Subject: QUERY: identifying research sites
To pseudonym or identify, that is the question. What is an ethnographer to do about naming a field site?
Some of us practice disclosure, while others offer a studied obfuscation. Often anthropologists (and perhaps others) have strong views on this question of identification. Supporting arguments for alternative practices are multiple and complex, but let me mention what seem to be some of the main ones:
Disclosure of place names is necessary for locating the field site precisely in geographical and historical context, which provides accuracy and depth. Furthermore, multiple studies and restudies by different researchers over time are more difficult to manage if researchers follow different naming practices or provide different names, and comparative studies lose their bite without referents that can be located in time and space. Finally, local people often do not want their town or city or institution or region or profession to be anonymous; and they want toable to relate research reports from their own and other locales to their own knowledge of regional geography and history.
Using pseudonyms for research sites protects one's informants from intrusions, potentially detrimental, by outsiders, such as agents of the government and tourists. Furthermore, the protection provided for informants by anonymity allows the researcher to be frank about his or her findings and to report local practices that would reflect (in someone's eyes) badly on local people. Finally, identification of the wider region allows sufficient geographical and historical specificity.
My question to colleagues of H-SAE is what are your views on this matter and how did you decide to pseudonym or identify when you wrote up and published your material.
Philip Carl Salzman
Department of Anthropology
McGill University
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Should research sites be identified? Depends. In many countries one needs permission to work and live. There the authorities know who studies where & whom. So, unless there is a real risk that the site would be inundated by tourists, giving sites pseudonyms is a fairly useless practice which impedes restudies, comparisons, local pride, etc.
In countries where permits to work and live etc. are not needed and people can operate more anonymously there might be some unility for pseudonyms. However, if the authorities REALLY want to know who does what, etc. I'm sure the local police can find out in fairly short order, unless the author keeps both the country and her/his name secret.
Another aspect is that local people will frequently have wild rumors about what was written about them. And lastly, if the local people are not already literate they probably will become so in fairly short order and so will frequently want to read what was written about them. To sum it up, where anonymity would be most needed it is least likely to be achieved and where it does not really matter it might be.
Andy Skreija
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The debate over pseudonyms or disclosure is surely central to the politics of ethnographic fieldwork and I am presently facing the dilemma in my work on the Scottish Hebrides. The other main ethnographers of this area (Susan Parman, Peter Mewett and Sharon Macdonald) have all opted for a pseudonym. Their published work is excellent ethnography; the problem is that in every case, the respective community - 'Geall', 'Clachan' and 'Carnan' - is hopelessly transparent and it would take little more than a road map to identify each site.
So have the locals been offended? Well, not really . . . but these authors' success in avoiding local resentment is largely due to their publishing strategy and NOT to their use of pseudonyms. Each book has been produced by an academic publisher which has made no attempt to find a Scottish market. In fact, I can't find a bookshop in Scotland which stocks any of these works. In many respects this is a real shame because the quality of the research would stand up well to local scrutiny. But there are other issues here relating to the politics of representation which remain unaddressed. One cannot undertake ethnography without revealing something about people and place, but with this comes a heavy burden of political responsibility. The absence of a right to reply to academic or 'etic' representations is a serious problem and one which is often highlighted by 'locals'. A right to reply would be a bonus; at the moment the subjects of this research do not even have access to read what is written about them (although Sharon Macdonald has courageously written up some material for a local newspaper).
I have looked for reactions to ethnographic representation from amongst my own respondents and have, in a few cases, shown them material written about themselves or about other islands (all under pseudonyms). The more self-aware islanders are horrified that so much could have been written and yet escaped their critical attention. But it doesn't take them long to identify the sites. As the Gaelic proverb says : "a man who reads can take a hint".
Fraser MacDonald
School of Geography
University of Oxford
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Just a short comment. I chose to identify Divis Flats in Belfast, the subject of my Phd/ethnography "Hearts and Minds, Water and Fish: Popular Support for the IRA and INLA in a Northern Irish Ghetto" (JAI Press, 1989). This was despite the fact that Frank Burton (British sociologist, The Politics of Legitimacy: Struggles in a Belfast Community, Routledge 1978) who had done the only previous ethnography of a Catholic ghetto in Belfast chose to use a pseudonym ("Anro") for his commmunity. There were several reasons for my choice, but the main one was that "Anro" and Divis are easily identifiable by anyone familiar with Belfast from their basic descriptive characteristics (particularly Divis, which was the only highrise housing project in the city), and I wanted the research participants to be able to cite my study in support of their own struggles of various sorts - political, housing, economic, health, etc. When I asked locals about this, they laughed and could not understand what I thought could possibly be gained by changing the name, and, in fact, generally viewed it as a sort of betrayal of trust ("You're writing a book to tell the world about our lives, so how can you then not tell them who we are?"). Today, the use of pseudonym's represents more of a symbolic act than a practical one. I don't believe anymore that anything is gained by using pseudonyms, but there are quite obvious negative effects of using them. Today, in nearly every case if "powers that be" want to find out the identity of a research site that is easy to do. So, since it only seems to interfere with the powerless making "use" of our studies, and not the powerful, it seemed to me to be a positive act - even an act of empowerment - to be "bold" and name our research sites. While in the past it was probably a good idea in many cases to use pseudonym's, in the present this appears to support the status quo, disempower the research subjects, and insulate the anthropologists from local-level criticism.
That's just some quick thoughts off the top of my head.
All the best,
Jeff Sluka
Massey University
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Since I have rarely if ever had any difficulty in immediately identifying the true identity of a community graced with a pseudonym in my area of interest (southern Spain), I have often pondered what the point of bothering might be. Since almost all ethno graphers provide at least a vague location ("on the road between Huelva and Sevilla") and a rough estimate of population size ("about 10,000 inhabitants"), a quick glance at a map and a statistical summary usually suffices. Add to that the tendency to fa bricate a pseudonym that contains one or more elements of the true name (a fictional example: "Montemayor" is disguised as "El Monte") and the practical utility of the pseudonym becomes even more suspect.
In some cases at least, I believe the use of the pseudonym is less about effectively protecting the folks who allow us to work with them, then it is about expressing our fond, but vain, desire to do so, even when it is not particularly necessary. Less cha ritably, it may also serve as a fairly inexpensive example of an empty CYA gesture. In fact it reminds me of the perennial Institutional Review Board ritual that we celebrate every time we undertake to do some ethnographic fieldwork. We fill out forms ex plaining how asking someone in a small town in the province of Huelva what term she uses to refer to her mother's-mother's-mother will probably not harm her very much and the University is content that it has improved its legal position if I go nuts in th e field and do unspeakable things. I believe it was Jack Douglas, the sociologist, who argued long ago that the IRB process was really more about protecting American bureaucracies than the subjects of ethnographic research.
Of course, I can envision circumstances in which community pseudonyms are called for (when studying criminality or "deviance," for example) and I am not inclined to second-guess a colleague who feels the need to use one (which is why I used a fictional ex ample above). For myself, I find it salutary to use real names for communities, precisely because it reminds me that I am responsible for what I write about people. Ironically, using real names may ultimately protect our research communities (from hyperb ole and overheated prose, if not from a wicked agent of the state or a pesky tourist) rather more than symbolically applying an easily decodable pseudonym.
Michael Dean Murphy
Department of Anthropology
The University of Alabama
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I have just completed a study on compliance with fisheries regulations. As you can imagine, asking people to 'confess' to breaking the law (and it carries a severe penality in the UK) and to comment on what they think their fellow fishermen are doing can only be done by ensuring them personal anonymity. That was the easy bit, attempting to write about the region was a whole other ball game.
On the one hand identifying the region would have helped the reported research. The region in question has some peculiar characteristics that (I believe) impact upon the actions of the community. However, because the issue of over-quota fish, the position of the European Union in dictating the rules of UK fisheries etc, we promised that the region would not be identified in the final report - the fishermen did not want the UK government or the EU to target them having discovered that they are the most un-lawabiding region in the nation!
In the end, the study site was simply identified as 'two neighbouring fishing ports in England'. There is a chance that someone could identify them from details on the average length of vessels, make-up of catch, income etc. but I think it is unlikely. What I now hope to do is send a report to the fishermen that will identify their region. This is so that they have a feeling of connection to the work that has been done, so they learn a little more about their community and so that they feel they have gained something from the exercise as well. How I prevent this report being leaked to the local press and exposing the community is another matter that I have still not resolved.
This was the first field work I had ever conducted so I am still feeling my way with regard to the identification or otherwise of the study site.
Liz
Elizabeth Bennett
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I agree with virtually all that has been said so far on the subject of revealing the identity of one's research site. When I used a pseudonymn for my original fieldwork site in Greece, I did so more so due to what I perceived as a proper ethnographic convention rather than for any practical/ethical reasons. I took the opportunity to be a bit whimsical and dubbed "my" village "Aspida", a modern Greek word meaning shield. The real name of the village is Skoutari, a Byzantine Greek word meaning shield. But Aspida has another meaning as well. I was conducting research during the period of the Greek junta military dictatorship. Andreas Papandreou, later the founder of the PASOK political party and long time prime minister of Greece, had founded in the 1960s a "secret" military/political organization called Aspida, so the choice of name, in addition to reflecting the real name also provided an opportunity for me to stick it to the junta, albeit in a small and probably meaningless way. But I never deceived myself that any astute (or probably less than astute) individual could figure out where the village was. Moreover, I was not dealing with any material that I deemed very sensitive, nor did I observe much that might have caused problems for villagers had I reported it (unlike Pitt-Rivers, for example, whose informants were fairly deeply involved in smuggling - one of the reasons he chose for concealing the identity of his High Sierra village), although several villagers used dynamite for fishing, a practice VERY common in Greece.
A few years ago Margaret Kenna, a British anthropologist who worked on an Aegean island finally decided to come clean about its identity, in part due to urgings from the islanders themselves who wanted their island to be recognized!
In the end, I think it is an entirely personal decision. There are still situations, I suspect, where it makes good practical, ethical, and possibly legal sense to conceal the identity of the community and certainly of certain individuals. I do not think there can be a blanket policy that would cover all or even most situations. Fieldwork is such a personal endeavor and each anthropologist and each community is entirely unique. So, to young anthropologists (an older ones as well) heading into the field, I say: Weigh the various factors involved and make your decision accordingly. You will never be able to conceal the identity completely, and it might be worthwhile to poll some of your informants about what course to follow.
Peter Allen
P.S. Although I used a pseudonymn in all my publications on "Aspida", I did use the real name in my (unpublished) dissertation which was/is available from the U. of Mich. dissertation microfilm service.
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I am intrigued with the discussion over identification of research sites, as this has been a troubling issue for me at times. I got into European research as a "refugee" from a Central American site where I did my dissertation research over a period of three years. Toward the end of that research, it became clear that I could not effectively explain the dynamics of family economics and local politics without accounting for a major variable differentiating some families from others-- the decision to grow marijuana. I made it through the dissertation OK by acknowledging the name of the community but assigning pseydonyms to every individual in the village (I developed a "formula"). I never developed the courage to publish a monograph, instead selecting some topics from within the dissertation that I could write articles on without jeopardizing the community.
Then I ended up in Ireland just down the road from the community where Nancy Scheper-Hughes did her research for _Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics_. Once again, I was hesitant and unsure about whether I should use the actual name of the community, actual names of people. So I asked the membership of the local Historical Society (my support network within the community) what to do, and they preferred that I use the real name of the community. So Ballyduff is Ballyduff in my publications.
The problem of identifying individuals remained a problem. So far I have continued to use pseudonyms. But I found myself restricted to using first names with initials, because assigning people the "wrong sort" of surname might prove worse than revealing their true identity. Many names have very local connections, and to purport to do research in North Kerry and then call people names associated with Cork or Tiperrary would be a major faux pas.
Now I am in process of writing a monograph in which the whole process of naming becomes a focus of analysis in its own right. I see no way to avoid naming names, real names.
Being a child of the sixties and having embarked early upon a career in journalism, my overall inclination is to "tell it like it is." And I think we should. But this requires us to be even more aware, especially within communities that are not only literate but worldly wise, that people will be construcing themselves and their communities for us with an eye to the judgment of our readership. All of which only serves to make our task more intriguing...
Donna Birdwell-Pheasant
Lamar University
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I didn't use a pseudonym in my own ethnography, aalthough I did consider it, and actually had one all picked out. The reasons I didn't may not apply in other places; this was in Denmark, on a rural island in northwest Jutland. But for what they're worth, they were as follows:
Best regards,
Andy Buckser
Purdue University
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I used the true names of all of the communities of Almonaster la Real in Huelva because I was so proud of what the people had given me....for the most part I hid the individuals in the composit characters within the text. Most of them knew who they were and after puzzling through the first english version they thought it quite a lark...now that it has finally come out in a terrible spanish translation...there are second generation Almuneses with better english skills who like the english version better. The original version from the early seventies benefited from that early translation by towns people...they made corrections in song texts and argued the merits of ritual descriptions...all changes which found their way into the subsequent english edition. Now after thirty years I have had to print and distribute the pictures which were used for illustrations to two and three generations and younger people marvel that "life was ever really like that". In my case the decision was easy. I learned and valued what I learned too much to pass it off as my creation...hiding the true authors behind a pseudonym seemed close to dishonest.
Francisco E. Aguilera
Faguilera@aol.com
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Europe is a region intensively studied by all social sciences. One of strongest contributions to the study of Europe ethnographers can make is the localization of broad, even global, processes. We look at what broad processes mean for a specific community and as we do this, we try to bring in all the characteristics of that community as it responds to those processes. For instance, I have studied the transition from a society based on a combination of subsistence and market-oriented agriculture, to one embedded in the modern international economy - a global process. My focus was on pottery, and I specified potters in relation to availability of raw materials, local techniques, and local labor relations; in relation to distribution regions; and in relation to socio-geographically characteristic consumption patterns. I studied how these potters transformed their production and marketing in response to such processes as the Spanish Civil War, the economic policies of the Franco government, the granting of Autonomy to Catalonia, and the integration of Spain in the European Community. By doing this, I looked at what made "my" village, Miravet, unique in the transition to a modern international economy. To use a pseudonym for this village would run against my whole study of specifying, or identifying, the potters of Miravet. Of course, not every ethnographer specifies his or her community to the same extenT. Moreover, I do recognize the importance of protecting one's informants. But what I would like to point out, is that the identification of one's field site is an inherent aspect of ethnography, and perhaps more so in a region like Europe.
Rob van Veggel
University of Chicago
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This thread has been interesting and is potentially useful for new ethnographers making decisions about the identification issue, but so far no one has defended the _general_ practice of disguising field locations (as opposed to doing so when criminal or political matters are involved), even though I know there are many ethnographers subscribed to the list who have done so. To provide a rull range of opinion, I invite subscribers who are so inclined to defend the practice. (I began by disguising my first field site on the Island of Pantelleria--largely as a matter of tradition at the time--but then realized that there was no particular reason to do so, and since the middle 1970s have not disguised field locales.)
Tony Galt, Editor H-SAE
added 6/6/98