Learning from Mistakes:

• Little record exist of mistakes and learning from them, and of the role of chance and accident in stumbling upon significant problems, in reformulating old ones, and in devising new techniques, a process known as ‘serendipity’ (Powdermaker 1966)

• One’s ethnographic understanding of others is never arrived at in a neutral or disengaged manner, but is negotiated and tested in an ambiguous and stressful field of interpersonal relationships in an unfamiliar society (Jackson in Minima Ethnographica 1998: 5).

What can these mistakes teach us about others and ourselves?

Ethnographic research is not without problems

What does the fact that anthropologists don’t have all the

answers teach us?

Become aware that:

• there is no right answer

• there is no formula

• in the process of ethnographic research we need to acknowledge our mistakes

Acknowledging mistakes teaches us that:

• 1). the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity:

• 2. the ethnographic experience cannot be taken as face value but should be studied in its sensational depth: beyond language

• 3. that meaning is not a fixed relation between discourse and “objective reality” (Grasping meaning is an event of gradual understanding)

Serendipity: the unique and contingent mix insight coupled with chance (Gary Fine and James

Deegan).

• Temporal serendipity (happening upon a dramatic instance)

• serendipity relations (unplanned building of social relations)

• analytical serendipity (connection of discoveries with a theoretical paradigm)

Question:

• How do the three readings differ and resemble one another with respect to the notion that ethnographers also learn from mistakes and chance?