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Paper short abstract:

The challenge embedded within ethnographic research is that anthropologists are curators of data; we select what speaks to us and leave much to one side because we cannot see it, or because it seems to say less. This tells listeners more about anthropological voices than it does our interlocutors'.

Paper long abstract:

During my doctoral research, my main objective was to understand how the vast minority population of British deaf people listened and were listened to. Throughout my time in the field, I strove to foreground the warm reception of sign language and deaf life-ways in the arts, specifically theatre, which I had witnessed during my professional life and my previous research. I knew, however, that there was another side of British society which belied a reality of constant struggles with inclusion. I found a counterbalance working in an advocacy centre at which I could help sign-users and non-signing deaf people access public services, becoming their voices - literally - as they signed. Through this role I became inextricably entangled with their cases, and with their voices.

This experience highlighted for me the challenge invisibly embedded within anthropological approaches to ethnographic research: whichever methodological approach is chosen necessarily delimits the kind of data one can access. But deeper than that, our outputs are equally pre-filtered - whether in the films, photography, drawings, or ethnographic writing that we produce. These are interpreted and edited at the point of data-collection and again as we work to analyse it. We, as Hage has suggested, are curators of our research; we select what speaks to us and leave much to one side due to time or space restrictions or because the anthropologist simply cannot see it, nor listen to it. As a result our work tells the listener much more about the anthropologists than it does about our interlocutors' voices.