Contents...
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Multi-Sited
Ethnography Project:
Youth Culture Across
the World
and Their Perceptions of the United States
By John Meade
Throughout the course of my travels I have dealt with the difficult
task of finding a common theme to base my ethnographic research
on. I have had that wonderful opportunity to experience so many
new cultures and interact with so many interesting people. Even
with all that I have seen and done, I found it hard to wrap all of my
research around a common theme. As I was compiling the reports I
have written and going over my experiences a thought came to me.
I had my theme all along and did not even realize it. Every time
that I sat down to talk with people my age that I met in the countries
I have been to, we ended up talking about basically the same
things.
The topic that we discussed most was the
subject of the United States. This has proved to be the perfect
theme for a project that deals with multi-sited ethnographic
research. I had been doing the research all along, now it was
just a matter of compiling the information that I had collected.
The theme that I chose to tie all of my encounters together is the way
that young people in foreign countries perceive the United States, U.S.
foreign policy, and citizens of the U.S. George Gmelch
illustrates how this theme is one that seems to pervade most
anthropological work from Americans who travel abroad. In a
section of his essay “Lessons from the Field” he discusses how the
students he was teaching fieldwork to gained a new perspective on being
American from their time spent in Barbados. I believe that the
same has happened to me.
In the subsequent pages I will detail my
experiences in three different countries. The countries that will
be discussed are Japan, Egypt, and Croatia. It was in these three
places that I had the most insightful conversations with people my age
about the United States. The next few sections will be composed
of my field reports on the three countries outlined above. First
click on the link to my field reports for a complete explanation of my
experiences there. Then come back here where I have supplemented
my discussions with a more detailed analysis of my fieldwork.
ANALYSIS
The discussion group at Ritsumeikan University included altogether
about twenty-five American students and about thirty-five Japanese
students. We were split up into groups and the Japanese students
at our table had a list of questions and topics for discussion that
they had prepared before our arrival. After we were introduced
the Japanese students wanted to know what we thought of Japan and how
it
differed in our eyes from the United States. We discussed the
similarities and differences in music, fashion, food, and general
culture and customs, but the real question on the table for us all
turned out to be politics.
Initially I was nervous when we started our
discussion of United States and Japanese political life. I had it
in the back of my mind that maybe these students would shy away from
the subject because of the tension from the Second World War. My
assumptions about their attitudes on the subject proved to be
false. They were only uncomfortable because they thought that we
might be uneasy or uninterested in talking about the war.
Theodore Bestor outlines this point in is article “Doing Fieldwork in
Japan”,
…[subjects] don’t generally volunteer information about their own
social environments if they don’t have reason to
think that [the researcher] also finds it particularly interesting or
significant (Bestor 326).
After the students realized that we were interested and utterly
comfortable talking about the war and also modern politics we had a
great discussion. They told us about their views on the war,
which included feelings of shame for what the Japanese government did
during that time and also feelings of resentment towards the United
States for their usage of the atomic bomb on Japanese civilians.
The discussion then moved on to the topic of
modern politics and American foreign policy. They prefaced their
comments by saying that they have nothing against the American people,
but they feel that American foreign policy is headed in the wrong
direction. All three of the students in my group felt that our
current president is somewhat of a war-monger and that he is only
interested in fostering democracy when it will serve his
administration’s interests. They felt that American policy abroad
is turning dangerous and that American hegemony cannot last
forever. They told us that the United States government needed to
be more like the Japanese government. They thought that Americans
need to stop interfering with other countries affairs and focus more on
our domestic problems, of which there are many. We closed our
discussion by asserting the fact that governments need to cooperate
with each other in order to serve global interests, not just American
ones.
ANALYSIS
Talking with this man in Cairo gave me insight into a completely
different perspective. This man had a totally opposite reaction
to the topic of American foreign policy than the students in Japan
did. The conversation that I had with his was one that I never
expected, but now that I am reflecting on it, makes a vast amount of
sense.
Before traveling to Cairo, when I thought of
the Middle East I almost imagined a world where one point of view is
represented. I thought of a place where one idea seems to hold
true and everyone living there conforms to that idea. The more I
explored Cairo and experienced the massive city it occurred to me that
I had been incorrect. The Middle East, or at least this part of
Egypt, is almost as diverse as large cities in the United States.
Farah Ghannam mentions this point in her essay Relocation and the
Creation of a Global City. She writes,
The mixture of actions,
buildings, people, and activities gives the
impression that the entire world is represented in Cairo
and that it represents the world (Ghannam 25).
The more that I discussed American policy with this man I came to see
Cairo as a much more diverse place. I also found that I was
attaining a clearer picture of the Egyptian people.
ANALYSIS
Vica illuminated many things for me. I had begun our talk by
simply asking him some questions I had prepared about America and his
thoughts on our policy, but the conversation gradually turned to just a
casual discourse about tourism and youth culture in general. He
made the point that all young people are basically the same. It
does not matter whether one lives in Croatia, or the U.S., or China, or
Saudi Arabia. All youth share the same dreams, the same goals,
many of the same interests.
He told me how he could see that in his observations of tourists.
There are many Europeans and Americans that come to Croatia for leisure
and relaxation, but he said that he has been able to see similarities
in all of them. He has had the opportunity to interact with
travelers his age before I met him and he has talked with them about
international politics before. He told me how most of the young
people he meets share the same views about the current global political
climate. Most people seem to think that the United States and
Western Europe appear far too concerned with their own interests to be
able to do any real good for the world. He wished people could
come together and forget their differences for once and join in
creating a more global community, rather than destroying things that
bind all people together.
It was amazing for me to see just how similar
Vica, a student living across the world, and I really are. We
shared many of the same opinions and wanted many of the same things for
the world. He mentioned how jealous he was of my travel
experience. He said that he longed to be able to see the
world. My only regret from our conversation was that he had
little to say about the Balkan Wars. He was much too young at the
time and he lived then in a very small town. He said that his
family was never directly affected by the war. He said that he
felt connected to the loss, but could not really elaborate any
further. I learned much from Vica, but I really wanted to get a
firsthand account of the war. I had read Irena Plejic’s article
in the ethnography Fear Death and
Resistance, and wished that I could
have gotten accounts like she was able to get. There is so much
depth in that conflict and Vica seemed to touch on a small portion of
it, but my dialogue with him was nothing like the accounts in that
article.
CONCLUSIONS
It
seems that I have come to the point in my multi-sited ethnography
project where it is fitting to ask, what have I really learned from all
of this? I have gathered a plethora of information and I have a
firmer grasp on the global youth mindset. I now hold a better
understanding for the pain and shame that the Japanese feel about the
Second World War; I more wholly comprehend the complexities of the
Middle East; and I was shown how no matter where you are in the world,
people still share the same hopes and aspirations. These are all
brilliant revelations, but at the core of all of my experiences there
is something greater.
I feel that I have ultimately learned much
about myself. Through all of my talks with people around the
globe I have come to a better conclusion about my own personal
views. I have been trying to study youth, but really I was
studying myself. As I acquired new information about the people I
met, I had to reassess my own perception. My research experience
has changed my view of the world and the people that inhabit it.
That is really what is at the heart of multi-sited ethnographic
research. My thoughts on this project and my anthropological
experience on a whole is best summed up by a quote from George Marcus’
article "Ethnography in of the World System: the Emergence of a
Multi-Sited Ethnography,"
In practice, multi-sited fieldwork is thus always conducted with a
keen awareness of being within the landscape, and
as the landscape changes across sites, the identity of the ethnographer
requires renegotiation (Marcus 112).
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