Bloggingheads is a new way to conduct interviews and debate others online. One just needs a webcam, computer, and a computer program to film the interview. Those involved in the interview can be interviewed from anywhere in the world, so long as they have a computer and webcam. This techique is simple, and all footage can easily be made public and placed on the web immediately after the interview is conducted. Would anyone in the class every conduct interviews in this manner?? How does this form change one’s idea about interviews?
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lizzy
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mstalcup
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
Here are quotes from professor Jeffrey Skoller on three types of interviews that we went over in film production class (what I read last week), plus some riffing. First, I want to flag that the media he’s discussing is film, something meant to be watched and listened to that progresses linearly, the temporality controlled by the maker.
One type of interview is where “The subjects are chosen and used to lend authority and veracity to the story the filmmaker is telling”. This is a type of journalistic interview “based on knowing of what the subject will say prior to the interview. The camera is fixed, carefully composed to make the interviewee look as credible as possible and the interviewer is not part of the scene”.
In anthropology, the interview would probably be conducted with pen and paper, or a lab top, and/or an audio recorder. The final form would probably be a text, which puts a layer between the human interaction and the product that cannot be there in the same way as when the interviewed is filmed and that temporal, physical interaction is visually presented. However, as far as the presentation of information, the anthropological parallel would be the interview where basically one knows what one wants to write already, but it’s stronger to have the words as a statement from someone else. The person interviewed is positioned as an expert, which is not to say that the content of the statement can’t be analyzed or disputed. The interview, however, is not exactly a form of inquiry.
In another type of interview “the filmmaker is investigating a question or trying to learn about something s/he doesn’t yet know about through the questioning of subjects. What the subjects will say is not already known. The intention of the interview is to find out what the person thinks. The interview situation with camera and microphone becomes a catalyst for the person to speak”.
In this case, the person is again an expert and the interview is a form of inquiry to obtain information he or she has. On occasion, having a human subjects form, a recorder and a laptop has functioned in a similar way for me to what he describes for the camera, which is that the tools legitimate the exchange, they make the person an expert. Most methods manuals I’ve read talk about the opposite though, situations where the implements make the person uncomfortable.
A third type is “an engaged relationship between the speaker and listener. Neither really knows what will happen in the interaction between the two”. Skoller focuses on “people speaking about things they want to forget or don’t want to talk about, but feel the need to. Often a person will say one thing to not say another about things that have been traumatically repressed. The work of the interviewer is to help the testifier get at what’s important to be said—even when the subject himself doesn’t know what that might be. So what actually gets said is a result of the interaction that is created in the present moment”.
Skoller is talking about the documented interview as testimony, which occurs in anthropology too. The idea that something emerges in an interview doesn’t have to be about repressed trauma though. The interview here is inquiry, for both parties, and the lines of expertise are blurred. The expertise of the interviewer at interviewing comes to the fore more obviously. The expertise of the person in Skoller’s example is not of things (or at least not only) but of him or herself.
What’s above is a schematic of types of interviews. In a given interview, some aspects of all three might come up – getting someone to say something one already knows could be a confirmation of credentials, or a way of establishing a comfortable speaking exchange. Presumably the “expert” will say things that the interviewer doesn’t know at some points, even if other parts of the conversation are shared inquiry. Our goal, we have said in reference to how anthropology differs from journalism, to be untimely. Our work “seeks to establish a relationship to the present different from reigning opinion”. If the topic were not personal trauma, but the interview is a shared inquiry, so that “what actually gets said is a result of the interaction that is created in the present moment”, then maybe there is something to think about in terms of this form, anthropologists, experts, truth claims and ethics that is not just down stream.
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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?
