Playing around with what Anthony and Lyle wrote: In biochemistry, an agonist is a substance that initiates a response when combined with a receptor, and an antagonist is a substance that interferes with or inhibits the action of another. So an interview can be agonistic, in the sense of two people coming together and in their interaction, initiating responses. Something emerges in the exchange of questions and answers. It can also be antagonistic, but if conflict is productive, the interference may stop one action/line of response and thereby encourage another. Human thought should be less bound than human physiological responses, right?
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mstalcup
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lfearnley
When is an interview an interview and not just a conversation? In my limited fieldwork experience, I can identify two modes of collecting information from informants. In the first, I set up an ‘interview’ by e-mail or phone, met over lunch to question an informant on a set of loosely organized but prepared questions. Typically, I directed the conversation towards areas I was interested in learning more about. This mode corresponds well with the OED’s definition: “A meeting of persons face to face, esp. one sought or arranged for the purpose of formal conference on some point.” Notably, the early uses of the word mostly referred to royals ‘granting’ an interview to their subjects. In the second, I might start up conversation (at for example a conference) with an informant or even a person completely unknown to me. In the latter case, I directed the course of conversation much less and I often found myself answering as many questions as I was asking.
In classic fieldwork anthropology, such as Malinowski’s Argonauts, the interview is considered artificial against long-term participant observation. Malinowski describes arriving in the Trobriand village and “setting to work”, obtaining the names of certain tools and their use, taking a village census, drawing kinship charts. “But all this remained dead material, which led no further into the understanding of real native mentality or behavior, since I could neither procure a good native interpretation of any of these items, nor get what could be called the hang of tribal life” (5). Rather than arriving in the village at fixed hours to conduct formal interviews, Malinowski “began to take part, in a way, in the village life” (7).
If today our fieldwork sites cannot be bounded in space and time around a village or a tribe, do we maintain the sense of the interview as artificial? What are the possible benefits of such explicit artificiality? Or what are the benefits of less directed conversations built around chance occurrences and informal encounters?
