Fieldwork as processual methodology

Fieldwork for Literary Travel Writers

Exploring theory to improve fieldwork

Salazar (2011) looks within cultural production to investigate regulation and power relations.  His motivation is that a failure by the DMO and tourism scholars to understand how imaginaries are embedded within powerful institutions, for example, the state and local government, results in a loss of the development of new tourism practices (Salazar 2011).  He shows that imaginaries can be studied even though their workings are hidden (Salazar 2011) by developing a research methodology derived from ethno-methodology which uses field-notes in a very similar method to Edgar Morin's work on Brittany (Morin 2013).  Salazar presents what he calls, ethnographic examples.  These are short narrative sketches of encounters between a local tourist guide and the tourists to whom he is providing a service (Salazar 2011).  Neither Salazar nor his research fieldworker appears in the sketch, not even as the explicit narrator.  The sketches are set in a different style of font to distinguish them from discussion.  Salazar then presents a discussion which analyses the encounter.  His paradigm, although un-stated, is interpretive but simultaneously draws heavily on the critical tradition and has strong similarities to the method of identity analysis developed by John Caughey from the 1980s to the first decade of this century (Caughey 1984; 2006).  This results in plausible and comprehensible explanations for the tourism practices.  In this my research on Concarneau I used auto-ethnography in conjunction with respondents acting as fieldworkers to examine the importance of the readers' imaginations and the play of the doxa in the social sphere, see Jones (2013) and Coghlan & Filo (2013) for examples of this.  

The Doxa in the Social Space

The background to my field research in Concarneau can be explained more fully with reference to this interpretive study of socialising factors and social practices in holidaymaking.  The core text, The Yellow Dog, is identified as a socialising document from the realist tradition and was chosen for this reason since its use by the case participants will provide opportunities for the researcher to detect and analyse changes in social behaviour which have connections to points in the literary text.  This decision to explore the social derives from Bourdieu (1977), Moretti (2007) and the concepts of the doxa and gratuitous place value and offers the DMO socially-acceptable practices to include in their site offerings.  Even though the novel explores criminal behaviour the socialising action of the realist novel with its free indirect discourse (Moretti 2007) coupled with a reporting procedure which includes publicly-accessible writing by the participants reduces the likelihood that the respondent will reveal criminal practices which are unattractive to the DMO.

Reference

Salazar, N. (2011) 'Tourism Imaginaries: A Conceptual Approach' in Annals of Tourism Research.

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