By Cameron Miranda-Radbord

It is a real loss for future generations of students in ANT 473 that Professor Li is retiring, but if the course continues to be taught, I have a scintilla of what I think is wisdom: your ethnography may not be everything you hoped it was. 

When I researched “anthropology disappointment” and “ethnography disappointment”, I found research on disappointment as an anthropological concept, which is interesting but not what I’m discussing here. No – what I want to explore is disappointment in your own work and your own research. 

I have adored ethnography since my first practicum in the first semester of my first year in Kensington Market as part of the Munk One program. I loved talking to people – to listening to them describe parts of their lives they may have always thought to be menial, but to me were critical. As I walk through Kensington today, I still remember what shop owners told me outside of their storefronts – how shoppers enthused about graffiti or raged about parking spots. 

Part of the disappointment of this ethnography, for me, was that every conversation I had was online. Without ties to a physical research site, it became easy for many of the concepts and questions I thought about to become nebulous or feel pointless – especially given that many of the assessment tools I was evaluating were inutile even to the people responsible for them. 

Perhaps a greater contribution to the disappointment, though, was made by the environment that I was studying – I was talking to professionals about their jobs. Compared to street interviews, which were what I conducted previously, the Zoom chats I had felt a lot less like seeing people in their “natural habitat”.  Consequently, the answers I was given had a kind of corporate polish to them I was not used to and that I struggled to break down. 

I say this not to gripe or make excuses – I am fully accountable for the final report I wrote, for better or for worse. Rather, I want to emphasize that something being disappointing and something being bad are different things. Part of the task of ethnography is noticing things, and I think the subversion of my initial expectations was an impediment to meaningful noticing. 

So – your ethnography may not be everything you hoped it would be. I think, in retrospect, that that is fine. As much as disappointment can be demoralizing – and for me, it was demoralizing – I regret not adapting to the spaces I was in. After all, what matters to me about ethnography is affirming that the everyday, oft-ignored lives of people deeply, truly matter – about making the ordinary extraordinary. For that to happen, I think one has to believe that the spaces they are in are extraordinary, even if the dull grey zoom backgrounds of the UofT Student Life department might make them feel otherwise.