TikTok and the New Public Ethnographer

The camera is focused on a young man in a red shirt and bandana. Text overlaying the footage reads: ‘Hi I have a question’. An emoji of a person with their hand raised punctuates the sentence. The young man begins to speak in Uzbek. His quandary is about the pillows in Uzbekistan: Why are they square? Does the viewer know the reason for this? In January 2024 when I first watch it, the 24 second Tiktok clip from 2022 has been viewed 102,700 times and has amassed 822 comments. For Yang Zhao, a current Research Fellow in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and somewhat reluctant TikTok influencer, it’s all part of the ethnographic process (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Yang Zhao uses TikTok as part of his ethnographic method.

In a 2014 article, Ronald Hallett and Kristen Barber declared ‘it is no longer imaginable to conduct ethnography without considering online spaces’ (2014, 307). While previous works (e.g. Hine 2000) have highlighted that the internet has fundamentally challenged the idea of the field, ethnographers today must now grapple with the ways the ‘digital’ and ‘real’ worlds have become enmeshed, such that one might wonder if there is a field outside of (that is, unmediated by) the web. At the same time, there is an increased focus on non-traditional impacts and public outputs from anthropology, with researchers considering how to better collaborate, communicate, and share benefits of research with communities beyond the Ivory Tower. All this adds to long-standing questions about what it means to do ethnography and be an ethnographer.

Enter TikTok. Since its international debut in 2017, the short-form video-hosting social media platform has left an indelible mark on the global cultural landscape. Viral clips from the platform have launched celebrities, initiated trends, and intervened in politics. Like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram before it, TikTok raises questions of freedom of speech and censorship, and can be simultaneously celebrated as a democratisation of popular media, critiqued as central to governmental and algorithmic echo chambers, and condemned for its role in circulating content relating to hate speech, extremism, and conspiracy. And like its social media predecessors, TikTok has also become a fertile ground for anthropologists to engage with diverse people to co-produce and circulate creative and ethnographic materials while mobilising alternative citational practices of memes, trends and stitches. TikTok Ethnography Collective (2023)—a collective of students, academics, and artists focused on the ethnography of TikTok—explicitly highlight the public anthropology potentials of the platform, highlighting their goal to undertake ethnography that is ‘accessible, public facing, and exciting’.

A quick search for #Ethnography on TikTok reveals a variety of posts. A clip entitled ‘WTF is anthropology’ catches my eye. The clip takes me to the page of Brenna McCaffrey, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at SUNY Geneseo. McCaffrey uses the platform to communicate her research on contraceptives and reproductive justice, while also sharing activist and educational materials. McCaffrey’s style is informative and political but also accessible and irreverent: In one clip she can be seen behind text that reads ‘Me to the abortion pills I’m saving now that I live in a post-Roe America’. She opens a bathroom cabinet to reveal a sign that says ‘abortion pills’, to which she sings a line from a Carly Rae Jepsen song: ‘I’m coming back for you’. In doing so, she bears witness to the actions and affects of an historical moment where politics and pop culture collide, without explicitly recounting her findings.

Other users engage with the hashtag to share advice for new anthropology students, define key anthropological terms, recommend books and podcasts, and crack niche jokes about citation styles and employability. Here ethnographers are content creators, participating in their field through their posts, and in doing so actively reconfiguring traditional relations of ethnographer and ethnographic subject through public ethnography.

Zhao (2024) draws on his experiences to show that TikTok can be leveraged as a tool of digital ethnography that offers fascinating insights into notions of the ‘researcher’ and ‘field’. As part of his research into masculinity in Uzbekistan, conducted in 2021 and 2022, Zhao created 50 TikTok clips, which received more than 300,000 likes. Having commenced his fieldwork in Tashkent at a time of global COVID-19 restrictions, Zhao saw TikTok as an opportunity to connect with Uzbek locals, communicate about his research, gather data, and recruit participants. Over time, he began to use the platform to explicitly focus on his research questions, with algorithmic encounters translating into in-person relationships. In some clips he poses questions about gender, in others he makes fun of himself, shares images from his travels, or acts out scenarios. There is a level of vulnerability to this work that, while not completely foreign to creative ethnography, feels distinctly new. In his paper (Zhao 2024), he explores how his positionality frames these encounters in an exploration of the sometimes fraught affective realm where online and offline blurs. In doing so, he explores the ways ethnographic encounters may be afforded or constrained by the platform and what this space of the carefully performed identities does to the ethnographic gaze.

Tik Tok ethnography is in its infancy, and there is still much to discover. The potential for a more engaged ethnography and accessible circulation of research through TikTok is evident and, as Zhao’s work makes clear, there is methodological value in strategic use of the platform. But, as Zhao is also careful to highlight, such methodologies also raise important questions about the roles and responsibilities of the ethnographer-turned-content-creator, the nature of ethnographic texts, and the ethics of ‘fieldwork’ as we negotiate new understandings of public and private in unbounded fields. In this sense, even as digital social media affords opportunity, there is a need to remain mindful of the limitations and challenges of the research method. This reconfiguration of the ‘real’ means we must critically grapple with representation and performativity as tension points in the making and unmaking of worlds, particularly in the face of political constraints and ideological control. What this new public anthropology will become and what it means for ethnographic identities and fields remains to be explored.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).