31 Aralık 2010 Cuma

Daniel Miller: Behind closed Doors

the study of home life is hardly new to anthropology. Indeed it is probably its core. Typically, in the "classic" period of ethnographic enquiry, supervisors would instruct their graduate students that it was essential that they live in the homes of their informants, at the heart of the community.
2
attfield: wild things: the material culture of everyday life
Auslander: Taste and Power
birdwell-Pheasant: House Lİfe: Space place and Family in Europe
Lawrence-Zuniga
chapman-Hockey
csikszentmihalyi : : The meaning of things: Domestic symbols and the self
steedman:the tidy house
rapport-Dawson: migrants of identity

very mobility of food , the fact that it can be easily transferred from one country to another, which makes it suitable as their means to stabilise their sense of home.
food is often intimately associated with both the particular cooking and smells of one's natal home and more generally the taste" of one's homeland.

sense of home emanating not from a house but from mobile material culture.
9

8 Aralık 2010 Çarşamba

personal space

can I measure it?
task: do measure it. a metric measurement device might be hard to use. maybe not hard but odd. what if I ask for permission from the person standing in front of me to measure it? I can do a guess, or measure it with non-metric devices. like the number of ceramic tiles between us.
that would be my approximate sense of distance in britain context.
then i should measure the others, how much space they leave between them when they que.
there should be some parameters setting this distance:
where you are waiting: indoor outdoor? is it a packed space?
what is the aim of queing? to withdraw money? people might leave extra space between each other if it is a atm que.
the level of conscious of the quer? (is there such a word first of all?) does drunkenness affect the queing practice?
...
i might also look at the way people sit in the library, when they are studying.

6 Aralık 2010 Pazartesi

on Agoraphobic Plant Collector

at the beginning of this project I had a bunch of picture taken at my mother's home, detailing all the objects with floral designs on them. She likes to adorn the house like an artificial, indoor garden; representations of nature, especially flowers are everywhere, they are on carpets, tablecloths, curtains, bric-a-bracs. and there are some potted living plants as well, that she looks after, and some fake flowers that I occasionally throw into bin, unbeknown to her. And on the other hand, she does not like the idea of cut flowers rotting in the vase. For her they are waste of money.

(I dont know where it does come from, but we have a tendency to go for fake, artificial things, that looks like something but not exactly the original thing, the real thing, a kind of looking for substitutes rather than the real one. Sometimes related with lack, going for substitutes. but the topic is not that at the moment, so I will try to go back on track)

The highly ornamental, floral twin Persian carpets in the house are the crystallisation of this preference.It is one of those eastern carpets, that represent paradise, the eternal spring. an oriental rug representing the Garden of Paradise in the middle of a house seems to support the associations of home with rest and peace.

For the piece “Agoraphobic Plant Collector”, I used a display cabinet in the college, and played with the ideas of curiosity cabinets, turning the “garden” in my family home into a subject of botanical study. Obviously there is a sharp contrast between a home garden in this sense, and scientific study of botanical study.
And I was trying to understand this tendency to adorn the house with representations of anonymous nature specimens through looking at this contrast, through a twisted lens or better put through an inappropriate language. trying to look at these two perspectives through one another.

I tried to identify the original flowers, their equivalance in real life, through some pencil drawings, first. I was trying to extract a realistic representations of these flowers on the carpet, as does botanical illustrations with real plants.

Botanical illustrations dissects the plant, represent it as realistically as possible, in a sense, maps the plant and the geography it is coming from. Those illustrations were once considered as reliable resources to prove the existence of species. The other forms of proof were the specimen itself, or ...I dont remember the third, I should check my notebook I was using when I visited British museum. Well, the point is, that botanical illustrations were reliable sources to depend on, to prove the existence of a specimen. They were that real.

Interestingly, botanical gardens, as places of encounter with the exotic species, as artificial homes for the flora of faraway lands were also associated with idea of Garden of Eden at its early stages.
Throughout the middle ages the Garden (of Eden) was believed, somehow, to have survived the Flood, and in the great age of geographical discoveries in the fifteenth century, navigators and explorers had hopes of finding it. When it turned out that neither East nor West Indies contained the Garden of Eden, men began to think, instead, in terms of bringing the scattered pieces of the creation together into a Botanic Garden, or new Garden of Eden" (Prest, 1981, p.9).
Beyond this more theological explanation, the practice of botanical gardens and botanical illustration is representative of the age of discoveries, of Enlightenment in the western civilisation. The transported species of flora from far away countries brought to European centres and kept in botanical gardens, under artificial living conditions suiting to the needs of the plants. In terms of the audience at the centre, it meant encountering with difference and a spectacle to enjoy those eccentric, exotic worlds and all within the very safe and tame boundaries of the home/land.

Another strand of my research for this project was to look at idea of garden and gardening, on the origins of gardening, domesticating a piece of nature, and why we developed such a habit. The earliest and most famous garden to date is The Hanging Garden's of Babylon, which was allegedly built to relieve homesickness of Amyitis, the wife of King Nebuchadnezzar.
"...Amyitis, daughter of the king Medes who seems to have had a passion for mountainous surroundings. Babylon's flat desert-like landscape made her pine for the mountains of Media where she was brought up. So the king decided to build an artificial, terraced hill lushly cultivated with trees and flowering plants."
(http://www.kidsgen.com/wonders_of_the_world/hanging_gardens.htm)

For further investigation:

-The emphasis on the homesickness in the story...
-the potted plants at home, home as a greenhouse, hot house.
the routine chore of the plant grooming: watering, wipeing the leafs, picking rotten leaves, changing the soils once a year, and changing the location of the plants, depending whether they like their place, the position of the sun, the wind, the conditions.
-greenhouses, hot houses, pineries, orangeries were developed to grow exotic species (back at that time) and became more prevalent as the time passes.
-gardening as the act of controlling the uncontrollable as r. Parker puts it.

5 Aralık 2010 Pazar

lorem ipsum

on my way back home, I lost my balance and slided on the icey pathway. I said "fuck" silently to myself. There was no one beside me to communicate in English, but I didnt say sss... that I would do if I were in Turkey, but used f word.
I wondered why, fuck and sktr is almost perfect translations of each other. and in duration the two are similar in duration as well, when you pronounce it, the sound of the words last 2 seconds at most. so, if what one prefers is a short and sudden sound they both fits to this need. and if one would like to put her anger, fear, fury, they both feed this need as well.
When I am too angry, to annoyed by something, sometimes a mouthful of swear works perfectly to unwind, to evacuate. the more angry I am, the more I need to swear. But I am not very good at finding enough nasty words to totally relax. So I try to find out some words long enough to keep my mouth as busy as possible, and if they have the strong consonants better. most common and obvious swears have those consonants (p,ç,t,k) and the more you press these the more aggressive you sound. For example, "züccaciye" (glasware) has a very strong sound, and it is also very out-of-date word that not everyone is familiar with.
then I was thinking of using a dummy text, if the only thing that matters is the duration the tonation. and the meaning deriving from the feeling should be filled with an embodied memory.
I dont know how its going to work, but the initial idea is this: to give plot to people, for example: you are walking on a icy pathway and suddenly you slide, you were about the fall, but you didnt, what would be the first sound that would come through your mouth?

than I will ask them to produce this sound with the text below. or I will try to make the sound myself with the dummy text.
well, if it is just an "ouch" no need for dummy text, isnt it?
hmm.

Lorem ipsum...
I checked that infamous dummy text online: Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

The standard Lorem Ipsum passage, used since the 1500s

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."
Section 1.10.32 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum", written by Cicero in 45 BC

"Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?"
1914 translation by H. Rackham

"But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?"
Section 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum", written by Cicero in 45 BC

"At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint occaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. Nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio cumque nihil impedit quo minus id quod maxime placeat facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellendus. Temporibus autem quibusdam et aut officiis debitis aut rerum necessitatibus saepe eveniet ut et voluptates repudiandae sint et molestiae non recusandae. Itaque earum rerum hic tenetur a sapiente delectus, ut aut reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias consequatur aut perferendis doloribus asperiores repellat."
1914 translation by H. Rackham

"On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains."
http://www.lipsum.com/

I will memorize it.
as we used to memorise arabic prays.
because it is good to know them.
You should recite 3 kulhu 1 elham for the soul of the passed away.
and ayetel kürsi when you have karabasan, or nightmare, or when you are afraid.

what would a dummy text save you from.
cranium fibula radius sacrum patella corpus: nasıl ezberlenir allahım, arabca dua eden insanın latince kemikleri
sometimes those words that I havent grown up with feels like dummy texts. empty, superficial, trivial. that is probably why I am putting words with similar meanings side by side, I am illiterate to their cultural-social history, burden.
I put words side by side, with different order and hope they will mean what I would like to express.

3 Aralık 2010 Cuma

my analytical voice and the voice I need to adopt when I am writing about myself.

ı need to clarify why ı am choosing autoethnography as a methodology.
1. the work derives from my own experience: (is it enough)
2. if I keep field notes, would it make it ethhnography straigtforward?
3. which question should those field notes cover?
though it is not a respectful academic reference, there you are some instructions by ehow:
1.
Choose the location or group that you want to observe. Select based on how the group's activities help you investigate the social issue you are studying. Arrange a schedule of observation with a person in a position of authority within the group or organization.
2.
Decide whether or not you want to be open about your study with the people you are observing. Some people feel uncomfortable or act differently when they know they are being watched.
3.
Keep a notebook and pen with you at all times. Jot down noteworthy interactions and quotes when possible.
4.
Be discreet and protect your notes. Field notes are documentation of what you witness and may include conflicts or gossip. Use significant keywords that jog your memory. Refer back to keywords to develop thorough notes after you have left the field.
5.

Type up a detailed version of your notes for future analysis. Fill in the gaps of your field notes by reading the keywords and fully explaining the situation you observed. Use code names for the people you observed to protect their identities. Include an interpretation and impressions at the end of the document.
Read more: How to Write Ethnographic Field Notes | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_2081359_write-ethnographic-field-notes.html#ixzz175vsYJVm


Your objective is to create an accurate written record of your field activities, investigations, observations and thoughts. You should record date and location information in a very detailed manner so that others can know exactly when, where, and under what conditions your work was done. This will enable you or others to return to the same areas in the future to verify findings and observe changes over time.

GENERAL FORMAT

Follow this format in your field notes:

1. Field notes should be divided into two sections: Journal and Species Accounts

2. Write on one side of the paper. Leave a generous left margin as shown in the ex-
amples.

3. Write your name in the upper left-hand corner

4. Write the year in the upper right-hand corner underneath your name.

5. Write the day and month in the upper left margin.

6. Write “Journal” in the top margin of your journal pages, and the name of the species
in the top margin of your species account pages.

7. Write in complete sentences and paragraphs. You can think of field notes as a letter
to a friend or relative explaining what you saw. Or think of them as a letter to someone
visiting the area 20 years later who is unfamiliar with the area.

FOR THE JOURNAL SECTION:

1. Put a heading on the top line of each page which identifies your location. You
should include specific site, city, county and state. Underline the heading. (Joseph
Grinnell underlined his location with a wavy line.)

2. Note the purpose of the trip (Why?)

3. Note who went on the trip with you (Who?).

4. Note the time of day of each important observation (When?).

5. Information about the places you visit should be written so that someone unfamiliar
with the area can find your exact location using maps and your description. Tell where
you started and where you went. Include what road or trail you walked on, or the
general route you took if you did not follow a road. (Where?).

6. Include notes on the weather, elevation, topography, geology, soil, water, vegetation
types, plant phenology (what life stage they are in), and evidence of disturbance (fire,
grazing, cultivation, etc.) (What?).

7. Be accurate. If you have to guess about something, identify your guess as a guess. It
is appropriate to speculate about things and to ask questions. Do include your feelings,
intuitions and thoughts! Just be sure you don’t mislead a reader into thinking your
thoughts are facts!

8. Be detailed and quantify your data as much as possible. “Saw some ducks on the
pond” is not as useful as “saw 12 pintail (7 males and 5 females) on the southeast end
of Olcott Lake about 5 m from the shore.”

9. Sketches and drawings can be very useful. Rough sketches and diagrams add details
and depth to your notes.

10. You may take temporary notes on a smaller field notebook, then transcribe your
notes into your permanent journal. You should transcribe as soon as possible after you
leave the field, and always the same day as your trip.

SPECIES ACCOUNTS

1. Create a page for each species you observe. This is the place for more detailed
descriptions and observations of an individual or group of one particular species.
Include sights, sounds, smells, textures, patterns, sizes, shapes, colors, and move-
ments. Include numbers of individuals, sizes, frequencies and behaviors.

this one must be the most useful one
1. What I write in the field, the bare minimum:

Date & time

Who & where

Note where people are placed in relation to each other/main objects (i.e houses, office layout, the Ormiston Gorge Kiosk etc)

Dot point* main topics of discussion/event flows/observations

Record verbatim any key quotes

Record any questions the situation raises for you that require later clarification or follow up

Record any ideas/creative zaps/insights you have whilst in-situ (place is powerful)

*Some situations allow you to write more freely (and copiously) than others. Some research sites are used to people with note books, writing furiously. If you’re fortunate to be in such a situation, go for it. Otherwise, jotting dot points on a piece pf scrap paper or a pad that looks like a shopping list might be more appropriate. I recall a story from a PhD student who was undertaking fieldwork near a sensitive Chinese border and regularly had her notes & papers taken by authorities. There were times when she couldn’t take field notes at all. Thus, a shopping list with random points on it might be your only choice.

2. What I write afterwards, ASAP if possible.

I use my dot points to create a narrative of the situation, events etc. What do I mean by a narrative? Tell the story of what happened in detail. I do this away from the field, in private (as much as possible), without disturbances (also as much as possible).

I finish with a paragraph or two of reflection on the event/situation relating to my current thinking about my research problem/trajectory.

I also find this process creates new questions, which I also record as part of the reflection section (and highlight for follow-up along with those in the original ‘dot point’ section).

I do not code at this point.

How?

If you read my comments posted on Savage Minds, you’ll see I’m very much a pen-and-paper girl. I use a hardcover notebook, A5 size. Why A5? It fits in a backpack or handbag (for American readers: pocketbook – which incidentially is a word that means laptop computer to Australians!) easier than the clumping great A4 notebooks that others use. I now use spiral bound, hard cover note books, but for some reason I’ve never understood, when I did my PhD work I didn’t use spiral bound. Also, I take notes on sheets of paper, ‘shopping lists’ or ’to do list’ type pages if the situation requires me to be discrete.

I have used a variety of minidisc players, mini voice recorders, expensive voice recorders and even an MP3 player to record interviews – but rarely for field notes. I find them intrusive. In fact, much of my work has been done with Aboriginal people, and I’ve only used voice recording for: stories & songs when requested by the informant themselves, words (place names, site names) in language (Aboriginal languages) that people wish to teach me, formal interviews.

I use a plain old blue pen and always have a spare.

Why?

For me, why you take field notes is a personal question, related to your own research. My advice is: if you’re a PhD researcher, you can’t have too many field notes (I have 7 books of field notes from my PhD & 2 from my Honours; a good friend of mine had 12 field note books for her PhD). It’s this simple: field notes will provide a rich source of data to mine when you’re writing up/thinking about your research. They can also be used to triangulate (back up, verify) with interview/focus group/discourse analysis etc data.

———————————————————————————————————————

Resources:

I will post as a separate downloadable document an (edited) example of my system shortly. For now, here’s just two books of the hundreds (!) available that I’ve found useful about field notes:

Emerson, R., Fretz, R., & Shaw, L. (1995). Writing Ethnographic Field Notes. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

The place to start, particularly if you’re extremely reflexive. Tells you how to do it, write them up, code them, turn them into data.

Sanjek, R. (ed.). (1990). Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Cornell University Press.

I haven’t used this one personally, but it comes highly recommended.

Whyte, W.F. (1984). Learning from the field: A Guide from Experience. Sage: Newbury Park.

One of my favourite books on qualitative research methods.

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Ethnographies that give *some* insight into field note methods:

(again, this is a short list – I’ll add to it later.)

Dianne Bell. (1993). Daughters of the Dreaming.

Paul Willis. (1977). Learning to Labour.

W.F.Whyte. (1993). Street Corner Society.

Basil Sansom. (1979). The Camp at Wallaby Cross

so well, what does ethnography add up to my practice?
research as practice.
why am I chosing this methodology, whereas it is so hard for me to make myself talk about myself, or better said take the start form myself, un-anchor the thing from my position. demir almak kendimden.

Kimse dinlemiyorsa beni ya da istediğim gibi dinlemiyorsa günlük tutmaktan başka çare kalmıyor. Canım insanlar Sonunda bana bunu da yaptınız.

oğuz atay

böyle kapansın perde, ya da burdan mı açalım?