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Ethnographic Reform: A technical turn

Kimberley Coles Law, Culture and the Humanities 2012 8: 398 originally published online 25 November 2010 DOI: 10.1177/1743872110379180 The online version of this article can be found at: http://lch.sagepub.com/content/8/3/398

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LAW, CULTURE AND THE HUMANITIES

Commentary

Ethnographic Reform: A technical turn

Kimberley Coles
Abstract

Law, Culture and the Humanities 8(3) 398408 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1743872110379180 http://lch.sagepub.com

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Redlands

This article explores a recent technical turn an interest in the interrogation of the technical means through which the world becomes and is arranged in ethnographic practice through discussion of three key methodological challenges found in recent ethnographic fieldwork: collaboration, linguistic competence, and temporal immersion. In alliance with posthumanist perspectives and through an interest in the techniques and practices of knowledge production, what at first blush appear as limitations are becoming resources for new sets of questions and approaches. Ethnographic reform requires rethinking the traditional relationships between ethnographer, empiricism and information, and the subjects and objects of data.

Keywords
Techne; ethnographic practice and methodology; actor network theory; knowledge production; epistemology

A technical turn has introduced new subjects and objects of inquiry to ethnography, and has led to renewed epistemic reflexivity within ethnography itself. In the following article, I examine this technical turn an interest in the interrogation of the technical means through which the world becomes and is arranged (e.g., bureaucratic, mundane of mundane, pragmatic, organizational) and discuss its impacts on ethnographic practice. The technical turn in ethnography, which has found affinities with scholarship using Actor Network Theory and/or within Science and Technology Studies, has allowed ethnographers to reinterpret and re-examine their own technical ends and means, those pragmatic tools such as immersion or language acquisition through which ethnographic knowledge becomes. This interrogation of ethnographic tools and assumptions leads to problematizations of ethnography and its ontology and epistemology of data. How then are contemporary ethnographers thinking about data and the data gathering process? What are their relations with knowledge and practices of knowledge

Corresponding author: Kimberley Coles, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Redlands, Redlands, CA. E-mail: Kimberley_coles@redlands.edu

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production, their own and those of their informants? How far are ethnographers from a Malinowskian base, and what methodological and/or analytical innovations have resulted from fitting dear concepts and tools to new configurations of being and of knowing?
Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight.1

Bronislaw Malinowski, in the opening chapter of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), his first widely read work, advances the method of participant-observation. His discussion of ethnography begins with the sentence above, one that seeks to capture the reader into the emotional, pragmatic, and intellectual life of the intrepid anthropologist. Concerned with scientific legitimacy, Malinowski devotes the entirety of the chapter to detailing the principles and techniques of ethnographic fieldwork. He likens his efforts to other scientific endeavors and justifies his discussion of method vis--vis the necessity of transparency of data and data collection to the scientific method. As befits a scientist (and a new field trying to find its place), no one would dream of making an experimental contribution to physical or chemical science without giving a detailed account of all the arrangements of the experiments.2 Ethnography has moved a long way from Malinowskis context. The myth of ethnographic practice as a holistic, objective, neutral science has been shattered, and ethnography has expanded its interpretive arenas and geographic locales. But, ethnographers as a whole, and anthropologists more specifically, still hue closely to his method and the strategies and techniques he championed. Malinowskis formulation of participantobservation as the most effective means to discover and illuminate the natives point of view, his relation to life, and his vision of the world remains strong.3 The Malinowskian method has acted as a steady base for ethnography despite and, indeed, through challenges and critiques. This base is the substance of ethnographys technical character: the tools and techniques through which ethnographers collect data and understand their inquiries. More and more ethnographers, however, are finding that it is difficult to get at the emic perspective embedded deep within the ethnographic sensibility. Rather than understanding the inability to utilize ethnographic tools as disfunction however, the recognition of the limits and vagaries of information and quests for knowledge can open ethnography up to new lines and modes of inquiry. Difficulties in approaching the social as an empirical given are at the heart of the technical turn, and have had wide-ranging, cascading effects on how ethnographers think about the tools by which they attempt to access the socio-cultural. The social and cultural as empirically given has only been challenged relatively recently. Ethnographers in the 1990s were experimenting with novel spaces and topics of work, but, as Bill Maurer argues, few were questioning the form of ethnographic
1. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacic (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1961 [1922]), p. 4. 2. Malinowski, Argonauts, p. 2. 3. Malinowski, Argonauts, p. 25.

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fieldwork.4 Maurer applauds the application of ethnography to new locales, such as the non-geographic or multiply geographic, but he gives an ovation to the destabilization work undertaken by scholarship grappling with societal instability. Dramatic social upheaval led to the collapse of our informants understandings of the world, he argues, but it also undercut the stability of our own taken-for-granted categories of social, political, economic, and legal analysis. Crisis provoked epistemological reflexivity and unseated any ethnographic practice that would claim a privileged closeness to the material, real relations on the ground that traditionally formed anthropologys special claim to knowledge.5 In the last decade, with innovation and experimentation as well as consternation and contention, ethnography has seen more and more of this categorical collapse and epistemological reflexivity as it subjects sense-making and knowledge practices themselves to ethnographic inquiry. In the next sections, I trace some paths that knowledge disruption has taken within ethnographic practice, beginning with disruptions found in the field. I follow with a brief primer of Actor Network Theory, which has assisted ethnographers to rethink and recast information and their relationship to it. Finally, I highlight two works that exemplify innovations in what I have termed ethnographic reform, the technical manner through which ethnographic data becomes and emerges as descriptive and analytical objects.

I. Ethnographic limitations and a deficit framework

Two particular tools of knowledge production dear to the ethnographic heart linguistic ability and temporal immersion stand out as constitutive of ethnographic empiricism. Ethnographers, rightly, often wield them as mechanisms through which new, more intricate and intimate knowledge can be generated in comparison to other social scientific and humanistic fields. In my own fieldwork within a post-war democracy promotion intervention, critics, including ethnographers, used them to explain why international aid workers were ignorant and unable to grasp the reality of the local post-war context. The world of international aid is marked by low local language skills and high professional mobility. Its easy to remark that interventions are often based on superficial knowledge. This is certainly not wrong, as numerous ethnographers have long argued, particularly in relation to colonial and development encounters. There are excellent reasons to demand linguistic excellence and temporal embeddedness in a specific locale, and of course they have long been mainstays of ethnographic practice. Ethnographic authority is still built primarily on the basis of being there. Good ethnography requires both rapport and immersion. In my own early fieldwork interactions, as a novice ethnographer, I naturally dedicated myself to my nascent language skills and to setting up a long-term presence in the community. I soon realized that there was a profound mismatch between my method and my site, and within my larger epistemological frames. The rapport that I was seeking to build relies on temporal, spatial, and
4. Bill Maurer, Please Destabilize Ethnography Now: Against Anthropological Showbiz-asUsual, Reviews in Anthropology 32 (2003), pp. 15969. 5. Maurer, Destabilize Ethnography, p. 167.

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linguistic assumptions, none of which held in my locale. Hypermobile events and informants disrupted spatial and temporal continuities in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina.6 There was little temporal continuity to tap into during my research within the international aid community and their interventions in elections and democracy promotion. It is difficult, even in retrospect, to pinpoint twelve consecutive months in which electoral activities would have been visible. The subjects of international electoral administration simply did not exist in Bosnia-Herzegovina in a continuous period. A traditionallydefined rapport was difficult in the highly mobile and unstable environment. Although called a community, their durable social ties to each other were weak. What exactly formed the basis of this purported international community? Informants would appear for two weeks, six weeks, two months, or six months, and then return to where they came from (i.e., countries in Europe and North America) or move on to another electoral or humanitarian aid project (e.g., South Africa, East Timor, Cote dIvoire, Haiti). Some would return for the next election, others would not. Furthermore, few electoral aid workers could converse at even a minimum level in any of the local languages, in part because of structural commitments to hypermobility. English was the common language used in professional settings, but was the native language of only a small percentage. While many aid workers were fluent or comfortable in English, the range of communicative skills was wide. Neither temporal immersion nor linguistic embeddedness in Serbo-Croatian or the successor languages (i.e., Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian) would assist in the development of the sought-after rapport or in the collection of data, let alone good data. Attempts to infuse new meanings into being there have been partially successful. Although graduate students report that the Malinowskian frame figures prominently in their fieldwork anxieties surrounding the crucial catalyst of rapport, many scholars are now analyzing new ways of inhabiting the field in ways that do not require what Anne Beaulieu has recently called co-location.7 Co-location, an extended period of time in one place, theoretically allows for the incorporation of the researcher into the society under examination, the development of trust and rapport, and thus, the associated truthful and intimate knowledge gained through the process of moving from outsider to insider (as much as possible). When I was in the field on my rather incongruous research trips (19972000), I ran into another PhD student who complained, upon hearing that I was as mobile as my informants, that her advisor wouldnt let her leave her village during her 12 month sentence. When I met her, I was on my way to a conference in Poland having just left the Croatian coast where I had taken some R&R with colleague-friend-informants. While contextually dependent, rapport need not be defined in alliance with temporality and cannot be in cases of distributed or intermittent phenomena. In this students case, she found the villagers more mobile than she! What are the options for intimacy, dwelling, or collaboration as replacements for a temporally and spatially defined rapport? Erica Bornstein and Beaulieu have recently argued for new modes of inhabiting the

6. Kimberley Coles, Democratic Designs: International Interventions and Electoral Practice in Post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 7. Anne Beaulieu, From Co-Location to Co-presence: Shifts in the Use of Ethnography for the Study of Knowledge, Social Studies of Science 40.3 (2010), pp. 45370.

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field.8 Beaulieu proposes co-presence as an epistemic strategy for ethnography as it decenters the notion of space in favor of an expansive interactive field which may include co-location and face-to-face interactions but also incorporates and embraces textuality and inscription, infrastructure, and mediated settings, such as e-research or social networking.9 My concern is how tools such as immersion affect an ethnographers abilities to collect, create, and record data objects. In my research case, it is easy to criticize the international aid community on their language skills or lack of familiarity with Bosnia, and to think that, if only, they knew the local languages better, if only they got to know Bosnia better, then . The same set of anxieties could be cast upon my own ethnographic persona if only I learned Bosnian, then I would really know what was happening, if only I stayed in one place for a long time, I would really understand . This valid critique within some contexts obscures important questions about the dynamics and emergence of knowledge and information. It is thus important to resist the temptation to work within what I term a deficit framework. For example, why (or when) is language not relevant to aid workers? What ideologies or meanings does not-knowing service? What are the limits of information? The ethnographic critique of language can, unintentionally, limit our interpretive ability to understand the dynamics of the social. Their lack of language skills and short temporal tenure are deficits, but only because of ethnographic claims that these tools are important to the process of knowledge production, and ethnography continues to work on enrolling allies into these commitments. Is it possible to focus on what actors dont know rather than on what they do know, or on how they are navigating uncertainty and assembling certainty? If in our quest for the quotidian and lived experience, we are wary of what our informants know and we give weight to ignorance and unintelligibility, what are the implications for interviews, casual conversation, and our own sense of the validity of our data? It means careful attention to how people state fact and wield evidence. What does a fact look like what form does it take? What does evidence look like? Is it form, practice, phenomenology? In the case of my co-presence in Bosnia, I became aware of a disjunction between power and knowledge through fieldwork, in part because I was acutely aware of my own knowledge limitations but realized (eventually) that my quest for knowledge often came up blank. However, I was often in good company. I expected experts to know something, or be striving to learn it. Furthermore, sometimes there was no possibility of definitive information. But there was information that they did not want, did not seek, and/or did not see. Consequently, I began to pay attention to information and knowledge flows and claims, and question my own gathering desires and triangulation tendencies. A danger of triangulation is the quest to really get at the social situation at the expense of seeing how the social is being put together, often haphazardly, across and through scales, elements, and processes. On the surface, wallowing in uninformation is neither efficient nor effective. The ability to gather data in the Malinowskian tradition relies on an ability to communicate and rapport within a community, but also on the assumption that information is out there.
8. Erica Bornstein, Harmonic Dissonance: Reflections on Dwelling in the Field, Ethnos 72.4 (2007), pp. 483508; Beaulieu, From Co-location to Co-Presence. 9. Beaulieu, From Co-location to Co-Presence.

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However, we need to think about the tools that produce knowledge or assist in the production of knowledge, whether it is our knowledge or their knowledge, be they notepads and pens, bureaucratic embeddedness, rapport, sociality, or learning/not learning along with the people inhabiting the field. Having a toolkit is perhaps what is needed being able to pull out an appropriate tool for the situation at hand, and being flexible enough to have a repertoire of tools and techniques at the ready. Using the wrong tool may simply be inefficient or it may lead a researcher down other engaging paths. However, it can also lead to a misunderstanding of the dynamics of everyday life. Mistaking a lack of information as a deficit, for example, (and thus seek out the source of the real information so as to fill in the gaps) may miss a point that these are realities of modernity. The information may not exist, but if it does, it still may not matter and it may not even be missed. The technologies of knowledge production that international actors utilized, for example, rested upon practices deeply inflected with uncertainty, unintelligibility, superficiality and hearsay; what elsewhere I termed gloss.10 Gloss deeply informed international sense-making of both democracy and Bosnias changing relations to democracy. Gloss was part and parcel of the establishment and determination of coherence and reliability, not a bump or obstacle on the road to truth. This approach offers a different lens on information and the relation of ethnographic research interlocuters to information. Maybe they dont have it, maybe they dont want it, maybe they dont have access to it, or maybe they are figuring it out. Perhaps, as Annelise Riles argues, people, such as the Japanese bankers she encountered, sometimes seek to unwind their knowledge in the face of its catastrophic failure.11 They disavow the utility of information, replacing it with, in Riles case, real-time economic machinations. Rather than searching for an empirical reality that may not exist or may not matter, recent ethnographic reforms make possible the embrace of uncertainty and failure, seeing them not necessarily as obstacles but as part of the process of arranging and assembling the social world. They too are ways of knowing. In a moment when information is fetishized and made paramount for claims of modernity, attention to the social and material productions of truth as well as to the limits of knowledge is a commitment to a processual and contingent sociality. The explicit doubling located within the ethnographic move of making explicit the forms and practices of sense-making has led Tom Boellstorff to wonder what a nonsensical analytical anthropology would look like.12 Could a nonsensical analytical anthropology focus on that that doesnt and cannot make sense, such as the noise and intractable unintelligibility described by Jim Ferguson or contemporary wars as described by Carolyn Nordstrom, or engage actively with uncertainty, ignorance, and unintelligibility?13
10. Coles, Democratic Designs, pp. 279. 11. Annelise Riles, Real time: Unwinding technocratic and anthropological knowledge, American Ethnologist 31.3 (2004), pp. 392405. 12. Tom Boellstorff, Crafty Knowledges, PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review 31.1 (2008), pp. 96101. 13. James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Carolyn Nordstrom,

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How might it be possible to analyze moments and situations where either there is no sense to make or where no sense-making is occurring? Fergusons answer is to read the production of noise (i.e., unintelligible signals) as a social practice, arguing in his case, for an ethnographically informed analytic of noise that takes seriously both the fact that signifying actors might have social reasons not to establish a bond of communication but to rupture it, and the way that stylistic messages take on a social significance whether they are understood or not through a social process of construal of the partially unintelligible.14 In the case of international election administration, ethnographic methods can illuminate electoral information, content, and meaning, but they can also probe the productive nature of gloss. Noise, uncertainty, and ignorance were not obstacles to democratic practice, but constitutive of it.15

II.The technical turn

Although often encountered first as obstacles in fieldwork settings, as highlighted in the prior section, issues with approaching the social have transformed into new tools through ethnographic alliances, innovations, and critical perspectives, allowing for a deeper probing of the processes and practices of knowledge production, of the technicality or techne of the research process, and also more broadly toward sense-making. Turns toward technicality have occurred along a few lines, but one of the most influential has been through critical interaction with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and through taking up theoretical and methodological insights developed through Actor Network Theory (ANT).16 Others have generated syntheses of STS and ANT, and I point readers towards them.17 The technical turn in ethnography particularly picks up a few key tenets: 1) the inability to presume the social and thus the need to analyze how the social becomes or emerges, 2) the necessity of not privileging human actors at the expense of non-human actors when analyzing associations and relations, and 3) remaining close to practice and
Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Proteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004). 14. Ferguson, Expectations, p. 210. 15. Coles, Democratic Designs. 16. See Bruno Latours scholarship more generally, but recently, Reassembling the social: an introduction to Actor-network theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 17. Barbara Czarniawska, Commentary: STS Meets MOS, Organization 16 (2009), pp. 155 60; Dave Cowan, Karen Morgan, Morag Mcdermont, Nominations: An Actor-Network Approach, Housing Studies 24.3 (2009), pp. 281300; Ron Levi and Mariana Valverde, Studying Law by Association: Bruno Latour Goes to the Conseil dEtat, Law & Social Inquiry 33 (2008), pp. 80525; Robert Oppenheim, Actor-network Theory and Anthropology after Science, Technology, and Society, Anthropological Theory 7.4 (2007), pp. 47193; Andrew Pickering, Asian Eels and Global Warming: A Posthumanist Perspective on Society and the Environment, Ethics & the Environment 10.2 (2005), pp. 2943; Annelise Riles, A New Agenda for the Cultural Study of Law: Taking on the Technicalities, 53 Buffalo Law Review (2005), pp. 9731033; Mariana Valverde, Authorizing the production of urban moral order: appellate courts and their knowledge games, Law and Society Review 3 (2005). See also The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd edition (2008).

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process. As a (new) ethnographic base, these tenets make new analytics possible and open up spaces for new technologies and actors in the processes of ethnographic research. Posthumanist perspectives, such as those developed in STS and ANT, bring into focus a mutual becoming between the human and nonhuman.18 This posthumanism (also referred to as postsocial) is a shift away from a Durkheimian model of the social as a separate reality that can explain externalities.19 Following precedent from Gabriel Tarde and Ludwik Fleck, posthumanism seeks to undo the basic split, the disciplinary dualisms and divisions of labor, between the world of things and the world of people.20 A postsocial approach thus stresses the erroneousness of a nature/society divide for understanding the world of human interactions.21 Here, we get to the real substance of ANT the interest in interactions, dynamics, becoming, making, processes, associations, assemblages and flows. There is no assumption of stability or externality. Importantly, it does not privilege humans or persons in its study of interactions. Rather, it grants agency to the nonhuman, treating things (e.g., artifacts/artefacts, tools, theories, machines, documents, technologies, devices) as actors in dynamic networks that produce the world and truths about the world. The effect of this recognition of the material are new analytics on the ways in which human and nonhuman actors assemble the world. For example, within legal settings, scholars have begun to analyze legal objects such as the case file, Conflicts doctrine, judicial review, and housing allocation nominations agreements as embedded in actor networks where the legal item or tool is considered to actively interact with and translate information along chains or flows of associations and connections. For each example, the analytical interest is in the process through which knowledge is made, and the role of the object as an actor or mediator in the process of knowledge articulation and agreement. In the case of Conflicts, for example, Riles explains that Conflicts knowledge has taken the form of metaphor. In her essay she traces the transformations of technoscientific metaphors and demonstrates their consequentiality for the rise of Realism and Realist interpretation as truth. She continues tracing how the metaphor of law as a tool literally became a tool itself through subtle transformations in form and performative character.22 If the technical turn invites us to query the actors and associations through which things get done and become known, then it stands to reason that tools should be scrutinized. The character of the tools matter.23 Tools have an agency within the processes and practices of knowledge production. In the traditional domains of STS, these tools and technical matters might be a Bunsen burner, a software database, a Petri dish, a fish tank, or a lab group. In other domains, such as law, a tool might be a theory, a regulatory process, a document, or a territorial/jurisdictional boundary. Tools enable humans to know certain things, and the tools we use determine what and how we know.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Pickering, Eels. Levi and Valverde, Studying Law; Pickering, Eels. Pickering, Eels. Pickering, Eels. Riles, New Agenda, p. 22. Riles, New Agenda, p. 7.

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III. Ethnographic techne

Challenging the form of data and of knowledge production is at the center of new modes of ethnographic inquiry, and this, like all knowledge, is done in tandem with nonhuman technologies. Reflexively then, the technical turn can be applied to the process and practice of ethnography itself, in particular assisting in the rethinking of the epistemological relations between researcher and researched, the objects being researched and their analytical maneuvers, as well as the work that ethnography performs. Traditionally, ethnographers have been cast as those seeking out knowledge. Informants, on the other hand, have long been rhetorically and symbolically set up as those with the knowledge that we want. Not withstanding the consequential critiques of this labeling and its effects, there continues to be an uneasy and uneven relationship in how ethnographers perceive their counterparts despite acknowledgement of multivocality, the processes of exchange and dialogue in ethnography, and the politics of academic/professional authorship. In published articles, most anthropologists characterize those who appear in their texts by social markers such as occupation, gender, age, nationality, and individual identity constructions. However, methods books still use the terms informant and subject liberally. Regardless of genre, a dichotomy is in place between the researcher and the researched, with the effect of minimizing the ability of researchers to account for the analytical work done by the objects of ethnographic inquiry. Recent ethnographic scholarship, however, suggests the productivity of re-evaluating the relationship of informants to knowledge and knowledge production. This new approach arises out of the current epistemic reflexivity within ethnography. This is a reflexivity directed not towards the recognition that one occupies a particular and contextualized subject position, but a reflexivity toward the form and process of knowledge and its production, deployment, and ontology. This allows for a new relation with ethnographys traditional subjects the informants as well as an opening up of the role and place of informants. Ethnography is no longer about a particular group of people and their culture. The centrality of individual and groups remains however; what is shifting is how ethnographers regard their relationship to the social. Are individuals and groups external to the social or a way to access the social and understand how the social comes to be? The difference in these last questions hinges on whether ethnographic informants are considered repositories of knowledge or as knowledge producers. This is the crux of shifts in ethnographic form: how does ethnography relate to knowledge as a process and what attendant effects are there on ethnographic form and practice? George Marcus suggests collaboration as a new trope for condensing a whole complex of new challenges of anthropologys key method, one which references a working relationship with multiply situated subjects on matters, concerns, and projects that reflexively overlap and enjoin subjects and researchers.24 The changing relations between researcher and researched moves beyond the 1980s critique of subjectivity, representation, and overt norms of research practice. Collaboration references a shift from an apprentice, one who acts a basic learner of culture in community life, to a collaborator
24. George E. Marcus, The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthropologys Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition, Cultural Anthropology 23,1 (2008), pp. 78.

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working with counterparts on a shifting terrain of knowledge production where the knowledge may be mobilized into different networks.25 A description of ethno-mining evokes this new ethnographic collaborator. In ethnomining, a joining of ethnography and database mining, researchers and researched engage in iterative and mutual analytic work. As Anderson et al. describe it, ethno-mining co-creates data with participants.26 Analytic entanglement is not an obstacle, but a designed and deliberate exercise in shared interpretive inquiry. In their case, they use semiautomated collection of behavioral data to create a shared artifact data visualization through which meaning can be co-constructed as the researched and researcher interpret together the data visualization. As a result, they create findings in partnership rather than discovering findings, such as personal motivations or individual needs. The data visualization analytic partnership acts as a powerful tool through which the visual representation of quantitative numbers engenders qualities, opening up collaborative conversations on relations and interactions. Anderson et al. tracked peoples interactions with computing devices (e.g., mouse movements, key clicks, application use, device location, etc.) in order to explore the relations between computer usage and temporality. The visualizations created were, in their words, evocative and complex. That is, interpretation was necessary in order to make sense of the colors, density markings, and bars. A decision to leave the data visualization in its rawest state allowed for maximal interpretive space, a space in which narratives could be created through the joint interpretive process. They report that participants and researchers would tack back and forth in trying to find the right perspective to tell a particular story. This interpretive space/ambiguity generated multiple complimentary and competing narratives through looking at a brief segment of a persons busy life via an alternative analytical device. Anderson et al. found that middle class Americans were able to get beyond the dominant and stagnant discourses of being busy through this cojoined analytical practice where each was moved to figure out what the visualization actually referenced. The creation of an alternative space (beyond quantitative minutia and beyond observations and interviews) in which interpretive frames are negotiated and re-negotiated opens up relational possibilities between the traditional researcher and researched, and modifies the form of ethnography. Crucially, ethno-mining re-evaluates who and how knowledge is created by collapsing knowledge production binarisms, whether researcher:researched or data gathering:data production. The work of Chris Kelty in Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software also demonstrates ethnographic reforms.27 Kelty envisions his informants, not necessarily as partners as Anderson et al. do, but at a minimum as interlocutors. His informants are producing analytic and reflective statements; they too are figuring it out. In this way, Kelty pulls together a mixed media collage of ethnographic material with the effect of conceiving and treating informants as knowledge producers rather than as knowledge
25. Marcus, Ends of Ethnography. 26. Ken Anderson, Dawn Nafus, Tye Rattenbury, and Ryan Aipperspach, Numbers Have Qualities Too: Experiences with Ethno-Mining, EPIC (2009), pp. 12340. 27. Chris Kelty, Two Bits: the Cultural Signicance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

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repositories. Ethnographers are not limited to interviews (and concomitant notes or transcriptions), fieldnotes, photographs/video, and documents/policy papers. The communicative and interactive elements interlocutors put together as they navigate their world demonstrate the flux and contingency of knowledge. In Keltys case, his treasure trove of material included digitally archived discussions, flights, collaborations, papers, software, articles, news stories, history, old software, old software manuals, reminiscences, notes, and drawings.28 His geeks were obsessively creating, analyzing, and archiving their roles. This is not unique to geeks however. What are the mediums through which people translate and articulate their interactions as they go about, in concert with other actors, using and producing knowledge? Keltys epistemological reflexivity is an instance of a new order, one that acknowledges and submits to critical inquiry ethnographic knowledge production and the process through which things become. Rather than assuming that things exist and are discovered, Kelty and others are joining together to demonstrate how things emerge and become in open-ended fashions; in this way, fieldwork itself can be viewed as the heterogeneous assemblage that exists prior to a coherent object. As he notes in the Introduction to his ethnography,
the ethnographic object of this study is not geeks and not any particular project or place or set of people, but Free Software and the Internet. Even more precisely, the ethnographic object of this study is recursive publics except that this concept is also the work of ethnography, not its preliminary object. I could not have identified recursive publics as the object of the ethnography at the outset, and this is nice proof that ethnographic work is a particular kind of epistemological encounter, an encounter that requires considerable conceptual work during and after the material labor of fieldwork, and throughout the material labor of writing and rewriting, in order to make sense and reorient it into a question that will have looked deliberate and answerable in hindsight.29

Ethnographic reform, along the lines of Anderson et al. and Kelty, are directed toward expanding the variety and possibility of analytic actors beyond the lone ethnographer.

IV. Figuring the social

Ethnography need not be a method for documenting and analyzing the real, that empirical stuff out there in the real world. More and more ethnographers are discovering and admitting that the social is not out there to find, but is actively figured out and assembled by a heterogeneous group of actors. This suggests that ethnography should not simply seek information, as data is not given but achieved, but be informed by the process of figuring it out. Ethnographic reform as gestured toward here expands analytic opportunities to subjects, a myriad of forms and types of subjects, and is epistemologically reflexive and iterative within analytical space. Ethnographic reform leads ethnographers to overtly recognize the shifting, emergent, and contingent terrain of the real, one that they are enmeshed with rather than external to.
28. Kelty, Two Bits, p. 21. 29. Kelty, Two Bits, p. 20.

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