awesome job!! downloading now. :D

woohoo!

Great stuff, I am wondering what were you using there to record the sound of the people talking. It wasn't a microphone. Was it a dictaphone device? Could you tell me which one I am thinking to get one.

Thanks.

i look like a doofus.

oh, the final edit is really informative. i learned a few things...

screened this at work this past friday. they really dug it and thought this would be a great thing to share with clients, both as a primer on how to interview and for the value that ethnographic interviews provide.

awesome work, y'all!

Thanks for posting this. I was just the subject of an Anthropological interview last weekend with a tech company. —This piece shed some light on what they were after and mostly, made me realize how good the interviewer was.

This was very well-done, and highlights important key points. Thanks.

Loved it! Great balance of theory and practice. I'm recommending this as a must see for my colleagues.

hi gabe and kristy,

i have been thinking a lot about questions of participant observation, so i have a lot to say. i'm glad your video inspired me to put this stuff down!

my first question was, how are you using these interviews? what's the point of them? i feel you're explaining how people should fish, without explaining *why* they are fishing. i guess you say the "why" is to understand why people buy designer jeans, BUT how will you use the ethnographic process to answer that question? it is not at all clear, and that's very important. do you expect that those of us coming to this video will already understand that?

the question at the beginning is something like "why do people buy designer jeans?" -- first thing to point out is likely that your subjects/informants don't really know the answer to this, in the way that you, as the researcher, want to understand this.

pierre bourdieu, the french sociologist, gave a talk that goes into this topic in great detail. you can find the paper here dl.dropbox.com/u/1195560/bourdieu_on_observation_2003.pdf but i've pulled out some important quotes that'll help frame my thoughts:

"and that one can say about them [the subjects or informants] that, strictly speaking, they do not know what they are doing (at least in the sense in which I, as observer and analyst, am trying to know it). They do not have in their heads the scientific truth of their practice which I am trying to extract from observation of their practice. What is more, they normally never ask themselves the questions that I would ask myself if I acted towards them as an anthropologist: Why such a ceremony? Why the candles? Why the cake? Why the presents? Why these invitations and these guests, and not others? And so on. The most difficult thing, then, is not so much to understand them (which in itself is not simple) as it is to avoid forgetting what I know perfectly well besides, but only in a practical mode, namely, that they do not at all have the project of understanding and explaining which is mine as researcher; and, consequently, to avoid putting into their heads, as it were, the problematic that I construct about them and the theory that I elaborate to answer it."

that last point is key, because a lot of the questions in this video seem to directly ask "why do you buy designer jeans?" if you're going to ask that almost point blank, what's the strategy for making sense of the answers? i know you can't embed all of, say, sociology into this video -- but for people who come to this video with not much under their belt, how should they proceed after this video?

ok, then there's the whole topic of what the researcher is bringing, unconsciously, to the practice.

the man who talks about interviewing kids sort of gets to this point of how your past influences your practice (though his takeaway is not what i would take away).

in addition, there's this quote: "let that all go" -- one of the researchers says that near the end. i believe she is referring to one's past, one's preconceptions. but is that what you really want? i'm glad that came up, but it's not good to say it at the end! i think one of the best things i ever took away from discussions of interview or participant observation work is nicely summarized in bourdieu's article:

"For what has to be questioned is not only this reactivated past but one’s entire relation to this past which, when it acts outside of the controls of consciousness, may be the source of a systematic distortion of evocation and thus of the memories evoked. Only a genuine socio-analysis of this relation, profoundly obscure to itself, can enable us to achieve the kind of reconciliation of the researcher with himself, and his social properties, that a liberating anamnesis produces."

and out of that self-observation and analysis:

"Yet I am convinced that one knows the world better and better as one knows oneself better, that scientific knowledge and knowledge of oneself and of one’s own social unconscious advance hand in hand, and that primary experience transformed in and through scientific practice transforms scientific practice and conversely."

anyway, i know this video is just a small window into how you practice, but does it leave out so much that it's harmful to anyone who doesn't already come to it with a lot of background?