Ethnographic hanging out exposes contradictions between what people say and do

Evidence

Most simply, ethnography is based on the idea that ‘hanging out’ with people in ‘natural’ environments yields very different findings than straightforward interview studies might, and ethnographers are interested in the contradictions between what people say and what they do. At a more fundamental level, ethnographers think that how people understand and narrate their own lives is important and interesting. I would take this a step further and say that ethnographers hope to learn something from the people they speak to. — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 41

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the methodological arguments about talk-versus-action gaps central to the moral panics around ‘immodest’ dress, where what people policed in speech contradicted their own sartorial practice. — connects to: Formal decorative patterns can encode and dream real social contradictions they cannot consciously grasp — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 741; Behavioral inconsistency masks consistency with shifting social norms.; People cling to self-interest vocabularies even when they contradict experienced motives
• SHARE: A crisp statement of why participant-observation beats interviewing alone — worth sending to any qualitative methodology student who finds interviews an obviously sufficient field method.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 41

Broader Connections

• People cling to self-interest vocabularies even when they contradict experienced motives #exemplifies (0.82)
• Behavioral inconsistency masks consistency with shifting social norms. #qualifies (0.80)
• Formal decorative patterns can encode and dream real social contradictions they cannot consciously grasp #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 741