Material Practices of Ethnographic Presence

Abstract

Ethnographic research is a thoroughly material matter, but the involvement of material things in performing ethnographic methods is hardly investigated. Referring to my own research in various fields of digitalized work, I offer a reflexive analysis of the material production of ethnographic presence. In particular, I reflect on how clothing, field notes, and a camera contribute to making ethnographic research noticeable for and accessible to participants. Taking a practice theory perspective, the article conceptualizes ethnographic presence as a situated performance based on the dramaturgical and embodying contributions of material things. My analysis challenges the idea of openness as an ideal of research ethics that could be realized independently of the material and situated circumstances of fieldwork. It also shows that the material making of ethnographic presence offers particular methodological benefits including epistemic partnerships, insights from staged behavior, and the facilitation of ethnographic data collection.

Practices of Ethnographic Research: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…The contributions to this Special Issue examine a variety of practices of knowledge production that are typically not framed as a matter of method (e.g., practices of establishing ethnographic presence or writing scholarly papers, cf. Laube 2020, Schindler/Schäfer 2020). In doing so, the contributions expose the gap between doing ethnographic research and explicating a very narrow set of practices as “methods.”…”

“…Stefan Laube (2020) highlights three material practices of establishing presence in the ethnographic field: changing costume, jotting notes, and sharing a camera. He shows how these routines constitute a practical and material accomplishment of overt ethnography, discusses their epistemic potential, and connects them to recent debates on materiality and reflexivity in ethnographic research.…”

Humour and Comedy in Digital Game Live Streaming

“…This necessitated – in my case – a dual engagement with the online and the offline components of the practice. This took place through observations of streamer and viewer behaviours on the platform for several hundred hours as a Twitch viewer myself – hence both ‘belonging to a scientific community and a local community of participants’ (Laube, 2021: 61) – as well as studying the behaviours and presentations of streamers and viewers alike at almost a dozen in-person events in several countries, interviewing over 100 professional and semi-professional streamers, engaging directly with Twitch as a company, and triangulating data via a range of other sources (primarily gaming news outlets and their coverage of Twitch events and issues). Although scholars often then subsequently draw upon a ‘triangulation’ of data such as observation, interviews and other kinds of information, and although my previous publications on Twitch have used both interviews and other sources of data, here I focus specifically on observational findings.…”

Everyday Ritual and Ethnographic Practice: Two Cases Showing the Importance of Embodiment and Reflexivity

“…The act of writing about the ritual as it took place would have created distance between us and the other participants, so we each made the decision not to take notes during the rituals. This was the first of many decisions we had to make about our level of participation in the ritual activities and how it affected others’ perceptions and our own observations (Laube 2021). As we argue in this article, this decision has implications for our analysis: first, by prioritizing participation in the ritual, our field notes likely were not as specific and potentially were shaped by lapses in memory or recall bias.…”