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

Determinants:

- Subject of study- Identity of researcher

access no access

- Gatekeepers

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