By Jonathan Wynn

I recently saw the trailer
for an upcoming Christmas movie, The
Secret Life of Walter Mitty, starring Ben Stiller. It is a remake of a classic 1947 film about a mild-mannered man who
daydreams about his own fantastical successes and journeys. As an undergrad I
often felt assigned books were daydreams too. I would read old ethnographies and
then envision myself as the noble researcher: diving into unknown worlds and becoming
a member of some group or tribe. Early on, I had no idea how troubling this
idea really was.

As a grad student I read a
lot of qualitative research with a more trained eye, preparing to embark on my
own research, and saw the same storylines of participant-observers struggling
to be accepted as members of the groups they study. Sometimes, ferreted away in
an appendix, there will be admissions that the ethnographer didn’t quite fit.

For example: Elliot Liebow’s timeless
ethnography Tally’s Corner describes
a moment when he is speaking to a respondent through a chain link fence to
illustrate the social and economic distances between them.

Reading more qualitative
research I came across more Mitty-esque ethnographies, like Loïc Wacquant’s Body and Soul, which made me question my
own chances for success at becoming a member of a community.

Wacquant’s book centers on his
education as an apprentice boxer through a methodology of emersion as he breaks
down barriers between his observer’s position and the subjective knowledge of
the men he was studying around a gym. His passionate prose brings the reader into
the visceral, sweat-and-blood world of Chicago’s boxing community as he learns
the ropes from the men at the club and his coach, ”Dee Dee.” It ends with
Wacquant portraying himself as a victor in the battle to collapse subjectivity
and objectivity, claiming he was an “honorary black” and ”One of Dee Dee’s
Boys.”

As I read so many of these
classic ethnographies, the bar for completing my research inched higher and
higher: Could I become the folks I
study? Could I, a while, middle-class male, reach past barriers of race, class,
and gender? Conducting ethnography seemed akin to another movie, Avatar, wherein the white protagonist (like
Wacquant) becomes one of the ”others”
through science. 

Thank goodness I read good,
non-fiction too. Although I hoped to learn to be a better writer, I learned far
more when I picked up George Plimpton.
Plimpton was a rather effete dandy, cofounding the honorable literary magazine
called The Paris Review, editing authors
like Kerouac, Roth, and Mailer. But his writing for Sports Illustrated interested me most. Although he seemed more
suited for the faculty lounge at Harvard, Plimpton embarked on a rather
haphazard career of participatory journalism (similar to ethnography) in the
world of sports.

Like Wacquant he tried to
box, but he talks about how he couldn’t ever master it. The titles of the rest
of his encounters communicated everything you needed
to know about his self-image on his intrusions into the sports world, and how
it differed from Wacquant’s: Out of My
League (about pitching a few series at an All-Star baseball game to limited
success), Paper Lion (about going
through the Detroit Lions’ training camp as a quarterback, only to lose yardage
in a preseason game), Open Net (for
his stint as a goalie for the Boston Bruins, wherein he describes himself as
the only hockey player to be shorter
on skates due to his weak ankles), and The
Bogey Man (for his time playing on the PGA tour). In each, Plimpton talks
about constantly reaching the limits
of his abilities rather than surpassing them. 

Mitty always
succeeded in his daydreams. Plimpton always failed. Again and again. Rather
than a daydream, these seemed like ethnographic nightmares. Hemingway, in fact,
once told Plimpton that he was “The dark side of the moon of Walter  Mitty.”

There are plenty of reasons
why Wacquant might have succeeded where Plimpton failed. For one, Loïc was a
passionate and learned student of urban culture and boxing. But the comparison should
make us think about our claims of success. 

On the one hand, it’s hard to
find a scholarly work that claims to have failed. There is a built-in reason
for success in qualitative research. We can adapt our projects based upon
changes in the field and from what we learn mid-process. Howard Becker
reportedly would tell his students that the great thing about doing qualitative
research is that a.) you likely started doing research already; b.) it’s fun
while you are doing it; and c.) regardless of what happens, you’ll finish it. I
recall the example: if your study is about a factory and it closes down during
your research, then you change your research to be about a factory closing
down! Success!

But another reason could be
the questionable presumption of success on the part of ethnographers
themselves. Are there real life Walter Mittys in our midst? 

So, what to do? One answer
can be found in Women Writing Culture,  the
feminist critique of these seemingly bold (often male) ethnographers heading
out into the field. One of the
editors of that volume, Ruth Baher, writes that qualitative researchers should “keep
our heads a little bowed,” that “greatness eludes us,” and that it’s a “loss of
nerves that makes us ethnographers”.
Doing so would limit our claims of becoming,
and would make us particularly cognizant of the lines of race, class, and
gender that are particularly challenging to cross.

Think of the problem of race
in the film like Avatar: the white
protagonist is transformed through science into a blue-colored native from a
seemingly less advanced society to become not only accepted as one of them, but
better–and even their savior! (If there are few ethnographies of failures,
there are probably even fewer films about them.)

I think, along these lines, qualitative
researchers–and students interested in methods in general–should try to
search out failures, and limits. In my mind: Be like Plimpton.