Points of Departure: Insiders, Outsiders, and Social Relations in Caribbean Field Research

Abstract

In traditional ethnographies, it is customarily assumed that the field researcher is an outsider who seeks to acquire an insider's understanding of the social world being investigated. While conducting field research projects on education and tourism in Trinidad (West Indies) we found that the standard distinction between insider and outsider became problematic for us. Our experiences can be understood in terms of two competing conceptions of fieldwork. One, rooted in classical ethnography, views fieldwork as a process whereby the researcher learns to translate the cultural practices of a little-known or misunderstood group into terms understandable to the ethnographic audience. The other, growing out of the institutional ethnography approach pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, views fieldwork as a process of mapping the relations that govern an institutional complex. In the latter approach, local experiences provide the point of departure for exploring a wider set of social arrangements. In this article, we treat our own fieldwork experiences as points of departure for a reflexive examination of this alternative ethnographic strategy.

“Home sweet home?” Struggles of intracultural “betweenness” of doctoral fieldwork in my home country of Jamaica

“…On my return to Jamaica, I was greeted by the pleasant tropical weather, family, and friends. But like Grahame and Grahame (), this sense of pure belonging became blurred as I conducted an increasing number of interviews with local residents.…”

“…Grahame and Grahame tell of similar experiences when they left the USA to conduct fieldwork in their home country of Trinidad. To them, “it seemed natural to think of … [themselves] as insider[s]” (, p. 292). But they nevertheless encountered many instances of tensions and were greeted with the surprise of being only partial insiders instead of total insiders.…”

“At-home ethnography”

“…My fieldwork began in a local committee located in the north of Chile and it expanded to extra-local settings in a process of mapping the relations at work in an institutional complex. Thus, local experiences provide the starting point for exploring a wider set of social relations that shape the local setting and which are not evident from the inside (Grahame and Grahame, 2009).…”

“…As my fieldwork continued, I needed to engage with processes happening in the wider society (Grahame and Grahame, 2009), which revealed multiple insides and outsides. This is due to the fact that the ruling relations involve a complex series of locations coordinated to each other.…”

Looking at Whales: Narration and the Organization of Visual Experience

“… 7. “Institutional,” as the term is used here, draws on a conception of institutional order developed by Dorothy E. Smith (Smith 2005; DeVault 2012; Grahame and Grahame 2009). Institutions, in this conception, are not things such as courts, hospitals, businesses, social service agencies, or other kinds of formal organizations.…”