Ethnographic Collection as a Tool for Media Education

Ethnographic collection offers a powerful alternative to journalistic interviewing. Rather than confirming what we think we already know, it opens us to the discovery of worlds that are foreign to us. Here is a practical guide, informed by field experience and collaborations with sociologist Serge Chaumier.

What ethnography is not: distinguishing collection from journalistic inquiry

Making visible what we do not yet know. This formula, seemingly simple, actually contains everything that separates ethnographic collection from journalistic interviewing. For contemporary journalism, as practiced in most newsrooms, operates according to a rigorously inverse logic. The journalist arrives with a thesis, an angle, a story to tell. They seek in the other’s speech not a discovery, but a confirmation, or failing that, a spectacular contradiction. Their questionnaire pre-exists the encounter; the person being interviewed merely serves as an illustration, sometimes favorable, sometimes hostile, but always inscribed within a narrative whose broad outlines have already been drawn.

Television sets offer daily spectacles of this mechanism. The interviewer positions themselves as the holder of knowledge that they confront their guest with. This posture of contradiction responds less to an intellectual requirement than to a dramaturgical necessity: for the profession to function, for the audience to remain captive, conflict must be manufactured. Tension, controversy, the clash between antagonistic positions constitute the narrative driving force of flow journalism. Without this staged conflictuality, the narrative collapses, attention disperses, the internet user moves on to the next video, the information economy falters.

Ethnography proceeds from a radically different intention. It does not seek to prove, to convince, or to adjudicate between positions. It seeks to understand. Bronislaw Malinowski, in his foundational work Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), formulated this requirement in terms that have lost none of their relevance: “The final goal that the ethnographer must never lose sight of [...] is to grasp the native’s point of view, their relation to life, to realize their vision of their world.” To grasp the other’s point of view, not to refute it, not to stage it within a pre-established dramaturgy, but to gain access to a world of meanings that was previously closed to us. It is precisely because ethnographic collection has nothing to do with journalistic interviewing that it constitutes such a valuable tool for media education: it teaches another way of listening.

Openness as a fundamental posture

Ethnography seeks neither to be right nor to establish truth in the sense that contemporary “fact-checking” understands it. Its ambition is both more modest and more vast: to understand a world other than our own. For each person inhabits a singular universe. The language spoken, the territory occupied, daily gestures, inherited beliefs shape forms of thought that seem natural to us but are in fact deeply cultural constructions. Ethnographic inquiry proposes to broaden our vision of the world by attempting to grasp the functioning of people whose representations differ from ours, sometimes radically, sometimes in more subtle but equally decisive ways.

This openness first requires a clarification of one’s own position. What do we represent for the people we are going to meet? Our age, our gender, our profession, our institutional affiliation, our status as researcher or cultural mediator, for example: all parameters that influence what we see and what people agree to show us. This preliminary reflexivity does not constitute an obstacle to overcome but rather a condition for the encounter itself. The ethnographer is never a transparent observer, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, in his article “The Politics of Fieldwork” (1995), shows that this opacity can become a methodological resource: it obliges us to make explicit the conditions under which knowledge is produced.

Before entering the field, documentary work is essential. Scientific literature, archives, websites, productions by the research subjects: this preparation allows one to arrive with what might be called “flexible hypotheses,” sufficiently informed to orient attention without confining the encounter within pre-established categories. The challenge is to formulate a genuinely open research question, focusing on processes, practices, relationships, rather than a simple descriptive “inventory” that would already presuppose what there is to see.

An ethnographic interview is never the same as a questionnaire. In a questionnaire, the structure is immutable, standardized, hierarchized, designed to measure elements already identified. The ethnographic approach follows a qualitative logic: it aims to reveal what we do not know, to explore territories of meaning, to gather raw and living material. Each interview constitutes a unique encounter, non-replicable, irreducible to any claim of objectivity in the positivist sense of the term. The goal is to bring forth subjectivities, not to neutralize them.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Tristes Tropiques (1955), described this requirement in almost mystical terms: “The ethnologist, for their part, must delve deeper into each particular case, accept no interpretation until they have explored all the possibilities contained in the observed facts, in light of all related sciences.” This exhaustiveness in understanding, this willingness to presuppose nothing, stands in point-by-point opposition to the journalistic approach which, prisoner of its own culture, seeks to argue its worldview through the filter of its particular gaze.

Participant observation: the heart of collection

The interview constitutes only one dimension of ethnographic collection. Participant observation forms its heart. It involves immersing oneself in the ordinary activities of the field—meetings, work, leisure, rituals, uses of a space—in order to grasp what escapes explicit speech. Observing space, objects, roles, relationships, routines, but also gaps, conflicts, silences: everything that constitutes the fabric of daily life and that people themselves do not always think to verbalize.

This prolonged presence in the field makes it possible to identify convergences and discrepancies between what people say and what they do. Not to catch them out—that would be falling back into the logic of journalistic contradiction—but to access layers of meaning that the interview alone cannot reach. Practices often reveal logics that discourse ignores or transforms.

The field notebook is the privileged tool of this observation. It welcomes observed facts with as much precision as possible—who, what, where, when, how—verbatim quotes when possible, the context of each situation—moment, atmosphere, spatial configuration, concurrent events. But it also welcomes the reflexivity of the researcher: impressions, discomforts, forming hypotheses, incomprehensions. This subjective dimension, far from being a bias to eliminate, constitutes a resource for subsequent analysis. It helps us understand how knowledge is constructed within the relationship.

The interview guide: a flexible structure at the service of the unexpected

The construction of an interview guide follows a precise logic, but this logic must remain at the service of the encounter and not the reverse. One moves from the most general to the most particular, from the least involving to the most involving for the person. The most complicated things to say, the most intimate, the most engaging, come last, when trust has been established. This organization of questions according to a logic one imagines likely constitutes a starting point, never a straitjacket.

The great specificity of the ethnographic interview lies in its capacity for real-time adaptation. Serge Chaumier explains it thus: perhaps the person will begin to address questions that do not correspond to what you had imagined. You will have to reorganize your interview guide during the interview. The questions are not mechanically worked through: second question, third question, fourth question. Perhaps it is the sixth question that will be addressed from the start. You will need intellectual agility, choosing whether to continue with the next question or return to a previous one.

This flexibility requires paradoxical preparation: one must have worked on the subject enough to be able to improvise, have follow-up questions ready, anticipate possible directions of the exchange. Marcel Mauss, in his Manual of Ethnography (1947), insisted on this preparation: “The investigator should never leave without being documented on what they are going to look for.” But this prior documentation must never become an intellectual prison. It is a foundation that allows one to venture into the unknown, not a grid that confines the other’s speech within pre-established categories.

Gathering speech without contaminating it

In an ethnographic interview, one listens, one is there to have people explain things, but one is not in a contradicting role. Whatever one thinks of what is being said, one is there to have it explained, to reveal people’s logics. The idea is to gather people’s speech and logic, not to contradict them in what they have to say. This posture of non-judgment constitutes perhaps the main difficulty of the ethnographic interview, as it goes against our habitual conversational reflexes.

In daily life, we respond, we agree, we contest, we participate in the co-construction of discourse. The ethnographic interview requires a form of withdrawal: being present without imposing, prompting without guiding, probing without suggesting. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, in his article “The Politics of Fieldwork” (1995), speaks of a necessary “immersion”: “Immersion is the primary condition of fieldwork. It is by immersing oneself in the universe of others that one can come to understand it.” This immersion requires a temporary suspension of our own categories of judgment.

There is often, in interviews, a tendency toward the implicit, things said leaving an ellipsis. Our role is then to prompt, to have things clarified, to try to make things as explicit as possible. Serge Chaumier recommends having follow-up questions on potentially addressed themes, so that people can get to the bottom of their thoughts, to the heart of things. This requirement for explicitation should not be confused with a desire to trap or contradict: it is in service of understanding, it aims to allow the person to go further in expressing their own worldview.

The temporal dynamics of the interview

An in-depth interview generally lasts an hour and a half to two hours. This duration is not arbitrary; it corresponds to an internal dynamic of the encounter. In the first third of the time, one enters the subject, one gets to know each other mutually, a kind of exchange is established, one immerses oneself in the discussion. Progressively, as the exchange advances, one moves toward more precise, complex, engaging matters.

The ethnographic interview is a work of anamnesis, in the sense that Plato used this term to designate reminiscence. The people being interviewed are in reflection, and this reflection leads them to think about things they had not necessarily spontaneously considered. They organize their thoughts as they speak, they go deeper. Often, at the end of interviews, people thank us saying it was wonderful to take an hour and a half to talk about a subject, because in daily life, one never stops to stay on a subject for so long and reflect. The interview reveals dimensions that people were not necessarily aware of.

But fatigue also sets in. After an hour and a half, there is a kind of exhaustion—not necessarily of the subject, but of the energy invested in reflection. Sometimes, on the contrary, people have gotten so into the subject that they can no longer stop; they want to say even more new things. Time management then becomes a challenge in conducting the interview: should one deepen what is being said, even if it means abandoning planned questions, or take back control to address other themes? Each encounter is unique; there is no replicable recipe.

Silences and follow-ups

Silences constitute an often underestimated dimension of the ethnographic interview. When someone suddenly stops their thought, pauses for a moment of suspension, our reflex is to immediately prompt. But sometimes it is better to let people take a pause in their thinking, because perhaps they will restart on their own and head off in an unexpected direction—unexpected for themselves first and foremost. Silence can be fertile; it can be the moment when deeper reflection takes place.

This tolerance for silence is learned. When one has many questions to ask, when one is interested in what the person is saying, when one wants to prompt, to continue, one must sometimes hold back. Sometimes, too-quick follow-ups can be problematic for later editing, for working with the material. But above all, they can prevent the emergence of something deeper, more unexpected, more precious for understanding.

Pierre Bourdieu, in The Weight of the World (1993), insisted on the importance of this attentive listening: “One cannot understand social beings unless one gives oneself the means to understand them, that is, gives oneself the time to truly listen to them.” This true listening requires accepting dead time, hesitations, detours. It requires not projecting onto the other our own rhythm, our own urgency, our own way of structuring thought.

Technical considerations in service of content

The technical dimension of audio and/or video recording should never take precedence over the quality of the encounter, but neither should it be neglected. When filming an interview, the question of gaze immediately arises: whom should the person look at? The camera, the interviewer, a fixed point? This choice is not merely aesthetic; it engages a conception of the relationship and of the document that will be produced.

If several people are conducting the interview, one must ensure that the person being interviewed is not destabilized by divergent gazes. Serge Chaumier recommends that if one decides there is a person to whom one speaks, slightly offset from the camera, the gaze or face should not suddenly turn elsewhere toward another person who might ask a question. If several interviewers ask questions, they can physically change places to maintain the same gaze axis. Otherwise, the interview will be very difficult to edit.

The question of sound deserves particular attention. A voice recorder placed on the person, in addition to the camera’s sound, ensures that the entire exchange is recorded correctly. This audio file, lighter than video files, provides security and also allows recording to continue after the formal end of the interview. For often it is at the doorstep, at the moment of leaving, that people say the most interesting things. Either because they are still in the flow of the exchange and continue to reflect, or because what they slip in at that moment, they could not say within the formal framework. Technical tip: the Sony ICD-TX660 is an extremely practical and good quality device (this article is not sponsored!).

The team and role distribution

When working with others, coordination is an important issue. Each person must have a primary role: one person for technical matters, one person who asks the questions, possibly a third who takes notes and identifies key moments. This distribution must be clear, but it does not prevent a form of flexibility. The essential thing is not to contradict each other, not to be at cross purposes, to allow a fluid unfolding of the exchange.

The third person, if present, can play a valuable role by noting the timecodes of important moments, the themes addressed, the leads to pursue. Serge Chaumier emphasizes that it is already complicated to concentrate simultaneously on listening, on the next question, and on technical aspects. When there are several of us, we can distribute these cognitive loads. But if one person wants to ask a different question from the one being prepared, it is better to let the first person finish, note the question, and then come back saying “I would like to return to this point.”

This collective discipline requires learning. Each interview is different; each team gradually finds its adjustments. Experience shows that one should not fear this difference, that one should not seek to standardize excessively. Authentic human encounter requires a degree of improvisation, a capacity to adapt to what emerges, to welcome the unexpected rather than channeling it into pre-established forms.

The ethnographer’s posture toward the informant

The very term “informant,” used in ethnology, says something about the relationship being established. The person being interviewed is not a passive subject, a reservoir of data to extract. They are a person who informs us, who transmits knowledge to us, who gives us access to a world that was foreign to us. Serge Chaumier readily uses the term “expert”: it is the person being interviewed who is the expert on their own life, their own practices, their own worldview. We have the advantage of being outsiders, arriving like the ethnologist who arrives at their field and does not know, who needs an informant to understand the logic of what is happening.

This exteriority is not objectivity in the scientistic sense of the term, but it allows for productive distancing. One can ask naive questions; one has the right to have explained things that seem obvious to the informant. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to have cultural implicit assumptions explained, to bring out what goes without saying for the person but which is precisely what we are trying to understand. One is not there to judge the person opposite or what they are saying. Analysis, dissection, critical contextualization—that is a second stage, the work after the interview.

Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), spoke of “thick description” to designate this attention to the meanings that actors give to their own practices: “What we call our data are in fact our own constructions of other people’s constructions.” The ethnographic interview is the moment when we gather these constructions, in their richness and complexity, without prematurely reducing them to our own categories.

After the interview: validation, cross-referencing, and ethics

The work does not stop when the camera and voice recorder are turned off. Normally, the interview is transcribed, then validated by the person, who accepts or not certain statements, who may request that certain things remain “off the record.” This validation step is essential from an ethical point of view: the person retains control over their own speech; they are not dispossessed of what they said. They can clarify, nuance, request that certain passages not be used.

The quality of ethnographic collection is measured by its density rather than its quantity. A few very well-documented situations—in-depth interviews, detailed observations, contextual documents—are better than many superficial scenes. This requirement for density means cross-referencing sources: participant observation, interviews, documents collected in the field. This cross-referencing helps identify convergences that confirm an interpretation, but also discrepancies between discourse and practices, which often open the most fruitful leads.

This ethical and methodological dimension also distinguishes ethnographic collection from journalism. The journalist generally uses the collected statements as they see fit, editing them, cutting them, contextualizing them according to their own narrative logic. The ethnographer, on the other hand, maintains a dialogue with their informants, respects their limits, builds a relationship of trust over the long term. Marcel Mauss insisted on this relational dimension: ethnography is not data extraction; it is an encounter that engages both parties.

The statements collected are not objective truths about the world; they are situated testimonies, singular perspectives, constructions of meaning. This recognition of the subjectivity of data does not invalidate them; on the contrary, it makes them precious as access to worlds of meaning that would otherwise be inaccessible to us. Ethnography does not seek truth in the singular; it seeks to understand how different people construct their plural truths.

Why ethnography in media education?

Ethnographic collection constitutes a valuable tool for media education precisely because it teaches us to open ourselves to otherness, to discover worldviews different from our own. It takes us out of the posture of the journalist caught up in their own culture, who through the filter of their cultural gaze tries to propose and argue their worldview. In ethnographic collection, we are not going to try to argue our own worldview; we are going to try to let expressions emerge that will open us up, allow us to discover something different.

This approach is profoundly democratic. It recognizes that each person carries legitimate knowledge about their own life, that “experts” are not only graduates and professionals, that everyone’s speech deserves to be listened to with attention. It teaches us to suspend our judgments, to welcome what surprises us, to let ourselves be transformed by the encounter with the other. All skills that are cruelly lacking in a media landscape dominated by controversy, confirmation of prejudices, and the staging of conflict.

From the materials collected, one can then reflect on societies, create exhibitions, films, publications, but without a priori judgment, without the will to prove something. The approach remains that of discovery, openness, sharing of a world that was foreign to us. That is the whole point, and that is what makes ethnographic collection a powerful antidote to the confrontational journalism that dominates today’s media space.

Cultivating listening as a political act

Ethnographic collection teaches us something fundamental: to truly listen is to accept being transformed by what we hear. It is not passively recording statements to use them later according to our own ends. It is entering into a relationship where the other truly matters, where their speech has intrinsic value, where their worldview deserves to be understood in its own coherence.

This posture of authentic listening has become rare in our world saturated with messages. The media speak more than they listen, social networks greatly encourage assertion rather than understanding, public debate is often reduced to the clash of fixed positions. Ethnographic collection proposes another path: taking time for encounter, accepting not knowing in advance what one will find, letting oneself be surprised by otherness.

For me, collaborating with sociologists like Serge Chaumier, ethnologists, or anthropologists constitutes a permanent source of enrichment. Their methods, their requirements, their ethics of encounter offer precious resources for rethinking media education, far more than the standardized methods of journalists. It is a matter not of training “critical consumers” who would know how to distinguish the “true” from the “false” according to criteria established by others, but of training people capable of opening themselves to worlds different from their own, of suspending their judgments, of truly listening to what the other has to say. Perhaps that is the true critical spirit: not the capacity to contradict, but the capacity to understand.