Three days in the 'pool - Part 1

This week I was in Liverpool: home of The Beatles, European Capital of Culture 2008, one time nurturer of slavery and, in the early 21st century, a really nice city. I thought it was great: a perfect mix of shiny new and decrepit, with quirky shops and bars and the many fruits of a committed investment in the arts this year (thanks to tonnes of money for the European Capital of Culture gig). The YHA youth hostel was also fantastic.

I feel bad for being surprised. My city has a reputation for being boring, ugly and industrial which I truly believe it only very slightly deserves. I am trying to remember not to diss until I have proof.

I enjoyed wondering around the city (I even went for an early morning run around the regenerated docks), but I was really there for a conference on the subject of ethnography. Ethnography for those of you as yet unenlightened, is a method of doing research whereby the researcher spends many hours, weeks, months and sometimes years integrating themselves into the culture of a village, school, hospital or any other area of a manageable size. You observe daily life, help out a bit and generally loiter with intent.

It has a dodgy history: steeped in colonialism and empire. Once upon a time ethnographers were those white guys who made trips into the jungle to observe the primitive lives of native savages. Here's Malinowski sort of demonstrating what I mean:

Things have moved on in so many ways. Yes, white guys still go into jungles to do research on people not like them, but these days with almost excruciating levels of reflection on ethics, power and ethnic difference. The discipline of anthropology has atoned for its sins by decades of penitence, guilt and reflexivity. People have begun to study cultures close to home: to make what they may have thought familiar, strange. The idea is that to truly understand people's daily lives (or at least their daily working lives), you need to pay attention to the tiny actions which no one notices because, well, they just do them. Think back to your time at high school: how many weird rules or happenings can you remember? I bet they all made perfect sense at the time but now....er....what were we thinking?

I think ethnography is a wonderful and very special method of research. It embraces uncertainty, bias, complexity, creativity and messiness. It doesn't try to order life in a way that it can never truly be ordered. In ethnographies, writing is seen as a craft, through which a picture of a tiny corner of life is painted. That painting is then used to help us understand whole other parts of the world. Like a little patch of purple on a mural which, if you notice it, suddenly makes you see all the other patches of purple where you never saw them before. The flip side is that you're left trying to craft a story from versions of the truth woven together, so complex you barely know where to begin.

The messiness and creativity in ethnographic research makes it open to attack for lacking such things as 'rigour' and truthtelling or that it's woolly and biased. I'm not going into why I think this is nonsense right now - explanations available on request; but to be in a space with 70 other people who all think ethnographic research is amazing is a rare and welcome treat.

I have also come to the conclusion that ethnographers are disproportionately extrovert people. Few shy people would put themselves through the experience of walking into somewhere and trying to persuade a large number of people to let them watch their work. Trust me, it's horrible. 70 extroverts in a confined space for three days with an enormous amount of free wine: fun, exciting, educational, hilarious, never dull but completely and absolutely exhausting.