Paper short abstract:

Paper long abstract:

In my earlier contribution to debates about ethnographic interviewing (Hockey 2002), I argued that interviews can resemble other bounded social encounters, making interviewing a form of participant observation in some settings. Interview material merits similar consideration. Like the anthropologist’s sound recordings, the material of our everyday lives continuously parts company from us, fragmented across application forms, CCTV images, job references, media soundbites, medical records or indeed departmental gossip. Data protection legislation highlights the vulnerability this engenders. Moreover, concerns felt about infringement of civil liberties within a surveillance society find parallels within our research practice. Anthropology at home has undercut previous ‘freedoms’ from the need to anonymise data, a pressure intensified in a political environment where enemies are imagined within as well as without, a situation compounded by the accessibility that electronic recording, storage and circulation of data bring. Moreover, the pressure to publish within restricted research hours can mean over-rapid, partial reading of data, a problem akin to the hasty marshalling of information in time-starved policy environments.

Concerns about risk and the exercise of control may not, however, be the whole story. The parallels between the social lives of different kind of material have other dimensions. For example, how might we understand processes of fragmentation that occur when elements of who we are fracture across different sites? Can we take some bearing from current debates around identification, from notions of identity as multiple, processual and yet not necessarily de-centred. What happens when the ‘fragments’ are assembled? Alongside political concerns about the integration of independent datasets giving access to multiple facets of an individual’s life, should we set theoretical awareness of the dangers of congealing separate dimensions of individuals’ lives into apparently coherent wholes?

Similarly, how might we balance taking responsibility for our data with anthropology’s commitment to responsiveness and serendipity? Does research governance risk making interviewing a safer option than participant observation, a practice more amenable to informed consent, triangulated coding and participant readings? I suggest that the social life of interview material follows a more open line than this, to draw on Ingold’s (2007) distinction between open and closed lines. Like a radio play, listening to interview material can enable more vivid insight than full-on screen/stage representations. Like poetic language, less can somehow be more. Listening to what an interviewee says takes us into the rooms or streets that ground their embodied life, a mediated journey materialising unpredictably within our imaginations. While not dismissing reflexive awareness of where our imaginations might (mis)take us, mental processes which move us beyond the particularities that bind interviewees to ‘telling it like it was’ can enable locally generalisable insights. Listening thus involves relinquishing a commitment to the closed lines of hypotheses or pre-determined publications. If interview material, like other forms of information, escapes its immediate context of telling, its unpredictable social life is not simply fraught with danger. It is also one that admits creative re-visioning of human experience via imaginative responses to its open-endedness.

Hockey, J. (2002) 'Interviews as Ethnography? Disembodied Social Interaction in Britain', in N.Rapport (ed) British Subjects. An Anthropology of Britain, Oxford: Berg.

Ingold, T. (2007) Lines. A Brief History, London: Routledge.