How anthropology can help your story soar
“Wow, these ethnographic research techniques of anthropologists could take what I have practised as a journalist and really take it deeper–take it to the next level.”
-Ted Conover, Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author (hear the quote)
If ethnographic methods are so useful to journalists, then why do so few reporters know about ethnography?
Panellist Ted Conover answers it to a degree in his article “Slow journalism: a letter to ethnographers,” saying:
The number of journalists interested in ethnography is not large. Conducting ethnographic field work takes time, and journalists seem to have less of it than ever before…Then there are things ethnographers typically do that journalists normally don’t. Including seeking approval from an IRB, masking the identities of people and places, and aiming for an academic audience rather than a general one.
But I actually think this jumps the gun, assuming journalists already know enough about ethnography to (incorrectly) determine it would take too long and be too academic to employ in the newsroom.
In short, anthropology shows how the details of life interact in a holistic perspective. It does this through contextual frameworks on which to hang the seemingly scattered details of life and culture. Within anthropology, ethnography is the study of culture. “Ethno” from Greek, meaning culture, and “graphy” meaning writing.
But journalists simply don’t come across ethnographic methods on their own at all unless someone does something to present them in a digestible format.
Someone like the three award-winning journalists who joined me in conversation about anthropology and journalism, courtesy of Gather.
A bottom-up approach
“It just seemed there was so much there that might be useful to a journalist…” says Conover, in the Gather Lightning Chat, going on to say how he wears the ethnographer’s hat at the same time as the journalist’s. Why?
One big reason is it counters the top-down approach of much of the information distribution at the moment. Panellist John Pendygraft explains how anthropology’s consideration of context (including past in the present) is one way. Negating power dynamics and developing rapport with sources are others. Panellist Gillian Tett suggests we go on the anthropologist’s three-part journey (mirrored in Tett’s excellent book Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life): Make the strange familiar; make the familiar strange; and listen to social silences.
Just as ethnography encourages a bottom-up approach, I’ll introduce you directly to these ideas from a worm’s-eye view, via panellists’ on-the-ground examples. Let’s start with Conover’s perfect set of chompers.
I have all my teeth
When Conover was researching for his book Cheap Land Colorado: Off-gridders at America’s Edge, a source expressed surprise that Conover had all of his teeth.
People look at the world through a different framework than you do–which sounds obvious, and yet it’s a very human thing to believe our perspective is ubiquitous–until you immerse yourself in an “alien” environment. This is how to make the strange familiar. In addition to learning about another group, you’ll learn about yourself: “The single best way to understand yourself is to jump out of your own skin and look back at yourself from someone else’s vantage point,” says Tett.
But, as a journalist, immersing yourself in a group different from yours means you may be reaching people who are not typically consulted by a reporter. “There’s an awful lot of suspicion,” says Conover.
Pendygraft suggests countering the me-have-questions-you-have-answers power dynamic by empowering collaboration. Meet on their home turf, let silences sit, and be less of an expert inquirer. Ease your questioning tone with phrases like: “That’s more of a ballpark than a question, what does that put in your head?” and “What does this topic make you think about?”
Tett also suggests asking open-ended questions, bookending her interviews with:
“What are the top issues around this theme that you’d like to tell me about?” and “Is there anything that I’ve not asked you about that you think is important, or anything that I should have asked about that would be more important?”
Conover advises making opportunities to circle back to someone–a common ethnographic method. Talking to them again shows you’re not in it for a quick hit. It allows you to ask questions informed by other sources’ replies and puts an apprehensive source at ease since now they get more than just one chance to be understood. Show you’re listening; remember their name and what they were talking about last time. “They’ll offer you more,” says Conover.
To combat suspicion, Conover says, “I decided the best thing to do might be to see if I could be helpful to them.” So he departed from strict journalistic objectivity when researching his book Cheap Land Colorado, and volunteered for a group that helps prairie people survive the winter. Like anthropologists, volunteers for this group needed to develop rapport. He did this by asking sources: What do you need? What are you thinking about? What are you worried about? “Once you give them credit for doing something difficult they can see that you’re not there to judge them,” he says. By positioning the prairie dwellers as teachers, he even learned about himself, notably how he doesn’t usually think about having all of his teeth.
As you can see, immersing yourself in the “strange” can help with making the familiar seem weird (the second part of Tett’s suggested anthropological journey).
Tett admits she didn’t remember this when writing about Brexit, extrapolating her own feeling and perspective that the British public would vote to stay in the EU. She largely only interviewed those who shared her worldview, which resulted in Tett calling the vote wrong. But she didn’t let that happen twice…
Pro wrestling
When it was time to report on the 2016 presidential election, Tett jumped into the unfamiliar. She flew to America, spoke with Trump supporters, and immersed herself in their worlds.
“For the Trump campaign… I tried to go back to my anthropology roots… and as a result, wrote a series of columns that Trump could win.” This, says Tett, was such an unpopular view at the time that her columns ran in the weekend cultural section of the FT because it went in direct opposition to what her colleagues were saying in the rest of the paper.
In her book Anthro-Vision, Tett explains how she got a tip that working-class Americans largely knew Trump’s brand from professional wrestling. So she attended a wrestling match and was struck by the parallels between wrestling and Trump rallies. She could clearly see how the performative style of wrestling had been transported into a political campaign and how Trump supporters didn’t treat his actions and words literally but instead as pieces of performative signaling. The “educated” elite (including many journalists), on the other hand, couldn’t spot this split. Instead, they took his “uneducated” utterances literally and (wrongly) assumed this display of being “unfit” for the position would keep him out of power.
“When I look back at my journalism career, the times when I got things more right is when I tried to re-remember my anthropology instinct and think again about social silence, and not social noise,” says Tett.
In Anthro-Vision, Tett writes, “the media is at its best when journalists focus on the silence, rather than just the noise.” In her book, she gives the example of Trump using the word “bigly” in his first presidential debate, and the newsroom laughed. “When [journalists] chuckled at Trump’s use of the word ‘bigly,’ they sometimes did so because they scornfully assumed that his seeming (mis)use of language showed he was unfit for office,” writes Tett. Where the laughter was the noise, the reason for the laughter was the social silence. Most journalists assumed that the American public shared their view that a command of language was a prerequisite for gaining power–when it wasn’t.
An egg with a history
“The present is an egg laid by the past that has the present in its shell,” says Pendygraft, quoting anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston.
“What anthropology does that journalism often doesn’t…is it’s longitudinal, but being longitudinal doesn’t have to take a year,” says Pendygraft. He encourages journalists to take a page from ethnography and embed the past in the present, “and it’s amazing it doesn’t take much time,” he says.
“They were going to redevelop a stadium that had displaced a community in the ‘80s,” he says of his former newsroom. “And the media covers it like ‘the stadium deal,’ whereas an anthropologist would view it in context of the community that is no longer there…where it has had a huge impact on vulnerable communities,” says Pendygraft.
You can embed the present into stories about issues but also into your interviews through a process of allowing the source to tell you the questions. One way is to use an origin story to place somebody in their present without creating a singular narrative that can be damaging. “Instead of you having the ten questions… you let them pick the points of their narrative, or at least have a process where you try to do that–in anthropology that’s all we do,” says Pendygraft. Ask them about their origin story with questions like: What was your first pet? When did you have kids? Who is a big influence on your life?
Playing dominoes
When it comes to writing the story, try to communicate information that might not be obvious to your readers’ interests using what Tett calls the domino theory.
You need loyal readership for commercial reasons, sure. But you can pull audiences in and still introduce them to a wider lens on a topic. Tett explains this is like dominoes: They have two pieces, and the numbers don’t have to be the same. Find one half that matches someone else’s interests, and once you’ve connected, give them the other half. “Pull them in with what they think is familiar and then hit them with something completely different,” says Tett, who leaves it up to you to determine the familiar and strange here.
Further Reading
If you’re inspired to explore the anthro-journo nexus more deeply, some of the panellists’ publications related to this topic are listed below. And for even more practical applications see anthrojourno.org.
- Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep, by Ted Conover
- Cheap Land Colorado: Off-gridders at America’s Edge, by Ted Conover
- “Slow journalism: a letter to ethnographers,” published in Frontiers Sociology, by Ted Conover
- Lost Storytellers: The Information Apocalypse in the Modern Newsroom, by John Pendygraft
- Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life by Gillian Tett
- “Clinton, Trump and the ‘Dirty Lens’ Problem,” published in The Financial Times, by Gillian Tett
Emily Kennedy is the founder of AnthroJourno.org, an online resource for journalists on how to use ethnographic methods in their reporting. Previously, Emily worked as a magazine senior editor and EIC, as well as an instructor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. She earned a degree in Anthropology from the University of Victoria, and a Masters in Journalism from Carleton University.
