I have to have Kentucky

My new reading project is "Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes," a neat book about writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Ethnography, as I understand it, has to do with understanding a society in terms of the experiences of the people who live in it. It is a little like anthropology, only with more emphasis on culture; it is a little like sociology, only with more field work; but it's different from either of them in that it's not so much an area of study as a technique of study. You can study a lot of things using ethnography. The key feature is that you go out and talk to the people you're interested in, maybe embed yourself with them a while, and then come back and write about what you learned. In that sense, Lover's Lanes is an ethnographic project -- though its scope, abstract like love and broad like the United States, is less focused than most ethnographies. And if Lover's Lanes is an ethnography then these love stories are field notes. Since Lover's Lanes will not go beyond the field note stage -- a real ethnographer does not merely anthologize his field notes, but writes a book about his theory using his field notes as source material -- it is especially important that I write my field notes well.

I've gleaned most of this from the first five pages of the aforementioned book -- that's all I've read so far -- which makes me optimistic that reading more of it will be useful.

Another thing I've gleaned from the first five pages of "Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes" is that there's some difference of opinion about who gets to do field work. Some people think you have to be a natural-born genius to talk to people and get coherent data from them. Other people think "any literate, adventurous person" can go do field work. The authors disagree with both schools of thought, believing that conducting and writing up field work is a skill that can and must be taught, which I presume is why they bothered to write a book about it. What caught my attention about this is that they referred to the second of those theories, the idea that anyone can do field work, as the "sink or swim" approach: you learn the skills you need on the job or you don't. That is very stark, but it precisely describes what I've been planning. I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself to learn from scratch a new skill, namely making friends on purpose, in an environment where if I don't learn the skill I'll judge the whole project a failure.

Maybe it takes a natural-born genius to make friends on purpose. I never have. There have been rather few times in my life when I've set out to make friends; I don't even remember those people's names, so you can tell how well that went. It may be related to the way other people seem to be able to choose what they believe or feel, while I experience beliefs and feelings mostly as things that happen to me. In the same way, I haven't picked my friends; my friends have happened to me, thank God, and I treasure you.

So that's one variation on Lover's Lanes I could pursue. Make the trip, but don't try to make friends on purpose. Don't approach a single person for an interview. In the course of the journey there will be conversations. Trust that friends, or at least acquaintances, will happen to me. When they happen, ask them for their stories. That's a nice vision that plays to my strengths. But it relies a lot on luck. Luck is good to have around but you can't count on it. What's the saying? "Believe in God but keep the powder dry," or something like that? Me, I'm still working on figuring out which end you point at the bad guy.