> > On the other hand, the extreme of "greater" sharing
> >would be something like your case in which you are very close to
membership
> >in the community under study. [...]
> >depth of detailed knowledge of the nuances involved in this cultural
mileau.
>
> This might not be the case, as 'common membership' may lead to rather
> superficial glosses of common understandings, while a dialogue between
> non-co-members may produce more elaborate mutual explication. It other
> wards, it may be more effective to 'make the familiar strange' and one way
> to do do this is 'being a stranger'.
It is precisely because common membership may lead to superficial glosses of
common understandings that penetration into the nuances or outer reaches of
that particular cultural mileau can often be greater. I don't know Toby's
cultural context enough to even come up with an example. So let me take one
from my dissertation. I studied Pentecostals in Venezuela coming to the
research with a lifetime of experience in Protestantism. Thus many of the
aspects of their talk, ritual, behavior that seemed strange to other
researchers seemed "natural" or unproblematic to me and I probably
superfically glossed them in my dissertation. That's a weakness. However,
glossing past those issues permitted me to penetrate other aspects of their
thought and behavior that I think others with less familiarity would only
get to with difficulty: for example, how they deal with the inevitable
tension between patriarchy and individualism in Christianity. Getting to
that depth on a particular issue is, I think, a strength. Any researcher
comes to a cultural context with more or less familiarity with it and new
knowledge is usually created by edging up to what we could call the
"threshold of strangeness." The difference comes in where that threshold
lies for different researchers.
***************************************************************
David Smilde
Caracas, Venezuela
URL: http://www.arches.uga.edu/dsmilde/
|