Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Key Words
Philosophy; Subjectivity; Reflexivity; Ethnography, Hermeneutics, Expressive
phenomenology
Acknowledgement
We wish to pay tribute to the late Professor Richard Prentice with whom we had
initiated this project shortly before he passed away. We also thank his wife,
Vivien Andersen, for granting us continued access to his papers. Many of
Richards ideas formed the original impetus for this paper and we hope our
development of them does him justice.
As said above, our first concern is with how ethnographies have actually been
used in tourism discourse. The uses of four well-established methodological
approaches for tourism ethnography were analysed in terms of if, and how, the
foci of the method used was discussed, and if, and how, the operationalisation of
these authors methods was fully articulated by other researchers making use of
them. Summary results are shown below in Table 1.
The results confirm our concern. Method was rarely discussed by the users of
these ethnographies, particularly in terms of detailed accounts of its
implementation. We are not asserting that all users should have discussed the
methods of these ethnographies before citing them when the need is to, for
example, simply cite the precedents of broadly similar studies in analogous
contexts. Nor are we, in this paper, casting doubt on the soundness of the
original ethnographic methods developed and subsequently invoked. The focus
of our concern veers towards claims of use rather than acknowledgment of prior
occurrence. Yet the overall picture presented is far from an evaluative profile,
and in consequence our view is that current attention to method is inadequate.
Indeed, the current profile would imply that the findings of ethnographies are
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being used largely irrespective of how they were derived. Our contention is that
this is a misuse of ethnography which needs to be corrected. Quantitative
methods are commonly contested and their findings qualified by their users. We
are simply asking that ethnographic methods be subject to a like academic
scrutiny. In turn, this may require the authors of tourism ethnographies to
engage in reflection similar to the discourse of mainstream ethnography.
The validity of the method is in the creative process and in the insights
produced, with reliability important in identifying the contrasting expressions
produced and their linkage to relived experience, rather than in their replication.
It is the plausibility and relevance to the reader of the expression which makes
personal sensing a hermeneutic phenomenological method of value . This is
similar to the emotional authenticity felt in performances . Equally, as with
design, general principles may be abstracted from expressions made by similar
individuals and these principles, however implicit, underpin shared expression.
These are the experiential structures, or themes, which give shape to the
shapeless from everyday lived experiences .
Serious cultural tourists are similarly flexible, being practiced at what they are
doing . Other than in the comparative transience of their stay at a place,
serious cultural tourists may, in effect, be thought of as ethnographers. Much
depends on the reflexivity and seriousness of engagement ascribed to cultural
tourists and the impact of their shortness of stays on how far this ethnographic
metaphor is appropriate. If it is, cultural tourists may be used as such to form a
basis of shared expression for academic analysis. For cultural tourists located in
Pine and Gilmores educational quadrant, absorption and engagement are
foremost, and these are the true ethnographers among tourists.
to what is felt (presences) in the context of these emotions. It seeks to grasp and
portray presences as a pre-analytical primordial form of knowing before what
Davies calls the analgesic effect of historical illusio modifies, through expressive
representation, that fleeting aesthetic immediacy.
A useful metaphor for the approach is the early twentieth century European
Expressionism artistic genre . The artistic genre sought to primitivise the
representation of urban society, emphasising passion, spontaneity and vitality in
an intensity of expression . As a form of ethnography, expressionism commonly
uses narrative as a medium, recognising narrative to be an active reconstruction
of events and significances, tied together through time by the narrator as a plot,
like artist as painter.
Personal sensing has not been totally ignored in tourism. For example, Lynch
used what he termed sociological impressionism as a method. This is a method
concerned with subjective experience, the spiritual and the emotional self. It
focuses on the intangibles that arise from experience, and attempts to capture a
stream-of-consciousness, and therefore to represent the uniqueness of subjective
experience. Lynch
concentrated on immediate perceptions that acquire
permanency and on impressions which were as near spontaneous as
circumstances permitted. The method seems to be a less formal application of
Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) which has been used in psychology for
twenty years . In the latter method, experiences are recorded by subjects at set
times. Like DES, sociological impressionism requires researchers to focus on
analysing their own experiences. As such, sociological impressionism is a method
of personal sensing, but not one undertaken at fixed intervals, rather recorded on
an opportunist and situational basis.
The difficulty with sociological impressionism is that it has so far focused only on
the expressions of a single individual, rather than seeking shared expressions. It
is unclear how impressions can be any more than a diary or set of notes
produced at the moment of impression, and whether these notes are an accurate
representation of introspection. DES has attracted like concerns. Further, once
written up as an academic paper the author, in effect, converts impressions into
expressions, but without a formal method to record the processing of the
information.
emotions itself simplifies and interprets these into words. All recollections of
experiences, reflections on experiences, descriptions of experiences, or
transcribed conversations about experiences are already transformations of
those experiences . And likewise, Our data are constructed through our
memories of happenings and memories of our informants . Statements such as
these reflect the engagement qualitative methods foster in their users, and that
memory can be reformed given that it is simultaneously situational and
temporal.
We may begin to consider this in relation to our iteration of the notion that the
temporal discontinuity between researchers textual expression of direct
experience in the field can only ever be representations. Time and translation
into textual form mean that expression is not identical with the immediate
impression it claims to represent. This is not simply a matter of time and
techniques or indeed the deployment of stylistic self-authenticating strategies
necessary to comply with the collective verification processes leading to
academic publication . Rather, as Bowie explains, it is a function of the Kantian
notion of an individuals encounter with endless particularity which is then
synthesised within, and enunciated upon, the framework of her or his
subjectivity. As Bowie (1990) goes on to explain, for Kant, it is clear that we can
only know the world as it appears to us via the constitutive categories of
subjectivity, which synthesise sense data. The world as an object of truth is
located in the structure of the consciousness we have of it. Nor, as Bowie
continues (1990, p. 246), relating the implications of Kants notions with later
Niestzchian ideas, these syntheses of individual aesthetic impressions within
expressive frameworks are best explained by their utility for the subjects
purposes rather than their efficacy as representations of truth in any pristine
sense.
In this, initial parallels may be drawn with the work of Althusser who maintained
that the category of the subject is only constitutive of ideology insofar as all
ideology has the function (which defines it) of constituting concrete individuals
as subjects. However, whereas as Jones points out, Althussers notion of
interpellation and Foucaults of subjectification are closely related, they diverged
on whether these took place within, respectively, an over-determined structure of
Marxist historical materialism or a decentred totality. The extent to which the two
thinkers may be used in tandem is, therefore, not so much one of direct
succession but rather one of the creation of the possibility for the critical
development of aspects of Althusserian thought by Foucault. What can be said is
that Foucault rejected the Enlightenment idea that the subject-object relationship
could proceed from anything transcending contingent, ephemeral historical
experience.
to] admit that the selves shaped by modern liberal societies are better
than the selves earlier societies created.
An understanding of the subject positions that generate and, indeed, themselves
become objects of knowledge is central to Foucauldian thought in the grand
histories of systems of epistemology he undertook. Our undertaking in this
article is, clearly, far more modest in terms of theoretical and contextual
application but is framed within broadly similar concerns.
Our view is that ethnography requires the far reaching participation of the
knower, and is thus simultaneously personal and expressive. At the outset we
identified two concerns. The first concern was with the inappropriate use of
ethnography in tourism discourse in which the personal quality of the
ethnographic account as representation is unacknowledged. Our second,
associated, concern was with that of the failure to mirror or to critique changes in
ethnographic method as articulated by anthropologists, namely in the move
towards interpretive-expressive anthropology. Following the analysis of the
tourism ethnographies in this study it is apparent that there is clear dissonance
between the state of the art in terms of ethnographic research in anthropology
and current articulation of that discipline in the contextual domain of tourism
research.
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