From The Peopling of New York City
Contents |
Source Study #4: Participant-Observer Ethnography for a Chosen Ethnic Cultural Institution
Source Study #4 is an exercise in engaging in participant-observer ethnography while visiting a cultural institution (such as a restaurant, grocery store, community center, or church/synagogue/mosque/temple) which draws on your experience with the class visit to Pho Mac.
Objectives
1. To learn how to engage in participant-observer reporting about an ethnic cultural institution.
2. To build a deeper understanding of the chosen community than can be gleaned from statistical information gathered in Source Study #2.
3. To make specific the generalizations made by scholars about the community in the literature identified in Source Study #3.
4. To produce a cultural sketch of the institution and the community to which it belongs.
The Process
1. Identify the cultural institution you wish to visit. This may be done by searching on the internet, in phone books, or by going to the community and looking at the street (while you are there, take pictures to be used later!). If you are trying to locate restaurants, you may wish to use WhereYouEat.com, which can be searched by cuisine.
2. Visit that institution, and record your experience (take notes, take photographs, take video – as long as the latter are appropriate and allowed; ask permission). Consider the questions below as starting points for your inquiry. You may recognize them as variations on the questions we discussed about our visit to a Vietnamese restaurant.
A) How does this institution fit into American culture? What makes it an “American” institution, even while it is also an “ethnic” institution?
B) What about the history and culture of the home country can you discern from the institution itself (including the decor, the staff, the people using the institution, and the materials provided there)? What is NOT represented in the institution as a text that you know to be a prominent part of the community’s cultural and historical experience? What explains the inclusions and exclusions? (Keep in mind that some cultural institutions are self-supporting businesses, and so are concerned about marketing and clientele – staying in business; those which must cater to people outside of their community will have different agendas than those who can survive independently).
C) If it is a restaurant, what sort of food is served? How does this type of food fit into both American restaurant culture and the home country’s food culture? If it is a store, what sort of objects are being sold? How does this type of stock fit into both American shop culture and the home country’s shop culture? If it is a religious institution, what sort of religion is practiced here? What rituals are performed? How does this fit into both American religious culture and the home country’s religious culture?
D) What are the authentic elements of the institution?
E) What are the adaptations to local conditions, including clientele, language, supplies, legal codes, and local cultural norms?
F) Who makes up the “clientele” of the institution? How do they arrange themselves socially and send out markers of identity in their styles of cultural behaviors? How does the institution participate in this process?
G) Look closely at at least one concrete item (a dish in a restaurant, a product in a store, a hymn or prayer or image in a religious institution) – what does that particular object tell us about the historical development of the cultural experience of both America and the home community? Which object best captures the history of the community’s immigrant experience?
H) How do you participate in this institution’s culture? What does it mean when you eat another culture’s food, or buy its products, or attend its services?
I) How does your own culture (especially your own ethnic subculture) represent its history through cultural institutions? What are the cultural practices that your ethnic history holds up as representative? Do you still participate in those practices? Why or why not? Ask the same questions for your community under study.
J) Who in your family (nuclear or extended) is most responsible for the perpetuation of ethnic culture? What is the practice in your study community?
3. Drawing on the answers to these questions, as well as the sources you identified in Source Study #3, write a cultural sketch of the institution and what it tells us about the community you are studying. This should be 2-3 pages long, clearly written, and assume that your reader may know almost nothing about your community.
4. To illustrate your experience, provide video and photographic documentation; these will be uploaded onto your community’s wiki page. Remember, if you take pictures of people, you need to have their written permission to post the photograph on the course website.
5. Start planning for your interviews now – use your visit to the institutions as an entry point into the community, and line up some interviews. Don’t forget that you want your interviews to illustrate variety – both males and females, young people as well as older, etc. The interviews will be due very soon after this assignment, so start working on them now!
The Assignment
What you will hand in as “Source Study #4":
Your working group will submit (jointly) your results from 3 and 4. Results from 4 will be uploaded to your wiki page and captioned.