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Paper short abstract:

Based on a sample from fifty years of evidence in Ethnologia Scandinavica, this paper will investigate how participant observation has been used and debated in Nordic Ethnology and Folklore Studies. Next, it will reflect upon the future of the method, in the wake of GDPR and other legal frameworks.

Paper long abstract:

Participant observation is a method for understanding cultural processes. Focusing on what is evolving between people, whether it be planned or unplanned, smooth, cumbersome, delightful, or deeply distressing, it provides us with perhaps the most close-to-lived-lives data that the ethnographic toolkit can deliver. This paper will trace the trajectory of the method and its implementation in Nordic Ethnology and Folklore Studies, based on a sample from five decades of printed evidence in the Nordic journal Ethnologia Scandinavica. Ranging from the 1970s to the early 2020s, this period should allow us to revisit something at least rather close to the method’s pioneering phase in our disciplines and follow it up to the present - where participant observation is at one and the same time part and parcel of our trade and, because of current rules and regulations of research ethics, increasingly difficult to perform.

The questions to be addressed are the following: To what extent, and how, has participant observation been used in our disciplines? What results have been yielded by the method? How has it been discussed, criticized, or challenged, in book reviews as well as, potentially, in more comprehensive reflections? And what are the prospects for its future use, in the wake of legal frameworks where social and interactional data are transformed into private property? What are the odds of reconciling GDPR and participant observation, and what can be gained and lost in that process?