講題
Industrial-Scale Ethnography: An Unfinished Project in Search of a Team
主講人
Dr. John McCreery
Ph.D. in Anthropology, Cornell University;
Visiting Professor at Institute of Anthropology, National Tsing Hua University
時間
2017年3月13日（一）上午10點至12點
地點
本所新館2319會議室

摘要
This paper begins with a remark from Clifford Geertz, who observes that while anthropologists discover insights in microscopic settings, they cannot be validated there. Their value will be determined in larger conversations. The polar opposite is what, adapting another concept from Geertz, I label “Ethnographic involution,” the study of smaller and smaller topics, impoverishing anthropology as a whole.
There is, however, a middle ground, exemplified in such works as Ted Bestor’s Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (2004) or Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), where the anthropologist combines first-hand experience and ethnographic sensibility embracing local detail with historical and multi-sited research to illuminate large topics.
This paper describes three projects in which I myself have been engaged. The thread that connects them is the inspiration provided by the Manchester School case method, embodied in the work of Victor Turner. All three grew out of efforts to follow Turner’s model: (1) begin with social structure, (2) examine social dramas, (3) closely examine the symbols in which conceptual conflicts and contradictions are linked to emotionally charged sensory experience.
The first was in Puli, where the author conducted his first fieldwork, intending to study Chinese religion and ritual, and found himself overwhelmed by the richness and complexity of what he discovered. Forced to be selective, he found himself unable to collect the kind of data required for Turner’s steps (1) and (2). Instead, he was given a unique opportunity and, following scientific practice, isolated the topic of what became his dissertation, the material grammar of Daoist ritual.
The second was a book about Japanese consumer behavior that rejects the stereotyping implicit in arguments about “the Japanese.” Adopting an approach that might be labeled “piggy-back” ethnography, it draws on the free-wheeling research conducted by an advertising agency think tank. The anthropologist’s collaborators, his key informants, are the think tank’s researchers. The artifacts examined are examples of an internal newsletter that presents the results of their research. The social structures and social dramas are those resulting from Japan’s post-World War II emergence as the world’s second largest economy. The symbolism analyzed is that of the words and imagery found in that newsletter.
The third is a new project, announced in 2008, and still underway. This project combines social network analysis of credits data from a major advertising annual, ethnographic interviews with key industry figures identified by that analysis, and historical research using the wealth of data provided by the Japanese advertising industry’s trade press. So far, the results are interesting, but the lesson is clear. This project is far too large for a single, independent scholar, working on his own, to complete. I need a team. My problem is how to recruit one.
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