"Neo: I know ethnography… Morpheus: Show me."

If you’re a Matrix fan like me, you will probably recall which scene of the original movie the title of this post refers to. If not here is a little refresher: 

This past semester has probably been the most challenging one of my entire academic career. Between the unreasonable amounts of readings and writing I had to complete each week; the intellectually stimulating discussions with my peers; work; my own research and my ethics review application; I am surprised to have made it this far without giving up!

In September, I was catapulted into a class in which, I realized with profound horror, I was going to be a minority in every aspect (academic background, race, gender, age etc.). My initial fears were confirmed when I was first assigned 6 papers to read and "prepare" for the next class’ discussion. I had never been asked to read 80 pages of heavy theory on such short notice (one week). Moreover, my progress was seriously impeded by my having to look up every other word in the dictionary. While I was delighted to finish the last article in the 30 minutes that preceded the beginning of class; my excitement quickly faded when I realized that even though I had read the texts, I certainly hadn’t "prepared" them. My peers had come organized with detailed notes on each article complete with excerpts and references ready to answer the questions that had been pre-circulated. I, on the other hand, sat blankly staring at the papers I had read, yet never bothered to highlight, tab or annotate. At that moment I felt utterly inadequate; I was ready to throw in the towel and cry that the social sciences weren’t for me. However, with the support of my classmates and professor I managed to muster enough confidence to persevere on this foreign path. With each passing week, I understood with more clarity what the expectations of the class were. With each passing week, I also slowly began developing a different way of looking at the social field.

This new worldview would force me to trade theoretical and empirical equations – which until then were for me the only acceptable way to describe my environment – for more nuanced approaches to generating knowledge. I came to learn that, unlike in engineering where the behavior of materials could be predicted to various degrees of accuracy and error could be quantified, human behavior was significantly more complex, and thus less readily predictable. To further complicate things, the immeasurable amounts of interconnected variables affecting individual and social agency make the social scientist’s – and more particularly the ethnographer’s– task especially difficult.

So what exactly is ethnography? To be quite frank, I am not sure I can give a straightforward answer to the question. Some respected scholars might also not be able to. It seems to be one of those disciplines that everyone intuitively understands and practices, yet cannot easily define. At first, I understood ethnography to be synonymous with fieldwork, but I was very wrong. While the two are often hard to dissociate, I came to realize that ethnography is a very particular way of doing, reporting and analyzing fieldwork.  By using his/her body as a learning apparatus, the ethnographer attempts to access the social database in order to decode elusive messages and translate them to a non-trained audience. However as it is the case with language translation, cultural translation is often dependent on the translator’s skill and sensibility to nuances, as well as by the inherent compatibility between the language pairs.

This is what I am hoping to do over the course of my research. Understand Zouglou and Coupe-Decale as seen through the eyes of a variety of actors (musicians, scholars, producers and consumers etc.) and translate it to outsiders. I am hoping that by immersing myself in the culture, I can go beyond an analysis of the songs’ lyrics and uncover meanings encoded within the dances, the lifestyles and the discourses while paying attention to their relation to politics. I am hoping to hang out in universities, libraries, Afrobeat nightclubs (in Paris), dance schools, concerts, maquis (open-air bars in Abidjan) etc. to undertake my research. These places will constitute my laboratory and my body will be the instrument.

So far, this Renaissance experience has forced me to explore my own uncharted intellectual limits and completely kicked me out of my comfort zone. I am set to leave Canada on January 14 and return on June 17 of next year (God willing). As I quite literally put my other life on hiatus, I am excited to explore the opportunities that this new one has to offer. My adventures are set to potentially take me to France, Belgium, the UK, Cote D’Ivoire and possibly other places. You can expect a new and improved Juste upon my return!