Hybrid Ethnography: Mixing Participant Observation and Observant Participation.

How much should ethnographers involve themselves with the people, places, and process they study? One answer has become increasingly popular: invert the standard method of "participant observation" into "observant participation." This paper details the trade-offs between these two styles of ethnographic inquiry, underlines some important issues often ignored in the current ethnography debates, and considers the merits of combining participant observation and observant participation. To reach these ends, I drawn on an ethnography of 911 ambulance work in a large and dense California county. My fieldwork included "ride-alongs" with labor and management at a private ambulance firm (participant observation) and short-term employment as a novice emergency medical technician at the same company (observant participation). Reflecting on this study, I identify three issues at stake between participant observation and observant participation: field positioning, analytic gaze, and data assembly. I claim that ethnographers' decisions to lean toward one method over the other inevitably influences where they stand, the direction they tend to look, and the manner in which they extract local knowledge. Where participant observation presents more opportunities for mobile positioning, outward gazing, and inscription, observant participation presents more opportunities for fixed positioning, inward gazing, and incarnation. I detail the relative benefits and drawbacks of each method, but I also argue that there is something to gained by mixing them. What I call hybrid ethnography is promising for a somewhat obvious reason: it allows ethnographers to use the strengths of observant participation to counter the weaknesses of participant observation and vice versa. I close this paper by considering the limitations of a hybrid approach and highlight some directions for future research and reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]