Ethnography is a relatively new concept to me. I heard the term used for the first time in my first-year seminar, an introductory Anthropology course, last winter. For me, learning about ethnography was one of the few things that was entirely new to me last year. It was different than anything I had ever done before in an academic setting. It wasn’t simply a much more complex variation of the subjects that I learned in high school like virtually all of my other classes were. Learning about the basis of anthropology and how anthropologists study people, events, and cultures in a qualitative manner was certainly eye opening for someone like me – someone who, having gone to a science and technology focused high school, was consistently taught to value concrete, quantitative data more than anything else. There is so much more to the world than tables and graphs, and discovering ethnography allowed me to discover how people systematically, and, yes, scientifically (or social-scientifically), study these other, less “concrete” parts of the world.

Although I have never practiced ethnography before, I am excited about its potential to contribute to the experience that we have with our Nicaraguan hosts during the CCESP trip this year. Conducting ethnography, mainly via oral history interviews, will allow us to work collaboratively with the local people when we are in Siuna, helping us avoid one of the potential pitfalls – an ignorant, imperialistic approach – of what some certainly consider “voluntourism.” These interviews will allow us to rid ourselves of some of the assumptions that we go into the trip with because we are Americans that have a certain way of thinking deeply ingrained in us. According to William Schneider in chapter 3 of “The Nature of Interviewing,” “an interviewer and an interviewee who come from different backgrounds and have different experiences…may not share common assumptions.” This means that both parties must work collaboratively to establish exactly what they mean when they say something. Through this interviewer-interviewee collaboration, cross-cultural interviewing allows us to see what real people really think about their own cultures, lives, and situations. This insight will allow us to help them with what they feel they need most. These interviews will allow us to see completely real accounts of things that may otherwise be distorted or entirely ignored by the American mainstream media (which would basically be our only source of information about people from other cultures without ethnography). The precision of the descriptions obtained from an interview is much greater than any number or statistic derived from any sort of multiple-choice questionnaire written by people who probably don’t even share many assumptions with the population in study.

Along with the great power of ethnography, even though not always entirely evident, comes a slew of ethical issues associated with the concept of cross-cultural interviewing for the sake of documenting a certain culture. This is something that I am sure I will be incredibly worried about when trying to figure out how to respectfully interact with Nicaraguan people. I will be worried about if I truly have the right to share anything they tell me and with whom I have the right to share it with. I will be worried about if I am even getting everything they say right. I will be worried about some of their stories translating back to English imperfectly, distorting their meaning and misrepresenting the views of the locals. I will be worried about asking loaded questions that evoke skewed answers. Most of all, I will be worried about the things that I will not get an honest answer about when I ask about them – things like emotional discomfort. I am honestly concerned about how I will navigate conversations that may make the interviewee feel emotionally uncomfortable, since most probably will not tell me about anything that I say that may somehow offend them or may be making them feel uncomfortable, of respect for me, or embarrassment for themselves. I am excited and I am worried – we will see how I will deal with jumping out of my comfort zone so much in just about a month now…

Update: After interviewing Professor Raúl Bueno for my oral history project, I would like to confirm that transcribing interview conducting in Spanish for an English-speaking audience is incredibly difficult, as understanding the nuance of spoken Spanish is much, much different than simply understanding written Spanish, as someone who is not a native Spanish speaker. If you are interested in seeing this interview, you can watch it on the “Oral History” page.