Date: 02-19-2019
Response to Sarah Pink and Jennie Morgan’s “Short-Term Ethnography: Intense Routes to Knowing”
Never did I encounter the word “ethnography” until a few months ago, when a friend introduced it to me as a way of doing social research. Nevertheless, I’m not a stranger to short-term ethnography, because less than a year ago I was with some classmates in Anhui (安徽) Province doing a service program with some rural kids infected with AIDS/HIV. We spent a few days there interacting with the kids. Although a service program is undoubtedly different from a social research, there are similarities between the two that make what Pink and Jennie say related to my experiences. Now that I’ve read about Pink and Morgan’s idea on short-term ethnography, not only have I realized the things that we could have done better in the program, but I’ve also learned how short-term ethnography could be effective as well, despite more people’s belief in long-term ethnography. What inspires me the most is the “intensity of the ethnographic-theoretical dialog” as Pink and Morgan addresses. It is required of ethnographers that they are ready to raise more theory-oriented questions that cut to the chase, which makes prior study extremely significant. For the service program, we were asked to learn a lot of materials about the kids’ living conditions and the situation of AIDS/HIV in China. What kind of confuses me is that Pink and Morgan suggest that details are crucial in short-term ethnographic studies: wouldn’t focusing on details make ethnographers more easily biased because the larger picture is forgotten? Besides, I don’t quite understand what they mean by Morgan drawing from her museum curating experience, which, according to them, “enabled [Morgan] to recognize and ask participants to reflect on practices that were unspoken and would have been otherwise invisible”. Though, their paper does inspire me in a lot of ways in terms of the short-term ethnographic trip that we are about to go on.