Points of Departure: Insiders,Outsiders, and Social Relations in Caribbean Field Research |
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Authors: | Peter R Grahame Kamini Maraj Grahame |
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Institution: | (1) Division of Social Sciences and Education, The Pennsylvania State University (Schuylkill), 200 University Drive, Schuylkill Haven, PA 17972, USA;(2) Social Sciences, School of Behavioral Sciences and Education, The Pennsylvania State University (Harrisburg), 777 West Harrisburg Pike, Middletown, PA 17057, USA |
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Abstract: | In traditional ethnographies, it is customarily assumed that the field researcher is an outsider who seeks to acquire an insider’s
understanding of the social world being investigated. While conducting field research projects on education and tourism in
Trinidad (West Indies) we found that the standard distinction between insider and outsider became problematic for us. Our
experiences can be understood in terms of two competing conceptions of fieldwork. One, rooted in classical ethnography, views
fieldwork as a process whereby the researcher learns to translate the cultural practices of a little-known or misunderstood
group into terms understandable to the ethnographic audience. The other, growing out of the institutional ethnography approach
pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, views fieldwork as a process of mapping the relations that govern an institutional complex.
In the latter approach, local experiences provide the point of departure for exploring a wider set of social arrangements.
In this article, we treat our own fieldwork experiences as points of departure for a reflexive examination of this alternative
ethnographic strategy. |
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