Beginning Secondary Research
This week, I started my secondary research stage of my thesis. This involved reading more of the foundational knowledge that my thesis will be based on, basically the study of rituals, festivals, diasporas, and cultural transmission in general. To be honest, it’s not a stage that I really look forward to. I find a lot of the journals and articles that I’m reading quite academic and boring. I am much more interested to get into the primary research stage where I plan to do interviews with Chinese diaspora community members. That is much more my cup of tea and something I much rather spend time on.
Currently, I just started reading Catherine Bell’s seminal work on rituals, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. I think one thing I do find interesting about it so far is the complexity of rituals that I had never thought about. Rituals can be looked at in a myriad of lenses, whether a form of social cohesion, performance, transformation, protest, etc. I am interested in seeing what else Bell has to say about the topic.
Other articles I have read this week include an introduction into an anthropological journal about festivals and an interesting article about the ritualesque manner of street demonstrations. I have included here some notes from my reading this week. Citations will be provided at the end of the blogpost.
Nicola Frost (2016) Anthropology and Festivals: Festival Ecologies, Ethnos
What can a festival be about?: High culture, music extravaganzas, religious commemorations, thanksgivings, celebrations, statements of alternative sexuality or national pride, etc.
What can festivals accomplish?: Money, fame, discussion of identity, politics, art, and more
Festivals have come to highlight many indigenous and migrant populations - thus highlighting cultural diversity as a positive attribute
Outsiders who go to these festivals are also being studied - led to the development of ways to measure the economic impact festivals inject into a particular location
Anthropology tends to look at festivals through the lenses such as kinship, religion, politics, economic, or cultural practice. They tend to emphasize the broader social and political context of the festivals through ethnographic research methods. They want to find the cultural significance and performance related to the festival.
This type of study makes it undesirable for the festival organizers and policy-makers to get involved since it doesn't seem to be related to their goal of economic profit.
Festivals as a cultural practice. Festivals as economic intervention. Festivals as a political platform. Festivals as symbols. Festivals as embodied practices.
Festivals are a place of intense "kinetic excitement" where insiders, performers, organizers, and visitors blurred together.
Festivals are things that need to be experienced and participated in to appreciate
Festivals are a "site of the collective, embodied memory" [573]. By going to a festival, you are engaging in the emotional aspect of festival participation.
Food at festivals: "suspension of the rules of everyday life", food as a ritual in festivals, "marker of time and space", "connects the special occasion to ongoing seasonal and agricultural cycles" [573] - effects on the body during the festival context
Festival and carnival affirm identity and belonging.
Festivals have been used by the authority to present a specific narrative about their history and sidelining others, thus creating a sort of identity propaganda.
Many festivals are also used as part of a political and economic process to increase self-awareness of local practices.
Jack Santino. “From Carnivalesque to Ritualesque: Public Ritual and the Theater of the Street.”
Rituals/Festivals are all a form of public performance
Public performances communicate through multiple modes, are a paradoxical encapsulation of joy and anger, and can frame "fun" as a sign of protest.
Carnivals are expressive rather than instrumental. Its temporary nature means that whatever happens at the carnival stays contained at the carnival. This provides leeway for inverted social hierarchies and usually unacceptable social behavior.
Though rituals are symbolic, they feel real to the participants. Thus, any transformation that occurs within the ritual feels real.
"Ritual...is instrumental symbolic behavior. The transformations accomplished by ritual are essentially permanent." [5]
"The distinction between ritual[s] and festival[s]....[are] blurred and porous." [5] Because of...
"Shared used of symbolic frames (certain ways of marking time or space), kinetics (parades, dances, house visitations), sound (noise, rough music, song, chants), and so on" [5]
"Ritualesque refers to those aspects of a symbolic event that are meant to lead to extra-ceremonial change, or transformation" [6]
Ritual transformations are expected to continue after the ritual ends, thus the ritual creates a permanent change within society.
A commonality of all public display events is the "claiming of public space by people not in any official way authorized to do so" [6]. These spaces are usually not neutral but contain within themselves important social or cultural meaning. Thus, by the people reclaiming these public spaces, it can be seen as an act of rebellion against the authority. It is no surprise then that these rituals and festivals can be seen as problematic by the authority.
Many rituals are a "theatricalization of intention"[6] towards the materialization of something (ie. healing or love) with the desire that it become the future outcome.
Festivals and commemorations that stem from grief and anger can easily be pivoted into riots and violence.
As a way to not become so bored, I did a little side research into the audience I’m most interested in, the Thai-Chinese immigrant communities. To start off, I did what most people do and started by reading the Wikipedia article about. What I did not know was that the Thai-Chinese community is the largest, oldest, and most prominent Chinese diaspora. This felt like a lightbulb went up in my head and led me to ask so many more questions. Why did they choose Thailand? Where did most people come from? It was written in the article itself too, but most Thai-Chinese people now see themselves as Thai because of how old the community is. So, what was the integration process like? Does this mean that the festivals that I went to all my childhood weren’t actually Chinese, but a hybridized version? I plan to do a lot more reading about this in the following weeks.
One last thing I read about this week was autoethnography. This method of research was mentioned to me last week by Professor Ansari, and it is a method that has piqued my interest. I had never heard of it before, so I decided to start my reading a little about what it was. Below are notes I took about them.
Doing auto/ethnography
“Autoethnography is a research method that uses personal experience to describe and interpret cultural texts, experiences, beliefs, and practices” (1)
Autobiography = based on memory and hindsight to reflect on past experiences.
Methods used: interviews with others, examining photographs, journals, recordings, newspaper articles
Written in storytelling way with "narrative voice, character development, and dramatic tension, to create evocative and specific representations of the culture/cultural experience and to give audiences a sense of how being there in the experience feels" [2-3]
Ethnography = based on observation and participation of a culture/cultural experience
Methods used: spend extended amounts of time with the culture, take notes, and "interview cultural members (“insiders”) about their experiences, thoughts, and feelings" [3]
Research is guided by the observations made and connected with more formal research on the experience later on
Goal: create an accurate representation of what the cultural practice is like for an outside audience through "thick, vivid, and concrete description, which offers readers a sense of being there in the experience." [3]
Autoethnography = combination of the two
Purposes and practices of autoethnography
Purposes
Focus on personal experiences
"Articulate insider knowledge of cultural experience" [3]
Assumes that the author has access to certain aspects of cultural life that other researchers do not
These personal experiences give the author a more nuanced view of the topic rather than an outsider with limited experience
This does not guarantee that the writing will be more truthful, but rather the perspective it gives will be more novel compared to others
Show how researchers have biases in their observations and conclusions
"Encourage autoethnographers to write against harmful ethnographic accounts made by others" [4] who do not have the wellness of the culture in mind.
"Create texts that are accessible to larger audiences, primarily audiences outside of academic settings" [4]
There's an intimacy and vulnerability that can be captured in autoethnographies that can't be captured in other academic writings. - compassionate storytelling
Practices
Written "with feminist principles"
How were the stories produced?
What were the author's motivations for and emotions in writing the piece?
Validating experiential and storytelling pieces of evidence
"Describe moments of everyday experience that cannot be captured through more traditional research methods." [4]
Using all of your senses to become part of the culture
The privilege to write about events in private contexts and reactions to offensive comments from a legitimate standpoint.
Next Steps:
Build more of a foundational understanding of rituals and festivals
Read more into the history of Thai-Chinese community
Read examples of autoethnographies so that I can start planning out how I can do one for myself
References:
Santino, Jack, and Jack Santino. “From Carnivalesque to Ritualesque: Public Ritual and the Theater of the Street.” Public Performances: Studies in the Carnivalesque and Ritualesque, edited by Jack Santino and Jack Santino, University Press of Colorado, 2017, pp. 3–15, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1z27gz3.4.
Nicola Frost (2016) Anthropology and Festivals: Festival Ecologies, Ethnos, 81:4, 569-583, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2014.989875
Adams, Tony E., et al. “Autoethnography.” Wiley Online Library, American Cancer Society, 1 Aug. 2017, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0011.