Culture…The surprise of Ethnography

I read Richard A. Shweder’s article after reading the one about Nacirema society. This way I could better understand why ethnography is so important for graphic design research too.

As Richard Shweder says “ethnography is about discovery. Skillfull ethnography is about making some room for the creative imagination and some disciplined intuition”. And absolutely important is that ethnography is about entering the field without predefining the domain of interest and without presuming that you already know what is universal. The process of discovery is a process that should be followed in everyday life: it would be a good way of keeping mind widely open in order to be able to participate the flow of life. If I had to think of an experience happened in my life, I would think of my first period of study in China. I did go to China for studying different times and even if I didn’t go there to make research on the community, but just to study the language (my major during my BA was Chinese language and literature), I did try to participate the flow of life of the community. This was I could always live there in peace and armony with everyone and their culture.

Reading the articles on ethnography and autoethnography (I never heard of autoethnography before reading Ellis & Bochner’s article) reminds me of my Chinese experiences. I completely agree with this statemente “understading the others is a process by which you will find something within yourself that will be the bridge to understanding difference”. if we are aware enough of this we might have the chance during our life to discover and develop the complexity of cognition and emotional structures that we have within ourselves.

The point for me now is to use the qualitative research method of empathizing, imagining, interpreting, narrating, contextualizing, and exemplifying for design research. It is true that desing research is qualitative research, not quantitative research, especially for the objects of study, both subjectivity and contect dependent realities.

editing…

Culture…Body Ritual among the Nacirema

Nacirema society….this is the first time I’ve heard of this culture and its society.

It is quite amazing; if I consider America from a European point, or just an Italian one of view, I would never imagine such a culture existing in XXth century.

I first tried to read the article without any point of view, especially without thinking of a particular time and place this society was/is living in. From the brief introduction, I could understand that the article would have been the description of a society, the Nacirema society, where “attitudes about the body” have a pervasive influence on. I tried to get involved in the detailed description of all the rituals, of all the people taking part in those rituals, the magical practitioners, the medicine men, the holy-mouth-men, the natives… The attention they pay to their mouth and all the rituals related to this part of the body was really astonishing to me. Such an attention to all the details being part of an entire society certainly left me speechless but more and more curious. My curiosity is the only point of view I chose to read the article the first time.

Now what? Still no prejudice, but…this society is a North American society analysed in the ‘50s. By chance I take a look to a book of American ADS of the ‘60s I have in my book-shelf: icons and images that gives a certain idea of the American culture and society at that time that wouldn’t leave place for the Nacirema society. Where was Nacirema society at that time? And nowadays? Hidden from far and above, beyond the crudity and irrelevance of magic, from a developed civilization point of view.

 This reading was another chance I had the opportunity to take to open my mind and to reconsider my origins and the origin of my culture too: every step I take in my life, in the society I live in, a higher stages of civilization society, is one more step the Nacirema group takes in his rituals, in the learning of their culture, a reminder of Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.