Chronicles and auto-ethnography
The Abaporu Project on Technology Appropriation: São Paulo’s motoboy ethnographers
“Earlier this year, 12 motorcycle couriers in São Paulo started using camera-phones to chronicle their daily lives. They get together periodically to discuss each other’s finds and decide collectively what stories they want to cover. The result is Canal*MOTOBOY, a real-time account of life on the Paulista streets…”
(via smartmobs)
A couple of years ago I noted a few things about other interesting projects on zexe.net, but just reading the Canal*MOTOBOY main page I was reminded of a word that is fairly common in both Portuguese and Spanish but is rarely used in English: cronista, or chronicler. The Wikipedia entry on chronicles describes them like this: “Typically equal weight is given for important events and less important events, the purpose being the recording of events that occurred. This is in contrast to a narrative or history, which focuses on important events and excludes those the author does not see as important.”
After reading, for my Masters thesis, all the colonial Spanish chronicles from Peru in the library at Dumbarton Oaks (yes, it’s one of my favourite places ever) I can’t agree that chroniclers’ interests are absent, or that chronicles are somehow more objective or more truthful than other narratives–but they do tend towards incredible detailing of the mundane. In that way, they’re ethnographic like Mass Observation is ethnographic, and that’s something that lots of sociologists and anthropologists obsessed with validity struggle with.
The São Paulo motoboys (and one motogirl) aren’t just appropriating technology, they’re being described by others as appropriating methodologies and tactics too. In other words, “auto-representação” becomes auto-ethnography by non-professionals.
Now, here’s a question: is this collective knowledge only in aggregate?