Confessions of a backyard ethnographer
Posted by Tanja Estella Bosch | 21 May, 2007I've always had methodological aspirations of being an ethnographer (of some kind), though truthfully, the only real piece of ethnographic work I've ever done was my doctoral dissertation. As I plan my research programme for those wonderfully teaching free June/July weeks (yay!), it occured to me that I should reflect a bit on that experience before moving forward in new directions.
This (rather lengthy) post describes my ethnography of a community radio station in Cape Town - referred to here as Radio X. In negotiating the line between insider and outsider, I found a comfortable space from which to "understand and interpret". Given my extensive involvement in the organization that I was studying, a reflexive or narrative ethnography seemed the logical methodological choice.
Taking into account that ethnography is a useful way of explaining how participation is enacted and constructed, these reflections provide a brief description of the ethnography conducted, and in moments of self-indulgent self-reflexivity reflect on the process, particularly the outcomes which led to exclusion from the community, a common but infrequently discussed risk.
Though, since South African radio, particularly community initiatives, remain under-researched, I argue that ethnography still remains a valuable methodological tool to understand it, despite the challenges one will invariably face.
Taking into account that ethnography is a useful way of explaining how participation is enacted and constructed, these reflections provide a brief description of the ethnography conducted, and in moments of self-indulgent self-reflexivity reflect on the process, particularly the outcomes which led to exclusion from the community, a common but infrequently discussed risk.
Though, since South African radio, particularly community initiatives, remain under-researched, I argue that ethnography still remains a valuable methodological tool to understand it, despite the challenges one will invariably face.
When the natives turn against you: Confessions of a backyard ethnographer
Introduction
When I was faced with the prospect of deciding on a PhD dissertation topic in 2001, I made a decision few researchers contemplate: I decided to study what was in effect, my own community. After having worked for several years at a community radio station in Cape Town, South Africa, as both a volunteer and full-time staff member, I was keen to make the radio station the subject of my research.
Given my extensive involvement in the organization that I was proposing to study, reflexive or narrative ethnography seemed a logical methodological choice. In reflexive ethnographies the researcher’s personal experiences are critical to illuminate the culture under study. Reflexive ethnographies range on a continuum - from starting research from one’s own perspective, to confessional ethnographies as described by Van Maanen (1990), where the researcher’s stories of doing the research become the main focus (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). I used “traditional” ethnographic methods to carry out the study; and Tedlock’s (1991) approach of narrative ethnography, to incorporate my experiences into the ethnographic description and analysis of Radio X, with the emphasis on the “ethnographic dialogue or encounter” between myself and members of the group being studied (p.178). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of rhizomes as ‘grass-like,’ heterogeneous entities with multiple entry points and routes rather than roots, I theorized Radio X as a connector and bridging mechanism that impacts the social fabric.
The methodology of my study thus consisted primarily of an ethnography of Radio X, with the researcher as instrument and reflective heuristic device. A qualitative ethnographic approach was essential. As O’Connor (2001) says, anthropologists have generally paid little attention to radio, even though the subaltern populations that are most usually their subjects usually listen to the radio. In general, the field of communication studies has had an ambiguous relationship with ethnography. Participant observation has been used to study the production of newspapers and TV shows, but cultural studies has been more receptive to ethnographic methods. As a few anthropologists became interested in the use of radio and TV by aboriginal people, there is some overlap between their writing and cultural studies, e.g., the work of Eric Michaels (1994) in Australia.
In other words, this study took note of the shift in the 1970s from an emphasis on participant observation to the “observation of participation”, and to concerns with power and praxis and the epistemological doubt associated with the crisis of representation (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). Morley and Geertz (in Murphy, 1999) assert that the value in ethnographic methods “lies precisely in their ability to help us ‘make things out’ in the context of their occurrence – in helping to understand...media consumption practices as they are embedded in the context of everyday life” (p.208). Ethnography sets aside the notion that behavior is rule governed or motivated by shared values and expectations, and maintains that social structures are locally produced, sustained and experienced (Holstein and Gubrium, 1999).
As Huesca (1996) points out in his study of the reporteros populares (people’s reporters) in Latin America, ethnography is a useful way of explaining how participation is enacted and constructed. Much of the literature on communication, participation, and democracy, has been useful for documenting and justifying the move to create more inclusive media systems, but few have pointed out how this participation occurs. This construction of participation is of theoretical and practical importance given the growing interest in revitalizing the relationship between communication, democracy, the public sphere and social change (Huesca, 1996).
Similarly, Hocheimer (1993) moved beyond merely describing community radio stations, and points out that such media structures should be more closely examined. He says inevitable problems need to be addressed where these newly conceptualized media come into being, and as more people start producing information for themselves. Inherent in the difficulties of attempting to establish and maintain democratic media is the problem of defining what constitutes a “communicative democracy” and how to realize one in practice (p.174). Hocheimer raises other potential problems such as: 1) Whether a station exercises any form of gate-keeping or whether it should be a conduit for all who step before the microphone (or perhaps both); 2) What happens when power, or people become entrenched, and when the interest or agendas of newcomers are at odds with those of the
founders; and 3) Whether a station functions to serve its constituent community segments and whether the community acts as resources for the station.
These were the same issues I was interested in exploring at Radio X, since intended practices may not always translate into reality. In particular, I was interested in exploring the fact that the station always claims to serve “the community.”
This article provides a brief description of the ethnography conducted, and in moments of self-indulgent self-reflexivity reflects on the process, particularly the outcomes which led to the researcher being excluded from the community studied, and a common but infrequently discussed risk.
The ethnography
When I was faced with the prospect of deciding on a PhD dissertation topic in 2001, I made a decision few researchers contemplate: I decided to study what was in effect, my own community. After having worked for several years at a community radio station in Cape Town, South Africa, as both a volunteer and full-time staff member, I was keen to make the radio station the subject of my research.
Given my extensive involvement in the organization that I was proposing to study, reflexive or narrative ethnography seemed a logical methodological choice. In reflexive ethnographies the researcher’s personal experiences are critical to illuminate the culture under study. Reflexive ethnographies range on a continuum - from starting research from one’s own perspective, to confessional ethnographies as described by Van Maanen (1990), where the researcher’s stories of doing the research become the main focus (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). I used “traditional” ethnographic methods to carry out the study; and Tedlock’s (1991) approach of narrative ethnography, to incorporate my experiences into the ethnographic description and analysis of Radio X, with the emphasis on the “ethnographic dialogue or encounter” between myself and members of the group being studied (p.178). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of rhizomes as ‘grass-like,’ heterogeneous entities with multiple entry points and routes rather than roots, I theorized Radio X as a connector and bridging mechanism that impacts the social fabric.
The methodology of my study thus consisted primarily of an ethnography of Radio X, with the researcher as instrument and reflective heuristic device. A qualitative ethnographic approach was essential. As O’Connor (2001) says, anthropologists have generally paid little attention to radio, even though the subaltern populations that are most usually their subjects usually listen to the radio. In general, the field of communication studies has had an ambiguous relationship with ethnography. Participant observation has been used to study the production of newspapers and TV shows, but cultural studies has been more receptive to ethnographic methods. As a few anthropologists became interested in the use of radio and TV by aboriginal people, there is some overlap between their writing and cultural studies, e.g., the work of Eric Michaels (1994) in Australia.
In other words, this study took note of the shift in the 1970s from an emphasis on participant observation to the “observation of participation”, and to concerns with power and praxis and the epistemological doubt associated with the crisis of representation (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). Morley and Geertz (in Murphy, 1999) assert that the value in ethnographic methods “lies precisely in their ability to help us ‘make things out’ in the context of their occurrence – in helping to understand...media consumption practices as they are embedded in the context of everyday life” (p.208). Ethnography sets aside the notion that behavior is rule governed or motivated by shared values and expectations, and maintains that social structures are locally produced, sustained and experienced (Holstein and Gubrium, 1999).
As Huesca (1996) points out in his study of the reporteros populares (people’s reporters) in Latin America, ethnography is a useful way of explaining how participation is enacted and constructed. Much of the literature on communication, participation, and democracy, has been useful for documenting and justifying the move to create more inclusive media systems, but few have pointed out how this participation occurs. This construction of participation is of theoretical and practical importance given the growing interest in revitalizing the relationship between communication, democracy, the public sphere and social change (Huesca, 1996).
Similarly, Hocheimer (1993) moved beyond merely describing community radio stations, and points out that such media structures should be more closely examined. He says inevitable problems need to be addressed where these newly conceptualized media come into being, and as more people start producing information for themselves. Inherent in the difficulties of attempting to establish and maintain democratic media is the problem of defining what constitutes a “communicative democracy” and how to realize one in practice (p.174). Hocheimer raises other potential problems such as: 1) Whether a station exercises any form of gate-keeping or whether it should be a conduit for all who step before the microphone (or perhaps both); 2) What happens when power, or people become entrenched, and when the interest or agendas of newcomers are at odds with those of the
founders; and 3) Whether a station functions to serve its constituent community segments and whether the community acts as resources for the station.
These were the same issues I was interested in exploring at Radio X, since intended practices may not always translate into reality. In particular, I was interested in exploring the fact that the station always claims to serve “the community.”
This article provides a brief description of the ethnography conducted, and in moments of self-indulgent self-reflexivity reflects on the process, particularly the outcomes which led to the researcher being excluded from the community studied, and a common but infrequently discussed risk.
The ethnography
Fieldwork was carried out between June 10th and August 31st 2002 while working at the station as a producer of Abantu Abakhulu (The Aged in the Xhosa language), an eight-part, 30-minute series, dealing with health and social issues relevant to the elderly and aging. I also drew on experiences working at the station as a full time programmer during June 1997 and June 1999; and during work at the station in a voluntary capacity during November – December 2000, and July-September 2001. I also spent three months at the station during June – August 2003. During these times I presented programs, facilitated training programs, assisted with scheduling, wrote and edited jingles, studio engineered for some evening programs and facilitated a training course. The primary data-gathering methods during these periods were participant observation and in-depth interviews. During 2004 and 2005 I remained a volunteer, and occasionally visited the station, sometimes to assist with training.
Insider/ outsider dilemmas
While I did not consciously set out to conduct a native ethnography, at some point during my research I realized I was doing exactly that. My knowledge of, and interaction with the field, had made me part of the field. Denzin and Lincoln (2000) describe native ethnography as third and fourth world researchers who share a history of colonialism or subjugation, including subjugation by ethnographers who have made them the subjects of their work.
Many students and interns have passed through Radio X to do research on the station, but the station has never seen the products of this work. These researchers descend on the station with tape recorders, cameras and notebooks then vanish, presumably back to their first world locations, to write up their notes. Neither the notes nor the final products of their academic tourism ever make it back to Cape Town. Many people have told Radio X that the organization or some aspect thereof, is the subject of their theses, but there is no evidence that they were ever completed.
This raises the issue of the origins of ethnography as a methodology for studying the colonized Other, often replicating the existing status quo by reinscribing the continued oppression of groups of people. Though the politics of representation, this increasingly raises issues of who is able to speak on behalf of whom.
As those who used to be the natives have become scholars in their own right, often studying their communities and nations, the lines between participant and observer, friend and stranger, aboriginal and alien are no longer so easily drawn. We now have a notable group of ‘minority’ anthropologists with a range of ambivalent connections to the abandoned and reclaimed ‘homelands’ in which they work. The importance of this ‘native anthropology’ has helped to bring about a fundamental shift – the shift toward viewing identification rather than difference, as the key defining image of anthropological theory and practice (Behar, 1996, p.28).
Thus everyone, particularly management, was enthusiastic when I arrived in June 2002 with the news that I too was making Radio X the subject of my research. The organization seemed to think that finally someone would write something which they could share ownership of. While I was working at the station, a workshop facilitator visiting from the United States brought in an article on Radio X that appeared in The Journal of Radio Studies (Olorunnisola, 2002). Anthony Olorunnisola wrote extensively on the station even though he did not visit the station or interview any staff. Shortly thereafter, the station director sent an email to several people, including myself, saying that since we had direct access to the organization, we should correct this kind of work by writing and publishing in our capacity as staff or volunteers.
One evening during a casual conversation after work, one staff member said to me, “I can’t wait to read your thesis.” The station director has said to me many times that I should write a book on Radio X or that my thesis should be published as a book. I was held responsible for telling the story that no one else had told. I was trusted to produce a tangible product from my interviews as no one else had done. At some point during the research, I was motivated by the words, “I can’t wait to read your thesis.” I kept thinking that if they want to read my thesis, I’d have to write it first! Of course my next thought was, “do I really want them to read my thesis? Will they like what they read?”
The study itself
This raised many ethical issues in terms of how much is disclosed in the final report. When I started the research process I came in from a very critical perspective, almost certain that Bush Radio would be unprepared for my inevitable criticisms of the organization. I had had the benefit of three years abroad in graduate school and I returned bursting with ideas about how the organization should be transformed from my vantage point of theoretical superiority. However, what I found was something completely different. The more time I spent at the station, the more I struggled to find the flaws. Every single day I spent at the station during the research period, something would happen to make me say “wow.” Furthermore, I was determined that my relationship with Radio X would not end when I finished the research. Since I planned to live in Cape Town after graduation I also planned to return to the organization in a voluntary capacity; and indeed I took up the offer to return to the station full-time in 2004 as station manager. As a result, decisions about what to include in the final report became increasingly important.
My dual positionality as insider and outsider, academic researcher and member, was advantageous, yet problematic. Adler and Adler (1987) coined the term “complete member” to refer to this problematic. While no longer employed by the station, I was always introduced to outsiders as an “ex-program manager who is now a volunteer producer.” And even though I assumed the relatively demoted title of volunteer producer during the research period, I was still accorded my old role by those in leadership, particularly because the same people were still running the station when I returned. Leaders confided in me about their hopes for and concerns about the station, and producers frequently requested my help with or advice on their programs.
I found that my rapport with the organization, as the result of having worked there, facilitated interviews considerably. Staff members were briefed on my research during a staff meeting, and everyone was asked to make time for my interviews. I also found that my personal relationships with staff members helped because they were much more open in conversation during the interviews. Even though our conversations were tape-recorded, people appeared comfortable talking with me and frequently referred to shared experiences.
To some extent this may also have been a limitation, because I found that I had to constantly push interviewees for greater detail. Because they assumed that there was a shared understanding about Radio X, they frequently omitted what they believed to be minor details or facts that they assumed I was already aware of (Jackson, 1987). This was also a personal limitation – i.e., because I was already familiar with the organization, I had to guard against asking questions based only on my own experiences there, or my own pre-conceived understandings of the station, lest they limit my conclusions. It is for this reason that I carried out participant observation during the first few weeks of fieldwork, before drafting interview questions, based on notes from these observations. Participant observation was thus used to generate the basic interview questions.
Furthermore, because the station has won many awards, staff members are accustomed to being interviewed frequently by the local and international press. The station has even been the site of several films and documentaries, including an MTV documentary featuring the hip-hop show. I was concerned that this, together with my familiarity with some of the interviewees, could lead to stock positive responses or what Spradley (1979) describes as “translation competence,” i.e., the undesirable tendency of informants to provide “prepackaged, partyline and extra-emic answers to questions” (Agar, 1986).
At the same time I think that former and current volunteers were more open with me during interviews because, in their eyes, I was no longer associated with the station. Many volunteers openly expressed their criticisms of the station in ways that they never do with staff members, and never would have with me had I not been perceived as a researcher or, at the very least, ex-staff member. Another issue that arose during the conducting of interviews was the ownership of these interviews. At some point I became involved in a discussion with some staff members about how poorly organized the archives are and how it is necessary to record a history of the organization. One person suggested that my interviews could fill this gap and that I should make them available to be burnt onto CD and kept in the archive for future reference. Another concern someone raised was that many of the people whom I planned to interview may not be alive in the next decade and that their interviews are important pieces of oral history. At first this seemed an excellent idea – a way for me to complete my research and also to give back something concrete to the station, in the form of contributing toward an oral history archive. However, once I actually started the interviews, I quickly changed my mind as I heard material that could be considered confidential. For example, material in which interviewees make personal comments on each other may not be appropriate for such an archive.
The situation was auto-ethnographic in the sense that I could not completely distance myself from the research or the ethnography as a distant or objective observer. The auto-ethnographic experience is neither here nor there, but betwixt and between, since one is simultaneously insider and outsider, native and foreign, standing “in that undeterminable threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out” (Trinh, 1989, p.418). Occupying the spaces in between also has advantages. As Said writes (in Akindes, 1999, 2), “The essential privilege of exile is to have, not just one set of eyes but half a dozen, each of them corresponding to the places you have been...” (p.48).
Authority and ownership
In a rhizomatic methodological approach, where the on-going deconstruction of binary opposites is key, and things are both this, and not this (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), authority and ownership must be deconstructed. Even in so-called participatory research, the voice of the researcher is usually dominant. This hierarchical, arboric approach means that the researcher is always in authority, and ultimately owns the text.
I intended to invert this with my ethnography through a rhizomatic approach. I hoped to achieve this by writing a text that would be accessible to the members of Radio X, as opposed to one that excludes the very subjects of the study. Furthermore, the text was both accessible and available, as opposed to the many researchers who do dissertation research in the developing world and are never heard of there again. I intended the final project to reflect the voices of the people at the station, and to engender a sense of ownership and empowerment. The final project was a dissertation, but it also a live text that reflects the complex interpersonal relationships and the rich visual impressions that constitute the research process, as well as the station itself.
Conflict
And then it all began to unravel. Perhaps at the point at which I exited the organization, or perhaps at the point at which I re-entered as station manager. Somehow, somewhere along the line, the organization had taken ownership of me and my dissertation. I could no longer be an independent researcher, I was an embedded researcher. While, as mentioned earlier, I found it hard to find the flaws during my dissertation research, they became all too clear to me when I returned as station manager. The dilemma being that while I had written the dissertation, the next step was to try to get it published or to publish chapters as articles.
Differences in management approaches arise out of diverse or conflicting ideas about the purpose and value of community broadcasting (Van Vuuren, 2003). In particular, I clashed on many occasions with the station director on this very issue. While we were in agreement that community broadcasting was to empower the local community, there were disputes as to the exact way to go about doing this. In my opinion, he was a totalitarian leader who was exploiting staff by demanding long work hours for little pay, threatening them constantly, and hurling insults when things did not go according to plan. Furthermore, I believed that the key was to build a sense of agency in the community, and not to treat them as a vacuous mass, in the classic sender-receiver model. The station director model did not believe that funds should be made available for this purpose. I slowly discovered, to my disappointment, that while the organization had huge promise as a vehicle for participatory communication, it was being held back by the person at its head.
Furthermore, I discovered that while others shared my opinions, they would not support me in meetings and that they feared the station director. We were really all puppets on a stage, being controlled by the station director puppet master, and completing an intricate dance for the international funding agencies. Our salaries were constantly cut back, we worked without contracts or benefits, the threat of being fired was constantly dangled before us, and we had absolutely no decision making power. Everything had to be run through the puppet master.
I also started to realize that an intricate process of exclusion limited access to most individuals. It was ultimately up to the puppet master who decided who was to be employed or who was to go on air. He hired family members who under-performed, and on several occasions used us to fire staff, who he then summarily re-hired, as part of building his character of compassion. While the concept of the public sphere does not necessarily imply equal access for all, I found the control by the station director to be particularly exclusionary.
We clashed heads several times in management meetings, and I eventually tendered my resignation, stating clearly that I was leaving because I did not feel that I had enough room to fully carry out my job as station manager. There appeared to be no hard feelings, and I carried on with my research and writing about the station, my friendships with individuals at the station, and my occasional visits and part-time voluntary production work.
Then one day it all finally unravelled. There was word that the station director was using other staff members to spread a rumour that the organization had “sent” me to graduate school (I was a Fulbright scholar). My staff member friends and informants stop returning work related emails and calls; and an agreement to broadcast my students’ radio projects, was summarily ignored. I suspect that requesting my framed diploma was certainly a pivotal point. Faced with the daunting prospect of personalising an office for the first time in my life, in my new position as a research fellow at a local university, I had called the radio station and asked whether, since I was no longer the manager, I might have my diploma back to display in my office. After several months, and a pointed email from myself to the administrator, I was told that I was now part of the Radio X Hall of Fame and that they would like to keep the diploma. Even upon exit from the organization, they felt some sense of ownership because I had once researched them.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I fully immersed myself into Radio X, a process constantly exciting as both researcher and staff member. In negotiating the line between insider and outsider, I found a comfortable space in-between the two, from which to understand and interpret what I was seeing.
Doing a native ethnography in your home city, surrounded by friends who are also colleagues, positions the researcher in a realm very different to that occupied by those early pioneers of anthropological and ethnographic research. Instead, an element of social responsibility emerges as you attempt participatory approaches, try to please your future audience: your academic professors, peers, colleagues and research subjects; and simultaneously attempt to create a product which results in increased understanding of the studied phenomenon via thick descriptions.
In the end, I did the ethnography of Radio X while acknowledging all the while that no blueprint for such a methodology exists; yet creating a product which is both something that selfishly helped me to understand myself and my passion for community radio, as well as a gift that I presented to the station, so that they could see themselves as I did; and hopefully this is still as close enough to a mirror image as anyone can get.
But perhaps it was inevitable that the "natives" would eventually turn against me. After all, one cannot betray one’s friends by turning them into research subjects. Or is it the other way around? Either way, I lost friends (informants?) and the opportunity to participate in what I still believe to be a truly grassroots medium, despite an autocratic leadership structure. Some might say that this was a small price to pay for an award winning (BEA outstanding dissertation award, 2003) PhD dissertation and the anthropological experience of a lifetime. But for the researcher, perhaps what's left is a lesson that one cannot conflate real life with the research setting.
Insider/ outsider dilemmas
While I did not consciously set out to conduct a native ethnography, at some point during my research I realized I was doing exactly that. My knowledge of, and interaction with the field, had made me part of the field. Denzin and Lincoln (2000) describe native ethnography as third and fourth world researchers who share a history of colonialism or subjugation, including subjugation by ethnographers who have made them the subjects of their work.
Many students and interns have passed through Radio X to do research on the station, but the station has never seen the products of this work. These researchers descend on the station with tape recorders, cameras and notebooks then vanish, presumably back to their first world locations, to write up their notes. Neither the notes nor the final products of their academic tourism ever make it back to Cape Town. Many people have told Radio X that the organization or some aspect thereof, is the subject of their theses, but there is no evidence that they were ever completed.
This raises the issue of the origins of ethnography as a methodology for studying the colonized Other, often replicating the existing status quo by reinscribing the continued oppression of groups of people. Though the politics of representation, this increasingly raises issues of who is able to speak on behalf of whom.
As those who used to be the natives have become scholars in their own right, often studying their communities and nations, the lines between participant and observer, friend and stranger, aboriginal and alien are no longer so easily drawn. We now have a notable group of ‘minority’ anthropologists with a range of ambivalent connections to the abandoned and reclaimed ‘homelands’ in which they work. The importance of this ‘native anthropology’ has helped to bring about a fundamental shift – the shift toward viewing identification rather than difference, as the key defining image of anthropological theory and practice (Behar, 1996, p.28).
Thus everyone, particularly management, was enthusiastic when I arrived in June 2002 with the news that I too was making Radio X the subject of my research. The organization seemed to think that finally someone would write something which they could share ownership of. While I was working at the station, a workshop facilitator visiting from the United States brought in an article on Radio X that appeared in The Journal of Radio Studies (Olorunnisola, 2002). Anthony Olorunnisola wrote extensively on the station even though he did not visit the station or interview any staff. Shortly thereafter, the station director sent an email to several people, including myself, saying that since we had direct access to the organization, we should correct this kind of work by writing and publishing in our capacity as staff or volunteers.
One evening during a casual conversation after work, one staff member said to me, “I can’t wait to read your thesis.” The station director has said to me many times that I should write a book on Radio X or that my thesis should be published as a book. I was held responsible for telling the story that no one else had told. I was trusted to produce a tangible product from my interviews as no one else had done. At some point during the research, I was motivated by the words, “I can’t wait to read your thesis.” I kept thinking that if they want to read my thesis, I’d have to write it first! Of course my next thought was, “do I really want them to read my thesis? Will they like what they read?”
The study itself
This raised many ethical issues in terms of how much is disclosed in the final report. When I started the research process I came in from a very critical perspective, almost certain that Bush Radio would be unprepared for my inevitable criticisms of the organization. I had had the benefit of three years abroad in graduate school and I returned bursting with ideas about how the organization should be transformed from my vantage point of theoretical superiority. However, what I found was something completely different. The more time I spent at the station, the more I struggled to find the flaws. Every single day I spent at the station during the research period, something would happen to make me say “wow.” Furthermore, I was determined that my relationship with Radio X would not end when I finished the research. Since I planned to live in Cape Town after graduation I also planned to return to the organization in a voluntary capacity; and indeed I took up the offer to return to the station full-time in 2004 as station manager. As a result, decisions about what to include in the final report became increasingly important.
My dual positionality as insider and outsider, academic researcher and member, was advantageous, yet problematic. Adler and Adler (1987) coined the term “complete member” to refer to this problematic. While no longer employed by the station, I was always introduced to outsiders as an “ex-program manager who is now a volunteer producer.” And even though I assumed the relatively demoted title of volunteer producer during the research period, I was still accorded my old role by those in leadership, particularly because the same people were still running the station when I returned. Leaders confided in me about their hopes for and concerns about the station, and producers frequently requested my help with or advice on their programs.
I found that my rapport with the organization, as the result of having worked there, facilitated interviews considerably. Staff members were briefed on my research during a staff meeting, and everyone was asked to make time for my interviews. I also found that my personal relationships with staff members helped because they were much more open in conversation during the interviews. Even though our conversations were tape-recorded, people appeared comfortable talking with me and frequently referred to shared experiences.
To some extent this may also have been a limitation, because I found that I had to constantly push interviewees for greater detail. Because they assumed that there was a shared understanding about Radio X, they frequently omitted what they believed to be minor details or facts that they assumed I was already aware of (Jackson, 1987). This was also a personal limitation – i.e., because I was already familiar with the organization, I had to guard against asking questions based only on my own experiences there, or my own pre-conceived understandings of the station, lest they limit my conclusions. It is for this reason that I carried out participant observation during the first few weeks of fieldwork, before drafting interview questions, based on notes from these observations. Participant observation was thus used to generate the basic interview questions.
Furthermore, because the station has won many awards, staff members are accustomed to being interviewed frequently by the local and international press. The station has even been the site of several films and documentaries, including an MTV documentary featuring the hip-hop show. I was concerned that this, together with my familiarity with some of the interviewees, could lead to stock positive responses or what Spradley (1979) describes as “translation competence,” i.e., the undesirable tendency of informants to provide “prepackaged, partyline and extra-emic answers to questions” (Agar, 1986).
At the same time I think that former and current volunteers were more open with me during interviews because, in their eyes, I was no longer associated with the station. Many volunteers openly expressed their criticisms of the station in ways that they never do with staff members, and never would have with me had I not been perceived as a researcher or, at the very least, ex-staff member. Another issue that arose during the conducting of interviews was the ownership of these interviews. At some point I became involved in a discussion with some staff members about how poorly organized the archives are and how it is necessary to record a history of the organization. One person suggested that my interviews could fill this gap and that I should make them available to be burnt onto CD and kept in the archive for future reference. Another concern someone raised was that many of the people whom I planned to interview may not be alive in the next decade and that their interviews are important pieces of oral history. At first this seemed an excellent idea – a way for me to complete my research and also to give back something concrete to the station, in the form of contributing toward an oral history archive. However, once I actually started the interviews, I quickly changed my mind as I heard material that could be considered confidential. For example, material in which interviewees make personal comments on each other may not be appropriate for such an archive.
The situation was auto-ethnographic in the sense that I could not completely distance myself from the research or the ethnography as a distant or objective observer. The auto-ethnographic experience is neither here nor there, but betwixt and between, since one is simultaneously insider and outsider, native and foreign, standing “in that undeterminable threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out” (Trinh, 1989, p.418). Occupying the spaces in between also has advantages. As Said writes (in Akindes, 1999, 2), “The essential privilege of exile is to have, not just one set of eyes but half a dozen, each of them corresponding to the places you have been...” (p.48).
Authority and ownership
In a rhizomatic methodological approach, where the on-going deconstruction of binary opposites is key, and things are both this, and not this (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), authority and ownership must be deconstructed. Even in so-called participatory research, the voice of the researcher is usually dominant. This hierarchical, arboric approach means that the researcher is always in authority, and ultimately owns the text.
I intended to invert this with my ethnography through a rhizomatic approach. I hoped to achieve this by writing a text that would be accessible to the members of Radio X, as opposed to one that excludes the very subjects of the study. Furthermore, the text was both accessible and available, as opposed to the many researchers who do dissertation research in the developing world and are never heard of there again. I intended the final project to reflect the voices of the people at the station, and to engender a sense of ownership and empowerment. The final project was a dissertation, but it also a live text that reflects the complex interpersonal relationships and the rich visual impressions that constitute the research process, as well as the station itself.
Conflict
And then it all began to unravel. Perhaps at the point at which I exited the organization, or perhaps at the point at which I re-entered as station manager. Somehow, somewhere along the line, the organization had taken ownership of me and my dissertation. I could no longer be an independent researcher, I was an embedded researcher. While, as mentioned earlier, I found it hard to find the flaws during my dissertation research, they became all too clear to me when I returned as station manager. The dilemma being that while I had written the dissertation, the next step was to try to get it published or to publish chapters as articles.
Differences in management approaches arise out of diverse or conflicting ideas about the purpose and value of community broadcasting (Van Vuuren, 2003). In particular, I clashed on many occasions with the station director on this very issue. While we were in agreement that community broadcasting was to empower the local community, there were disputes as to the exact way to go about doing this. In my opinion, he was a totalitarian leader who was exploiting staff by demanding long work hours for little pay, threatening them constantly, and hurling insults when things did not go according to plan. Furthermore, I believed that the key was to build a sense of agency in the community, and not to treat them as a vacuous mass, in the classic sender-receiver model. The station director model did not believe that funds should be made available for this purpose. I slowly discovered, to my disappointment, that while the organization had huge promise as a vehicle for participatory communication, it was being held back by the person at its head.
Furthermore, I discovered that while others shared my opinions, they would not support me in meetings and that they feared the station director. We were really all puppets on a stage, being controlled by the station director puppet master, and completing an intricate dance for the international funding agencies. Our salaries were constantly cut back, we worked without contracts or benefits, the threat of being fired was constantly dangled before us, and we had absolutely no decision making power. Everything had to be run through the puppet master.
I also started to realize that an intricate process of exclusion limited access to most individuals. It was ultimately up to the puppet master who decided who was to be employed or who was to go on air. He hired family members who under-performed, and on several occasions used us to fire staff, who he then summarily re-hired, as part of building his character of compassion. While the concept of the public sphere does not necessarily imply equal access for all, I found the control by the station director to be particularly exclusionary.
We clashed heads several times in management meetings, and I eventually tendered my resignation, stating clearly that I was leaving because I did not feel that I had enough room to fully carry out my job as station manager. There appeared to be no hard feelings, and I carried on with my research and writing about the station, my friendships with individuals at the station, and my occasional visits and part-time voluntary production work.
Then one day it all finally unravelled. There was word that the station director was using other staff members to spread a rumour that the organization had “sent” me to graduate school (I was a Fulbright scholar). My staff member friends and informants stop returning work related emails and calls; and an agreement to broadcast my students’ radio projects, was summarily ignored. I suspect that requesting my framed diploma was certainly a pivotal point. Faced with the daunting prospect of personalising an office for the first time in my life, in my new position as a research fellow at a local university, I had called the radio station and asked whether, since I was no longer the manager, I might have my diploma back to display in my office. After several months, and a pointed email from myself to the administrator, I was told that I was now part of the Radio X Hall of Fame and that they would like to keep the diploma. Even upon exit from the organization, they felt some sense of ownership because I had once researched them.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I fully immersed myself into Radio X, a process constantly exciting as both researcher and staff member. In negotiating the line between insider and outsider, I found a comfortable space in-between the two, from which to understand and interpret what I was seeing.
Doing a native ethnography in your home city, surrounded by friends who are also colleagues, positions the researcher in a realm very different to that occupied by those early pioneers of anthropological and ethnographic research. Instead, an element of social responsibility emerges as you attempt participatory approaches, try to please your future audience: your academic professors, peers, colleagues and research subjects; and simultaneously attempt to create a product which results in increased understanding of the studied phenomenon via thick descriptions.
In the end, I did the ethnography of Radio X while acknowledging all the while that no blueprint for such a methodology exists; yet creating a product which is both something that selfishly helped me to understand myself and my passion for community radio, as well as a gift that I presented to the station, so that they could see themselves as I did; and hopefully this is still as close enough to a mirror image as anyone can get.
But perhaps it was inevitable that the "natives" would eventually turn against me. After all, one cannot betray one’s friends by turning them into research subjects. Or is it the other way around? Either way, I lost friends (informants?) and the opportunity to participate in what I still believe to be a truly grassroots medium, despite an autocratic leadership structure. Some might say that this was a small price to pay for an award winning (BEA outstanding dissertation award, 2003) PhD dissertation and the anthropological experience of a lifetime. But for the researcher, perhaps what's left is a lesson that one cannot conflate real life with the research setting.
But South African radio, particularly community radio, remains under-researched, and ethnography still remains a valuable methodological tool to understand it, despite the challenges one will invariably face.
References:
Adler, P. & Adler, P. (1987). Membership roles in field research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Agar, M. (1986). Speaking of ethnography. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Akindes, F. (1999). Methodology as Lived Experience: Rhizomatic Ethnography in Hawai’i. Diegesis: The Journal of the Association for Research in Popular Fictions. No.5 Winter.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.
Denzin, N. & Lincoln, Y. (2000). Handbook of qualitative research. Sage Publications, Inc: Thousand Oaks, California.
Hocheimer, J. (1993). Organizing democratic radio: Issues in praxis. Media, Culture and Society, 15(3).
Holstein, J. & Gubrium, J. (1999). Phenomenology, ethnomethodology and interpretive practice. Strategies of Inquiry.
Huesca, R. (1996). Participation for development in radio: An ethnography of the reporteros populares of Bolivia. Gazette 57 (1), 29-52.
Jackson, B. (1987). Fieldwork. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Michaels, E. (1994). Bad aboriginal art: Tradition, media and technological horizons. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.
Murphy, P. (1999). Media cultural studies’ uncomfortable embrace of ethnography. Journal of Communication Inquiry. Vol.23, No.3.
O’Connor, A. (2001). The mouth of the wolf: Anthropology and radio. Available online at http://www.ourmedianet.org/eng/om2001/ica2001.html
Olorunnisola , A. (2002). Community radio as participatory communication in post-apartheid South Africa. Journal of Radio Studies. 9(1).
Spradley, J. (1979). Participant observation. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
References:
Adler, P. & Adler, P. (1987). Membership roles in field research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Agar, M. (1986). Speaking of ethnography. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Akindes, F. (1999). Methodology as Lived Experience: Rhizomatic Ethnography in Hawai’i. Diegesis: The Journal of the Association for Research in Popular Fictions. No.5 Winter.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.
Denzin, N. & Lincoln, Y. (2000). Handbook of qualitative research. Sage Publications, Inc: Thousand Oaks, California.
Hocheimer, J. (1993). Organizing democratic radio: Issues in praxis. Media, Culture and Society, 15(3).
Holstein, J. & Gubrium, J. (1999). Phenomenology, ethnomethodology and interpretive practice. Strategies of Inquiry.
Huesca, R. (1996). Participation for development in radio: An ethnography of the reporteros populares of Bolivia. Gazette 57 (1), 29-52.
Jackson, B. (1987). Fieldwork. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Michaels, E. (1994). Bad aboriginal art: Tradition, media and technological horizons. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.
Murphy, P. (1999). Media cultural studies’ uncomfortable embrace of ethnography. Journal of Communication Inquiry. Vol.23, No.3.
O’Connor, A. (2001). The mouth of the wolf: Anthropology and radio. Available online at http://www.ourmedianet.org/eng/om2001/ica2001.html
Olorunnisola , A. (2002). Community radio as participatory communication in post-apartheid South Africa. Journal of Radio Studies. 9(1).
Spradley, J. (1979). Participant observation. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Tedlock, B. (1991). From participant observation to the observation of participation: The emergence of narrative ethnography. Journal of Anthropological Research 47:69- 94.
Trinh, T. (1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism; Bloomington:; Indiana University Press.
Van Maanen, M. (1990). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. N.Y: State University of New York Press.
