“It’s All Social” or “There is no ‘I’ in ‘Anthropology’”

The Reflex

We anthropologists are meta folk. This should come as no surprise considering that we are a group of people who study…groups of people. Not wanting to be too obvious, the meta does not stop there. Thinking about how we think and studying how we study are deeply ingrained in our approach to work. It has served us well as we hone our ethnographic methods and continues to do so. This is especially true in this moment as technology, the business applications of anthropological theory and method, and a global pandemic force us to reevaluate how we do our work.

The rigorous consideration of the role and the impact of the researcher on their own research is known as reflexivity. (The meta rears its head again as we ponder the meaning of the fact that we are people studying how other people construct meaning). This awareness/obsession is central to the history of anthropology. Since at least the early twentieth century when the likes of Branislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead made ‘participant-observation’ synonymous with ‘ethnography,’ reflexivity was ever-present.

Much as the term participant-observation suggests, anthropologists have always assumed a dual role in our studies. We simultaneously take part in the activities of everyday life alongside those we study (first-person participation), while also absorbing the details of cultural practices, language, space, material culture, etc. with the trained eye (and notebook) of a professional (third person observation). While fieldwork has always been rigorously conducted according to established best practices, it has never achieved anything approaching objectivity. We account for this by being reflexive — our human-ness never leaves us as we study other humans.

In the current moment of lockdowns, travel restrictions, and generally Zoom-enabled lives, it is important for researchers (especially ethnographic researchers) to really crank up the reflexivity. We are eager to see how business anthropologists rise to this challenge. Covid-imposed necessity has accelerated what technology and demands for agility started: conducting research remotely. This is easier said than done, however. One critical implication of remote research — which all researchers would be well-served to remember right now — is that when anthropologists, behavioral scientists, psychologists, sociologists, etc. conduct primary research, their work is always based on the social relationships between research and participants. How we build and maintain these relationships directly affects the information we get and what we can learn.

Social Working

Most people never realize how much subtle effort goes into being social creatures. On the whole, we tend to focus on language when thinking about our interactions with others (consider the fact that ‘he said/she’ said may be the number one cultural cliche when describing subjective nature of experiences). This is especially true in a business context, where transcripts and video clips abridge wider contexts. However, recording and analyzing words gives short shrift to our efforts. Our ability to connect with and understand one another relies upon layers of tone, gesture, relationships (who are we to one another?), purpose (why are we here talking?), values and norms, trust, and even physiology. Below I want to talk about three kinds of work researchers need to make up for when we can’t be there in-person.

Trust Me I’m (Not Only) A Researcher

When I began my career as an ethnographic researcher in business, I was amazed that anyone would talk to me. Not just me actually, that anyone would talk to any researcher. It is more than a little odd to enter a person’s home as a complete stranger in order to ask them questions about cleaning toilets, cooking meals, playing fantasy sports, caring for sick partners, or any of the far-flung topics that I’ve studied. Yet time and time again, people do it…and they let their guards down and open up to me in the process! Why? The cynical answer is that we pay them — which we do. However, that does not explain people’s willingness to tour me through their homes, showing me their rooms and closets, sharing emotional stories about themselves and loved ones, and laughing and crying while doing it.

We talk about the need to “build rapport” in order to bring out this honesty in people. In truth, we simply try to make them see us as a human being connecting with them as a human being. When conducting research in-person, we have a whole range of resources at our disposal to forge these bonds; tone of voice, eye contact, and body language signal interest and openness from us and allow us to gauge others’ interest and openness accordingly and recalibrate when necessary. Sitting in one’s home we have a shared environment filled with objects onto which we can focus our attention and elicit stories. We can also use these objects to contribute our own stories and perspectives, making the interaction an exchange and helping us to find common ground and connection. There are even physiological effects of shared focus and tasks. Studies have shown that strangers engaged in activity together and in close proximity may synchronise their breathing and heartbeats, subtly making them more comfortable and trusting. Not to sound overly dramatic or profound, but on Zoom, there are no shared heartbeats.

Who am I?/Who are you?

As much as we may strive to connect with our participants human-to-human, the fact remains that they recognize that I am a professional researcher talking to them as I do my professional research. This might inadvertently cause a status imbalance between myself and a participant. This is not unusual in our lives. Think about doctor-patient relationships. Though it is changing in the United States, many patients are deferential to their doctors. At times this is good — doctors have specialized knowledge and are often best-equipped to solve our health problems. However, this relationship can also be detrimental if this seeming asymmetry of expertise makes the patient uncomfortable — causing them to doubt or be ashamed of their experience and lie about symptoms, behaviors, or efficacy of treatments. Though the stakes are far lower, a similar dynamic may form between researcher and participant, creating a situation where the latter may not want to share a story or demonstrate how they use a product because they feel they might be judged by me (the expert).

You’d be surprised how quickly this can happen. I remember being in an interview discussing personal care and generally how people make themselves look and feel good for the world. We were talking to a young woman, around 20 years old, about some of her make-up. She was nervous to be interviewed, but excited about the first higher-end products she’d been able to afford on her own because of her job. She was sharing stories about her emotional investment in these items, which helped her feel more adult in the “real world.” Then someone on the interview team, a middle-aged man with a technical background, asked a detailed question…a detailed question about the “helical mount of the bristles on the wand.” Game over. Our participant’s sense of status immediately shifted and she was no longer smart enough to contribute to this chat about mascara. This is why it’s my job to let participants know that however they do or think about things is, by definition, the right way.

To keep the researcher-participant relationship in balance, I like to take inspiration from ideas of interpersonal social capital. Social capital maintains that the possession of certain kinds of resources (such as knowledge or experience) can become a kind of capital in social situations and elevate one’s status in a group. One method or trick in an interview is helping the participant understand that their “expert” knowledge of their everyday behaviors, opinions, beliefs, etc. is a valuable resource which they can exchange for status and appreciation in our interaction. The trick, in truth, is rather mundane. I might begin an interview by assuring the participant that they are the experts in their own lives and that we are there to learn from them. I affirm this with simple engagement cues (e.g., active listening, body language) and mirroring the language of the participant. With some repetition, I can undo any sense that I am an expert (at anything) and my participant can share with me confidently and, hopefully, more freely.

It’s a Genre Piece

Another key part of an ethnographer’s work is to make participants forget they are doing research in the first place — a daunting, if not seemingly impossible task. This idea may seem absurd on its surface, especially given that we are only speaking to one another because they were recruited for a study and I work for a company called Conifer Research. So, why aim for such a fundamentally absurd goal? Well, though we might build trust (through rapport) and build confidence (though status inversion) with our participants, their responses and behaviors are still shaped by socially-driven expectations of how a research interview is supposed to be conducted. This is because the “research interview” is a kind of speech genre¹ with a theme, style, and structure that guides how we interact — effectively limiting what we might share. In short, participants know that: 1) I am going to ask questions, 2) they are supposed to answer them, and 3) there is probably a corporation behind the study who wants to make new stuff that people like better than the old stuff.

We operate within such speech genres all of the time; they provide useful guidance on how to communicate and how to interpret communication in different contexts (consider how the mini-monologue of the ‘elevator pitch’ is going to be taken very differently during a coffee break at a conference than at your great aunt’s funeral). And it’s not just decorum, speech genres affect the type and depth of information we share. Consider the parenthetical elevator pitch above — it’s a great way to quickly convey why a business or investor might want to work with you, but it doesn’t really put you in the mindset to plumb the emotional depths of the journey that brought you to the idea you’re pitching. Similarly, the question-answer-question-answer content and rhythm of an archetypal interview is likely to yield information, but not necessarily empathy.

Genres, and the roles we assume within them, can work to our advantage, so long as we can displace the “research interview” as the guiding structure. By invoking other genres, we shift what Erving Goffman called the “footing” of the researcher and participant.² This provides permission, perspective, and space for the participant to bring us into their world and experience. For instance, within an interview we may go from small talk to home tour to shared activity (e.g., a shop-along, a cook-along, an anything-along). As such the footing might go from strangers getting to know each other to host-guest to collaborators. In self-documented research, we might take this a step further and draw on vernacular genres to put the participant into a particular mindset. We might ask them to write a break-up letter to a product or to film an unboxing video for something they purchased. Each of these genres have culturally recognized components and rhythms to them which can add nuance and depth to our understanding of people’s experiences.

Tool Users, Don’t Let the Tool Overshadow the User

The importance of all this interpersonal work in research has been brought into relief during the pandemic. We are trained to do this work face-to-face, but we have had to reassess in this moment of forced digital research. The temptation may be great for researchers to say “Hey, it’s 2020, we’re just going to do the best we can and get through it.” Yes, this is fine on the surface, but it should not be used as an excuse for less-than-rigorous, “good enough” research. Our increased reliance on smartphones and video conference platforms just means that we need to fire up our reflexivity and think about how technology affects our role as researchers.

The good news is that we aren’t starting from scratch because this is not a new challenge and remote ethnography is nothing new. When I started my job at Conifer Research in 2007, we frequently shipped digital cameras to participants so that they could record themselves without us present. When the smartphone put cameras in nearly every person’s pocket, our jobs became much easier; mobile research platforms made our jobs easier still. However, just because people became comfortable filming themselves and mobile tools were developed specifically for researchers, does not mean our work became plug-and-play. As I hope I’ve laid out here, plug-and-play research makes little sense to an anthropologist.

Still, even when we can return to in-person work we’ll keep using the smartphones and the digital platforms…with nuance and intention. It is when researchers elevate the tool above the interaction, the means before the end, that results can fall short; we are less likely to capture the emotion, personal idiosyncrasies, and the serendipitous discoveries that make for rich data. Worst of all, the data might be plain boring. The reason for this is simple — we give up a lot in remote ethnography when we allow smartphones and video cameras to replace us in the social context of research. We just need to leverage social capital, genre, footing, and much more to make up for that shortfall.

Notes
¹M.M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60–102.
²Erving Goffman, “Footing,” in Forms of Talk (United States: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 124–159.

Written by: Evan Hanover

Evan Hanover is an anthropologist and Director at Conifer Research in Chicago. Please feel free to contact him via LinkedIn to discuss language, research, foraging, photography, or, well, anything really. Conifer Research is a design research consulting firm. Our multidisciplinary teams blend research, strategy and design methods to develop perspective-shifting insights to guide innovation and research teams forward.