The Project

Operating as an ethnographer in the role of participant observer describe and analyze the culture of your Warren Wilson work crew.

Background

Ian Robertson, Dean of Work, asks us to think of Warren Wilson College as a "Little Town." In this analogy, the separate crews are employed to fill the various needs of a community small enough to require just one cohort of each field or trade: the gardeners, the accountants, the librarians, the restauranteurs, et. al.. Having recently arrived in this microcosm, part of your assimilation involves coming to terms with the Warren Wilson culture of work writ large. This project, however, asks you to investigate a portion of that culture: your new work crew.

As a new member of this crew, you are likely to find its culture somewhat foreign. This makes your position like that of a field anthropologist, and this perspective may be your greatest advantage in paying attention to the crew's culture—its systems, behaviors, and assumptions. At the same time, like an ethnographer you'll have to take steps to understand the culture on its own terms. Clifford Geertz will be our guide here. As Geertz reminds us, culture is a web of significances, and "analysis, then, is sorting out the structures of signification...determining their social ground and import." Still, this analysis is "an imaginative act" and it is a literary act. As ethnographers, "we begin with our own interpretation of what our informants are up to, or think they are up to, and then systematize those." We obesrve social structure and we "write it down."

For Geertz, thick description attempts this contextual analysis, whereas "thin description" settles only on superficial reportage. Thick description is at once "microscopic" and intent on extracting some broader claims from this detail.

Project Specifics

You'll write an essay of 4-5 pages focused on your work crew. This essay should employ "thick description," which means both descriptions of the social structures you observe in your crew and some analysis of their importance. One of the challenges of presenting your material will be to determine what portion of your observations to present. A successful essay will find a purposeful structure that makes specific claims about the culture. And in this, an essay is selective and distinct from a field journal which mostly collects observations.

In searching for your structure, you might consider starting with one of these strategies:

• Chronological: A day or a week in the life of your crew
• Evolutionary: Several stages of your changed or progressed understanding of this work crew
• Snapshots: Multiple scenes that each reveal different aspects of the crew
• Roll Call: Sequenced focus on all or some of the individual members of the crew
• Role Call: Breakdown of the different types of workers/work being done
• How To: Breakdown of the skills needed on the crew

Workshop Draft: A full (not rough) draft of your essay is due in duplicate in class Monday, September 12th.

Revised: Your revised essay is due Friday, September 16th by 9:19am at my office
(along with a copy of your workshop draft).

Note: As it reflects your earliest experience with your crew, I don't expect your essay to provide a comprehensive look at every aspect of that culture. Still, aim to offer a level of understanding sufficient to an audience who has no fore-knowledge. And a more precise and detailed exploration of a few aspects is almost always superior to a cursory glance at many things.

Also: If despite all of these suggestions, you have concerns that your involvement in your crew during these first weeks is insufficient to complete this assignment successfully, come talk to me.