Going out to do fieldwork seems like embarking on some grand adventure. I like to joke that doing comparative politics research sometimes feels like being Indiana Jones: you're on a constant quest for new knowledge in environments that lack the structure and formality of a classroom or an office. The reality of doing fieldwork, however, is much closer to being Dr. Henry Jones, the bespectacled, bow-tied professor. In the last four months I've never had to use a bullwhip or a pistol. I have, however, found myself presented with intellectual challenges that I would not have previously anticipated.
What kinds of challenges am I talking about? Doing academic research in the field presents a scholar with a lot of different obstacles, especially when the scholar's research requires an extended stay in a foreign country. These barries include differences in language between the researcher and respodents, differences in culture that a researcher may not recognize immediately, the researcher's lack of familiarity with a research site, the respondent's perception of the researcher as an outsider, etc. In addition, researchers frequently encounter other unanticipated obstacles: political or social instability, changing research environments, sudden unavailability of data, weather, etc.
There is also the matter of my own position as a researcher vis-a-vis the people with whom I'm talking. Interviews, I'm learning, are about expectations. In most cases, respondents want to help a researcher arrive at the information they need. But researchers aren't always the best in communicating what exactly it is that they're trying to observe. Here's where disconnects happen. In explaining what they're up to, scholars sometimes create a picture of their aims (deliberately or otherwise) that isn't in line with what they actually want to know. And, likewise, in trying to give researchers answers that they think will be helpful, respondents sometimes venture down other paths that aren't totally related to the question at hand. It's a thorny issue. As "The Man With No Eyes" from the Paul Newman film, Cool Hand Luke, says "What we have here is a failure to communicate."
In some instances, however, failures to communicate unearth information that nonetheless leads to valuable insight. Respondents that I interviewed recently provided me with a similarly unintended revelation about everyday experiences with ethnicity. The key lies in a phenomenon I've come to refer to as 'epistemic deference,' wherein respondents express that they feel unqualified to speak on a subject due to their lack of formal education about it, and instead defer to elites or experts as sources of authoritative knowledge.
To explain this more fully, I want to reference some work done by other scholars describing a related, but opposite, phenomenon: epistemic denial. In a 2011 article that studied the way in which firefighters discuss tactics in review sessions which follow the completion of a job, Minei and Bisel (two communication scholars) noticed that veteran firefighters dismissed young members of their team who had just graduated from the academy and suggested doing things according to the formal procedures they'd learned there. Veteran firefighters, they argued, proclaimed the superiority of the tactics they'd developed from lived experience in fighting fires, even if they ran counter to what the academy taught. Experience taught them a way they felt was better than what protocol suggested. Minei and Bisel called this phenomenon, in which lessons learned from personal experience trumpted technical training, "epistemic denial." The idea is simple: just because you learned how to do something in a classroom doesn't mean it's the best way to do something in real life.
What I experience in the field might be considered the negative image of what Minei and Bisel observed in their firefighters. In many cases, my interviewees have expressed a degree of uncertainty about their own qualifications for talking about their own identity. Sometimes, my interviewees express doubt that their opinions are worth much. "I just don't understand what the use of all of this information is," one woman who owns a restaurant in Jinan's Hui Quarter told me. I explained that I wanted to explore how everyday life in the neighborhood had changed in recent years, especially in response to modernization in Jinan. She relented a little, and described the way that the neighborhood used to look, who used to live there, and what she remembered from her childhood. "But I don't think that anything I tell you will change the way things are," she told me. I told her that I understood. Her skepticism is understandable. Part of the disconnect seems to stem at least in part from a fairly well observed point: Academic studies rarely change the course of large scale development. Where matters of policy and planning are concerned, discussions of cultural preservation and daily life rarely figure in.
More commonly, however, people I talk to express an honest belief that they lack useful knowledge to share with me. These statements are always polite. They always contain an expression of sincere desire to help out. One woman in her early fifties apologized to me after we finished our interview. "I'm afraid that I haven't been very helpful to you," she said. "I just don't really know that much about Islam." Many respondents begin by telling me that they don't know much about theology or Islamic philosophy, and that they worry they won't be able to aid because of it. "I'll try to respond to what I'm familiar with," one respondent (a man in his 40's) told me, "but I don't really know much about being a Muslim." Where personal expertise is lacking, individuals usually offer to search for answers from more authoritative sources. Another younger Hui interviewee (in his late 20s) told me, "I really hope I can help you," adding that "If I don't understand I'll try and find some elders who do." This appeal to more senior or elite figures is common. A woman in her mid 40s told me, "I'll try and help you find some of the elderly members of the community. Their understanding of Islam is depper than mine."
But even those seen as elders may defer, suggesting a higher authority than their own. "What kinds of questions do you want to understand?" one respondent (a gentleman in his 80s) asked me, adding "I don't know if I can satisfy your requirements." He continued to ask, "If you want to understand the Hui, why don't you go to the mosque?" The suggestion that Hui culture is best displayed and understood at the mosque is a sentiment I hear frequently. While in Beijing, I asked a restauranteur on Niu Jie where I needed to go to see and experience local culture. "If I want to really understand Niu Jie, where should I go?" I asked him. "You should go to the mosque," he said. "Find the imam. He'll be able to tell you all about its history."
Usually, through the course of the interveiw, I'm able to redirect these conversations. "I want to represent everyone's point of view," I'll say, "even it they're not very knowledgable about Islam. That's OK. Everyone's experience matters." In other instances, I'll stress that the things I want to know are not esoteric or scholastic matters, but are mostly tied to everyday life. "I'd just like to understand your daily routines, and ask about your personal experiences," I'll say. These invocations usually prove fruitful. Asking respondents questions about their childhood neighborhood, the lessons they learned about religion from their parents, the traiditions that are special to their community, the changes they've seen in their lifetimes, or the routines of their everyday life seems to redirect and focus conversations. When I ask these questions, resistance fades, and people share what are genuinely interesting recollections of their past. In these moments people give fond recollections of their youth, intriguing stories about their family, detailed accounts of change (both in a sense of changing physical/geographic landscapes and in the mindset of people that they live around). These are great discussions. They're exactly the kinds of things I hope to hear about. Further, they don't require special training, or elite status.
So what do I make of this? At this point, I think it's too early to tell. Such deference to elite sources of information (imams, scholars, even written works rather than people) could suggest that the way ethnic and religious identity has been institutionalized by the state has made it formal and separate from the daily experience of the people who claim it. Or, equally, it may not. The linking of faithful Islamic practice and observance to truly being Hui might suggest that religion is integral to ethnicity in this case, but again, this, too, might not be accurate. It could suggest that some aspects of ethnicity (such as the way it appears in daily routines) are so taken for granted, or so banal, that respondents assume that they're unimportant or not useful to the study of ethnic identity. But this conclusion also risks reading significance and motive into a respondent's answers that may simply not be present. In many ways, it doesn't pay to try and guess what motivates or drives interviewees to give a certain type of answer. Perhaps more useful is gaining an ability to understand when, and how such claims are invoked. Does such epistemic deference occur more often in certain demographics? Certain levels of education? Or social class? What do we learn by looking for patterns in these repsonses? More, importantly, however, knowing where these challenges exist makes it easier to unpack the significance of this kind of epistemic deference, and will hopefully allow for a further untangling of what it might mean.
There are lessons here, too, for a researcher, and I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to pause and reflect on what such responses might indicate about my own style of questions. The lesson to take seems to be this: how we ask questions matters. Word choice, question order, emphasis. All of these influence how someone may percieve or attempt to respond to the task at hand. The burden to be clear about what an interview hopes to accomplish rests as much on the researcher as it does on the interviewee. Situations like these remind me that, as a researcher, I need to be as mindful of the way I ask questions as I am of how my respondents answer them. It's through understanding these dynamics that greater understanding of Hui ethnicity on the whole can be gained.