INTRODUCTION

During a project in Brazil an ethnography team immersed itself in the lifestyle of lower socioeconomic class women who work as independent sales representatives for a direct sales cosmetic company. Taking into consideration the difference in worldviews among the ethnographers, participants and the client, we present this case study and discuss positionality, methodology and access to data, i.e. the ways characteristics such as socio-economic, education and gender helped or harmed the research. During the project we received some surprisingly and involuntary reactions, feedbacks and responses from the participants with whom we ran the ethnography. Some personal stories (one such story was about a woman who got a divorce during the course of the project) and some well known ethnography guidelines we had to ignore due to the circumstances (such as disclosing that the client was present at the interviews) made us ponder on who we are and where we are headed as a community of ethnography practitioners.

The initial perceptions regarding this fieldwork framed notions of positionality which are the basis of the reflection aimed by this paper. Firstly, we present the project scope and briefly discuss the specificities which pushed us to reflect on positionality. Secondly, after a summary of the anthropology literature on positionality and its implications, we go through the three main areas from which we draw our reflections: ethnography and the client during the fieldwork, ethnography and gender, and ethnography and different social status. Finally, we debate positionality implications into ethnography practice (whether it is academic- or private-sector driven). The idea is not to set rights and wrongs but to ponder on how successful (or not) were our attempts and reflect on unforeseen effects of our own work.

PROJECT SCOPE AND HOW WE GOT INTO THINKING ABOUT POSITIONALITY

The source of the debate discussed in this paper has been a five month project at a Latin American innovation consultancy which was conducted in 2012 for a Brazilian cosmetic direct sales corporation. The objective of this project was to provide strategic basis for an internal project the client was conceiving: a new digital learning platform for an ongoing online training support about cosmetic sales. The development of this online system should be focused on the needs of different profiles of the independent sales representative all over Brazil, therefore the methods adopted were intense in ethnographic research,¹ focusing on understanding the lifestyle, needs and motivations of those independent sales representatives. We got in touch with more than 60 people while traveling to 17 cities, including the 5 geographic macro regions of the country, ranging from small towns (28,000 inhabitants) to the main Brazilian capitals (11 million inhabitants).

The interactions were guided by in-depth semi-structured interviews and by immersion in the lifestyle and typical venues of our participant routines (their houses, their workplaces, the venues where they gather for training which was conducted by this direct sales company etc.). During these interactions we also had the chance to get in touch with other people close to them, such as their relatives, close friends, colleagues, etc. The fieldwork was conducted by a four people team, which was split in two pairs (in order to be able to work simultaneously in two different areas). Each one of these pairs was composed by one male and one female researcher and most of the time someone from our client team (always a woman) followed us.

The fieldwork was divided in two phases. Firstly we ran a more exploratory research in which the focus were house-visits and individual interviews aiming at identifying lifestyle, learning related needs and technological profiles of the participants. The second phase involved a more generative research in which we opted for group activities – usually asking key participants to invite friends over (other independent sale representatives of the same corporation) – exploring their routines and habits related to their professional activities and proposing projective exercises which sought to validate a hypothesis and to create design principles for the development of the platform.

Due to the characteristics of this cosmetic business in Brazil, this ethnographic research was conducted mostly with women, as they are the vast majority of the independent sales representatives our client has. We interacted with people from different socioeconomic levels, however the women from the lower classes were the ones who motivated us to reflect about our experience and to write this paper. Although they were the poorest from our sample, the financial issue was not at the core of our differences, i.e. at the core of the situations that pushed us to think about who we are, who they are and how complex is to do the ethnographic interactions from the point of view of these assumptions. From Bourdieu (1979) we can consider that each one of us (researchers and participants) had different life paths and through them we have been internalizing different values and aspirations. From these different paths, and in spite of an overall low level of education and instruction, it is noteworthy that these women from the lower socioeconomic levels clearly have traces of entrepreneurship. And although their socioeconomic condition has always been an issue for them, they have found direct sales as an opportunity to be more independent, not only economically, but also in the sense of achieving freedom in a wider sense. This is important because historically in Brazil those women were dependent and faced restraints under a sexist environment dominated by men, sometimes including domestic violence by their husbands. All that configures a scenario where our participation as researchers ought to be carefully planned regarding thinking about how to best access the data (while still of course respecting the ethical nature of our professional activity).

Finally, it is important to note that we returned to some participants from the first phase during the second phase of the project (as key participants²) and thus it was possible to observe and analyze the influence the researchers may have had on the participants’ lives. Thus, it was possible to draw a set of reflections regarding the role of the ethnographer in terms of positionality related to client presence, gender and social position.

POSITIONALITY AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL LITERATURE

As briefly mentioned before, the objective of this paper assumes that our own position during the fieldwork as researchers has had influence over the access to data. In our case, we are pondering on how our personal characteristics, our personal path and our methodological strategies helped or made it more difficult to be accepted in our participant households, to promote rapport and to make the fieldwork experience a rich source of data.

The origin of the idea of an ethnographic enterprise is not to directly question people about the topics the researcher is interested in, but to experience their culture, lifestyles, routines, and to talk directly and in-depth with them in order to gather enough experience in that community to be able to infer about the ways that this culture operates. As Brewer (2000:11, emphasis in the original) suggests, ethnography is a specific method of data collection, which differs itself by its objective and approach, respectively: “to understand the social meanings and activities of people in a given ‘field’ or setting” requires “close association with, and often participation in, this setting”, involving “intimate familiarity with day-by-day practice”. On that topic, Malinowski (1922:9-10) states:

Though we cannot ask a native about abstract, general rules, we can always enquire how a given case would be treated. Thus for instance, in asking how they would treat crime, or punish it, it would be vain to put to a native a sweeping question such as, “How do you treat and punish a criminal” for even words could not be found to express it in native, or in pidgin. But an imaginary case, or still better, a real occurrence, will stimulate a native to express his opinion and to supply plentiful information. A real case indeed will start the natives on a wave of discussion, evoke expressions of indignation, show them taking sides – all of which talk will probably contain a wealth of definite views, of moral censures, as well as reveal the social mechanism set in motion by the crime committed.

This passage highlights the importance of the interaction between the ethnographer and the people involved in the fieldwork. From the 1920s until today a lot of methodological debates suggest interviewing techniques and other fieldwork guidelines to empower this interaction and to promote rapport³ – and, moreover, learn from the difficulties emerged from that challenge, considering it as a part of your findings (Harrington, 2002). Nevertheless positionality proposes a different approach to that same issue: the ethnographer is a person with a background, with certain characteristics that unavoidably say something about her on the first glance – such as age, gender or ethnicity etc. – and, therefore, the ethnographer may have some influence over the fieldwork and how data is accessed.

Considering Malinowski’s example about setting a conversation around crime punishment, if the imagined crime is a case based on racial issues, any difference in terms of ethnicity of the interviewer and of the interviewee might be crucial to understand and interpret what is said during this conversation. From the 1960s, with the emergence of the postmodern critiques to the epistemology of knowledge, which questions the existence and accessibility of a ‘reality’ to be uncovered by science, ethnographers started to question their own methods:

[Postmodern] ethnographers question the ability of any method to represent ‘reality’ accurately on three grounds: there is no one fixed ‘reality’ in the postmodern understanding of nature to capture ‘accurately’; all methods are cultural and personal constructs, collecting partial and selective knowledge; and since all knowledge is selective, research can offer only a socially constructed account of the world (Brewer, 2000:22-23).

This reflexive approach is widely discussed within the anthropology literature during the last decades, assuming that “ethnographic fieldwork characteristically invokes a conception of knowledge modeled on subjective vision” (Asad, 1994:57). This subjective vision embraces the notion that the one who writes about ethnography is not a generic or a neutral scientist – i.e. it advocates the rejection of the concept of the ethnographer as the subject in charge of discovering the truth about her or his research objects through the fieldwork. As Chiseri-Strater (1996:119-120) argues “while there is no formula for locating oneself within this delicate ethnographic terrain, I would suggest that we take no more risk in adopting subjective and reflexive roles as researchers than we would in presenting ourselves as objective and detached, a stance that most postmodernist fieldworkers would reject”. Back (1993:217) adds feminism to this epistemological and methodological change: for him, “the feminist criticism has resulted in the death of an academic discourse which has viewed male accounts of society as generic”; consequently “the male ethnographer has been made visible”.

Indeed, the feminist approach is one of the boldest within the positionality debate, offering a rich literature about it. For example, Ganesh’s reflections about her experience within the Kottai Pillaimar community detail the difficulties and successes in accessing the community members, and, moreover, compare the ways she was treated with the ways other women around were treated: “A lone (‘unprotected’) upper-caste woman with the appropriate behavior is more likely to be treated by men with respect. Women from the bottom of the hierarchy would doubly have to prove their ‘goodness’ and even so might be open to rough treatment” (Ganesh, 1993:134).

Hence, the objective is to look back on the project having in mind that “the growth of postmodern and reflexive anthropology constitutes a significant diversion for those who are serious about developing a sensitivity to the gender-loaded context in which fieldwork takes place” (Back, 1993:217). We suggest that gender is just one issue among others which constituted the differences between the research teams and the people we got in touch with and we argue that these differences influenced the results of the ethnography. As Chiseri-Strater (1996:119) suggests, we must write about these topics as part of our ethnography: “turning in upon ourselves as researchers makes us look subjectively and reflexively at how we are positioned” – and, we would add, how this position influence our work.