mock-ups, and constructing future scenarios. Design ethnography established itself in the 1990s in this rather technology- and market-driven environment (Nova 2014, p. 29 ff.). In the article “Ethnographic Field Methods and Their Relation to Design” Jeanette Blomberg et al. identifies the central reason why ethnography is important when it comes to the implementation of new technologies in workplaces (Blomberg et al. 1993, p. 141 f.): because designers create artifacts for workplace contexts about which they know very little—and will therefore pursue their own needs and conceptions.

This accords with the notion of User-Centered Design, which became a topic of discussion in the 1980s (Gould and Lewis 1985): the center is, so to speak, the lifeworld of the user and the “member’s point of view,” which the researcher closes in on through methods such as on-site observation, informal interviews, and video recording (Blomberg et al. 1993, p. 127 ff.). Hughes et al. described four types of ethnographic approaches (1994, p. 432 ff.)Footnote 2 applied in CSCW that also have potential for design ethnography:

  • Concurrent ethnography: A technical system or a “rapid prototype” is introduced into praxis at the same time as it is observed ethnographically, whereby iterative loops, such as field research—debriefing—design of a prototype—field research, are played through several times. The observations are focused on the human-object or human-interface interactions. This type of research usually lasts a year or a little longer.

  • Quick and dirty ethnography: This refers primarily to quick forays into the field. Such ethnographies are “dirty” because they are not very detailed. This process can provide an overview of an area that has been defined in advance. Length: 2–3 weeks.

  • Evaluative ethnography: This ethnography is performed after the implementation of a new technology or system. It is focused. Various forms of interview are utilized as the main method. Length: 2–4 weeks.

  • Re-examination of previous studies: This refers to analyses of earlier ethnographic studies. It is therefore purely desk research with no visit to the field.

Yana Milev criticizes the kind of applied design research that serves to generate prospering branches of industry and multiple labels as “design governance” (2015, p. 144). In contrast, the design anthropology she proposes places “the complex habitat of cultures as well as the anthropological techniques of constructing meaning and survival at the center of the theory and practice of design” (2015, p. 145).

Keith M. Murphy and George E. Marcus have mapped out the similarities between design and ethnography in social research, which they describe as follows (Murphy and Marcus 2013, p. 257 ff.): (1) Design and ethnography exist as product and process, (2) Design and ethnography are focused on research, (3) Design and ethnography are people-centered, (4) Design and ethnography are at the service of more than the thing itself, and (5) Design and ethnography are reflexive. At the same time, differences come into play that are related to the fact that design is characterized by being future oriented, interventionist, and collaborative (Otto and Smith 2013, p. 3 f.).

Ethnography in the social sciences is primarily interested in observing the “naturalistic backdrops of foreign groups” (Dellwing and Prus 2012, p. 54 ff.) and deriving theories from this. This is why structured interviews, which are “artificial” situations, are perceived as a problem and “conversations” are preferred (Dellwing and Prus 2012, p. 117). Design intervenes and orients itself on the future, which to some extent it itself creates (Yelavich and Adams 2014). Future, in this context, should be understood less as a linear exploration of the present than as a multitude of ideas, critiques, and possibilities that is embedded in the narrative, objects, and practices of our everyday world (Kjærsgaard et al. 2016, p. 1). In design ethnography, situations are disrupted, data is interpreted more quickly, and the processes are iterative. Moreover, fieldwork, analysis, and the transfer to design cannot always be sharply distinguished (Bratteteig et al. 2013, p. 134 f.). In this context, Crabtree et al. posit:

Fieldwork is not about going out and looking at what people do, gathering some “data,” and then analyzing it when you get back to the ranch. Analysis is part and parcel of fieldwork. It permeates fieldwork. When you go into a field—into a setting—you should be doing analysis. (Crabtree et al. 2012, p. 130)

In the context of design ethnography, iterative processes continually produce hypotheses, out of which prototypes, workshops, mock-ups, future scenarios, etc., are developed. Murphy and Marcus postulate that it is not just that design can learn from ethnography, but that enrichment also flows in the other direction: ethnography can also learn from design—for instance, from its iterative, less linear and more playful approach to the field and the data (2013, p. 253 ff.).

The design researcher Nicola Nova provides a descriptive treatment of ethnography in his book Beyond Design Ethnography. How Designers practice Ethnographic Research (2014). Nova interviews designers about how they apply the methods in practice. To distinguish design ethnography as compared to ethnography in the social sciences, Nova lists the following characteristics:

The time spent in the field is shorter, the focus is more narrow, the analysis of the material is closely linked to the design practices with the production of intermediary objects […], the field data are widely heterogenous, the ways that ‘results’ are presented are so distinct from anthropology that it’s sometimes difficult to draw a clear line between “field results” and “design work”. (Nova 2014, p. 117)

Design ethnography is not about a fixation on methods, but rather about immersion in social lifeworlds. Curiosity and a fundamentally open attitude toward people and social lifeworlds is paramount. It is about a radical attentiveness to social realities, whereby the methods for achieving this are only a means and not an end in themselves (Charmaz and Mitchell 2009, p. 161). Crabtree et al. even maintain that methods should be eschewed completely (2012, p. 67), which on a philosophical level accords with the epistemological anarchism of Paul Feyerabend (2010). Salvador et al. plead for using methods creatively, by always developing them specifically for an individual field context (1999, p. 41). Nonetheless, there are certain aspects—such as for instance access to the field or the researcher’s role in the field—that are relevant to any field research and which will therefore be discussed in more detail in the next sections.

5.3 Access to the Field

To explore a particular lifeworld, it is best to simply go where it is located (this could be a digital as well as a physical space). This, however, might turn out to be a considerable challenge, depending on the place. While there are some lifeworlds that one can simply enter spontaneously, for others—such as for instance “total institutions” (Goffman 1961) such as prisons or mental hospitals—a formal permit would be needed. While certain groups are very accessible, other react to foreign visitors with hostility or even aggression. Robert Prus proposes four ways of accessing the field: (a) utilizing our own experiences, (b) accessing mutual settings, (c) finding sponsors, and (d) making “cold calls” (1997, p. 216 ff.).

In each of these cases, it is important to have a gatekeeper—that is, a person who knows the field and is trusted there in ways that can carry over to the ethnographer. The impression one makes when entering the field is also critical. In certain areas, to enter the field without a gatekeeper is dangerous or nearly impossible. For our fieldwork in Angola, we made use of the contacts of a half-Angolese architect with whom I have long been personally acquainted. This man accompanied us during our first 3 days in Luanda and introduced us to important people to whom he had previously reached out—such as leaders of an NGO that assists victims of war and people with disabilities. Together with these officials, we could go into the field and conduct interviews within the local lifeworlds with those who were affected (Müller 2016, p. 69 ff.). In the case of Larissa Holaschke, who investigated the subversive strategies of women in Iran in her master’s thesis, couch surfing turned out to be a successful mode of entry into the field. In this manner, Holaschke came into direct contact with people from the liberal-minded milieus that were the focus of her research (2016). She gained direct insight into the lifeworlds and limited spaces of freedom that were found behind closed doors.

The situations looks different when it comes to experiments, focus groups, and interventionist methods such as cultural probes. In those cases, test subjects must be identified in advance. This raises the question—particularly with qualitative methods, which are used with small groups—of what criteria should be used to select them. Nicholas Nova asked designers what process they used to form their test groups and encountered the following methods of selection (Nova 2014, p. 48 f.):

  • Random: Arbitrary people chosen from the population

  • Homogenous: A focus group of people with common characteristics

  • Comparative method: Various groups for comparison

  • Extreme cases: People and groups with patterns of behavior or characteristics that deviate sharply from the norm

  • According to reputation: Recruiting test subjects based on recommendation

  • Beyond-users: non-users or abstainers as a focus group

  • Analog situations: Focusing on situations similar to what is characteristic for the field being investigated

When selecting test subjects, it is important to consider what is motivating them to participate. In some field work, there may be little understanding for a research project. People in certain environments might not even understand that there is something like a specific research interest in them. If they are willing to collaborate, then, this mainly has to do with a liking for the researcher. Or they may see possible economic advantages in participation, which should be openly discussed and negotiated.

5.4 Researcher’s Role in the Field

The researcher’s role in the field has been variously handled in anthropology, and there has been no lack of self-critical and occasionally ironic judgment. The anthropologist John van Maanen describes ethnographers as “dull visitors,” “meddlesome busybodies,” “hopeless dummies,” “social creeps,” “anthropofoologists,” “management spies,” and “government dupes” (2011, p. 2). In some societal milieus, anthropology is a foreign concept—and consequently, the presence of researchers in the field can be alienating. The situation in the field thus ceases to be “natural,” as the researcher in fact wants it to be. Their presence alters the field.

It is rather rare for designers to conduct fieldwork in Angola or the south of Mexico. Mostly, they operate in environments that are not entirely remote from them. But even those who deal with the milieus of computer games, rock climbing, dementia, or insect eaters are challenged to engage with the genuinely specific aspects of the corresponding lifeworlds and realms of consumption. And if they are no strangers to these worlds—for instance, if they themselves are active gamers—they will attempt to distance themselves artificially.

When I was conducting fieldwork in a Ghanian and a Swiss evangelical community in the greater Zurich area (Müller 2015), I was received openly by both. On my first visit to the Ghanian Sunday service, I was asked to come to the front and introduce myself to the attendees. In the course of my visits, I was able to convince the pastor of the relevance of my research and could move about freely throughout the spaces. However, not everyone was aware of my role as an ethnographer. My attempts to maintain distance at ceremonies such as healings and exorcisms were often ignored by the faithful because they saw me as a potential convert and encouraged me to participate. One day, when I was attending a baptism, a pastor wanted to baptize me alongside. She said I had been there long enough after all and knew enough about the faith. As an agnostic who personally has no use whatsoever for evangelicalism, I of course declined.

Distance and proximity, among other things, are thematized in the sociology of religion in connection with methodological agnosticism. This refers to an attitude that brackets the content of religion as ontological truth. For example, whether religious testimonials—such as conversion narratives—are “true” cannot be determined by the sociologist of religion, but only within the limited social lifeworld of religious practice. There—in the field—is where the “truth” that is of interest to the researcher will be intersubjectively negotiated. For “[…] the task of the ethnographer is not to determine ‘the truth’ but to reveal the multiple truths apparent in others’ lives” (Emerson et al. 1995, p. 3).

Dellwing and Prus note that ethnography has “hot” phases of participation, during which one is passionately involved and contrasting “cooler” phases, in which one is calmer and more distanced (2012, p. 69). Goffman advocates for an immersive approach:

The sights and sounds around you should get to be normal. You should be able to even play with the people, and make jokes back and forth […]. The members of the opposite sex should become attractive to you. You should be able to engage in the same body rhythms, rate of movement, tapping your feet, that sort of thing, as the people around you. (Goffman 1989, p. 129)

This leads to a temporary immersion in specific lifeworld contexts. Ethnographers adapt to situations. They are chameleons. Fieldwork alters them. It is important to set aside one’s own values, at least temporarily, and conform to the field. Within intercultural constellations, in particular, one’s own convictions and ideologies could become obstacles. For instance, Marimar Sanz Abbul and Mariam Bujalil reported at the MX Design Conference in Mexico City:

When a group of students from Mexico City visited an indigenous community in the mountains and did not touch the food because it had meat and many of them were vegetarians, the target community’s trust toward the class immediately broke down and the project had to be prematurely terminated. (cited in Sierach 2016, p. 57)

Ethnographers should be open, curious, empathetic, adaptable, and ready to revise their opinions, preconceptions, and values—at least to a certain extent. Anne Honer advocates taking people in the field seriously and not overwriting them with one’s own moral ideals (2011, p. 87). Those who only judge and are not prepared to reconsider their own opinions are rather unsuitable for ethnographic fieldwork. Salvador et al. therefore write about design ethnography: “We will study people. It’s their voice, their story, not our own […]” (1999, p. 41).

5.5 Observation

Observations are always intentional. We cannot see everything. Our biological make-up does not allow us to see the world in 360°. Even within our field of vision, we only see a portion in sharp focus and the rest is unclear. Maturana and Varela have called attention to the epistemological consequences of this biological structure. They speak of a blind spot: “We do not see that we do not see” (2003, p. 8). The gaze is singular, given that it originates in the consciousness of a biological individual whose body is situated in a particular place. Ethnographic observation is always based on selection (Katz 2019).

What do these epistemological considerations mean for ethnographic observation, which Roland Girtler calls the “queen of fieldwork methods” (2001, p. 147)? For one thing, they relativize the faith in objectivity. Objectivity is based on reduction. I can, for instance, count the number of people in a certain space. This number is objective. But this objectivity obscures a universe of other attributes—for example, the gender, age, ethnicity, etc., of the people in the room, the clothes they are wearing, their behavior, whether they are meditating, sitting on chairs, boxing, working at computers, dancing, etc. Obviously, I can operationalize each of these individual attributes in turn. I can quantify the gender, ethnicity, age, etc. and capture these statistically, but this does not overcome the basic problem that objectivity is attained only through reductionism. Seeing is thus always a form of classification. Seeing is based on prior knowledge:

We, people of today, directly see a railroad station, a form that a primitive man would be unable to see. He would look at the mass of ironwork in tangled “laths” fixed to the ground, at houses on wheels, at a hard-breathing monster exhaling fire and smoke, and he would probably see his own forms: the dragon, the devil, perhaps many other things, but not our good old railway. (Fleck 1986, p. 137)

When we observe ethnographically, then, we should attempt to set aside such acquired knowledge, at least partially. In this process, the familiar is particularly problematic because it is classified all too rapidly. That is why Manfred Lueger calls for the familiar and the mundane to be transformed into an unfamiliar state “by decomposing it, treating it as something new, looking for conceivable connections of meaning” (Lueger 2000, p. 111).

5.6 Dimensions of Observation

On epistemological grounds, then, we cannot see everything and therefore always define a focus. Lueger distinguishes three possible areas of focus in observation (2000, p. 107 ff.): (1) actors, (2) events and actions, (3) objects and products. These three dimensions can be used to describe any social situation, since they are found in all of them. There are people involved who are carrying out actions (even if they are passively meditating, that is an action) and there are always objects—for instance clothing—on hand. Even in places where people are naked—doctor’s offices, swinger clubs, and nude beaches—there are culturally specific objects present. James P. Spradley descries ethnographic observation as follows: “We observe what people do (cultural behavior); we observe things people make and use such as clothes and tools (cultural artifacts); and we listen to what people say (speech messages)” (Spradley 1980, p. 10).

Spradley differentiates between grand tour observations and mini-tour observations (1980, p. 77 ff.). He compares grand tour observations with a tour of a house, a school, or a business, in which someone is shown the basic structure of the building. If one then goes into the individual rooms and examines them, to stick with the building metaphor, then those are mini-tour observations. Spradley emphasizes that the observations are actually made in an identical manner, but the main difference is that the focus is on units of a different scale. He distinguishes between nine dimensions of observation (1980, p. 78):

  • Space: the physical place

  • Actor: the people involved

  • Activity: a set of various actions

  • Object: the physical things

  • Act: individual acts carried out by the people

  • Event: a set of activities carried out by the people

  • Time: the chronological sequence

  • Goal: the aims people wish to accomplish

  • Feeling: the emotions that are expressed

Spradley is interested in the interactions between the nine dimensions, which he presents in his descriptive question matrix (1980, pp. 82–83), which results in 81 fields (Table 5.1).

Table 5.1 Spradley’s descriptive question matrix
Full size table

These 81 fields create a grid that is an effective way of bringing to light the complexity in a social situation on the one hand and reducing it analytically on the other. Along the diagonal line of the matrix, where the same two categories meet, is where the detailed description of that category takes place—which Spradley calls the “grand tour questions” (1980, p. 81). Next to this, in the fields in which the interdependencies between the various dimensions are investigated, are the “mini-tour questions” (Spradley 1980, p. 81). Such a matrix can be helpful in looking for certain dimensions. It could be used to more closely examine a relevant focus—for instance, time, objects, or emotions. This focus might arise during the fieldwork, or it could already be determined in advance. If the design project consists in creating a new object, it makes most sense to intensively investigate all the questions that are related to objects.

5.7 Front and Back Regions

Goffman called attention to some other dimensions relevant for observation: A setting has what he called a front and a back stage (Goffman 1956, p. 66 ff.), which should be understood as relational and not substantive entities. The classic example is in the theater. While on the front region of the stage, the actors play a specific role and are exposed to a great degree of scrutiny, backstage they act more relaxed, make jokes, or rest. This is similar in expensive restaurants: there, the servers behave toward the guests in accordance with particular rules, while back in the kitchen the interaction is gruff. The servers alter their behavior depending on the space in which they find themselves. The speak a different language, use different words, carry themselves differently, etc. In short, place determines social identity.

These categories are, as mentioned, relational. If we define the church service as the front stage, then the bible study group can be defined as back stage. At the front stage, normative identities are constituted through sermons, while in the bible group, as a back stage, communication can be personal and intimate (Müller 2015, p. 146 ff.). Within the bible group itself there are also front and back stages. The front stage, for instance, can be the entire space in which interaction happens among the group. The back stage could be the kitchen, where snacks are being prepared, or the office where the bible group is organized. The theatrical metaphor suggests that the identity on the front stage should be seen as “played” while the one back stage is “authentic.” But in American Pragmatism and symbolic interaction theory there is no such thing as “authentic” identity. Identity is always produced through naming and classification (Strauss 2017, p. 17 ff.)—and is therefore contingent.

A situation will not necessarily be conclusively understood through observation alone, which is why ambiguities might be cleared up through interviews (Honer 2011, p. 31).That observation can have its limits is something I would like to illustrate by an example from my own fieldwork, which involved a visit to the Sunday service at a Ghanian evangelical church in Zurich (Müller 2015, p. 122). It was Pentecost, and the mood of the worshippers was excited from the start. The pastor invoked the Holy Spirit. He called on everyone—including me—to come up front, where we all stood close together in a semicircle. He went from one to another and put his hand on their brow. One woman at the start fell to the ground and began to speak in tongues. Other women followed. The mood was ecstatic. Then a young woman walked quite calmly up to the front. She seemed completely untouched by the ecstatic mood. She did not fall to ground after the pastor laid hands on her, but rather lay down gently and slowly. Finally, she lay motionless on her stomach while another woman put a white cloth on her back. I could describe these actions, but the meaning was not conclusive. Why were there such obviously different reactions to the workings of the Holy Spirit? Why did it have an ecstatic effect on most, while this young woman was contemplative in behavior? At a later point, I asked the pastor about this situation. He explained to me that the Holy Spirit manifests in different ways. If a person twitches sharply after the laying on of hands, as most women did, then this indicates a conflict taking place inside them between evil spirits and the Holy Spirit. The young woman who lay down calmly did not have any evil spirits inside her—and accordingly, the Holy Spirit manifested itself gently. The Holy Spirit could even be at work while someone was deeply asleep. Only now did another observation that I had made repeatedly for some time finally become conclusive. I had seen people sleeping in the service. That this sleep had religious connotation would not have become evident from pure observation alone.

5.8 Interviews and Conversations

When situations do not become conclusive on the basis of observation, interviews and conversations are then warranted for clarification. I use the two terms consciously, since they refer to two different types of face-to-face communication. The interview arose during the nineteenth century in the context of American journalism. Crime beat reporters working on human interest stories began to orient themselves on police interrogation and incorporated quotations from them into their texts. Interviewing as a method of social science became established only later.

Question-answer situations are based on the assumption that there are disparities in knowledge (if this were not that case, there would be no reason to ask the questions). Furthermore, social science interviews are artificial situations that do not exist in everyday communication—similar to confession, psychoanalytic talk therapy, or police interrogation. These settings are subject to certain framings and power dynamics that are more (police interrogation) or less (psychoanalysis) explicit, raising various questions: What does the interviewee hope for? What are their goals and motivations for participating in the interview? Does the interviewee understand the role in which they are being addressed in the interview? Has the interviewee agreed to audio recording of the interview?

In principle, interviews in the social sciences are divided into qualitative and quantitative, open and structured types, in which soft and hard and open and closed questions can be asked. In the context of ethnographic interviews, it is important to ask open rather than closed questions—that is, the questions should be able to open up new horizons and not simply be answered with a yes or no (Liebold and Trinczek 2009, p. 38).

In the qualitative context, there are focused interviews (Flick 2014, p. 211 ff.; Merton 1987), semi-structured interviews (Flick 2014, p. 217 ff.), problem-centered Interviews (Flick 2014, p. 223 ff.) and expert interviews (Flick 2014, p. 227 ff.), which require extensive preparation and are therefore described by Michaela Pfadenhauer as a “conversation between an expert and a quasi-expert” (2002). Further, there are narrative (Schütze 1983) and ethnographic interviews (Spradley 1979), which will be discussed later. Another distinction concerns classic and idealist approaches to interviews, where subjects present their real lifeworlds and experiences in the former, and their wishes in the latter (Byrne 2012, p. 208).

Video recording of interviews is generally discouraged because this can negatively impact that atmosphere of the conversation. Whenever possible, interviews should be documented through audio recording, since no one can take notes and conduct a conversation at the same time. Of course, recording is not always possible, and especially with informal conversations, a recorder can be disturbing to the interlocutor. Turning on the recording mode on a smart phone can equally lead to a break—from that point on, conversations often become suddenly formal and “artificial,” although this feeling may dissipate after a short time. I have often had the experience in interviews that after the recording device is turned off—that is, as soon as the formal part is over—this is when the interviewee really begins to tell the story. Such situations demonstrate how strongly the technology impacts our behavior.

In any case, the interviewer needs the competence “to understand roles, to grasp ‘as who’ he himself is seen and ‘as who’ his interlocutor acts and speaks” (Hermanns 2008, p. 364). Harry Hermanns describes the interview as a drama that is substantially shaped by the interviewer. He offers the following stage directions (2008, p. 367):

  • The framework and objectives of the interview should be made transparent to the interviewee through a briefing.

  • A pleasant atmosphere should be created during the interview.

  • The interviewee should be given space to show several aspects of themselves. If the interviewer is embarrassed by anything, they should make clear that they will not avoid the content and subject.

  • The drama must be allowed to develop. This is facilitated by posing brief and easily understandable questions about the lifeworld of the interviewee. Jargon should not be used.

  • The conversation should not explore any theoretical concepts but rather focus on the lifeworld of the interviewee. This also means that the interviewer should ask follow-up questions if something is unclear and allow the interviewee to explain situations with precision.

5.9 Narrative Interview

The narrative interview was developed by the German sociologist Fritz Schütze. This type of interview deals primarily with autobiographical aspects and themes (Svasek and Domencka 2012). In the narrative interview process, the initial question is particularly significant: it should induce the freest possible narrative flow, upon which the interviewer should step back so as not to disturb it. The narrative interview is divided into three phases (Schütze 1983, p. 285):

  • Narrative prompt: The prompt can refer to the entire biography or can be focused on a specific phase of life—for instance, a religious conversion, an illness, or a period of unemployment. This initial question should be formulated openly and not be suggestive. The interviewee marks the end of this sequence with phrases such as “so, that was it.”

  • Immanent follow-up questions: Here the interviewer takes up certain statements from the initial narrative and probes them with deeper questions. It is important that these follow up questions, too, are open and evoke new narrative flows.

  • Exmanent follow-up questions: Here, the interviewer will introduce their own topics of interest into the interview that have not yet been discussed. These questions may relate to other interviews or theoretical knowledge.

A narrative interview lasts at least an hour. Whether the initial question will actually be sufficient to set the narrative flow in motion depends on a number of factors—the mutual sympathy between the two interlocutors (narrative interviews should be conducted in private, since people open up significantly more to just one listener); the interviewee’s trust in the interviewer; the situation and place where the interview is conducted; the negotiated timeframe; the agreed-upon conditions of anonymity; and cultural influences. It should be noted in this context that interviews do not represent realities but rather reconstruct them narratively. Thus, they are not mirror reflections of events and experiences (Hahn 1995, p. 140).

5.10 Ethnographic Interviews

Roland Girtler criticizes the narrative interview because in his view the researcher’s initial question puts the interviewee on the spot. Moreover, interviews are designed to elicit specific information as quickly and pointedly as possible, which also puts pressure on the interviewee (2001, p. 147 f.). Girtler instead suggests the ero-epic dialogue, “in which the point is narratives and stories that might refer to pretty much anything within a culture or group” (Girtler 2001, p. 147). Anne Honer, in turn, speaks of the explorative interview, which is intended to open up “the widest possible, ‘unknown’ and latent areas of the interviewee’s knowledge” (2011, p. 41). These approaches resemble the ethnographic interview (Maeder 1995, p. 66 f.; Spradley 1979). This type of interview is characterized by the idea “that the researcher must first learn from their informants what the right questions to pose even are” (Maeder 1995, p. 66). Ethnographic interviews begin as open interviews and become increasingly more closed. In this way, hypotheses are developed during an interview through an abductive process that are then woven into new questions. Spradley emphasizes that ethnographic interviews are quite similar to “friendly conversations”: “It is best to think of ethnographic interviews as a series of friendly conversations into which the researcher slowly introduces new elements to assist informants to respond as informants” (Spradley 1979, p. 58).

The place where a conversation or interview takes place is important. Is it happening within the lifeworld being investigated or is it in a “laboratory setting”—for instance, in a seminar room at a university? The proponents of the laboratory setting argue that this “neutral” environment helps to clarify connections more precisely. This however begs the question of how “neutral” a laboratory—such as a seminar room—actually is. Most likely, “there are no decontextualized, that is, ‘pure,’ interview situations” (Liebold and Trinczek 2009, p. 40). One does not go into an interview as a neutral quantity; rather, one has a habitus, a biographical background, a gender, etc. Clothes, hairstyles, and habitus also convey symbolic information that influence the course of the interview.

Conversations situated within the lifeworld under investigation enable direct reference to the things on hand. Daniel Miller has demonstrated this with his study of objects in one hundred apartments in a London street and their biographical significance for the inhabitants (2008). Because there are certain things present in the context of every lifeworld, one can refer to them in a conversation. At the same time, however, there may be other people present as well, who may influence the interviewee’s portrayals. It is possible that the respondent may not articulate certain sentiments when people from their personal milieu are there within earshot. During our fieldwork in Angola it was quite disconcerting for us to speak with disabled people while their friends and family were around. It contradicted our conception of the private sphere.

A meeting within the lifeworld context of the interviewee develops an entirely different atmosphere. The conversation develops quite differently when one is drinking or eating together. Even the question of whether one sits together at a table or stays on the move—for instance, while taking a tour of a building or a home or taking a walk—produces a different kind of conversation. A walk with a person on their own familiar territory shows how people adapt to spaces (Holliday 2007, p. 256; Kusenbach 2008; Lee and Ingold 2006; Pink 2007b, p. 240 ff.). This provides information about the “native’s view point” (Geertz 1999), which refers not to the subjective individual consciousness, but rather to the cultural grammar with which people access their world.

5.11 The Senses

In western societies, it is assumed that we have five senses: seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. This classification, however—which goes back to Aristotle—is not in fact universal. In her research with the Ewe in Ghana, Kathryn Lin Geurts found terms that denote perceptions that are at once psychological and physical, suggesting that the duality of mind and body that shapes western thought does not exist there (2002, p. 197). If there are cultural differences in how other societies classify the senses, then this has consequences for perception (Pink 2015, p. 59 ff.). This draws attention to a problem inherent to any engagement with questions of sensory perception: We experience the world sensorially, but are not able to express these personal perceptions through language because in doing so we always operate with reference to an already given language and cultural classification. Neither can sensory perception be measured (Pink 2015, p. 136). One can merely attempt to describe it, which is a genuinely interpretive process.

Quite likely, it is these epistemological difficulties of dealing with the sensorily perceptible world that have contributed to making an “Anthropology of the Senses” (Howes 1991) a marginal phenomenon for a long time. The idea has however received more attention recently.Footnote 3 Different places have specific olfactory and sound environments. A hospital, a Catholic church, a used book shop, a boxing gym, an Irish pub, a Mexican taqueria—they all have their own specific smell. Objects have scents too—not just food, but also books, furniture, laundry, the interiors of cars. Things have their own haptics, which we experience through touch (Classen 2005), and their own acoustics (Vokes 2007). Smells, scents, and stench are everyday experiences that help us ascribe things to categories such as dirty and clean, which are anthropological ordering schemes (Douglas 1966). In this respect, a description of subjective sensory perceptions in the context of an ethnographic study must be understood less as a representation of an experience and rather more as part of a cultural classification system, in which the researcher themself is embedded. The assumption is that the relevant classifications are a fundamental part of the culture. To research such “sensory categories” (Pink 2015, p. 148 ff.) interactive and participatory processes in which the researcher themself plays a part are most suitable.

In this regard, Sarah Pink speaks of a “multisensory approach” (2011), “digital-visual-sensory-design anthropology” (2014), and “sensory ethnography” (2015). Arantes and Rieger also speak of sensory ethnography (2014).Footnote 4 Pink calls attention to the fact that subjective as well as intersubjective sensibility have their relevance (2015, p. 62). Subjective sensibility refers to the personal perception of the researcher. Intersubjective signifies that this experience of the researcher is embedded within a cultural context and within social relationships. Since the “translation” of sensory experience into text entails the aforementioned difficulties, Pink proposes to carry out interventions (2007a, 2015, p. 7). By this, she means events such as jointly producing a film, cooking a recipe, or singing a song with the participants: “The practice of eating food prepared by people with whom one is doing research (or preparing food with or for them) is an obvious way to participate in their everyday lives” (Pink 2015, p. 108).

Harold Garfinkel’s “breaching experiments,” in which everyday norms were shaken, are worth recalling in this connection. Drawing on this tradition, Kelvin E. Y. Low conducted a study about gender and scent in which he sprayed himself with women’s perfume and questioned his social milieu about it (2005, p. 407). At the methodological level, Inga Reimers proposes three approaches to investigating sensory experience (2014, p. 85 ff.):

  • Ethno-mimesis: Developed by Maggie O’Neill and Phil Hubbard, Ethno-Mimesis (2010) aims to produce sensory knowledge through creative means. O’Neill und Hubbard have implemented this approach with asylum seekers, with whom they walked together on city streets and spoken with immediately afterward about their experiences.

  • Experimental procedures: Researchers plan and realize specific settings together. This might, for instance, be a meal in which eating practices are investigated, where feelings are articulated and exchanged. This open-ended and experimental process helps make internalized classification patterns explicit.

  • Situational group discussions: Researchers create multi-sensory settings—such as a meal—and involve specific groups of test subjects with whom group discussions are then held afterward. The hierarchies between the researchers and the subjects should be as flat as possible.

5.12 Things and Material Culture

Whether we are in a library, a laboratory, a department store, or a museum—we are surrounded by man-made, designed objects. We have internalized implicit knowledge of how to deal with these things and our handling of them is complex and variable: We buy them, use them, consume them, repair them, alter them, throw them away, destroy them. The things in question can be very simple or highly technologically complex. Flatware, for instance, is technically simple—from a cultural perspective, however, even a technically simple fork can turn out to be very complex: “Once a more or less consistent functional core develops and, importantly, becomes historically stable, then forks begin to vary with cultural standards” (Böhme 2012, p. 102). The fact that even something like a mechanical toaster is complex has been demonstrated by Thomas Thwaites in his “Toaster Project” (2011). He obtained and processed his own raw materials and used them to build a replica of a mass-produced toaster by hand. In this way he made visible the complexity of mass-produced objects. What is already a very time-consuming process in the case of a toaster would be completely impossible with a smartphone. In under a decade, smartphones have fundamentally altered the way we communicate, interact, behave in private and public, indeed how we live (Bell and Kuipers 2018; Ictech 2019). Virtually no one who uses a smartphone knows how it actually functions technologically. Neither is this necessary, given that it fully suffices to just know how to use it in everyday life. It is only in a crisis—that is, when the smartphone stops working—that the complexity normally concealed by its smart interface is revealed (Berger and Luckmann 1967, p. 24; Latour 2002, p. 223; Schön 1983, p. 59 ff.).

Every society has its own material culture, which is variously dealt with in anthropology (Appadurai 1986; Böhme 2012; Clarke 2017; Habermas 1999; Hahn 2014, 2015; Hahn and Schmitz 2018; Lueger and Froschauer 2018; Miller 2008, 2009a; Müller 2019; Tilley 2009; Tilley et al. 2013). The microcosms of small social lifeworlds are filled with a variety of things: The things inside a Buddhist temple are different from the ones in a Catholic church or a mosque—even though all these places contain both holy and mundane objects. The things in a Kung Fu school are different from the ones in a boxing club. A lab contains different things than a law office. A Korean restaurant has different things than a Spanish one. Things in a bathroom are different from the kitchen. At the same time, there are objects that are present in all of these places: for instance, screws, lightbulbs, light switches, etc.

Things have certain material properties. They can be hard, soft, elastic, rough, smooth, matte, bright, light, heavy, etc. Their existence is conditional (Lueger and Froschauer 2018, p. 65 ff.): They have been produced under specific circumstances and in specific contexts. They have functions and meanings, whereby the latter have less to do with their material properties but rather rest on social attributions. We own some things that have a particular meaning for us and others of which we take no notice. We do not pay the same degree of attention to all things—significantly more to a smartphone than to a screw, although screws are certainly fundamental. Some things—such as toothbrushes, towels, or sheets—are a part of our completely private sphere, and accordingly we do not like to share them with other people. Habermas describes these things as our “identity kit” (1999, p. 122 f.). Living spaces contain collections of personal things that manifest a certain lifestyle and individuality. Hartmut Böhme describes them as “storehouse and performative organ of the self” (2012, p. 99). We own things that have a special emotional significance because of their biographical connections—so-called “memory objects” (Hahn 2014, p. 37 ff.). These include souvenirs, which embody an extraordinary experience and evoke a temporally or geographically distanced perspective (Habermas 1999, p. 291 ff.). Family heirlooms transcend the here and now in a similar way. They “lend a social (family) identity, distinction, and belonging, as well as historical identity” (Habermas 1999, p. 292). What we value emotionally is dependent not just on economic value, but also on the habitus and cultural milieu in which we move, our age, the historical era in which we live, etc. At the same time, our personal relationship to things cannot be explained by sociological factors alone, since the relationships that a person has with such things is highly individual.

Things are designed, produced, adapted, further developed, appropriated for different purposes—the latter known as “non-intentional design”: being used in a way that the designer did not intend. Such is the case, for instance, when I keep my pens and pencils in a beer glass. Furthermore, objects can also be used as markers to reserve personal space. Sun glasses and a tube of sun block signal someone’s claim to a lounge chair on the beach; a drink on the bar lays claim to the bar stool in front of it (Goffman 2010, p. 41). The idea then is that all people practice design and therefore have design knowledge (Cross 2007, p. 47).

5.13 Consumption Is Not Superficial

In the age of modern consumption, a critique of consumerism has also been established to shed some critical light on it. A central argument of this critique has to do with the distinction between (necessary) basic needs and (superfluous) luxury needs. According to this critique, which has gained strength in recent years in sufficiency discourses, we consume more than we truly need. Wasteful, excessive consumption must be disciplined. A further critique claims the objects of consumption are superficial, suggesting that there is a deep inner self that has been coopted by external, “superficial” things. The sociological Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism in particular have branded consumer culture as superficial in judgments dripping with the sort of morality one would sooner expect from puritanical lay preachers than from sociologists.

Daniel Miller rightly points out that the emergence of mass consumption has also greatly contributed to reducing poverty (2013, p. 341). The distinction between things that are necessary and superfluous is not a universal one; rather, it goes back to puritanical Protestant values (Hahn 2014, p. S78 ff.; Campbell 1998, p. 238). It is in this context that Miller speaks of the Poverty of Morality (2011): Anyone who judges one lifestyle to be “wrong” implicitly considers another to be “right.” Positions critical of consumerism are less concerned with analyzing the facts of a situation than with branding consumption. As the ethnologist Hans Peter Hahn points out: “On the one hand, the line between luxury and need is subject to an emic, culturally dependent definition; on the other, the European concept of need is influenced by a very particular rhetoric […]” (Hahn 2014, p. 81). This also contradicts Maslow’s pyramid of needs and the mechanistic conception of man associated with it, which posits that self-actualization becomes a goal only after material, rudimentary, and social needs have been met. In his essay “Why Clothing is not Superficial” (2009b), Daniel Miller shows that everyday and consumer culture shapes identity to a great degree and is anything but trivial. Miller debunks the assumption—which is particularly wide-spread in the German-speaking world, that superficiality is a distraction from something deeper:

We possess what could be called a depth ontology. The assumption is that being—what we truly are—is located deep inside ourselves and is in direct opposition to the surface. A clothes shopper is shallow because a philosopher or a saint is deep. (Miller 2009b, p. 16)

Consumer goods do not simply satisfy needs; rather, they convey symbolic statements. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood have fundamentally refuted the theory of consumption as the satisfaction of need, which is grounded in economics:

Instead of supposing that goods are primarily needed for subsistence plus competitive display, let us assume that they are needed for making visible and stable the categories of culture. It is standard ethnographic practice to assume that all material possessions carry social meanings and to concentrate a main part of cultural analysis upon their use as communicators. (Douglas and Isherwood 1978, p. 62)

To define eating, drinking, clothing, etc. simply as the satisfaction of need assumes a mechanistic model of mankind and obscures symbolic categories. Douglas describes the manner in which we nourish ourselves as an information system (Douglas 2011, p. 82 ff.). We define ourselves through eating: from veganism to from-nose-to-tail, whether one’s eating habits are ascetic and self-disciplined or hedonistic and pleasure-oriented makes a social statement. Clothing also significantly constructs a social identity, which is why it is also described as a “social skin” (Turner 1980). We are different people when we walk around town in scruffy jeans or in a suit. We make a different impression and experience the world differently. The things with which we surround ourselves form our identity. Accordingly, Habermas posits that clothing is experienced as a part of our person that defines our physical boundaries (1999, p. 67). Mary Douglas describes our entire everyday world as meaningful and symbolically loaded: “we do not seize upon as theatrical props to dramatize the way we want to play our roles and the scene we are playing in” (Douglas 1966, p. 101).

5.14 The Contingency of Things

Anselm Strauss write: “An object which looks so much like an orange—in fact which really is an orange—can also be a member of an infinite number of other classes” (2017, p. 22). An orange can be the fruit of a citrus plant from the Rutaceae family. It can be a food source rich in vitamins. It can be sold as a product in a supermarket or an informal street market. It can be used as the subject of a still life at an art school. At the Basel Carneval it can serve as a projectile, while at the Día de los Muertos in Mexico, it is an offering for the dead. An orange can thus be an object of biology, nourishment, economics, religion, etc. Its identity is contingent, which contradicts the concept of identity that posits that a thing is one. The definitiveness of naming thus brings into the world the contingency that it seeks to overcome. At the same time, the orange has an undeniable materiality. As soon as we begin to describe this materiality in more detail, however, a field of ambiguity opens up again: Do we describe the orange only on the basis of its external appearance? Do we limit ourselves only to its size, color, and form? Do we cut it open, which again produces a different image? Do we squeeze the juice out of it? Do we describe only the isolated orange or do we consider that it grows on a tree that needs water, light, and air? The questions proliferate. This demonstrates that material culture is far more ambiguous than it appears to us in daily life. Or, as Böhme puts it: “Things are deeply familiar to us. When we want to know what they are, they become alien” (2012, p. 35).

5.15 Field Notes

As previously discussed, observation is based on selection: We make decisions, in part conscious ones and in part intuitive. We make further decisions when we take notes. What do we note down? When do we take notes? Do we write notes using key words or complete sentences? What does it actually mean to “translate” an observation into a textual note? Is it a translation or a construction of something new? And why do we take notes at all when we can simply photograph or film the situations in the field with a smart phone?

To begin with, it is important to recognize that working with visual data is fundamentally different from taking notes. Which approach one chooses, or whether one combines several, depends on the research project, its context, and one’s personal preferences. It should be kept in mind that notes do not just describe actions—rather, the taking of notes is itself an action (Emerson et al. 1995, p. 15).

Emerson et al. speak of “jottings,” which build the foundation for “full notes” (1995, p. 51). Spradley calls these brief notations, which are composed of key words rather than fully composed sentences, “condensed accounts” (1980, p. 69). He recommends composing “expanded accounts” immediately after the fieldwork and keeping a “fieldwork journal” in which not only observations but also feelings, associations, and impressions are articulated. The last step is writing up the “analyses and interpretation,” which is the final ethnographic report (Spradley 1980, p. 69 ff.).

Taking notes can unsettle people in the field. When we take notes we are signaling that we consider a situation or a statement significant, which the people in the field may see differently. Goffman therefore recommends not writing notes down during the observation itself, because people would then know which actions were being documented (Goffman 1989, p. 130). This raises the question of whether such evasive tactics are necessary. Ultimately, acceptance of note-taking naturally depends on the field itself and not least on the situations in which one finds oneself. For instance, if you are conducting participant observation of gang members, it will be difficult to take notes during a fight. I had more luck in my fieldwork in the Ghanaian evangelical church community in Zurich: there, many of the worshippers took notes on the pastor’s sermons during the Sunday service. In that context, my behavior conformed to the norm—to such an extent, indeed, that many of the attendees took me for a convert.

5.16 Sketches and Illustrations

Sketching is often done so automatically by designers that it is not even perceived as a method of fieldwork. In fact, sketching—called “graphic anthropology” (Tondeur 2016)—is a highly useful approach in fieldwork, especially in situations where photography and video recording is not possible. The designer Franz James employed this method in an investigation of prisons in South Africa, where photography is not allowed (2016, p. 163). Sketching has various advantages (Tondeur 2016, p. 666). First, paper and pencil are cheap. Second—in marked contrast to electronic media—it leads to a more relaxed form of observation. Third, it is considerably less intrusive than photography or filming. And fourth, it often leads to conversations and new forms of encounter in the field. The anthropologist Michael Taussig made the sketches he produced over decades of fieldwork in Columbia into a springboard for the autoethnographic and literary reconstructions in his book I Swear I Saw This. Taussig writes: “[…] photography is a taking, the drawing a making […]” (2011, p. 21). This active element of sketching leads to more sensitivity and openness in perception. Sketching and drawing can be made by the researcher themselves or—in a participatory approach—by the people within a certain field (Pink 2015, p. 89 f.) Forgoing audiovisual technology leads to more contemplative observation in the field.

5.17 Photography and Video

With smartphones now omnipresent, an enormous amount of visual data is created every day, which is shared, evaluated, commented on, adapted, filtered, deleted, or archived. In 2017, 1.8 trillion photographs were produced, 85% of these with smartphones.Footnote 5 According to the German portal statistica, 3.26 billion people worldwide had a smartphone in 2019 and the number is projected to reach 3.76 billion in 2021.Footnote 6 With 5G technology, upload speeds will become massively faster again, which will significantly increase the production of visual data. But it is not just the quantity but also the quality that is fundamentally changing. Many companies that never had an infrastructure for traditional land-line communication are leaping directly from face-to-face oral interaction into the digital world. In the future, smartphones will be even cheaper and more widely distributed globally, which will further increase the production of photos and video. Ultimately, the smartphone alters not only our culture of interaction and communication, but also the presence and meaning of visuality in our everyday world (Eberle 2017b, p. 111).

This development lends a new relevance to the Iconic Turn (Boehm 1994). The new visual worlds require new methodological approaches. Social science journals such as Visual EthnographyFootnote 7 or Visual Studies,Footnote 8 which is published by the International Visual Sociology AssociationFootnote 9 (IVSA), deal with these visual approaches. Despite the flood of images, visual data in sociology continue to stand in the shadow of text. Aside from visual sociology (Harper 2012) and videography (Knoblauch 2006; Schnettler and Raab 2012; Tuma et al. 2013), visual data in sociology often have merely a documentary function: they supplement texts, which continue to stand at the center. Thomas S. Eberle attributes this to the dominance of positivism in the foundational ideas of sociology, which must be called into question by a turn to the image. He calls attention to the fact that

images have to be interpreted by recipients and due to their more open horizon of interpretive possibility as compared to verbal descriptions always produce a surfeit of meaning. Images can therefore never be fully represented or substituted by text. Conversely, due to their ambiguity and the need for them to be interpreted, images also cannot provide any definitive statement that can be verified intersubjectively. (Eberle 2017a, p. 20)

Anthropology is more open to images than sociology, and accordingly it has long since developed a visual tradition (Harper 2012, p. 5). The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski took many photographs during his investigations on the Trobriand Islands (1932). Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead established a visual ethnography with their study of “Balinese Character” (1942). Harper advises sociology to “open the eyes of the discipline to a wider and infinitely more interesting perceptual world than a computer screen filled with numbers” (2012, p. 4).

As advances in technological reproduction in the late nineteenth century allowed photography to enter into print media, this went along with a new faith in objectivity. At the time, the photograph was considered the reflection of reality—in contrast to text, in which an author “formed” the events through narrative. This assumption is now outdated—and not only because of the technical possibilities of image manipulation. Every image is made from a particular perspective, since it is people—and not cameras—who take the pictures. An arbitrary component is therefore always manifest (Ball and Smith 2009, p. 305). Photos are “subjectively re-shaped by the photographer” (Baur and Budenz 2017, p. 93). They are not objective representations. On Howard S. Becker’s account, the difference between journalistic and sociological photos consists entirely in their context (1995, p. 12): The same photograph can appear in a social science journal or a newspaper. It can be situated within a sociological or a journalistic context. The context determines what sort of image we see.

Such theoretical considerations of images are as relevant for a photograph used in ethnography as for photojournalism. Take for instance the aforementioned crime beat reporter Jacob A. Riis (1997). In the late nineteenth century, he went around the streets of lower Manhattan, where immigration was giving rise to neighborhoods like Little Italy, China Town, and the Jewish Lower East Side. Riis was among the first to use the flash at night in order to show and shed light on the flip side of life—the life of the marginalized. He presented “night-time people in a surreal visual universe” (Harper 2012, p. 24). His photos are hybrids of journalistic and ethnographic photography. The photographer and visual ethnographer Camilo Jose Vergara, who took documentary photos of ghettos in the USA, among other things, operated within a similar tradition (2014).

In the early twentieth century, film was increasingly employed in anthropological fieldwork (Tuma et al. 2013, p. 24 ff.). A classic of ethnographic film released in the early 1920s is Nanook of the North by Robert J. Flaherty, who lived for several months with the Inuit and documented their everyday lives. The documentary film demonstrates that the genre is not without dramaturgical elements: The film produces a romanticized image of the Innuit lifeworld with stylistic means and music. Film and photos are—like texts—constructions and not reflections of reality. They are “transformations of lifeworld situations” (Schnettler and Knoblauch 2009, p. 277) and the producers of the visual data are enmeshed in this process.

A person with a camera is not neutral. Their behavior is fundamentally determined by technology (Eberle 2017a, p. 28, 2017b, p. 100 ff.). Photography itself is a physical act, in which the photographer bends, kneels, lies down on the ground, or even climbs up to high places (Eberle 2017b, p. 108). And every shot with the camera is preceded by a selection. “Even the decision as to when the investigation is concluded and the camera unpacked represents a selection—just like the focus and duration of the shooting” (Tuma et al. 2013, p. 12).

In the context of the contingent conditions of the production of visual data, it is also important to consider that people in the field will be conscious of the presence of the researcher’s camera and will react to it (Pink 2015, p. 48; Tuma et al. 2013, p. 13). The nature of this reaction depends substantially on how the camera is handled: whether it is mounted on a tripod in the field or whether filming is simply done with a smartphone produces not just a different type of reaction in the field, but also different kinds of aesthetic representations of the course of social activity in the field.

5.18 Factors that Influence Production of Visual Data

Photography can facilitate the first contact in the field: The question of whether one might be allowed to take photographs is—depending on the field—well-suited for establishing contact and possibly conducting a spontaneous interview. In our fieldwork with the disabled in Angola the visibility of the camera often led to the landmine victims posing for the picture. This proved to be fruitful during one excursion to a musseque where the designer Bitten Stetter and the photographer Flurina Rothenberger were also there gathering audiovisual material during a Kuduro production. This was later edited into a video clip, which then became part of the exhibition “Sometimes people in Luanda shine.”Footnote 10

Tuma et al. have identified three factors that influence the production of visual data (Tuma et al. 2013, p. 37 ff.):

  • Research situation

    This dimension relates to the aforementioned dichotomy between natural and artificial situations. Would the situation being filmed be taking place without the presence of the researchers? Do the people in the field know that they are being filmed? Are they reacting to the investigator’s camera?

  • Operation of the camera

    How the camera is used is central. Will it be mounted in place to film a particular part of the space over some length of time? Is the researcher filming with a subjective, moving camera, such that the film represents their perspective? Or will film material be included that was produced by the people in the field independently of the investigation? In the last case, the aesthetics with which the people in the field produce their films would also be investigated, among other things.

  • Post-processing

    Post-processing is relevant for visual data that have been produced independently of the investigation. Here, it is not only the filmed or photographed events, objects, and actions that play a role, but also how these have been edited afterward. This can include cuts, color filters, time-lapse, dubbing, etc. Such stylistic devices make visible the aesthetic specific to a milieu, a group, or a scene.

Tuma et al. define video ethnography as follows: “Researchers go ‘into the field’ and focus the video camera on everyday situations in which people are engaged in actions and analyze how they are doing it” (Tuma et al. 2013, p. 10). This data—whether still photographs or film—serves primarily as documentation. While field notes are reconstructive, photos and video recordings are simultaneous technical recordings of a fluid moment or timespan. In contrast to notes, visual data—in particular moving images with sound—are highly complex and enable microscopic analysis of individual details and sequences of events, which would not be possible with classical reconstructive survey methods (Schnettler and Knoblauch 2009, p. 276).

The production of film has become technologically easier and has a much lower threshold. Whereas entire film and photography crews once went into the field with tripods and technical equipment, operating there as a collective and colonizing the field, today a single researcher with a smartphone can produce video material. Such researchers are more agile—physically and mentally—and more empathetic and less disruptive of a situation, because smartphones are ubiquitous. At the same time, this can lead to the production of an enormous amount of video material, which can in turn make analysis more difficult. The ethnologist Barbara Keifenheim therefore sees something disciplined in working with 16-mm film: one knows that the recording time is limited and the processing costs high, which demands a focused eye when the camera is turned on (2008, p. 278 f.).

5.19 Participant Produced Images

“Participant produced images” (Pink 2013, p. 86 ff.) describes visual data created by the people in the field—for instance, for posting on social media. The resulting images and videos are then “liked,” evaluated, and commented on there. Such data are “natural”—produced in the field without the researcher actively eliciting them. These data can serve as the basis for in-depth interviews or discussions in focus groups. Of course, analog images can function similarly. For instance, in her ethnographic investigations of bullfighting, Sarah Pink has conducted interviews about photographs in clubs for bullfighting aficionados (2013, p. 95 ff.).

Digital photography fundamentally changes image-making practices. In this regard, Nina Baur and Patrick Budenz list the following techniques (2017, p. 77 ff.): staging and retouching, choice of framing, focal distance to the object, depth of field, and coloration. Eisewicht and Grenz describe digital photography as interpretative conservation and identify three levels (2017, p. 121 f.):

  • Camera software for shooting: Tools to improve image quality, tools that preset certain picture modes, and tools with special trigger mechanisms

  • Camera software for editing existing images: Editing of existing image data, editing through addition of material and through rearrangement

  • Camera software for managing images: Sharing, sorting, and backing up photos

The various processing technologies give rise to new aesthetic dimensions that are particularly relevant when analyzing visual data that was produced by participants in the field.

5.20 Digital Ethnography

In the wake of digitization, a flood of new textual and above all visual data has been created. Not only has the quantity of data increased dramatically, but the quality has also fundamentally been altered, which manifests itself in new methods such as Online Ethnography (Boellstorff et al. 2012; Hine 2015), Netnography (Kozinets 2010, 2019), Digital Ethnography (Pink et al. 2016) and Armchair Anthropology (Ge 2017), in which visuality must be methodologically taken into account (Gómez Cruz et al. 2017). Every special interest community exchanges experiences through social media. They communicate about diseases, addictions, extreme sports, politics, anxiety, and sexual practices. A distinction should however first be made between “online communities” and “communities online” (Kozinets 2010, p. 63 ff.). Communities online are actually existing communities that have a supplemental platform on the internet. Online communities, on the other hand, are communities that have formed solely on the internet, whose members in most cases never see each other face-to-face.

Similarly to the way the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century privileged subjectivity and individualization, the internet also gives rise to new forms of visual identity. Codes, symbols, and signs are used as resources in order to express subjective states or desired identities that orient themselves on existing patterns of identity. In this way, digital realities become a site where “expression and perception of the self are pre-structured in a specific way but are also malleable” (Muri 2010, p. 87). Norms are negotiated through likes and comments (Müller 2018). Selfies exhibit a standardized pattern and they objectivize normative patterns of self-representation. These can pertain to the pose, the social constellation (selfies with friends), the facial expression (“duckface”), or even individual body parts (“belfies”). At the same time, however, these normative patterns are continually transformed subjectively. Style and aesthetics are worked out through filters, through which process however adaption and new interpretations repeatedly favor precisely the objectivization (Baur and Budenz 2017, p. 93). In the context of selfies, Neumann-Braun speaks of photographer and feedbacks being “part of a glocal peer review system” (2017, p. 345). Pink notes:

Moreover, the rapid rise in popularity on the ‘selfie’ practice of photographing oneself with a smartphone, indicates the closeness that these technologies have to the ways people view and represent their own identities, thus suggesting that the personalization, closeness and affective qualities of the smartphones create potential to similarly create empathetic and corporal connections with audiences through sensory ethnography media. (Pink 2015, p. 165)

Selfies are produced in certain contexts—such as in museums, in front of tourist attractions, at parties, at home in the bathroom, or in bed. The poses are rehearsed and normative. They display a generalized other (Mead 2015, p. 152 ff.) and a social front region (Goffman 1956, p. 67). A photo that deviates from the norm would not be published; it would damage the image of the depicted person. Which norm applies depends on the social environment. There is great differentiation in this regard. For instance, in the context of mental health, where teens and young adults negotiate psychological suffering and subjective mental sates in digital media, quite particular self-representations are practiced: Young people touch their faces with their hands or show themselves in vulnerable poses in bed, which becomes a symbolic Safe Space (Schmocker 2018, p. 51 ff.).

Kozinets defines netnography (2010) as “participant-observational research based in online fieldwork. It uses computer-mediated communications as a source of data to arrive at the ethnographic understanding and representation of a cultural and communal phenomenon” (2010, p. 50). The specific aspect of his netnography consists in the fact that—just as in ordinary ethnography—the interaction of the researcher with the participants occurs in the field (2010, p. 50). This means that the researcher participates actively in forum discussions, posts images to generate comments, and responds to these: “Online interaction forces the learning of additional codes and norms, abbreviations, emoticons, sets of keystrokes and other technical skills in order to transfer the emotional information vital to social relations” (Kozinets 2010, p. 69). The principle of active participatory observation is translated to digital reality. Further, Kozinets proposes a “blended ethnography,” in which online research is combined with research in real-world situations (2010, p. 55 ff.). The process enables identification of the following:

  • Integration vs. Separation of Social Worlds: What constitutes the similarities and differences in the patterns of behavior in internet and face-to-face situations?

  • Observation vs. Verbalization of Relevant Data: What it the relationship between observing physical behavior and articulating its description? Are there deviations?

  • Identification vs. Performance of Members: How relevant are demographic characteristics such as age, ethnicity, gender, etc. of members of a particular community? Or do they distinguish themselves solely through certain contributions or actions?

With Mediated Sensory Ethnography (Pink 2015, p. 117 ff.), the action is not reduced to virtual reality; the sensory dimension is also included. The focus is thus on visual, auditory, tactile, and other sensory experiences that occur with digital practices (Pink 2006, p. 44 ff.). For digital technologies continue to appear object-like to us. There is (still) some physical interaction with a device—for instance, a touch screen, a keyboard, a microphone, etc.

5.21 Participatory Action Research

In a certain sense, ethnography is always participatory, since the researcher participates to a greater or lesser extent in the field. Most design processes also have participative elements, given that designers do not just tinker in a lab but rather develop their solutions interactively with particular groups. However, the concept would become diluted if every study and every design were described as participatory. The methods described as participatory in what follows, therefore, are specifically those in which researchers work together with the participants to produce ethnographic data and/or design solutions, or brief them about producing data and solutions themselves. The basic principle is: “Good research is research conducted with people rather than on people” (Heron and Reason 2006, p. 179).

Participative research and design approaches emerged in Scandinavia in the late 1960s and 1970s (Bjerknes et al. 1987; Blomberg and Karasti 2013, p. 87; Kensing and Greenbaum 2013, p. 27 ff.). “Design Participation” was the theme of the annual conference of the Design Research Society in Manchester in 1971 (Robertson and Simonsen 2013, p. 2). In terms of theoretical background, participatory approaches draw on a Marxist-oriented critique of society (Rahman 2008, p. 49) and a critique of positivist sciences (Gergen and Gergen 2008, p. 159). The Marxist idea posits that underprivileged people and societies can improve their situations in collaboration with researchers (Rahman 2008, p. 49). A problem to be solved together serves as the starting point. Robertson and Simonsen define Participatory Design as

a process of investigating, understanding, reflecting upon, establishing, developing, and supporting mutual learning between multiple participants in collective ‘reflection-in-action.’ The participants typically undertake the two principal roles of users and designers where the designers strive to learn the realities of the users’ situation while the users strive to articulate their desired aims and learn appropriate technological means to obtain them. (Robertson and Simonsen 2013, p. 2)

The participants thus are designers and users—and by articulating their concerns and aims they figure out how to achieve the latter. In this process, all the parties involved in the research project should benefit from it: Designers develop design approaches, anthropologists gain insights, and participants solve problems through collaboration. In practice, this means that privileged academics work together with underprivileged people, which requires ethical consideration. Castillo-Burguete et al. describe participation in local communities as a form of cultural capital, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, that must be incorporated and mobilized jointly (2009, p. 532). This does not mean that the communities in question are to be colonized but rather that an exchange of ideas takes place.

5.22 Participatory Photography and Cultural Probes

Participative photography and video means handing out cameras and letting people in the field use them themselves. This approach was employed by Ruth Holliday, who called upon participants to produce “video diaries” (2000). Holliday also explored queer identities this way by asking 15 people from the queer scene to take pictures of their clothing practices at home, going out, and at work (2007, p. 257 ff.). Eric Michaels and Francis Kelly (1984) proceeded similarly when they gave out cameras to Aborigines and had them produce images. In our project in Angola, we gave disposable cameras to students of rehabilitation medicine, who in turn passed these out to physically disabled people so they could take photographs from within their own lifeworlds. The response rate was relatively low, which was in part due to the fact that we did not give out the cameras directly but via a social node. This made the channels of communication significantly more challenging. It was much more productive when we actually included one of these students in the project. Domingos João Pedro Bernardo, who was himself a victim of polio, produced a poem (Bernardo 2016, p. 35) and photos from his lifeworld that were incorporated in our publication (Müller 2016).

Even when researchers are physically absent during the production of the photographs, they are still part of the process through the briefings (Pfadenhauer 2017, p. 136 f.). Such briefings might put the focus on various realms of the everyday world—for instance, things in one’s home that are considered beautiful, disruptive, clean, or dirty. The issue here is not just what people will film or consider relevant, but also how they will film: that is, how is the camera deployed and moved, what framing is chosen, etc. (Keifenheim 2008, p. 282).

Giaccardi et al. suggest delegating the filming to things and employing them as “co-ethnographers” or “autographers” (2016, p. 235 ff.). In their research project “Thing Tank” they attached small cameras that took photos automatically to three everyday objects—a kettle, a refrigerator, and a tea cup. These “autographers” uncover blind spots, such as the contact or interaction they have with other objects. “A thing perspective opens up possibilities for understanding the limits of human action on time and space and the ways in which non-human things are directly informing and creating the everyday realities in which people live” (Giaccardi et al. 2016, p. 243).

Photovoice was developed by Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris (1997). In a study, Wang encouraged women in a rural area in China to take pictures relating to their health situation in their everyday work context. The impetus for the study was the hypothesis that health problems existed there. The procedure had three objectives: First, it aimed to motivate the women to empower themselves to represent and reflect upon their personal and shared strengths and worries. Second, the photos were intended to generate a dialogue about the personal and shared concerns. Third, it sought to reach the level of politics and engage it in dialogue. The method was grounded in the assumption that photos show how we live and how we define ourselves in relation to the world. The methodological approach is described as follows (Wang 1999, p. 187 ff.):

  • Select and recruit a target audience and community leaders

  • Recruit a group of photovoice participants

  • Introduce the photovoice methodology to participants and facilitate a group discussion

  • Obtain informed content

  • Pose an initial theme for taking pictures

  • Distribute cameras to participants and review how to use them

  • Provide time for participants to take pictures

  • Meet to discuss photographs

  • Plan with participants a format to share photographs and stories with policy makers or community leaders

A different direction is taken by the method suggested by Sarah Pink—“Walking with Video” (2007b, 2015, p. 111)—in which the researcher accompanies the participants on walks while simultaneously filming them. This method is based on the assumption that routes and paths do not simply connect start and end points in a functional way but also represent subjective sensory microcosms. By filming directly, the researcher can make reference to the things that are present and make them an immediate subject of the conversation: “Walking with video, I suggest, can generate a more involved approach to the question of how places and identities are constituted” (Pink 2007b, p. 250).

The cultural probes process developed by Bill Gaver in the late 1990s is an extension of the participatory approach (Gaver et al. 1999, 2004; Brandes et al. 2009, p. 168 ff.). The background for it was a study on the elderly in Oslo, Amsterdam, and an area near Pisa. Gaver et al. distributed sets of several postcards to the participants that posed questions about their wishes, everyday worlds, and objects. The sets also contained cards with poetic and sometimes direct questions, such as where participants prefer to meet people, where they are alone, or where they would most like to go but are can’t. The participants were given disposable cameras and were asked to photograph where they lived, something they wished for, and something boring. In addition, they received a photo album in which they were supposed to tell their life story in six to ten images. Finally, they were to keep a media diary in which they would record their media consumption—that is, which newspapers they read, which radio programs they heard, and what they watched on television (and with whom they did so) (Gaver et al. 1999, p. 22 ff.). Cultural probes are conceived as an open method that lends itself easily to expansion, supplementation, and alteration (Gaver et al. 2004).

5.23 Photo Elicitation

In “photo elicitation” (Harper 2002, 2012, pp. 155 ff., 81 ff.; Pink 2015, p. 92 ff.) pictures are not simply analyzed by researchers but also function as the basis for interviews with the participants in the field. This method was developed in the 1950s by John Collier (1957, p. 846 ff., 1967, p. 46 ff.). At the time, Collier was conducting interviews with and without photos for a 3-year study on the lifeworlds of workers in Canada. He came to the conclusion that in the interviews with photos, the responses were more precise because the images built a “language bridge” (Collier 1957, p. 858).

The driving assumption here is that the meanings of photographs are not inherent but ascribed (Harper 2002, p. 13; Pink 2013, p. 92). Multiple perspectives on an image open up multiple schemes of interpretation. These interpretations should not be understood as purely subjective processes because categories of cultural signification impact these processes as well. Photo elicitation leads to a new definition of the sociological interview “because it centers an object in a photo that both parties are looking at and trying to make sense of” (Harper 2012, p. 157). As Sarah Pink demonstrates in her empirical investigations of bullfighting in Spain, opponents and aficionados of the practice interpret images differently. In her study, Pink defines three groups that hold diverging positions on bullfighting and female bullfighters: First, bullfighting aficionados who favor female bullfighters; second, bullfighting aficionados who are opposed to female bullfighters; and third, opponents of bullfighting as such (2013, p. 77). Pink conducted interviews focused on images of the bullfighter Cristina Sánchez with people from all three of these groups, which demonstrated that they ascribed varying meanings to the pictures. For instance, if a picture showed Christina Sánchez in a challenging situation, then for the proponents of female bullfighting it was proof that women are capable of mastering it. In contrast, the aficionados opposed to female bullfighters saw in the image a confirmation of their preconceived belief that women are unsuited for it, while the opponents of bullfighting as such saw the superiority of the bull. The interviews that are centered around images thus seek to pluralize perspectives:

Photo-elicitation relies on the idea of the photograph becoming a visual text through which the subjectivities of researcher and participant intersect. It can evoke memories, knowledge and more in the research participant, which might have otherwise been inaccessible, while simultaneously allowing the researcher to compare her or his subjective interpretation of the image with that of the research participant. (Pink 2015, p. 88)

The image functions as a starting point for seeking out new contexts of meaning and new patterns of interpretation. This can take place in various settings. Researchers can ask participants to comment on photographs in writing. Photos can serve as the basis for face-to-face interviews, group discussions, and focus groups. In the context of a netnography, photos and videos could be posted online, where they can be commented on, evaluated, and/or altered.

Anna Brake points to several factors that play a relevant role in photo elicitation and are as pertinent to the production of visual materials as to the manner in which the interviews are conducted (2009, p. 376 f.):

  • Photographic material: This material can come from either the researcher or from the people in the investigated field. There, in turn, it can be produced explicitly for the study or be pre-existing (for instance, family or travel photos, profile pictures from Facebook, Instagram, etc.).

  • Interviews: The photographic material can be employed quite differently in the interviews. With a structured approach, the sequence, time frame, and questions are defined in advance. With an open approach, respondents can choose the photographs and the duration of the commentary themselves

  • Social constellation: The inquiry can be conducted in different constellations—in pairs (an interviewer and a respondent) or in larger groups.

  • Media: The visual materials can be displayed in various media—as prints, on a screen, or projected onto a wall. The medium in which the material is produced can also vary—from photos, sketches, journals, or design tasks to film.

  • Text and visual analysis: The comments of the respondents are recorded and transcribed and the transcriptions and visual data are interpreted and analyzed, whereby the relative weight given to text and image-based data can vary.

5.24 Interventions

Ethnography in social science research is interested in the natural environment of foreign groups. As already noted, however, researchers also bring forth the world that they observe and identify. In contrast to descriptive ethnography, design intervenes in and alters situations. Design ethnography is based on iterative steps that cycle between description, interpretation, and intervention:

These include interventionist forms of fieldwork and design that work through iterative cycles of reflection and action, and employ methods and tools such as video feedbacks, scenarios, mock-ups, props, provo- and prototypes, tangible interactions, and various forms of games, performances and enactment. (Otto and Smith 2013, p. 11)

Collaborative approaches such as co-production of a film, joint preparation of a recipe, or participatory design of a prototype are interventions (Pink 2015, p. 7). A design object, after all, does not yet exist during the design process, which is why it cannot be investigated with a conventional ethnographic research approach (Halse 2013, p. 282). The “natural” context in which a new design object will be used cannot be empirically investigated. This is why it is necessary to design prototypes that can be used to intervene in everyday situations. These design interventions can be described broadly as experiments (Hegel et al. 2019), in the sense of open-ended experiments, not those that confirm or refute a hypothesis. Joachim Halse and Laura Boffi speak of “Design Interventions as a Form of Inquiry” and define the method as

a form of inquiry that is particularly relevant for investigating phenomena that are not very coherent, barely possible, almost unthinkable, and consistently under-specified because they are still in the process of being conceptually and physically articulated. (Halse and Boffi 2016, p. 89)

Fundamental design methods such as prototyping and sketching are used to intervene in order to see lifeworld contexts and segments of reality in a new light. According to Friedrich Stephan, designers take on “the role of creatively destroying certainties and seek occasions for disruptions that call for and enable new adaptations” (2010, p. 86).Footnote 11 Gatt and Ingold write that “anthropology-by-means-of-ethnography” is a practice of description while “anthropology-by-means-of-design” in contrast is a practice of correspondence and mediation (2013, p. 144). Barbara Tedlock writes of a development “from Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation” (1991).

5.25 Withdrawing from the Field

Especially during longer and more actively participatory fieldwork, relationships and possibly even friendships between the researcher and the participants develop. There grows a mutual empathy and intimacy. While at the start of the process the researcher may still be an irritant, the participants will have soon become used to him. But every research project must come to a temporal end, at which point the researcher retreats from the field—at least in his role as researcher. If the researcher remains emotionally and socially connected to the people in the investigated lifeworld, this is described as “going native” (Knoblauch 2003, p. 96 ff.). But even where the researcher does not become a “convert” to the group in question, other forms of relationship still arise—for instance, a moral one, as when the researcher has investigated a socially marginalized group and afterwards engages in political activism on their behalf, which may be seen as what César Cisneros Puebla has called “activemia” (2016, p. 173 ff.), a combination of political activism and academic knowledge. Another ethically important point, of course, comes when the researcher publishes about the studied group. In this regard, Roland Girtler recommends sharing the data and texts with the participants prior to publication and discussing them together (2001, p. 128 ff.). The ethical questions raised by the retreat from the field will be dealt with in the next chapter.

5.26 Ethics

In contrast to morality, which is based on socially accepted values and norms, ethics is reflective. It begins at the point where moral concepts are questioned and considered (Luhmann 2008, p. 372). Ethnographic fieldwork gives rise to numerous ethical concerns (Roth and von Unger 2018) that often have to do with various kinds of disparities between the researcher and the participants in the field. While such disparities do not speak against the project at all, still they need to be taken into consideration. The American Anthropological Association advocates the following seven points on the question of ethics:Footnote 12

  1. 1.

    Do No Harm

  2. 2.

    Be Open and Honest Regarding Your Work

  3. 3.

    Obtain Informed Consent and Necessary Permissions

  4. 4.

    Weigh Competing Ethical Obligations Due Collaborators and Affected Parties

  5. 5.

    Make Your Results Accessible

  6. 6.

    Protect and Preserve Your Records

  7. 7.

    Maintain Respectful and Ethical Professional Relationships

Concretely, the ethical questions concern primarily personal rights. In contrast to quantitative research, where reports are based mainly on statistical data, ethnography sketches out people’s lifeworlds. Participants tell their life stories, offer a view into their everyday worlds, and perhaps reveal intimate and embarrassing details. If this information is published, it can harm those involved, which must absolutely be avoided. The issues that are associated with this must be weighed carefully, especially in research with children or people will impaired judgment. Consent must be obtained from parents or appropriate authorities.

An important point concerns the way in which research data is made available to the public. In the case of textual data, there are varying degrees of anonymization. But visual data is different (Pink 2015, p. 67 ff.; Schnettler and Knoblauch 2009, p. 279; Tuma et al. 2013, p. 67 f.): Since people are photographed or filmed, they are identifiable. They should therefore be informed of any publication and give their consent. Sarah Pink recommends involving the people from the investigated lifeworlds in the research process rather than defining them as objects (2015, p. 68).