Ethnographic Approaches to Researching LFI
Michael Guggenheim & Zuzana Hrdlickova
Goldsmiths, University of London
Organising Disaster: Civil Protection and Population
• 2011-2014/15• ERC funded project• Disaster preparedness of the state in:
– Switzerland (Joe Deville),– UK (Michael) – India (Zuzana)
Main Questions:
– How does Civil Protection conceive of disasters and the population?
– Training: Problem of absence
What is ethnography?
Anthropology: • Fieldwork as emerging against “armchair” work. • Bundle of methods
Sociology: • Ethnography as (participant) observation
Limits of observing Incidents
• Incidents as extended in space and time, difficulty for observation
• Unannounced (hence they happen at all)• Multiple methods (including retrospective ones)• Researching Preparedness to overcome this problem
Overview: Four Continua of Ethnography
Access <-> no access
Participation <-> observation
Recording <-> documenting
Theorizing data
Participation Observation
- multiple ways of being ‘there and behaving’
- Interviews – semi-structured
Skype Listening
Pure observation: listening to planning of an exercise.
Collaborators work in different locations, co-operate over skype.
• No indexicality is possible (they cannot point to things in front of them)
• Need to explicate
A: Remember you have a weather condition which can change.
B: So we are going to have a light wind. It needs to be westerly.
A: Once you cross the railway line, there is a residential area.
B: Oh gosh, yeah, pleanty of people panicking…. So on the map
of the council there is a fire symbol. Is that a fire station?
A: Yes it is .
Recording Documenting
Video/Audio Recording:
• Directional• Produces a lot of data (how to reduce it?)• Recorder acts as extension of bodily organs
Fieldnotes
• Surround• Multi-media• Reduce the world in one go• Allow to “record” events in which other forms of
recording are impossible
Example: Sandbagging
When there are no more bags, a man offers to bring his van to
distribute the bags. A discussion ensues about how to do it. He
wants adresses to deliver.
The woman who organises the facebook page (which brings
together the volunteers) says that we cannot start to take over the
decision to whom to distribute from the council. The council is
already unhappy with the fact that the sand got delivered here.
The van driver suggests to deliver to a doctors offices, as this is
where elderly people turn up. And it is the elderly that need most
help. The woman (from the facebook page) agrees. “
Theorizing Data
Emic: How people interpret the world
Etic: How the analyst interprets the world
Classical Anthropology: Trying to understand the “other”
Moving from Emic to Etic
Theory-ladenness of data
(why did we record these two examples?)
->interest in the materiality of disasters
->interest in how organisational structures relate to the population
Video:• Selectivity of Disaster and its materiality• Need for Drama, shock, surprise as elements of
exercise• Embodiment problem of actual disasters vs. exercise• Natural world as dangerous
Fieldnotes:
-particularity of UK emergency response: fragmentation of population and how to solve it.
-”vulnerability” as conceptual placeholder for organisational fragmentation
Other Disaster Ethnographies
Diane Vaughan: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Case: The NASA Challenger Incident 1986
Methods: Retrospective Interviews and Document Analysis
Main Claim: Challenger Explosion was not a technical failure, but a problem of organisational culture.
Insider culture: Actions that appeared deviant (too risky) to outsiders after the accident were normal and acceptable in NASA culture”
Hastrup, F., 2011. Weathering the World: Recovery in the Wake of the Tsunami in a Tamil Fishing Village, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Case: South Indian coastal village followed for several years after tsunami
Method: Hastrup came every year and stayed in the village for a couple of weeks
Informal interaction with people as she was visiting them and they were visiting her
Interviewed people, observed panchayat meetings and public events - found how people made sense of the tsunami and of the changing world into becoming less predictable
Geography of the village including remnants of ruined houses - a way of memorial to the diaster
Farias, Ignacio, 2014. Misrecognizing Tsunamis: Ontological Politics and Cosmopolitan Challenges in Early Warning Systems. In: M. Tironi, I. Rodriguez-Giralt, & M. Guggenheim, eds. Disasters and Politics. Materials, Experiments, Preparedness. The Sociological Review Monograph. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 61–87.
Case: Why was there no Tsunami alert before the Chilean Tsunami in 2010?
Methods: Interviews, Document Analysis of various government agencies responsible to collect data and issue alerts.
Main Claim: A Tsunami warning is not just a message sent based on a data point. Rather, a tsunami warning depends on an infrastructure that enforces the same interpretation of data and messages (and that these have to be taken as messages at all).
Gisa Weszkalnys: Anticipating Oil: The Temporal Politics of a Disaster Yet To Come. The Sociological Review 2014 62: S1: 211-235
Case: anticipation of oil industry in Sao Tome and Principe
Methods: Interviews and observations of institutional meetings
Main Claim:
Conclusion: Ethnography and LFI
• LFI – need to reconstruct the incident retro- or pro-spectively• Ethnography depends on access, chance, openness of the
researcher• Ethnography is usually case based• Ethnography is explorative method• Allows for a multiplicity of data to be brought together• Ethnography tends to multiply theoretical and comparative
reference points