Tour Bus Ethnography

Posted 12/10/2008 by jaimes

Image: A snapshot of today in Western European (liberal media!) culture.

In this post he deals primarily with some of his techniques for managing life on the road, through a kind of “mental scaffolding” for comprehending where you are (taking photos of local papers) and managing data through a very specific process and dedicated person.

The post seems to implicitly raise other issues though. He notes that in a 100 interview tour of the States, the first 4/5 days produce the most valuable insights. This is the pragmatic side of the argument. Get in, get out, keep moving. You never know the truth anyway so what counts is having a clear idea of where “truths” came from. The scaffolding is what counts, not the detail.

The other side is that the tour bus is like a moving armchair, carrying our 19th century study with all it’s preconceptions with us. Admittedly it’s a different set of preconceptions that I’m talking about here.

Somewhere in the middle lies a compromise. In the end, it hinges on the framing of ‘the field’. Concerned exclusively with the field inhabited by users of general practitioners in a particular town, your terms of reference hinge on that town and more depth is desirable. The issues are local and therefore specific, and time may be required to uncover them. If your frame of reference swings to the wider issues of medical services infrastructure, then looking at ‘instances’ of GP use can be enlightening, alongside ‘instances’ from other aspects of that eco-system. Within this eco-system perspective, it can feel like an unrealistic luxury to spend too much time in a single instance.

There’s something of Sennett’s critique of potential man in this debate. And something of a nostalgia for when the world was seen simply enough to spend a year mythologising remote cultures.

Here in the thick of it, Chipchase’s scaffolding techniques and images of traffic flows, feel like the reality of the never more global world that we inhabit and it’s perhaps a different, rather than inauthentic anthropology.