Interpreting Cross-Cultural Digital Ethnography: The Need to Consider Local and Religious Context

Interpreting Cross-Cultural Digital Ethnography: The Need to Consider Local and Religious Context

Jim Harries
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-4190-9.ch003
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Abstract

This chapter finds that the use of digital ethnography (sometimes considered a wonderful new effective way of unearthing truth) interculturally can easily dupe the gullible into confusing presuppositions with research outcomes. The widespread assumption that English communicates accurately between cultures underlies the duplicity. Examples from Africa illustrate how English words can be misleadingly assumed to carry original-native plus foreign meanings both distinctly, yet also simultaneously. Responses to COVID-19 and Protestant theological education practices in Africa illustrate the concern. Widespread veneers of Westernization around the world, in combination with taboos upholding political correctness, build on the hegemony of secularism to conceal consequential goings-on. The chapter concludes that intercultural use of digital ethnography easily results in unhelpful deception.
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Problems Associated With Cross-Cultural Digital Ethnography

“Thanks to smartphones and tasks such as video diaries and photo uploads, researchers can now peek into the lives of respondents without physically needing to be there” (Boughton n.d.). A market-research organization further describes the advantages of digital ethnography as enabling:

the study of people in a real-world … natural environment, … bringing the researcher to the participant rather than vice versa. … [It] paints a much truer picture of how they really think and feel than asking them to fill in a questionnaire or chatting to them on the phone. … [It] enables researchers to understand participants behaviour in more ways than ever before. … It’s discreet, it’s fast, it’s fun, and it’s flexible … Researchers … can capture and assess behaviour and reactions as they happen, delivering true to life data quicker and easier than ever before.…[It is a] natural research tool and makes research effortless because people already know what they need to do. … no one around them even needs to be aware! (Boughton n.d.).

Was all research to be of people having identical cultures to that of the researcher, the above could be a valid generalization. Yet, invariably in today’s world, should a method be used intra-culturally, then it will very soon also be used cross-culturally, if only because the implications of not doing so would imply inferiority on the part of people of another culture, as if they could not be researched with digital tools. Today’s powerful antiracism, especially as it emerges from the USA, ring-fences secularism to protect it from threats to its normative position (Harries, 2021b,pp.79-96). Following this, not being racist requires presupposing non-Western cultures to be secular. While the deception inherent to this may be discovered in the course of embodied participant observation using indigenous languages, various methodologies of digital ethnography may not reveal it.

Key Terms in this Chapter

Research: Which is a process of taking the responsibility of researched community to encounter a problem.

Cross Cultural Settings: Is relational interpreting the cultural practice and existing meaning of culture or ‘social things’ among the different culture and peoples within the boundary.

Religious Context: Is depicted here as “cultural features” of course include much of the content of “religion.” An example of the latter would have secular as understood in India, as a means of handling “religious diversity”.

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