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Chapter Two Social Organization, Kodak Culture, and Amateur Photography Next we need to explore the relation of Kodak culture and the home mode to the social organization of amateur photography. We will outline a categorical scheme for knowing what to look for, what to treat as data, and how to classify, evaluate, and interpret the results. An ethnographic approach can be used to study the relationship of Kodak culture to the home mode. Ethnographic methods of observation are used by social scientists to describe social and cultural settings or well defined parts of a culture. This research strategy emphasizes the first hand observation of behavior as it occurs in "natural contexts" of social life. In a sense we are trying to visit ordinary people to understand better how they use the home mode in patterned ways. Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski is frequently cited for his claim that the goal of ethnography is "to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world. "1 Thus we are drawn to an interpretation of how Kodak culture is responsible for a "vision of the world", a "vision" produced by ordinary "natives" as they use their cameras as part of everyday life. Sociolinguistic Backgrounds Ethnographies of speech communication offer detailed examinations of social contexts in which normal or "native" people engage in "states of talk" and (hopefully) "states of listening," speech "encounters," "events," and "acts." Anthropological studies done in cross-cultural, cross-regional, and cross-class contexts have demonstrated considerable variability in speech use and have clarified how speaking behavior is culturally ordered and socially maintained. New areas of study were suggested when concepts central to an ethnography of speaking were generalized to the study of human communication.2 In proposing an ethnographic approach to human communication, Dell Hymes summarized four basic questions: 1. What are the communicative events, and their components in a community? 2. What are the relationships among them? 17 18 Snapshot Versions of Life 3. What capabilities and states do they have, in general, and in particular events? 4. How do they work?3 The perspective that will be outlined and applied to the home mode addresses a similar set of questions, applying them to the structure of non-professional photographic communication. In communications research, ethnographies of visual communication have been discussed,4 ana methods have been suggested for doing ethnographies of film communication in a framework of "ethnographic semiotics."5 Following these theoretical leads, ethnographies of visual (pictorial) communication study how people go about producing images in different contexts, and how people go about interpreting messages from the vast array of pictures that appear in all contexts of daily life. Our objective is to apply ethnographic methods to one model of pictorial communication. In most general terms, we are asking when, where, with whom, under what conditions, and for what reasons people are observed to be participating in any part of home mode communication. Purposefully being naive, we might initially ask if we are examining patterns of structured behavior or merely working on pictures made in an idiosyncratic or random manner. Is everyone doing the same thing with their cameras and pictures, or are different people producing distinctly different images and using them in unique and incomparable ways? Another approach to the same line of inquiry is phrased as follows: While it is the case than anyone can take a picture of any person or anything, at any occasion, at any time, in any place, for any reasonand subsequently show that picture to any person, in any place, at any time, for any reason-do people, in fact, behave in this manner?6 The obvious answer to this rather awkwardly phrased question is that we can record almost anything we want in snapshot or home movie form, and we can subsequently show these images to almost anyone we wish. Clearly the advanced state of our camera technology allows this situation, and the advertising for, and by, the photographic industry promotes it. However, there is an important difference between what we can do and what we do do; a difference between potential for occurrence and actual occurrence; between hypothetical freedom of choice and culturally preferred, or even determined, patterns of choice.7 A Framework For Observation And Description In Chapter One we stressed the ideas of social process and social organization. This is a convenient starting point for describing how [3.134.104.173] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 14:01 GMT...

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