Patchwork ethnography helps shift us "away from a certain unrealistic image of what fieldwork ever was" and towards what it "increasingly can be."
Tyler Zoanni
24 August 2021
Published: 16 February 2022
Image by Tyler Zoanni.
Tyler Zoanni notes how many people feel like their first fieldwork experience was a failure. Going to the field feels black-boxed; you arrive and wonder what the hell you’re doing, how you should spend your day. You have ideas when writing grants, but then things always change. Ultimately, normative ideas about a unified, bounded field are not actually realized. However, patchwork ethnography helps challenge these internalized images of fieldwork, displacing the fiction of holism. It helps open the black box. Tyler’s first fieldwork was relatively conventional on the surface–he spent thirteen months with a small, delineated group of people, an institution. Yet, he soon came to experience the actual patchwork nature of the research, realizing that the people and relations were not reducible to the institution that had centered his work. Instead, the field was a loose weave of these people and relationships across a wider scope. His fieldwork also had patchy temporalities, despite his consecutive time there. It had varying intensities, with continual repetitive experiences punctuated by paradigm-changing moments. The temporality and spatiality of even sustained, seemingly bounded fieldwork is uneven. Patchwork is always there. While he might not have understood his fieldwork as patchwork at the time, these characteristics are brought to the foreground with things like the pandemic, or doing a second (or first) project with a family. His current research continues to highlight this for him, as he gathers data across offices, homes, reports and newspapers; there’s no illusion of a unified field. The field is self-assembling as he assembles it–and also as the people he works alongside are assembling their own fields. Patchwork ethnography is not a call to reject extended intensive engagement, but to un-black-box the patchiness that’s always already there.
Tyler Zoanni is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. zoanni[at]eth.mpg.de / @TZoanni