"Ethnography and Compostion"

Rosie Caldwell
Professor M. Boland
English 329
3 February 2009

Moss, J. Beverly. “Ethnography and Composition: Studying Language at Home.”
Composition in Tour Key; Inquiring into the Field. Wiley, Barbara Gleason & Louise Wetherbee Phelps, eds. Mountain view, CA: Mayfield, 1966.

“Ethnography and Composition: Studying Language at Home”

The article, “Ethnography and Composition: Studying Language at Home” by Beverly J. Moss, talks about her research and some of the important things that one must consider when doing research of their own. Firstly, it is important to know that there “are three modes of ethnographic inquiry: comprehensive-oriented ethnography, topic oriented ethnography and hypothesis-oriented ethnography” (389). “Comprehensive-oriented ethnography seeks to document or describe a total way of life [while] Topic-oriented ethnography narrows the focus to on or more aspects of life known to exist in a community” (389). Finally, both the topic-oriented and comprehensive-oriented work together to build hypothesis-oriented ethnography.
“While ethnography in general is concerned with describing and analyzing a culture, ethnography in composition studies is generally topic oriented and concerned more narrowly with communicative behavior or the interrelationship of language and culture” (389).

Fieldwork is also discussed in this article. Moss states that fieldwork can be characterized by a participant observation. This includes “formal and informal interviews of informants, photographs, audio and video recording of daily occurrences in a community, gathering of physical artifacts that are a part of the daily routine of a community” (391). It was important to read that ethnographers may lean too heavily on their own background and knowledge on the data; they must think that all patterns are relevant and noteworthy. More specific to Moss’ research, she comments on her expectation when observing African American inner-city churches. Moss states that “my perceptions and expectation of the community also posed potential problems. I expected to find a great deal of similarity in the churches because there were, after all, African American inner-city churches with well-educated African American male ministers and fairly well-educated congregations” (394).

I thought it was very interesting that Moss comments on how she developed a “sense of loyalty to the community” and “did not want anyone in the community to be dissatisfied with what I had written” (396). The ideas of becoming attached to the community, and having your feelings shade the research are things that we should all be very aware of when conducting out own research. It will be difficult to be purely unbiased, but it can be striven for within our reserach.

The information provided is extremely helpful to consider before endeavoring in our own research project for this class. The possible complications and problems, that we might encounter when conduction our own research, were provided in this article. Also, by reading about Moss’ experience and thoughts, I felt like I will be able to handle the research project better. Moss states that “getting through fieldwork and analysis are faced through introspection, reflection, and triangulation” (369). These are things that I will consider when I accumulate research and start structuring my research paper.