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Audience
ethnographies: a media engagement approach
Antonio
C. La Pastina Texas A&M University O
estudo analisa a importância de métodos etnográficos para
o estudo de audiências mediaticas e propõe um modelo de análise
da relação entre consumidores e textos que leva em
consideração vários vieses teóricos para os estudos das
audiências. Neste modelo teórico-metodológico a idéia
central é articular a importância da etnografia, como um método
e um viés teórico que propõe a imersão e a análise de
longo prazo na compreensão das audiências mediaticas. In the last two decades ethnography has acquired a central role theoretically and empirically in media studies. But it has also acquired a rhetorical function. Rhetorically, ethnography has come to represent an opposition to positivistic paradigms towards data collection and analysis as well as the relationship between research and researched. Ethnography represented a shift from empirical practices of data collection pushing scholars to introduce non-objective strategies to audience analysis and a greater level of self-reflexivity among researchers. This turn however, has also led to a problematic situation. The term has acquired great currency among media scholars at the expense of a focused coherence to its meaning. This critique has already been advanced by others scholars. Murphy (1999) has outlined the dilemma of ethnography use in reception studies. He argues that cultural studies scholars have theorized about the importance of ethnography to an understanding of media and cultural practices at the same time that they have reached an almost paralyzing position in which the political and epistemological debates regarding the role of the researcher have limited rather than promoted the production of ethnographic media studies. In this chapter I argue that audience ethnography need to be reposition as a fieldwork based, long term practice of data collection and analysis. This practice allows researchers to attain a greater level of understanding of the community studied while maintaining self-reflexivity and respect towards those one is attempting to understand within the everyday life of the community. Relying on my work in rural communities in Brazil over the last decade I will discuss some of the ways in which ethnography, as a long-term in-depth practice can benefit our understanding of the reception dynamic as well as provide insights otherwise impossible to attain. I will propose a model for audience ethnography, which I termed media engagement, to discuss how the process of ethnography functions to apprehend the complex dynamic that evolves between consumers and cultural products. Murphy and Krady (2003) edited book demonstrates how ethnography can provide a solid understanding of the engagement process between viewers and cultural products. Taking in consideration the complexities of location, the dynamics of gender, race, ethnicity, class the different chapters in that anthology demonstrate how media/audience ethnography can be done as a long term, in-depth project that allows for solid knowledge about media practices. Ethnographers immerse themselves in a culture to retell the lives of a particular people, to narrate the rites and traditions of that people, and to understand and explain their cultural practices. In doing so, ethnographers contain, even if unintended, the experiences lived, giving form and coherence to a multiplicity of experiences, to simultaneous events, sensations, feelings and emotions. The ethnographer is trying to order the chaotic world in which theory and praxis are jumbled. According to Geertz (1973) this is accomplished through thick description: Ethnography
is thick description. What the ethnographer is in fact faced
with . . . is a
multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them
superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at
once strange, irregular and inexplicit, and which he must
contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render (p.10). To
Geertz, "understanding a people's culture exposes their
normalness without reducing their particularity [...] It
renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their
own banalities, it dissolves their opacity" (p.14). As
ethnographers, Geertz explains, "we begin with our own
interpretation of what our informants are up to, or think
they are up to, and then systematize those."
In this sense, what we observe and write is a
retelling, from the researcher's perspective, of what
happens in the locality. The intent of the ethnography must
be to allow the systematization of these accounts, so the
reader can understand the events described, knowing full
well these are the accounts of one observer who has framed
and perceived the events within his or her limitations. Rosaldo
(1989), in discussing the work of Geertz and Turner and
their role in developing methodologies for processual
analysis in ethnography, argues that the danger of thick
descriptions is that they may end on thin
conclusions. His view is that the focuses on social control
placed on most of these authors' earlier works "exclude
precisely the informal cultural practices whose study they
elsewhere advocate and whose work their case studies so
effectively illuminate" (p. 98). Rosaldo is not arguing
against thick descriptions, what he is developing is an
argument against the notion of culture as a form of orderly
structure and controlling force: “One often equates
culture with order (as against chaos) and social norms with
regulation (as against anarchic violence)" (p.99). For
him, when culture is equated to a "control mechanism,
such phenomena as passions, spontaneous fun, and improvised
activities tend to drop out of sight" (p.102). As
ethnographers we must be prepared to look at culture not in
a system enclosed in itself but rather a system in
continuous motion. Abu-Lughod
(1993), in the introduction of Bedouin
Stories, writes that the concept of culture seems to
work as an essential tool for making "other."
The author argues that in producing a discourse on
culture that explains the "difference,"
"anthropology ends up also constructing, producing and
maintaining difference" (p.12) In
his radical argument that "natives" are a figment
of the anthropological imagination, [Appadurai] shows the
complicity of the anthropological concept of culture in a
continuing "incarceration" of non-Western peoples
in time and place. He argues that by not looking to their
histories, we have denied these people the same capacity for
movement, travel and geographical interaction that
Westerners take for granted. The fluidity of group
boundaries, languages and practices, in other words, has
been masked by the concept of culture (Abu Lughod 1993,
p.11). The
importance of the concept of culture in ethnographic work is
that in gathering data or facts one inevitably will select,
and in so doing will present a certain view of a group's
"culture" creating a representation or a
construction of a group’s lived experience. As
Scheper-Hughes (1992) argues,
"all facts are selected and interpreted from the
moment we decide to count one thing and ignore another, or
attend this ritual but not another, so that anthropological
understanding is necessarily partial and is always
hermeneutic” (p.23). This selectivity that the
ethnographer inevitably engages in may result in
generalizations that, according to Abu-Lughod (1993), lead
to the creation of "coherent, self-contained” others,
allowing for the "fixing of boundaries between the self
and the other" (p. 7). Nevertheless
these narratives, that represent a particular segment of a
group’s life provides a deep understanding of the dynamics
that form that groups practices and for our purpose in this
essay, their particular engagement with media and popular
culture. The diversity of methods and theoretical approaches
delineated by Drotner (1994) clarifies the strength of the
ethnographic method for the study of media practices. A
method as open-ended as ethnography provides space for the
researcher to incorporate information and build upon it, as
well as to recycle and re-evaluate it the next day based on
newly acquired information and renewed perceptions. The
advantage of using ethnography to engage in audience studies
rests on its potential to provide both a domestic and a
communal context of television and telenovela reception
among the different groups in the community. It also
facilitates an understanding of how the reception context
can affect the interpretation of the message by viewers,
individually and in groups. The ethnographic research also
allows for the examination of the phenomena not only in its
immediate social, political and economic contexts, but also
in a larger historical framework as well as its insertion in
the broader regional, national and global context. Morley
and Silverstone (1991) argue for the advantage of
ethnographic methods in studying media audiences, explaining
that they provide an "analysis of multiple structured
contexts of action, aiming to produce a rich descriptive and
interpretative account of lives and values of those
subjected to the investigation" (p. 149-150). The
importance of ethnography lies in the possibility of
assessing the different elements involved in the reception
process and how these elements interact within the context
of the locality in which the observation is taking place, as
well as with the culture and identity of the community
members. Television
audiences are fluid; they present different characteristics
in different situations and toward different programs.
"Watching television should be seen as a complex and
dynamic cultural process, fully integrated in the messiness
of everyday life, and always specific in its meanings and
impacts" (Ang 1991, p.161). According to Ang (1991),
the ethnographic research is the appropriate methodology to
better understand the viewing behavior in the specific
concrete situation in which it takes place. She argues that
ethnographic research can account for situational
practices and experiences of those who must make do with
television provision served them by institutions -- an
open-ended discourse that conceives quality as something
relative rather than absolute, plural rather than singular,
context specific rather than universal, a repertoire of
aesthetic, moral and cultural values that arises in the
social process of watching television rather than through
criteria imposed upon from above (Ang 1991, p. 167-68). For
Drotner (1994) media ethnography “draws on a variety of
classical anthropological and ethnological methods of
investigation: participant observation, informal talks and
in-depth or life course interviews, diaries kept by the
informants as well as self-reports kept by the researcher.
In addition, he or she may apply textual analysis of for
example selected television programmes, musical scores or
magazines genres.” She argues that this variety of methods
and theoretical approaches do not necessarily provide a more
veridical picture but rather she argues that the
“discrepancies that are most significant and revealing.”
The practice of audience ethnography remains a challenge. The need to focus on the complexities of the surrounding environment and on the personal ideational values and attitudes makes this a process fraught with limitations. To observe and participate in the process of media consumption might limit a more general analysis of the societal process and the general trends that can be observed in a sociological study. Nevertheless, the understanding of individual and communal media consumption practices might help to apprehend the role of media texts. The
engagement between viewers/consumers and texts needs to be
investigated as a process locate in a context broader than
the immediate site of the viewing interaction. I identified
four stages of this engagement process: reading,
interpretation, appropriation, and change. The first phase
is when the actual reading happens, normally in the home
within a family context. This phase is best understood in
terms of a factual explanation of the narrative structure
and content. The second phase is when the text is
interpreted, which happens not only at an individual level
but also through social interactions that might impose
norms, values, and beliefs shared by the community upon the
text. After interpretation, the third phase involves
appropriation, where the issues brought up by the text and
interpreted though mediating forces are used to explain
one’s own life or the social relations and cultural
dynamics one is inserted in. The processes of identification
and catharsis are normally at work in this phase. Resistance
also happens in this phase. The final stage in this
engagement model is behavior change, which in most cases is
the hardest stage of this process of engagement to be
documented. Ethnography has the potential to observe
community and social changes that might be related to media
presence do to its ability to develop longitudinal
investigations. These four phases are an artificial attempt
to impose an analytical frame to this unruly process, these
stages are not discreet or present in all textual
engagements either. What I am proposing with this model is that ethnography allows investigators to grapple with the complexity of the relation between viewers/media consumers and media texts as an ensemble where all the different available media sources need to be consider in their interelation. I
espouse the view that when viewers engage in this reception
process, several things happen at the same time. The
interaction between viewer and text is complex,
multidimensional and multi-layered. No single term can
explain this process. Viewers engage in several processes,
many times simultaneously: the text becomes part of a
routine; it is used for gratification and leisure; its
meaning is negotiated with family and community; some
images, topics and characters are rejected -- others
embraced; the text is inserted in a context that also
mediates the process (Martin-Barbero, 1993); this process is
continuously evolving due to social interactions.
Identification happens; interpretation happens; use for pure
gratification happens; use for access to information
happens; passive viewing happens; and highly active reading
happens. Chatting about these texts might lead to
interpretations, and consequent acceptance or negation of
values and attitudes presented in these narratives.
Sometimes nomads, subjects are normally predictable in their
interpretative strategies. The challenge in the study of
audiences is that we are stepping into a field where no
clear unified structure is at place. In this research I am
trying to go beyond the analysis of interpretations alone to
discuss that transition where text becomes reality and
sometimes reality seems to be the text. I am using
engagement here to imply the totality of the media
experience -- from reading about the show, to watching it,
to talking about it, to remembering it, and so on. Telenovelas
in rural Brazil: a case study of media engagement To
explain the advantage of the ethnographic process to
apprehend what I have termed media engagement I will preset
an analysis of the confluence between a particular
telenovela text and viewers’ lives in a specific context.
Telenovelas are layered structures of signification, with
different sets of meanings associated to different aspects
of the creative and production process. Telenovelas are
melodramatic texts that favor traditional notions of class
ascension and romance inherent to the genre. Nevertheless in
recent years, the Brazilian telenovela, especially as the
genre has been developed by Globo network, has become much
more attuned to the national reality, discussing current
affairs and the social and political structure of the
nation. In doing so, telenovelas have become a space in
which authors’ agendas, and many times those promoted and
supported by the network, become an important sub-plot in
the narrative. In
The Cattle King (O
Rei do Gado), the particular telenovela discussed
here, adultery, pre-marital sex and pregnancy raised
important issues to a small community that was struggling
with a more visible teen sexuality and changing codes of
moral behavior. It also underscored the large number of
women questioning traditional norms that limit women’s
sexuality while allowing men to retain their sexual freedom,
even after marriage. The sub-plot of land reform and
political integrity included in the narrative clearly
touched the local reality. In 1996, during the broadcast of
the telenovela, Macambira, the site of this fieldwork, was
split by the rivalry between the two political parties in
the community. In this scenario of political rivalry, the
notion of integrity, honesty and land rights, prompted
viewers to discuss the images presented in the telenovela in
relation to their own reality. The commercial nature of
telenovelas pervaded the narrative as well with commercial
insertions and ties in with material advertised during
commercial breaks. Viewers, however, do not necessarily
decode the commercial content of telenovelas evenly.
Technological limitations reduce the access to commercial
messages, and the remoteness of the community impacts the
engagement with the commercial messages, clearly
establishing a hierarchy of viewer’s desires based on each
individual’s cultural, economic and symbolic capital. Transition In
Macambira, located in the interior of the Rio Grande do
Norte state, in northeast of Brazil, television is perceived
as the ultimate form of entertainment. Years of savings are
invested by some families in satellite dishes that allow
them to tune into 14 channels instead of the single one
available to the majority of the population. But television
is more than entertainment. For many viewers, it is the
main, if not the only, source of information. Television and
telenovelas provide access to a modern and urban reality
where male and female roles appear to be different. Through
television, viewers in Macambira knew what was going on in
Brasilia, the nation’s capital, the latest fashion trends
in the industrialized south, and the misery of communities a
few hundred miles away. Television reminds these viewers
about the gap between their lives and the lives of people in
the urban centers of the South. Whether decadent and
dangerous or “modern” and exciting, the lifestyles of
other families are brought to those in Macambira through the
telenovelas that feature conflicts, struggles, emotions and
romance. Macambira
was distant and isolated, not only physically and
culturally, but symbolically and emotionally, from the urban
and modern representation of the nation, the Brazil
constituted in the political and social discourse of the
school textbooks, news and entertainment media.
This was reflected in physical distance, economic
disparity and large difference in values and daily life
routines. These
structural differences created a breach or perceived gap
between viewers in Macambira and the modern, urban Brazil of
the telenovelas. This
gap created a fracture in the national identity, producing a
regional/local sense of not belonging to the nation
generating diverse readings of the reality consumed through
the media. For
most in Macambira, television and radio remained the main
sources of information about the outside world.
Besides these media channels, only very limited
interpersonal contact with outsiders complemented that media
knowledge. Migrants,
particular temporary ones, represented a bridge to the
outside world, providing personal stories on the
opportunities and vicissitudes one has to confront to
survive in the South. This
lack of direct experience severely limited the cultural
capital rural Brazilians bring to understanding the
telenovelas, such as many of the more unfamiliar consumer
themes and product placement exposures, but also instances
of intertextuality between news and the telenovela plot. In
the year I spend in Macambira, I talked to man and women
about their lives and the lives of the characters in one
particular telenovela, The Cattle King. These viewers’
views of their lives and the lives of these fictitious
characters in many moments resembled each other. In others
were totally dissonant. Discussing the telenovela with males
was almost always preceded by a disclaimer that this
telenovela was an exception. Male viewers tended to deny
enjoying watching telenovelas, except for those with
realistic portrayals. The definition of realistic portrayals
however varied, from The Cattle King (The Cattle King), to
Brother Courage (Irmãos coragem) to Isaura, the slave
(Escrava Isaura), but mostly, males attributed realistic
characteristics to those texts that dealt with rural
lifestyles. Man
and women’s roles in Macambira were defined and influenced
by the economic set up of the community. The embroidering
industry, and informal economic system, was the main source
of income. Most of the people engaged with embroidery were
women. Few men peripherally participated in this industry.
However the bulk of the labor and income derived form
women’s labor. Men, in the community, had a limited number
of job opportunities. They could either try to get one of
the few public jobs, mostly at the municipal level with a
very limited income. Or they could work in the agriculture
and struggle with the limited water resources, the limited
access to the land, and the raising cost of production in
comparison to the declining selling prices. Through the
years a large segment of the population migrated. And
temporary migration to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro has
become one of the main sources of income for many males.
This limited access to job opportunities has, according to
some residents led to a situation of imbalance where men few
powerless and women empowered, and that shift of power has
led to conflict. Erivaldo’s
family was from São Fernando, a small community only 15
miles away. Every time I met with his relatives they would
tell me how different Macambira was from São Fernando. The
main difference according to them was that in Macambira
women sat down at the bar and drunk beer and cachaça
without been intimidated. In São Fernando they said this
didn’t happen. In Macambira women went out to the few
bars, drunk at parties and many times at home with friends.
To many in Macambira, these were the result of women’s
ability to secure their own income. Dona Bezinha was clear,
woman have to work to be able to be independent. They need
to secure their income so they don’t have to ask their
partners for money to do anything. What about the husbands
that had to ask their wives for change to go have a beer
with their mates? Gender relations were colored by the local
economic culture, but undeniably there were clear leftovers
from traditional patriarchal structures, were males’
rights and women’s obligations were articulated. The
reverse, women’s rights and their partner’s obligations,
is the terrain of conflict. Males, in many cases, wanted to
maintain their culturally granted rights while women wanted
to acquire what they perceived to be their conquered rights.
It is in this struggle where telenovelas are located in
Macambira. Males and females watch these shows, some more
than others depending of the particular show and the time of
its broadcast, but over time telenovelas have become part of
many community members’ lives. For some telenovelas are
just entertainment, to others it provides insights into
another reality, into a world far away, into a world were
man and women relate differently, were women have more
freedom, were parents and children talk about their
problems, where affection was displayed. What
became clear through this ethnographic work is that viewers
engaged with the different narrative plots within the
telenovela, but the attention devoted to some elements was
much greater than to others. Gender, nevertheless, was one
of the most central elements in the process of
interpretation and engagement with the telenovela text.
While cultural capital and other elements influencing the
reading of the text were important, gender, was in fact,
central to this process. The
established gender norms and attitudes in Macambira
structured in many ways the levels of engagement and the
readings of viewers. The women’s increasing economic
empowerment has created a fracture in the established
traditional male-female domination patterns. This allows for
women to question their role and men’s role in the
household and the community. The telenovela seems to be one
way through which women observe alternatives, which are then
used to think their own lives and the lives of the community
in relation to that of the characters in the South. This
corresponds to and supports earlier reception finds by Leal
(1986) and Vink (1988). But
gender constructions also hindered the ability of males to
engage with the text in a more complex manner. The
perception that their masculinity, many times questioned by
their inability to provide for their households, could be
damaged even more by their association to telenovela, a text
still perceived as women’s program. This distancing that
many males presented in relation to telenovelas was even
more present when discussing certain elements in the
narrative. Males watching the telenovela preferred to talk
about issues associated to land reform and rural lifestyle
discourses. Consequently, many males presented a limited
cultural capital regarding knowledge of telenovela narrative
structure and an inability to use situations in the
telenovela to discuss their on reality as many women did.
Cultural capital in this context relates to the knowledge of
certain elements in the telenovela such as: a) narrative
conventions and strategies employed by telenovelas; b) an
awareness of previous roles played by a certain artist that
can provide a framework to understand his or her current
role and; c) the career trajectory of writers and directors
which allow to notice stylistic threads from one telenovela
to the next in which they worked on; d) intertextual
information regarding the telenovela relations to other TV
programs and real life characters. The last two items are in
many ways not only the result of telenovela watching but
also exposure to other texts that provide contextual
information about telenovelas. Even
if the text was perceived as feminine, males did use the
rural lifestyle and the political narrative to think about
their lives in relation to the urban modern south. The
images of farming and the technology associated with the big
cattle and milk producing farms in the telenovela caught
most males’ attention, as did the discussion on politics
and land reform. Males also were prone to comment and
rejoice with scenes on cattle herding and the lifestyle of
the peões
(herdsmen), their singing and story telling. This engagement
with this element of the narrative seems to indicate that
perceived gender norms did in fact hinder their level of
engagement with narrative layers such as the more
traditional melodramatic elements of love and betrayal. This
however does not mean that males did not pay attention to
those elements or were totally oblivious of them either. It
means a greater interest in talking about elements locally
associated with the male sphere, such as politics and farm
techniques, rather than engaging with other elements in the
narrative normally associate with the women sphere, such as
family raising and romance. Due
to the rural nature of The
Cattle King, described earlier, it was easily perceived
as a text pertaining to a male sphere. For women,
telenovelas -- and The
Cattle King was no exception -- were about romance.
Women viewers in Macambira perceive the melodramatic roots
of the genre and expected melodramatic genre conventions to
be followed by the writers. The incorporation of a more
contemporary social context in the telenovela’s narrative
seems to be distancing these texts from the melodramatic
roots, apparently making it harder for women to identify
with the characters. Males, on the other hand, see in this
process of contemporanization a bridge with what they
perceive to be a realistic narrative, which justifies their
viewing and enjoyment of the telenovela. However, the
established norms and attitudes regarding gender roles in
the community still limited the possibilities of males to
acknowledge the melodramatic as enjoyable. Telenovelas, for
these males, were valued according to their perceived
informational and/or realistic content. The
political and commercial layers of signification in the
narrative were nevertheless not always available to all
viewers in the same fashion. The newness or distance from
Macambira’s reality of these political and commercial
themes and images clearly established a certain hierarchy of
meanings available based on cultural and social capital.
Very few viewers successfully decoded the instances of
political intertextuality. These were instances in which the
telenovela characters, interacted in the plot with real life
politicians, or when real life politicians acknowledge in
the news media the importance or relevance of the telenovela
subplot on agrarian reform. Few were also able to decode
many of the commercial product placement insertions. The
available knowledge of the political debate in the nation
and of a larger range of commercial goods seems to have
limited the access of many viewers with less cultural
capital in these areas to those sequences. The male
identification with the rural plot line led many to see in
the commercial insertions the kind of information they said
they enjoyed in the telenovelas. What was puzzling was that
even viewers aware about Globo’s merchandising strategy
did not see in the placement of agricultural products an
attempt to advertise. This may possibly demonstrate that the
pleasure derived from the rural imagery, even if reinforcing
their perception that they live in the periphery of this
modern world, reminds them of their own rural traditional
values and identities. The
local political structure also hindered the readings of the
political message within the telenovela. The electoral
disputes in town and the tradition of local political fights
and accusations of corruption and mismanagement served to
create a local climate in which politicians were perceived
as corrupt by definition. Most viewers, particularly women,
saw in the political class a group that were only after the
financial return they were going to get out of an electoral
position. For these viewers, the representations of honesty
by the Senator in the telenovela became an unbelievable
representation of an unrealistic political structure. The
viewers, in that sense, live in a political system that is
not perceived to allow for the full development of their
rights as citizens. Their perception of the political
process as one that is inherently corrupt and leading to no
change, can, nevertheless, be questioned by the continuous
opposition that structures the election process. The local
political patronage created a need to be associated with
those in power. Residents question the honest politician as
one that was not aware about the ways the system work and
therefore could not accomplish anything, neither provide for
his family, at least not in the terms expected by a national
politician in a telenovela, nor win support to his
proposals. This
article attempted to demonstrate how an ethnographic
approach to media engagement between viewers and text(s)
allows for a better comprehension of this complex process.
Structural elements within the narrative as well as within
the viewing context mediate the process of reception and
appropriation of the narrative into viewers’ lives. It
became apparent that gender, both as social norms that are
culturally based, and as elements within the narrative were
key in the process of hindering and enabling viewers to
engage with the text into their lives. Gender as a socially
constructed category was also used to provide an element of
comparison between male and female viewers and their
expectations regarding the text as well as their willingness
to engage with certain narrative layers. This
ethnographic approach also contributed in providing a better
understanding of the role of the local (versus the
national/global) in the process of media engagement. It
clearly established that the perception of the telenovela
text as a representation of urban reality hinders the
process of identification; at the same time it creates a
bridge between the two realities, allowing viewers to engage
with a discourse that they perceive to be modern. These
representations of difference may lead in some instances to
a desire to question one’s life in relation to the lives
of those in the screen. Men also question their limited
power to farm and raise cattle comparing their reality the
modern rural technology used in the telenovela farms. In
that process consumer items, lifestyles and particular
behaviors, as well as norms that challenge the local
traditions may become part of the local cultural capital
that will be used to interpret situations in their own
lives. This
knowledge may potentially lead viewers to question their
lives and in that process engage in change. Returning to the
example that opens this conclusion, it seems to me that the
simple mimicking of some dance steps cannot be dismissed as
just a fad. The implications of such an incorporation of
conflictive sexualized behavior for local moral or sexual
traditions, values and attitudes can not be measured, but
can certainly be questioned. In the long term, telenovelas,
as well as other media text, has provided viewers in
Macambira with an array of images and ideas about what the
world beyond its borders look like. In that process it has
allowed local teenagers to challenge the established local
norms, led males to perceive their role in the community as
one that could be changed and given women an array of role
models that strengthen their perceptions of their own
rights. Ethnography allows to investigate patterns of
telenovela engagement that permit scholars to question how
this process from reception to appropriation of those
message into viewers’ lives that may lead to an awareness
about the self, the community and ultimately promote social
change. On
evaluating good ethnography Evaluating ethnographic media research is trick. In our discipline ethnography has been a hodgepodge of possibilities. As I argues in this paper media ethnography needs to return to a sense of commitment to traditional practices: long term, in-depth, site specific, multi method approach. A good ethnographic study has to provide evidence that the data reported, the analysis and processes described are the result of a long and careful process of maturation of the information collected. Ethnography is time consuming and costly. It is hard for most researcher to devote an extended period of time away from other job obligations and family. It is also still quite difficult to secure funding to conduct extensive ethnographic research. The inability to generalize from ethnographic data should not be seen as a weakness but rather as part of a methodological process that allows scholars to attain a deep understanding of particular processes. Nevertheless generalizability might be reached in limited ways to replicability of ethnographic studies in several sites. Ethnography requires a high level of commitment and an willingness to share your work and your life with a particular group that you care about and want to understand how a particular cultural process takes place. Many, such as Schepper-Hughes (1995) have argued that we should always engage in militant ethnography. I agree with her that once in the site our presence affect the work we are conducting but also affects the community we are working in. I believe that good ethnographic work has to make that self-reflexive relationship clear, building on that knowledge of our own limitations and the role we have in the research process but also acknowledging the central role the community members have in the final research product.
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