Doing Autoethnography
Do you read my words?
Sketched on the page
And learned of entanglement
Well, here now is my flesh
What say you, as I sing my song?
Where do you belong?
Paul Whitinui (2014)
3.1 Introduction
In the beginning of my work for this Master’s thesis I undertook a lot of preparation. I read a lot and planned my way with a relatively high degree of accuracy. In retrospect, I recognise the vague hints from my supervisor, Britt Kramvig, about letting the way of the research present itself by following my intuitive openness and humility, and letting the different situations materialise and speak to me. The following chapter is a methodological autoethnography on how and why nothing went as initially planned and the valuable educational process that it was for me. The “auto” prefix to ethnography means looking back at myself and comparing my earlier experiences, reflecting upon my own culture and ways of knowing, in comparison to the differences I experienced through fieldwork. By doing so, I believe I have come to ask more questions than resolving answers. The ethnography tries to communicate the messiness inherent in the different ways of knowing nature, culture and academic theories.
3.2 Dynamic procedures
Reading Guba and Lincoln’s (1994) descriptions of the constructionist paradigm led me to Denzin and Lincoln (2018) and their philosophies of qualitative and indigenous methodology in the social sciences. In particular, I liked the way they located the observer in the world through situated activity, and that observer was able to transform that world by making it visible through a set of interpretive, material practices (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018). This perspective argues that the world is represented through a mix of those practices, like writing field notes, making sound recordings, making conversations, taking photos, and so on. This involves an ongoing interpretive process of trying to make sense of what people bring to certain phenomena (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018).
How we interpret phenomena is always perspectival and “facts” are always theory-laden (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2017). Alvesson and Sköldberg (2017) argue that the study of confusing and contradictory empirical material has much to offer that may be both surprising and inspiring. But, to be able to do such studies we need methodologies that go deeper than those of induction and deduction separately. The nomadic process of moving between theory reading, data gathering, in situ reflection and empirical analysis is described by Alvesson and Sköldberg (2017) as “abduction”. It is a reflexive process of both induction and deduction (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2017). This resembles the process I found myself in and I can relate to Haraway (1988) whom reminds me that even if at the end of the journey I ended up in another destination than the one intended, I was still at a specific destination and not at any destination. She tells me it is of importance to describe how I ended up at that specific destination. Which decisions along the journey did I make? What was included and what was not – and why? (Haraway, 1988). It is all about reflecting upon how to balance these aspects to become a researcher attending to the need of situating the knowledge production in which I have participated (Haraway, 1988). Haraway (1988) argues that the disposition of knowledge involves more than reflecting on who the researcher is – it also involves explaining where knowledge comes from in each situation. Thus, we need to know which links and switches are made both in the past and present (Haraway, 1988).
I have a multiple academic background with previous Master’s degrees in biology of resources from the Arctic University of Tromsø and in nature-based tourism from the University of Lifescience at Ås. Both introduced me to ways of knowing how concepts are evolved and agreed upon. Doing natural science, I just had to gather materials, identify and count the individuals to provide others with “knowledge”! I could easily avoid having to attend to politics. Not to my surprise, most of my fellow students in biology felt the same. From such a position, nature was one thing and culture was many possible layers that could be added on top of that nature (Joks & Law, 2017b ). Through my academic training I soon realised that biology, especially ecology, was filled with truths established on faltering scientific grounds. First, I saw that specific species were more abundant in areas with universities teaching biology. Academics had used more time to do research in environments close to home and on aesthetically and politically interesting species. Methods were also questionable in relation to percentage coverage of the totality of species. When models for management and governance where made, some of the species were significant and others not. The whole idea of multispecies management, that Norwegians “bragged about”, was not so “multiple”. The last boxes cracked with Ernst Mayr (1996) asking “What is a species and what is not?” Introducing the concept of sibling species, complex species concepts, genetic divergence and convergence in evolution, and so on, made me realise that not even basic structures that we rely upon in nature management are fixed and they should indeed be questioned.
Reading Guba and Lincoln (1994), and Alvesson and Sköldberg (2017) reflections on how our experience influence us as researchers, made me reflect upon the benefits and implications this earlier academic training provided me. I felt the need to return to Meløe’s (1979) notes in philosophy of science. These have been stuck in the back of my head ever since my first days at university. Inspired by Wittgenstein praxeology, Meløe (1979) reflected upon the relationship between language and landscape. In his notes, he specifically thought about what he called typically questions in the philosophy of science:
What is it that we do when we do something? What do we understand when we understand a statement or an action? What is it that we don’t understand when we do not understand? How can we learn to understand what we do not understand? (Meløe, 1979, p. 1).
He argued that landscape becomes through practice as well as is a concept that the landscape offers. The concept, however, does not exist outside of the practice. A harbour is known through the knowledge about good harbours when you enter with a boat (Meløe, 1979). In chapter later I will build further on these theories with Rudie (1994) and her theories about making sense of new experiences.
3.3 Developing methodology and methods on the move
Tomaselli et al. (2008, p. 348) write about “developing methods as we go” in relational long-term case studies. Place plays a crucial role and must be taken seriously in knowledge-generating work (Kramvig & Førde, 2013). Even though my plans to reach a specific destination got lost in my orientation through mess (Law, 2004), I still reached some destination. A destination I regard to be a new inspiring way of knowing both the challenges of Sámi tourism and the way that entrepreneurs work to build bridges between traditional knowledge and tourism activity. A theoretical destination was made based on inspirations from tourism studies and included a place inspired by feminist and indigenous methodology tied to actor network theories (ANT) that describe the network between both living and non-living actors in the world (Haraway, 1988; van der Duim et al., 2017) – a place that made sense in regard to my ethnographic material as well as academic personal interests.
The case with which I worked was introduced to me by my supervisor. Being an indigenous native to the coastline of Finnmark with fjords, islands and open sea, the tundra was partially different and an unknown landscape – still partially known. We all contribute to the smaller pieces of an incomplete totality. There is no way that I can know Piera’s world as a totality. I can only try to understand and relate to his knowledge and practices through my knowledge and practises, which at the same time is similarly out of reach for him. I will explain this with Rudie (1994) later in this chapter. Yet there is no totality without every single piece. There is consonance and dissonance between the pieces as some are more similar than others and others more different. Ethnographic truths are similarly partial. Being incomplete of the totality, they are still committed to the whole (Strathern, 2005). Making generalisations is not the aim. The aim is to contribute with these small parts, and see where, how and if they fit into a totality (Latour, 2010). There is a constant duality between the parts and the whole that needs to be considered as if we had double vision (Haraway & Teubner, 1990). Winthereik and Verran (2012) suggest that to treat this duality, there is the possibility of identifying figures in our ethnographic material that may work as crucial elements in instrumentalising insights into stories of composition (Latour, 2010), double vision (Haraway & Teubner, 1990) and partiality (Strathern, 2005).
3.4 The indigenous influence on methodology
Denzin et al. (2008) positioned indigenous methodologies at an intersection where theories of interpretive practice, pedagogy and practice meet. This turns the focus towards indigenous inquiry practices, interpretive pedagogies, performance and theories of truth, power, politics, social justice, ethics and aesthetics. In their introduction to critical and indigenous methodologies, Denzin et al. (2008) suggested a good start in designing such research is to look deeper into the relationship between axiology, ontology, epistemology and methodology. Wilson (2001) explained the four aspects that make up an Indigenous research paradigm thus:
One is ontology or a belief in the nature of reality. Your way of being, what you believe is real in the world: that’s your ontology. Second is epistemology, which is how you think about reality. Next, when we talk about research methodology, we are talking about how you are going to use your ways of thinking (your epistemology) to gain more knowledge about reality. Finally, a paradigm includes axiology, which is a set of morals or a set of ethics. (Wilson, 2001, p. 175)
These relations are unique to every indigenous community and, if possible, must be revealed in each case by the researcher (Wilson, 2008). Wilson (2008) put forward a methodological relationship as a separate paradigm in indigenous research. He described the shared aspect of an indigenous ontology and epistemology as relationality – the relationships do not just shape reality; reality is what they are. The indigenous ways of being and knowing differ, and there are no culturally, socially and politically independent theoretical tools that can be used to analyse indigenous knowledge. Scientific theories are also locally embedded in ways of performing knowledge. For the indigenous researcher, the truth is not external or an object being “out there”. Reality forms as a process from the relationship one has with the truth (Wilson, 2008, p. 73), or as Carolan (2009) asked; is there a yes/no border dominating our logic or do we pick multiple sides? Knowledge is relational and shared with every creation in the world as it goes beyond individual knowledge to a relational system of knowledge shared with reality (Wilson, 2008). Indigenous axiology builds upon accountability to relationships. It makes it impossible to separate the researcher from the research and the subject of the research. It is of importance that the interpreted knowledge is respectful of the relationships formed during research. In addition, respect must be paid to that which helped to build the relationship through the research process of information gathering and interpretation . The methodology must contribute to a process that adheres to relational accountability and a healthy relationship with a focus on respect, reciprocity and responsibility (Wilson, 2008). These paradigmatic aspects can be put into practice to support indigenous researchers by choice of research topic, methods of data collection, form of analysis and presentation of information (Wilson, 2008, p. 7). The indigenous research methodology was developed under the considerations that they would participate in the forming of their own knowledge and that this knowledge should be relevant to the societies involved in knowledge-making (Battiste, 2008; Brattland et al., 2018; Denzin et al., 2008). I will expand upon this towards the end of Chapter 4 when I talk about ethical concerns.
3.5 Making sense of common experiences
I was generously welcomed as a verdde. This relationship gave me insights that I believe I would not have gotten being a plain outside researcher. The generosity and care that developed in the space between me and Piera, his family and guests was used to understand the nature of the encounter and the social assumption of me as a researcher in relation to Piera. The sensitivity towards this space was essential for what I learned through verddevuotha and influenced the way my research and my methods changed. I continuously asked: How much of myself do I put in and leave out? As Holman Jones (2005) and Tomaselli et al. (2008) noted, this is a question that I share with other researchers. Throughout the research process I have had an ongoing dialogue with Piera, who became more of a co-researcher than informant. In addition, I had enlightening discussions with my supervisor. Thus, the ethnography also became embedded in the reflection of my own life, culture and practices, which was brought forward through my research and encounters on and around the mountain lodge. In this case, even though I was an ethnographic researcher, I also performed as a tourist in search for something “other” (Tomaselli et al., 2008). Albeit the questions have been different with my being a native of Finnmark, the northernmost part of Sápmi, I have wondered much more about the nature of the differences, than just stating that there were differences and the amounts of it. As such, it is more like looking for “an-other-than-me” than the described “other” in tourism and indigenous research (Franklin & Crang, 2001; Tomaselli et al., 2008). Being Sea Sámi and native to the County of Finnmark means that Piera and I come together through similarities. My neighbours back home are more different to me than Piera, and I especially found common grounds in fishing and driving a traditional wooden boat, but I also found differences. I do not specifically know the inland fisheries with the different species of fish. I certainly do not know reindeer herding and gathering wood for winter. I do not know much of the meahcci of the inland with the spruce and pine woods, mushrooms and reindeer lichen, the big predators and elk. Neither do I know the large lakes and big rivers carving the tundra. We do not even share the length of the days and nights, nor the climate or the number of insects. What we have in common in addition to wooden boats and fisheries, is the endless sight over an open meahcci with endless possibilities. We do have some similar species of the tundra, like the willow and the mountain ptarmigan, cloudberries, lingonberries, blueberries, crowberries, birch, juniper, char and trout. Even though I am not native to this place I would still survive by using my inherited Sámi practices even though they belong to the coast.
In a co-creational performance ethnography, the ethnographer and the informant are “catalysts to each other’s effort to make sense” (Rudie, 1994, p. 29). Rudie’s (1994) view of sensemaking is a process where experience transforms continuously into knowledge. Our learned dispositions intersect with new experiences and are mentally processed to fall into familiar patterns or create new ones. The ethnographer and the informant manage their experiences and make sense along parallel lines. They balance between tacit incorporated practical understanding and verbalised and discussed practices. Interpretations are hence intertwined in a final text. The ethnographer tries to transform the practice into knowledge, but the practitioner’s self-interpretation and sense-making of the experience lie partly “inside” the final text. There is dissonance and consonance throughout the experience, and they will confirm, rearrange or destroy earlier understandings (Rudie, 1994).
The cultural sense-making process into which Rudie (1994) invites us, moves through reflection and representations to language structuring, from tacit experience to common belief to images stored in mind for future practice, to metaphors fit for intersubjective communication, to direct language in speech and writing. Connerton (1989) was specifically concerned with how societies remember and the stabilising effect of body practise and commemorative rituals with inbuilt habit memory. These stabilising forces institutionalise innovation and make improvising increasingly difficult. Especially when memories of a culture are brought forward by reproducing inscriptions rather than through live performance (Connerton, 1989). Rudie (1994) saw this as two sides of the inventive edge that reflect our different experiential positions and interests when trying to make sense. On one side, there is a constant flow of creative practice presenting possibilities of undetected change, and on the other side is the institutionalised innovation. Rudie quoted Ingold (1991) to describe the plasticity and creativity of the process of acquiring culture:
For it is in and through relationships that persons come into being and endure in the course of social life. It might be helpful to think of social relations as forming a continuous topological surface or field, unfolding through time. Persons, then, are nodes in this unfolding, and sociality is the generative potential of the relational field in which they are situated, and which is constituted and re-constituted through their activities. (Ingold, 1991 in Rudie, 1994, p. 31)
From this perspective, Rudie (1994) argued that we can view culture as constantly happening, invented and re-evented. This corresponds to how Meløe (1979) wanted social scientists to develop our glance at the world and realise that forms, like culture, are composed, maintained and decomposed in time.
Situating knowledge plays a part in feminist theories particularly as brought forward by Haraway (1988). Haraway (1988) reminds us that knowledge production is always partial and incomplete and the result of situational practices. Theories are created in relation to place and our thinking evolves continuously as the effect of multiple relationships stretch out in time and space (Haraway, 1988). Kramvig and Førde (2013) argue that situational practices organize and stabilize relationships, they connect and switch – and through these links, realities, knowledge, and models claim different degrees of authority. This follows on from Haraway’s (1988) argument that:
…politics of location, positioning, and situating, where partially and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims of people’s lives. …for the view from a body, always complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the God trick is forbidden. Here is a criterion for deciding the science question in militarism, that dream science/technology of perfect language, perfect communication, final order. (Haraway, 1988, p. 589)
Location plays a crucial role and must be taken seriously in knowledge-generating work (Kramvig & Førde, 2013; Latour, 1986). Through my working process on what politics of location means, as well as through positioning and situating my research project and research vision, I have made myself open to the ambiguity of empirical materials and the complexity of interpretations (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2017; Beard, Scarles, & Tribe, 2016; Denzin et al., 2008; Haraway, 1988). I have also come to realise that the way I view the world as a messy effect of different life and work experience, academic training and engagement in leisure activities. This has affected my nature-culture vision, specifically, the indigenous nature-culture view of the world.