For this week’s post, I would like to build off of Grace’s fantastic post-production from September 24th to offer new insight into the following questions: what purpose does ethnography serve in media studies? What are ethnography’s strengths and weaknesses, and how does this impact its ultimate message? While, like Grace, I don’t have a conclusive answer, my hope is that this post can function as a springboard for others to further this discussion in the coming weeks.

To begin, I feel it is critical to point out that ethnography’s power lies in its localization and contextualization, which is what makes it uniquely equipped to decipher and unpack media studies’ cacophony of information. As the introduction of Media World touches on, technological modernity has both homogenized and divided cultures around the globe, making ethnography’s capacity to understand the “persistence of difference and the importance of locality while highlighting the forms of inequality that continue to structure our world” increasingly important (Media Worlds, p 25). The propensity of ethnographers to “‘work ‘close to the ground’ and at the ‘margins’” provides them with a specialized, contextual knowledge situated in the specific socio-historical environment of interest, enabling them to better identify and interpret the medium’s rhetorical appeals to its imagined audience (Media Worlds, p 24). By forming an intimate relationship with the cultural context while maintaining a necessary distance, ethnography allows anthropologists to engage and contribute to larger discussions concerning media studies, globalization, and cultural imperialism in distinct, nuanced ways.

Interestingly, however, ethnography’s contextualization can also be perceived as one of its largest weaknesses, as it often heavily relies on cultural interpretation. Like all forms of representation, ethnography has the potential to take on some of the value judgements of the anthropologist, as we extensively discussed during on conversation on Mitchel. This presents a number of challenges, as anthropologists are tasked with taking into consideration the motivations, biases and interests of the involved parties while accounting for their own. As Grace pointed out in her post-production, part of how ethnographers are able to do this is through the intense interrogation of the media’s pretext (What was the creator’s intended reaction? How was it received?, etc). However, it is often more difficult to ask those hard-hitting questions, and get painfully truthful answers, from yourself. While those questions are certainly vital to execute a successful ethnographic study and understand the media of interest, all of them could also be asked of the ethnography itself. What is the ethnography’s intended purpose or reaction? What is its goal? How has the author’s own cultural pretext influenced their study and its findings?

As such, ethnography, in many ways, is a precarious balancing act. Although we have frequently framed the discussion around the investigation of the studied media’s motivations and interests, I feel like it is important to remember that ethnography is also a medium and like other forms of media, it is not immune to the influence of context and culture. Simply because one is writing from the perspective of an outsider does not mean they are situated outside of culture’s web. As we continue to engage in these conversations, I will have to get better at keeping this in mind and interrogating all forms of media, including the ethnography itself. See you all in class!