Ethnography at a Distance: A New Approach to Researching the Lifestyles and Agricultural Practices of Urban Population During the War

Author

Lytvynchuk Nataliіa

a Ph. D. in History, a research fellow at the Ukrainian Ethnological Center Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0691-9662

Ethnography at a Distance: A New Approach to Researching
the Lifestyles and Agricultural Practices of Urban Population During the War

Abstract

The experience of using the method of remote ethnography to study the realities of wartime everyday life, in particular economic life and agricultural practices in small towns on the Ukrainian-Russian border is described in the article. The territory has become in fact a frontline zone with the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The authoress details the specifics of working in the field beyond the physical reach because of the hostilities, and recreates the mechanism of recording empirical materials and joining communities and their environment in the conditions of so-called spatial inaccessibility.

The use of this method is caused by the situational circumstances, such as the occupation of some territories, the character of military operations, and the destruction of transport infrastructure. A strategy and research tools have been developed according to the actualized tasks. The individual approach to selecting locations for synchronous and asynchronous research, as well as respondents for online communication, is based primarily on solid expeditionary background. The main stages of research work, ways of observing territories, the optimal time and methods of documenting oral history and visual materials remotely have been identified relying at the same time on the examples of studying specific social phenomena at a distance presented in the national and foreign scientific literature.

The experience gained in studying the peculiarities of agricultural practices in a small town in times of hardship using the method of remote ethnography gives grounds to consider effective the combination of such techniques as conducting a series of semi-structured individual and paired interviews by telephone, virtual communication with respondents in real time, the exchange of photo and video messages, and continuous monitoring of media content and social networks.

Keywords

remote ethnography, spatial inaccessibility, military everyday life, Russian-Ukrainian war, Ukrainian-Russian borderland.

References

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