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Ethnomethodology & Qualitative Studies |
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"Frankly,
I would prefer to have accurate information on a small number of cases
than such garbage... Do you honestly believe that anyone will fund me to
do research on gay sex clubs or on gay culture?... Almost no ethnography
has been done in ten years on gay culture in relation to AIDS... Give me
a lone ethnographer any day over multimillion-dollar team projects"
(Bolton, 1995:
298-9).
"One
cannot do sex research if one is not comfortable with one's own sex in
all of its manifestations" (Bolton,
1995: 296).
"At
best anthropologists have kept silent on the topic of sex in the filed;
at worse they have perpetuated hypocritical pretences and ethnocentric
injunctions about sex with people in the societies they study. It is still
considered acceptable to share meals with informants, it is okay to invade
the privacy of their funerals or the intimacy of their sickrooms, but God
forbid we should share their sexuality, i.e., in one of the most meaningful
aspects of their lives" (Bolton,
1995: 303).
"We
reinvent anthropology alright, like reinventing the wheel. But then it's
understandable - if you don't have new ideas then at least invent new terms
and by all means make your writing obscure and capable of multiple interpretations
(keep then guessing) to keep the game going, to promote your career, to
get a piece of the action" (Bolton,
1995: 291).
"Some
researchers, hoping to bring greater clarity... have carried out extensive
interviews / discussions with gay men to elicit their rationales for participating
in high-risk erotics. Bolton (1992) cautions that comments offered in the
objective environment of an interview setting may not coincide with the
respondent's actual practice in real-life, erotic domains. Equally serious,
I suggest, are instances where researchers elicit first-hand commentary
about risky sex but use their own assumptions about erotic risk, rather
than clues in the respondents' commentary, to interpret the respondents'
explanation for their behavior" (Leap,
1995: 234).
How
to avoid the "Lying Factor"? Ethnomethodology and good qualitative studies
may be needed. But: How will we respond to possibly unwelcome realities
reported in these studies? Examples: Next Page.
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