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- Convenor:
-
Hariz Halilovich
(RMIT University)
- Stream:
- Digital/Virtual
- Location:
- A208
Short Abstract:
Ethnographers have been increasingly challenged with finding new ways to study digitally-mediated human relations and experiences. This panel offers a robust discussion on a variety of perspectives, approaches and understandings involving ethnography in virtual, digital and multimedia environments.
Long Abstract:
Coming from a long tradition of a holistic research approach, ethnographers have been increasingly challenged with finding appropriate ways to study new forms of technologically-mediated human relations and experiences. In an age when identity performances, place-making, mobility and connectivity have expanded from physical to also include virtual space, researching almost any contemporary socio-cultural phenomenon is likely to involve elements of both conventional and digital ethnography, or 'on-site' and 'on-line' fieldwork. Understood as the process and methodology of doing ethnographic research in a digital space—'whereby the digital field site is sometimes comprised of text, video or images, and may contain social relations and behaviour patterns strewn across many nations, cities or intellectual geographies' (Cyborg Anthropology, 2011)—digital ethnography has become a new 'cool tool' and an approach yet to be fully conceptualised and embraced. Rather than proclaiming the end of ethnography as we have known it, and seeing digital ethnography as an alternative to or evolution of the conventional ethnographic approaches, contemporary ethnographers who have put up their virtual tents in the midst of cyber villages argue that its epistemological remit remains much the same and treat it foremost as a logical extension of the existing ethnographic traditions: from Malinowskian to multi-sited ethnography (Murthy 2008, Halilovich 2013; 2014). This panel offers a robust discussion on a variety of perspectives, approaches and understandings involving ethnography in virtual, digital and multimedia environments.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Berna Yazici (Bogazici University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper builds on my fieldwork with individuals who grew up under state care in residential homes in Turkey. Explaining the research process where I continually had to switch between on-line and on-site ethnography, I demonstrate how digital and conventional ethnography define and refine each other.
Paper long abstract:
This paper builds on my ongoing fieldwork with individuals who grew up under state care in residential homes in Turkey and their associations which aim to promote group solidarity and fight against the social discrimination which impinges on both the institutional and post-institutional lives of those under state care. I reflect on how conducting research with young people in an age where identity-making and activism has extended into the digital space, social media ethnography emerged as central to my research. Concurring with perspectives which refuse to see digital ethnography as an alternative to conventional ethnography, my methodological discussion focuses on the articulations of the two. Explaining the research process where I continually had to switch between on-line and on-site ethnography, I demonstrate how digital and conventional ethnography define and refine each other. The discussion offers an analysis on this relationship between on-line and on-site ethnography by tracing its relevance at multiple stages/components of the research, including the very formulation of the research question, establishment of rapport and field relations, getting access to informants etc.
Hariz Halilovich (RMIT University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on multisided and digital ethnography, this paper discusses the ways refugees in diaspora use ICT and the internet in the contexts of their new emplacement and home-making practices. The paper shows how ICT enables them to reclaim their identities and create ‘cyber villages’.
Paper long abstract:
Based on multisided and digital ethnography, this paper discusses the ways Bosnian survivors of 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide use ICT and the internet in the contexts of new emplacements and home-making practices. In the process of adopting the internet as their preferred medium of communication and re-connection with the members of their shattered communities, many of the refugee groups have been able to reclaim, reimage and reimagine their 'erased' local identities by creating vibrant 'cyber villages' as an alternative to the places lost. Usually starting as an individual exchange of scanned photographs, documents and other records between people coming from the same place or neighbourhood, many such grassroots initiatives have grown into sophisticated portals and online repositories of documents, images and stories about local places. Some of the places destroyed during the 1990s Bosnian war now only exist in cyber space and as a part of the digitally mediated social relations of those who identify with the lost places.
As with the groups described in this paper, for many refugees, cyber space and digital social networks do not only act as an extension of the places and networks in real space, but often their replica and the only possible alternative. Hence, when it comes to research into contemporary forced migration, I advocate for a 'mixed ethnography' approach integrating elements of both conventional and digital ethnography—or 'on-site' and 'on-line' fieldwork—and interpreting 'sites' and interactions in cyber space in relation to actual places, issues and actors in real space.
Geoffrey Hobbis (University of Groningen)
Paper short abstract:
Looking at human-computer interactions holistically, on-site and on-line, this paper enquires into the multiplicities of human experiences with (digital) information-communication technologies and media in rural and urban Solomon Islands today.
Paper long abstract:
For most of its history the noosphere - the geological epoch of human cognition - of the Solomon Islands has been in the immaterial form of oral traditions. Material tracings of such thought exist in the limited work of folklorists, the archeological record and some modes of communication such as 'talking drums' and conch trumpets which continue to this day. This has radically changed with the introduction and recent widespread accessibility of digital technologies, especially but not only in the form of mobile phones. By using an object-centric approach to all media - digital and analog - collected in Gwou'ulu Village, Malaita, and in the capital city, Honiara, during a one year period of ethnographic fieldwork the purpose of this paper is to examine the human-computer interface holistically looking at on-line and on-site experiences with digital culture in Solomon Islands today. In this context I will specifically discuss the methodological implications of 'on-line only' and/or 'on-site only' ethnography in comparison to a grounded netnographic approach. I argue that the advent and rapid adoption of digital communication technologies in the Solomon Islands represents an explosion of data relevant to any seemingly 'on-site only' research. It constitutes an imperative on the part of researchers to look at the world through the heterogeneity of experiences with digital information communication technologies and media. The digital divide is not one gulf to bridge but a nuanced and complex "zomia" of chasms particular to the context being studied.
Richard Allen (Indiana University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will seek to explore the differences between the offline and online versions of a debate about the Hunger Strike of 1981. The paper will focus on one Republican website and try to show both how the internet has shaped the debate and its importance for Folkloristics.
Paper long abstract:
In 2005 a debate erupted concerning the 1981 hunger strike in Northern Ireland, in which one person alleged that six of the ten men who died could have easily been saved. Since then, the debate has raged both offline and online and whilst it has cooled down recently, nothing has been resolved. The internet has been instrumental to the development of this debate and has given people near and far access to both official documents related to the strike and access to community discussions or conferences in which the topic has been discussed. It would not be outrageous to suggest that without the internet, the debate would not look anything like the way it currently does.
This paper seeks then to explore the ways in which the online debate differs from the offline one. It will focus primarily on the debate as it appears on Republican.ie, a popular Irish Republican website, and the ways in which the users engage with both each other and the material related to the debate. At the same time, there will be a discussion about the ways in which the debate has taken place offline and how the internet has been important in not only shaping the offline debate, but also in keeping the debate alive in general. It is hoped that this paper will not only show how the internet was a key to the debate, but also how folklorists need to pay more attention to the way the online and offline interact.
Adrian Stoicescu (University of Bucharest)
Paper short abstract:
The specially designated forums on topics related to weddings may represent a place where a rather fruitful ethological research may be conducted. Such forums can be the place where the old traditions are recalled and the new ones are put in shape.
Paper long abstract:
Today, conducting research on various contemporary aspects of ritual behaviour appears to be incomplete without investigating the multiple facets of tradition appropriations people upload on the web, on different sites ranging from the discussion forums to social media pages. At the same time, since there is a tendency of getting information about how things should be done by asking other users how they did may double as picturing such internet pages as a tradition maker or as a trendsetter in matters of contemporary ways of ritualising the lifetime events.
My paper proposes to investigate a few layers of meaning when it comes to searching the web for the facts and acts to be followed during a wedding: the way people connect to the old traditions, the openness to the newly set rules of organising a wedding and how people try sometimes to join together to some end the most contrasting steps to be taken in a wedding. Furthermore, this papers aims at answering a rather difficult question in places where national ethnology research is still carried out, namely to what extend an ethnology on the internet is of essence on a theme that traditionally belongs to the national ethnologies fields of study, or in other words is there a netnological approach useful when trying to see how people shape their offline ritual lives?