Doing “indigenous” ethnography as a cultural outsider: Lessons from the Four Seasons

ABSTRACT

This piece narrates the author's experience with González's Four Seasons of Ethnography framework as an ethnographer-in-training in an advanced field research methods course conducted in a small Rarámuri village in the Copper Canyon of Mexico. Three core elements emerged as the narrative's focal interest: the nature-based logic of the Four Seasons framework, the tensions between indigenous child-rearing practices and modernizing influences among the Rarámuri, and the problematic of conducting indigenously grounded research in a community not one's own. Learnings highlight the unique oeuvre lent by the “Four Seasons” framework and its potential for transforming knowledge production about the “other” within the academy and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous ethnography
• Four Seasons of Ethnography
• Rarámuri culture
• intercultural communication
• indigenous knowledge-production

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Dr. Don Trent “Four Arrows” Jacobs for his kindness and generosity in lending insight into a baffling aspect of Rarámuri culture that surfaced in the course of my research. As well, I owe gratitude to the reviewers without whose feedback and helpful comments this piece would not be what it ended up being.

Notes

1. A legacy of half a century of direct U.S. occupation of my country in the first half of the 1900s.

2. Some, for example, have shown incredible sensitivity and capacity to overcome their own ethnocentric blinders in writing about another culture (cf. the sensitive work of Rosaldo, [1989/1993], a Chicano anthropologist, on the Ilongot headhunting tribe in Northern Philippines.

3. That is, the posttheory discourses of poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism.

4. See Smith's warning (in Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008) in the book's Preface: “From the vantage point of the colonized … the word ‘research’ … is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary” (p. ix).

5. My reflections here are based on a graduate course I took with the author herself (Maria Christina González) in Advanced Field Research Methods, a course offered by the Arizona State University during the 1997 Summer Intercession.

6. From the preethnography orientation lectures given the class participants by local scholars Alfonso Chavez and Jesus Baca in Chihuahua and from an on-site interview with elementary school director Mr. Gutierrez.

7. Interview retrieved from http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/25/dr_gabor_mat_on_the_stress

8. In contrast to the language of “resolve” which is merely a matter of the will and of rational cognition, the language of “seeing” is deemed key to self-transformation. To be given a different way of seeing is to enable paradigmatic change (cf. Mendoza, 2016, p. 47).