WRITING

ETHNOGRAPHIC

FIELD NOTES

�[COND [OITION

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WRITING

ETHNOGRAPHIC

FIELD NOTES

UCOND [DIJION

Robert M. Emerson

Rachel I. Fretz

Linda L. Shaw

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS • CHICAGO AN□ LON□ON

ROBERT M. EMERSON is professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Contemporary Field Research: Perspectives and Formulations, now in its second edition. RACHEL r. FRETZ is a lecturer in the Writing Programs unit at UCLA. LINDA L. SHAW is professor in and chair of the sociology department at California State University, San Marcos.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1995, 2011 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011. Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20683-7 (paper) ISBN-10: 0 -226-20683-1 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Emerson, RobertM. Writing ethnographic fieldnotes / Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz,

Linda L. Shaw. – 2nd ed. p. cm. – (Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20683-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-20683-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1.Ethnology-Authorship. 2. Ethnology-Fieldwork. 3. Ethnology­

Research. 4. Acadelnic writing. I. Fretz, Rachel I. II. Shaw, Linda L. III. Title. GN307.7.E44 2011 808' .066305-dc22

2011016145

@ This paper meets the requirements of AN sr/NI so z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To our friend and colleague,

Mel Pollner (1940-2007)

57

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition ix

Preface to the First Edition xiii

Fieldnotes in Ethnographic Research 1

Ethnographic Participation 2

The Complexities of Description 5

Inscribing Experienced/Observed Realities 12

Implications for Writing Fieldnotes 15

Reflections: Writing Fieldnotes and Ethnographic Practice 18

2 In the Field: Participating, Observing, and Jotting Notes 21

Participating in Order to Write 24

What Are Jottings? 29

Making Jottings: How, Where, and When 34

Reflections: Writing and Ethnographic Marginality 41

3 Writing Fieldnotes I: At the Desk, Creating Scenes on a Page 45

Moving from Field to Desk 48

Recalling in Order to Write 51

Writing Detailed Notes: Depiction of Scenes

Narrating a Day's Entry: Organizational Strategies 74

93

173

193

8 243

In-Process Analytic Writing: Asides and Commentaries 79

Reflections: "Writing" and "Reading" Modes 85

4 Writing Fieldnotes II: Multiple Purposes and Stylistic Options 89

Stance and Audience in Writing Fieldnotes 90

Narrating Choices about Perspective

Fieldnote Tales: Writing Extended Narrative Segments 109

Analytic Writing: I n -Process Memos 123

Reflections: Fieldnotes as Products ofWriting Choices 126

5 Pursuing Members' Meanings 129

Imposing Exogenous Meanings 131

Representing Members' Meanings 134

Members' Categories in Use: Processes and Problems 151

Race, Gender, Class, and Members' Meanings 158

Local Events and Social Forces 166

Reflections: Using Fieldnotes to Discover/Create Members' Meanings 167

6 Processing Fieldnotes: Coding and Memoing 171

Reading Fieldnotes as a Data Set

Open Coding 175

Writing Code Memos 185

Selecting Themes 188

Focused Coding 191

Integrative Memos

Reflections: Creating Theory from Fieldnotes 197

7 Writing an Ethnography 201

Developing a Thematic Narrative 202

Transposing Fieldnotes into Ethnographic Text 206

Producing a Completed Ethnographic Document 229

Reflections: Between Members and Readers 241

Conclusion

Notes 249

References 269

Index 283

Preface to the Second Edition

Over the past twenty-five years or so, ethnography has become a widely rec­

ognized and generally accepted approach to qualitative social research. But

ironically, in the years since the publication of the first edition of Writing

Ethnographic Fieldnotes in 1995, the surge of interest in ethnographic writing

we noted at that time seemingly has receded. Sociologists and anthropolo­

gists no longer take up the complexities of representation in ethnography as

frequently as they did in the 1980s and 1990s; they offer fewer considerations

of the nature and effects of writing in ethnographic research than in those

decades, although these issues seem to remain lively concerns in commu­

nity studies and writing programs. But the earlier concern with the pro­

cesses of writing fieldnotes, as opposed to polished ethnographic articles

and monographs, does appear to have made significant marks on the prac­

tice of ethnography: Some ethnographers now publish articles on key issues

and processes in writing fieldnotes, including Warren (2000) and Wolfinger (2002). In addition, and probably more significantly, some ethnographic an­

thologies (e.g., Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont, Lofland, and Lofland's Hand­

book of Ethnography) and qualitative research guides (e.g., Lofland, Snow,

Anderson, and Lofland, Analyzing Social Settings, fourth edition; Warren and

Karner, Discovering Ql!alitative Methods: Field Research, Interviews, and Anal­

ysis, second edition) now provide extended discussions of how to produce

and work with fieldnotes. These developments provide some indication that

X PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

addressing policies and practices for writing fieldnotes is increasingly part

of ethnographic training for many social scientists.

These developments provide part of the motivation for a second edi­

tion of Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. But our own experiences teaching

ethnographic fieldwork to another generation of students played a much

larger role in this decision. As we continued to work with both undergradu­

ate and graduate students in fieldwork courses, we were struck again and

again by the pivotal role that writing fieldnotes plays in introducing ethnog­

raphy and in molding and deepening students' research experiences. And

we remain intrigued by the varieties of writing issues that students have to

grapple with and try to resolve in order to create lively, detailed, and accu­

rate fieldnote depictions of the social worlds they are trying to comprehend.

Teaching in large part from Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes had another

effect: As the result of continuing student questions and confusion, we saw

at close hand some of the limitations in parts of the book. These student re­

actions led us to make changes at a number of points in the text, although

we have tried to retain as much continuity as possible with the first edition.

In particular, we have substantially reorganized chapters 3 and 4 on strate­

gies and tactics for writing fieldnotes to more closely mirror the sequencing

of stages through which beginning ethnographers pass in learning to write

fieldnotes. In these chapters, we deepened our discussion of point of view,

in particular, focusing on the shifts between first and third person as well

as showing the benefits of writing in focused third person. We also clarified

the many ways that fieldnote writing is a kind of narrating, both in creating

a loosely structured day's entry and in composing more cohesive fieldnote

tales within those entries. We have made fewer and less drastic changes in

the other chapters, although we have provided a fuller discussion of the

issues of race, class, and gender as well as the relationship of fieldnotes and

ethnography to broader social patterns and structures. Throughout, we

have updated our references to reflect contributions to ethnographic prac­

tice since the pub Ii cation of the first edition and included new student field­

note excerpts that exemplify our concerns and recommendations.

In terms of the actual substance of these changes, in our teaching we now

place strong emphasis on beginning analysis as early as possible. Develop­

ing theory from fieldnote and interview data is not an easy or straightfor­

ward process and should be started early enough to allow the fieldworker to

look for, find, and write up observations that will advance such analysis. The

new edition reflects these concerns: We now urge writing brief asides and

more elaborate commentaries from day one in the field, one-paragraph sum-

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xi

mary commentaries at the end of each set of fieldnotes, and lengthier

in-process memos within a matter of weeks. We continue to distinguish

these forms of in-process analysis and analytic writing from the full-bore

processes of coding and memo writing that best occur after a substantial

amount of field data has been collected.

We want to acknowledge the help and support of a number of students

from our courses who have contributed feedback on the first edition and/or

fieldnotes that we have incorporated in this second edition. These students

include Diego Avalos, Caitlin Bedsworth, Stefani Delli Quadri, Marie Eksian,

Katie Falk, Christy Garcia, Graciella Gutierrez, Blaire Hammer, Brian Harris,

Heidi Joya, Eric Kim,Jaeeun Kim, Norma Larios, Grace Lee, Nicole Lozano,

Miles Scoggins, Sara Soell, and Jennifer Tabler.

We would also like to thank the following family, friends, and colleagues

for their intellectual and personal support in this project: Bruce Beiderwell,

Sharon Cullity, Amy Denissen, Sharon Elise, Shelley Feldman, Bob Garot,

Jack Katz, Leslie Paik, Mary Roche, Garry Rolison, Bob Tajima, Erin von

Hofe, and Carol Warren.

Preface to the First Edition

In recent years many ethnographers have emphasized the central place of

writing in their craft. Geertz's (1973) characterization of "inscription" as the

core of ethnographic "thick description" and Gusfield's (1976) dissection of

the rhetorical underpinnings of science provided seminal statements in the

1970s. Subsequently, Clifford and Marcus's edited collection, Writing Cul­

ture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), Van Maanen's Tales of the

Field (1988), and Atkinson's The Ethnographic Imagination (1990) have ad­

vanced consideration of ethnographic writing.

Yet examinations of ethnographic writing remain partial in scope: All

begin with already written fieldnotes and move on to examine matters such

as the rhetorical character of these fieldnotes or the more general structure

of the whole, finished ethnographies built up from them. In so doing, they

neglect a primal occasion of ethnographic writing-writing.fieldnotes. Thus,

they ignore a key issue in the making of ethnographies-understanding

how an observer/researcher sits down and turns a piece of her lived experi­

ence into a bit of written text in the first place.

Indeed, most analyses of the "poetics of ethnography" (Clifford and Mar­

cus 1986) take as their subject matter the polished accounts of social life pro­

vided in published monographs. But such finished texts incorporate and are

built up out of these smaller, less coherent bits and pieces of writings-out

xiV PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

of fieldnotes, many com posed long before any comprehensive ethnographic

overview has been developed. Moreover, fieldnotes in finished ethnogra –

phies are reordered and rewritten, selected and molded to some analytic

purpose. They thus appear in very different forms and carry very different

implications than the original corpus of fieldnotes that the ethnographer

produced in the field. In these respects, writing fieldnotes, not writing pol­

ished ethnographies, lies at the core of constructing ethnographic texts.

On the practical methodological level, field researchers have similarly ne­

glected issues of how to write fieldnotes. "How to do it" manuals of field­

work provide reams of advice on how to manage access and relations with

unknown others in different cultures and settings. But they offer only oc­

casional, ad hoc commentary on how to take fieldnotes, what to take notes

on, and so on.1 Field researchers, in general, have not given close, systematic

attention to how fieldnotes are written in particular projects. Nor have they

considered how to effectively train fieldwork novices to write more sensi­

tive, useful, and stimulating fieldnotes. Instead, fieldwork manuals direct

practical advice toward how to work with existing fieldnotes in order to

organize and write finished ethnographies. For example, Strauss (1987) and

his coworkers (Strauss and Corbin 1990) provide detailed treatments of how

to code notes and how to work with codings to produce finished ethnog­

raphies. But this focus on coding assumes that the ethnographer has com­

pleted writing a set of fieldnotes and now faces the task of analyzing, or­

ganizing, and making sense of them. These guides say nothing about how

ethnographers wrote these fieldnotes in the first place or about how they

might have written notes differently. Similarly, three practical guides to

field research-Fetterman (1989), Richardson (1990), and Wolcott (1990)­

devote primary attention to developing and writing finished ethnographic

analyses in ways that presuppose the existence of a set of fieldnotes.

In the past few years, however, some ethnographers have begun to re­

dress this problem, giving serious attention to the nature and uses of field­

notes. In 1990, Sanjek's edited volume, Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology,

brought together a collection of papers written in response to a symposium

call "to examine what anthropologists do with fieldnotes, how they live with

them, and how attitudes toward the construction and use of fieldnotes may

change through individual professional careers" (Sanjek 199ob:xii). The col­

lection includes an extended history of "fieldnote practice" in Western an­

thropology (Sanjek 1990d), as well as analyses of the research and personal

uses and meanings of fieldnotes to anthropologists (Jackson 1990b; Sanjek

1990c; Ottenberg 1990), of fieldnotes as means of describing and represent-

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION XV

ing cultures (Clifford 1990; Lederman 1990 ), and of reading and using others'

fieldnotes (Lutkehaus 1990).

At the same time, Atkinson's The Ethnographic Imagination (1990) began

to examine the textual properties of classic and contemporary sociological

ethnography. Although he focuses on the rhetorical structure of completed

ethnographies, Atkinson does call attention to the importance of analyz­

ing fieldnotes. Emphasizing that at the moment "field notes remain private

documents" unavailable for analysis, he urges the future importance of

close study of "the stylistic features of field notes from particular au tho rs or

sociological schools" (1990:57) and takes an initial step in this direction by

analyzing two fieldnote extracts originally published in Junker's Field Work:

An Introduction to the Social Sciences (1960 ).

Several factors underlie this long-term, if perhaps now dissipating, ne­

glect of ethnographic fieldnotes. To begin with, ethnographers are often un­

easy or embarrassed about fieldnotes. Many seem to regard fieldnotes as a

kind of backstage scribbling-a little bit dirty, a little bit suspect, not some­

thing to talk about too openly and specifically. Fieldnotes seem too reveal­

ingly personal, too messy and unfinished to be shown to any audience. For

these and other reasons, scholars do not have ready access to original, un­

edited fieldnotes but only to completed ethnographies with the selected, re­

ordered fieldnotes they contain. As a result, how ethnographers write field­

notes remains largely hidden and mysterious.

In contrast, later stages of ethnographic writing, centered around pro­

ducing finished ethnographic monographs, are more theoretically driven

and less obviously personal. With a body of fieldnotes assembled, the eth­

nographer withdraws from the field to try to weave some of these strands

into an ethnographic story. At this point, the ethnographer handles field­

notes more impersonally as data-as objects to be studied, consulted, and

reordered in developing a tale for other audiences. The issues and proce­

dures that mark this phase of ethnographic writing-coding, developing

an analytic focus, and so on-are closer to the finished, published product

and, thus, more amenable to presentation to others.

Furthermore, field researchers show no consensus on what kinds of writ­

ing to term "fieldnotes," when and how fieldnotes should be written, and

their value for ethnographic research. These diverse, and at times discor­

dant views of the nature and value of fieldnotes, have stymied self-conscious

consideration of how to write fieldnotes.

In the first place, field researchers may have a variety of different forms

of written records in mind when they refer to "fieldnotes." A recent inven-

xvi PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

tory (Sanjek 1990c) found that ethnographers talked about all of the follow­

ing: "headnotes," "scratch notes," "fieldnotes proper," "fieldnote records,"

"texts," "journals and diaries," and "letters, reports, papers." Hence, there

is wide variation in what ethnographers characterize as fieldnotes. Some

field researchers, for example, consider fieldnotes to be writings that record

both what they learn and observe about the activities of others and their

own actions, questions, and reflections. Others insist on a sharp distinction

between records of what others said and did-the "data" of fieldwork-and

those notes incorporating their own thoughts and reactions. Yet deep differ­

ences also exist between those who emphasize this distinction between writ­

ings about others and writings about oneself: Some view only the former as

fieldnotes and consider the latter as personal "journals" or "diaries"; others

"contrast fieldnotes with data, speaking of fieldnotes as a record of one's re­

actions, a cryptic list of items to concentrate on, a preliminary stab at anal­

ysis, and so on" (Jackson 199ob:7).

Second, field researchers may write fieldnotes in very different ways.

Many compose fieldnotes only as "a running log written at the end of each

day" (Jackson 199ob:6). But others contrast such "fieldnotes proper" with

"fieldnote records" that involve "information organized in sets separate

from the sequential fieldwork notes&