Michael V. Angrosino

Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research

Introduction Ethnography and Participant Observation What Kinds of Topics Can Be Effectively and Efficiently Studied by Ethnographic Methods? Selecting a Field Site Data Collection in the Field Focus on Observation Analyzing Ethnographic Data Strategies for Representing Ethnographic Data Ethical Considerations Ethnography for the Twenty-First Century

Brain Death and Organ Transplantation: Cultural Bases of Medical Technology [and Comments and Reply]

Les concepts de mort cerebrale et de transplantation dorganes sont ancres dans les traditions intellectuelles occidentales, et lintroduction dune nouvelle technologie correspond a lexistence de principes philosophiques, moraux et religieux

ON THE BUS WITH VONNIE LEE Explorations in Life History and Metaphor

This article discusses the use of life history as a method of ethnographic research among stigmatized, unempowered people. The author describes and analyzes the process of elicting the life history of a man with mental retardation. To combine life history interviewing with the detailed observation of behavior in a naturalistic setting is typical of the ethnographic tradition; interviews with people from marginalized social groups (particularly those who are considered mentally “disabled”) are, however, often decontextualized and conducted in quasi-clinical settings that emphasize the retrospective reconstruction of the life. By treating a person with mental retardation as a contextualized participant in a world outside the clinical setting and by eliciting the life narrative in the course of following that person as he attempts to make sense of life outside the institution, it is possible to clarify the dynamic in the formation of a metaphor of personal identity. This technique might not be appropriate for all persons with mental disability, but when it can be used, it helps to demonstrate the proposition that mental retardation is not a monolithic condition whose victims are distinguished by arbitrary gradations of standardized test scores. Rather, it is only one of many factors that figure into a persons strategy for coping with the world.

Civil Religion Redux

The events of September 11, 2001 have led to a public display of unity unseen for nearly four decades in fractious, pluralistic America. The response could be dismissed as simple reactive patriotism at a moment of crisis, and given the nebulous and attenuated nature of any likely war on terrorism, one might guess that the fervor will be difficult to sustain at the level apparent at this moment. But American patriotism has always been a more complex matter than the stereotype of unthinking, jingoistic flag-waving might suggest. According to the political historian Richard Reeves, writing in the New York Times on October 1, 2001, We are a self-created nation driven to defend our own masterwork. Being an American is not a matter of geography or bloodlines. America is a matter of ideas, the rejection of an Old World standards we thought corrupt. He cites De Tocqueville, who wrote that Americans have been repeatedly and constantly told that they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people, and as a result, they have an immensely high opinion of themselves. This attitude has been contextualized by a variety of social scientists within the concept of an enduring American civil religion. It might be argued that American civil religion became something of a joke in the era of political cynicism associated with Vietnam and Watergate (although it was revived very briefly during the Bicentennial). (See Jorstad 1990 for a more complete analysis of the transformation of the traditional American pieties into what he calls the awakening to peace and justice issues in the 1970s.) It certainly has not been a conspicuous element in the national consciousness during the subsequent decades of increasingly bitter interest-group politics. Social scientists, heir to the positivist traditions of Comte and Marx, accepted as a given the trend of modern societies toward secularization, and hence have grown increasingly impatient with the notion that religion-even a civil one-has any place in a modern polity (Wilson 1998). Nevertheless, troubled people in a secular society may seek meaning and solace in a civil religion in response to the same motives, emotions, and associations that lead people in traditional societies to the standard sacred religions. The historian Joanne Freeman (2001: B6) has noted that in a way no one ever wanted or imagined, the events of this month [September 2001] have taken us back to the mindset of an earlier time, when the American nation was newly formed. It was a time when only a deep and abiding loyalty to the nations founding principles of governance prevented the early Republic from dissolving into civil war. Another historian, Richard Slotkin, reminds us that a society experiencing trauma may come to believe that a certain shocking event upsets its fundamental ideas about what can and should happen. Such a challenge to the authority of its basic values leads people to look to their myths for precedents, employing past experience--embodied in their myths-as a way of getting a handle on crisis (2001: B11). This process, regardless of the form it might take in secularized societies, is a fundamental process of any religious system in any culture. Culture is, after all, more than simple behavior (e.g., patriotic flag-waving). Behavior always flows from a complex of attitudes, beliefs, and values that derive from a common historical tradition. The concept of a civil religion allows us to interpret current behavior-which may appear superficially to be transitory and shallow-in light of historical tradition and values that have historically held meaning in American culture. At the same time, the concept allows for the analysis of particular values and behaviors in the larger context of cross-culturally salient categories of ideology, ritual, and myth-making. For anthropologists trying to get a grip on a huge and somewhat amorphous entity like American culture, the concept of civil religion may be a reasonable point of entree, particularly at a moment in history when the residual commonalities of the culture loom larger than its otherwise more prominent divisions. …

METAPHORS OF STIGMA How Deinstitutionalized Mentally Retarded Adults See Themselves

Narratives produced by the author in extended conversations with mentally retarded adults in noninstitutional settings demonstrate the ways in which even persons with communication deficits can manipulate the formal and stylistic properties of narrative to convey metaphors of their identity and thus function in social interactions.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF MENTAL RETARDATION An Applied Perspective

An ethnography of a group of adults with mental retardation was structured around the collection of life histories. Research procedures are discussed and the impact of the research on policy affecting the delivery of services is analyzed.

The Two Lives of Rebecca Levenstone: Symbolic Interaction in the Generation of the Life History

One of the authors life history informants produced a second published autobiographical account in response to another interviewer. This paper emphasizes the formal differences in the two tellings of the same story, rather than the inconsistencies of content. It does so in order to demonstrate the value of analyzing the dynamics of interview and the symbolic aspects of the interactive setting of the interview as prerequisites for interpreting the data of the life history text.

L'Arche: The phenomenology of Christian counterculturalism

L’Arche is a worldwide network of more than 100 communities designed as places of refuge for people with developmental disabilities. More than just another group home for those with mental challenges, L’Arche sees itself as a counter cultural witness in the midst of secular, materialistic modern society. Grounded in Christian principles but explicitly multicultural and interfaith in operation, L’Arche attempts to demonstrate the possibility of living by alternative values. This article, an exercise in phenomenological inquiry, identifies the philosophical basis for the counter cultural claims of L’Arche and then presents a descriptive analysis of how the L’Arche communities go about putting those claims into action. Modifications in the standard methodology of phenomenological analysis suitable for application to a group such as L’Arche are discussed.

Applied anthropology and the concept of the underdog: Implications for community mental health planning and evaluation

Medical anthropologists have long been involved in health-program evaluation and have studied factors related to program acceptance in target communities. However, assessing the reasons for the success or failure of a program should not be an end in itself, but should be a process that generates guidelines for the development of similar programs elsewhere and more general suggestions about the appropriate roles that applied anthropologists can fulfill. This paper briefly summarizes the research of an anthropological team who investigated the apparent failure of a respite home facility for retarded children in a suburban neighborhood to generate requisite community support. The team was able to develop a series of recommendations in aid of a plan to establish such centers elsewhere in the county, and in the state of Florida as a whole. However, the paper is more broadly concerned with applied anthropological attempts to define the nature of target or client communities and at delineating the appropriate anthropological perspective on health care delivery transactions. New roles for the anthropologist as evaluator will be considered.

Symbolic Leadership: An Interactive Analysis of Caribbean Political Autobiographies

This paper examines the autobiographies of three Caribbean leaders to illustrate the thesis that leadership is a process of dialogic encounter between a leader and his followers. The formal construction of an autobiography is viewed as a symbolic act by which a politician stablishes his worthiness to govern by allowing him to assert that his personal aspirations have come to embody the national aspirations.