My interest in data sharing took a while to… um… let’s say, cultivate. I came to UC Irvine with very static and somewhat traditional ideas about fieldwork, data, and ethnography. Because, to be honest, I was less interested in anything to do with method than I was in the history and future of anthropological theory. I am a big fan of (maybe even a junky for) shattering my contemporary worldview (or what Foucault called “getting free of oneself”), and I had always assumed that consuming and producing theory was the best way to achieve this “shattering” effect. Ironically, however, this fetishization of theory has been (and still is) the most stubborn and shatter-resistant “pillar” of my perspective, though I am hoping the archive can help me crack it!
An important step towards cultivating a deep interest in data sharing came when I recognized the “question” as a discarded middle between theory and method. This came out of my reading and writing for my qualifying exams, where Kim Fortun taught me how to “read for method.” Through this new style of reading (a new way of punctuating the text), I came to completely re-interpret my interest in the discipline. That is, I became less interested in the (theoretical) answers that scholars generated than in the problems and questions that anthropologists had been able to ask. That is, I became interested in data production as a theoretical problem.
This “question of the question” dominated my fieldwork (i.e. I generated about 41 different research questions during this period, and discarded many more) and has also haunted my efforts to “write it up.” I spent the first few months of post-fieldwork revisiting the (now canonical) anti-canon that was the “Writing Culture” moment. It was the first time I really felt the depth and the gravity of the “crisis of representation,” living through my own version of it (which I’ve still yet to escape). In this struggle, I ended on a “meta-modeling” mode of dissertation writing, where I am attempting to construct four chapters as unique (Naven-esque) wholes; that is, each chapter serves as a different-yet-repeated vantage point into my ethnographic material (differentiated by scale of attention, rather than theory), hoping that the reader can develop their own arguments and interpretations of the material by reading across them. In doing so, I am trying to resist that ever present demon of the “question of the question:” its answer.
Which finally brings me to my rather meandering and round-about answer to the question posed here: my interest in data sharing (which I equate to my interest in the archive) lies in the added capacity to keep ethnography open by always approaching closure (like an ethnographic asymptote), both through continually refreshed angles of data analysis and also more meta-analyses of the ethnographic process. The archiving tactic also refreshes the relevance of ethnography, by opening up an new question of how and what it means to maintain this archive and continue to keep it lively, rather than "nail it down" in a book.
