Dear Paul Hackett,

How many pages would you like to be the chapter you are interested in.

Thank you in advance.

Best regards,

Tilemachos

Dear Paul Hackett,

How many pages would you like to be the chapter you are interested in.

Thank you in advance.

Best regards,

Tilemachos

I am looking for around 7,000 words.

Let's see. The two general textbooks I have on research methods in ethnology and the one more specific to orality and linguistics all start with a "What is ethnology?" section, none of which really agree; another guide/volume to ethnographic methods is entitled Improvising Theory; the field of marketing research, consumer psychology, and the incorporation of these and related fields has become so interdisciplinary that I ran into a graduate researcher in marketing at  the HCI (human-computer interaction) conference whose was writing his doctoral thesis on incorporating ethnographic methods into cognitive interviewing (and, if memory serves, extending the scope of the latter using the former); and while methods from anthropology and sociology are being incorporated into marketing/business research there is on the other hand a push towards cognitive science and neuroscience exemplified in neuromarketing. So we have a hard to define approach applied to a discipline with both a long history yet filled with emerging methods, frameworks (and frames! in the technical sense), etc., as they pertain to the heart of the sciences which are a matter of no small debate both in general, as the generation of hypothesis are at the center of debates over the philosophy of science, and in particular given the qualitative, "fluid", and/or "flexible" nature of theories and hypotheses within ethnography.

It's the kind of question I love. First, it concerns a central focus of mine (research methods). Second, it's an inherently an interdisciplinary topic and thus speaks to the changing nature of the sciences as well as the ways in which demarcations are increasingly fuzzy. So I'm going to need to write up a response whether its used or wanted now. I'm not really concerned with whether you actually use whatever I write, but I do hope there's something useful I can provide.

I think Hypothesis in etnographic research as Rizoma (Deleuze).. are you interessing? (So I write in spanich)

Rodrigo, thank you for contacting me but I don't understand Spanish at all and I think this would make it too difficult for us to work together.

If it is the languish the matter, I'm strong in french too.. So, Esperanto is always an option.. Best regards

Rodrigo, thanks for the offers but I am only fluent in English with some German. 

It is an interesting problem area for qualitative researchers...Messing has it all correct so you probably already have your 2nd author...if not, love to work on that problem.

Thank you for the offer James. I'll be in contact.

Paul, have you ever considered the possibility of a chapter on ethnomusicology as a specific way of generating hypotheses in ethnology?  Anyone familiar with the research of Lévy-Strauss will find inductive hypothesis formation.  Given traits of the music of a given so-called primitive people, what can be said about the character of said people? In my latest book, on the relationship between Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, I show that Lorca derives a characterology of the Spanish gypsy out of characteristics found in his music-- deep song-- by Falla.  

I was just re-reading Shadows in the Field! A potential issue, though, with using the incorporation of ethnography within an interdisciplinary field like musicology is the loss of generalization (an orthographic variation of the title of the chapter "Generalisation" in Karen O'Reilly's Key Concepts in Ethnography). The central method of hypothesis generation within ethnography (to the extent one can say that ethnography generates hypotheses) is fundamentally a matter of asking broad questions of interest and using participatory, exploratory, and (at least somewhat) subjective methods to narrow these initial queries and using one or more comprehensive, (hopefully) systematic methods/frameworks such as grounding theory. How "hypotheses" are generated within business research are quite distinct from the ways in which they are in musicology. The fundamental core of ethnographic research is a combination of the impetus and (to a greater or lesser extent) the methodologies of the scientific endeavor with the most basic, universal human activity: narratives. In some ways, one can capture the essence (albeit little of the process and certainly not the method) of ethnography by quoting fiction as much as one can by quoting peer-reviewed, scientific literature:

Orson Scott Card's Xenocide.

"Ethnography gives voice to people in their own local context, typically relying on verbatim quotations and a “thick” description of events. The story is told through the eyes of local people as they pursue their daily lives in their own communities. The ethnographer adopts a cultural lens to interpret observed behavior, ensuring that the behaviors are placed in a culturally relevant and meaningful context. The ethnographer is focused on the predictable, daily patterns of human thought and behavior. Ethnography is thus both a research method and a product, typically a written text."

Fetterman, D. (2009). Ethnography, In L. Bickman, & D. Rog (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of applied social research methods. (2nd ed., pp. 543-589).

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow...So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

C. S. Lewis' The Silver Chair

"The tattoos that covered his arms and chest each bore the name of a place – Burma, Singapore, and Malaysia. Each of them had a record of the year the inscription was made. He had been a merchant seaman and had traveled the world. On his right arm was the figure of an Indian woman dancing with her hands clasped together above her head, her skin darkened by the tattooist’s ink. In the sailor’s autumn years the figure etched on this pale canvass had turned a deep shade of blue. On the left forearm was an inscription that marked his journey’s end: a tattoo of Tower Bridge, London and beneath it the dedication – “HOME.” It read like an anchor. The voiceless patient spoke beyond sound. These tattoos told a story of the places he had visited, the voyages in between, and contained allusions to intimacies shared in tattoo parlors around the world. Here the sailor trusted local artists enough – in India and Burma – to spill blood and mark his flesh indelibly. On the surfaces of this failing body was a history of the relationship between the sailor’s metropolitan home and the hinterlands of trade and Empire. The permeability of that relationship –between imperial center and colonial periphery – was marked on the porous membranes of his dying body."

Back, L. (2004). Inscriptions of love. In H. Thomas & J. Ahmed (Eds.) Cultural bodies: Ethnography and theory (pp. 25-54). Blackwell.

can I have more details so I can seriously think about it?

Liora Gvion

Would love to read it!

Dear Lauri

Can you tell me some more about the chapter and collection of essays so I can think about a possible contribution?

I am a health scientist and senior researcher in the mental health care field. I am experienced in a number of methods of qualitative research and currently busy with user driven research projects. Together with a psychiatrist/phenomenologist and an epidemiologist/professor in innovations in mental health care we are searching for appropiate data collection methods to bring the user driven research further. We aim at matching phenomenology/grounded theory with user involvement to bring the research into the first person perspective a bit further.

kind regards, Diana Roeg

There will be a chapter on this subject in my forthcoming book, Qualitative Research Methods in Consumer Psychology: Ethnography and Culture, Routledge Publishers which will be published in the summer of 2015.

Hello--I didn't see this right away, and I can't write a chapter for you, but I have a referral you might use.  The following essays between Ketner and the Cohens--all folklore scholars--took place in the 1970s as a debate in the Journal of American Folklore (JAF).  They seem perfectly suited to your question:

Ketner, Kenneth L. 1973. The Role of Hypothesis in Folkloristics. JAF 86: 114-130.  

Cohen, Norm and Ann. 1974. A Word on Hypothesis.  JAF 87: 156-160.

Ketner, Kenneth L. 1975. Hypothesis Fingo.  JAF 88: 411-417.

Cohen, Norm and Ann. 1975. When All is Said and Done, We Make Hypotheses Too. JAF 88: 417-418.

These may all be available in JSTOR.

Thank you Judith. Paul