INTRODUCTION

Erin Murphy: How did you find yourself studying ethnography and anthropology?

Dr. María Vidart-Delgado: Yeah. So I've had a meandering career.

Erin Murphy: Nice.

Dr. María Vidart-Delgado: When I wrote this piece, I was working with a government contractor. That was my official gig as a UX researcher.

Erin Murphy: Excellent.

Dr. María Vidart-Delgado: Before that, I was in academia. I have an undergrad in anthropology. I grew up in Colombia, where there are 64 languages spoken. There are many indigenous groups and ethnic diversity.

And I was always fascinated by different ways of organizing society, different ways of processing reality, of seeing the world and understanding the world. So I studied anthropology, and ethnography is the main method, but it's also a theory.

And it looks at how groups of people make meaning. And how they organize the world around them. And it's marked by a suspension of judgment. Basically, like, as ethnographers, we are called to suspend our own judgment, and actually, for example, understand how certain values are produced, and ask why and explain why they're producing that way.

We are called to explain cultural patterns rather than emit our own judgments. So, that framework, like, that is the framework that I come with, like just that, the ethnographic framework that I come with to my own work, my own practice. I was in academia for a while.

I have a PhD from Rice University. I then went to MIT to do a postdoc in anthropology. And then there were no jobs. 

Erin Murphy: How it goes.

Dr. María Vidart-Delgado: I had to figure something out.

Erin Murphy: I looked up a couple different descriptions of ethnography, and I don't think I got a... as compelling of an answer to "What is ethnography?" until you just described it now, of making sense... observing how other humans construct reality, and how other humans are making meaning from their worldview.

I think that's so much better than the weird clinical stuff I was finding on Google.

Dr. María Vidart-Delgado: Yeah, I think that in applied settings, there's a superficial definition of ethnography, which is not incorrect. If you go into kind of like this Socratic method of understanding — "What is context?", "Why?" — you get at the importance of context; the environment in which certain practices take place, and that those practices are shaping the context. So it's like really understanding how is environment, and what you're observing, related.

After I left academia, I started working with an urban planner and artist.

I was dressing in costume and kinda like doing public interventions in Boston, and kinda like studying how people relate to space, and it was amazing. This was kinda like my first time applying ethnography and seeing the application in real-world settings.

It's very helpful to understand how people's relationship to their neighborhood, the city. What is the hidden meaning of things that we take for granted?

We're going to be talking about veterans, which is highly bureaucratic. The VA government services are highly bureaucratic. Signing a piece of paper, to verifying identity, we don't think about it as much — but if you think about it... like, why do we sign a piece of paper? What does signature have to do with identity?

At a deeper level, you start answering the way that identity is constructed in our society, and how individualized it is.

Erin Murphy: Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about the signature element? So why have we all subscribed to this idea that a signature is associated with identity?

Dr. María Vidart-Delgado: Okay... if you think about it, it's just we are scribbling something to verify that it's us.

Thinking from an ethnographer perspective — we act as kinda like, translators. We're encounter really foreign practices to us, we try to relate them, to explain them to the people, w— to our people, who... where we come from. That's what ethnographers do.

Erin Murphy: You had mentioned that you were working with an urban planner. Yeah. Was there any interesting kind of observations that you had during that time?

Dr. María Vidart-Delgado: Yeah. At the time, we were hired at some point by the city of Boston for the 10-year arts and culture plan — the first ever drafted for the city. Yeah. And our job was to engage people. We dressed up as gallerists from the future.

Erin Murphy: Oh, cool. Okay.

Dr. María Vidart-Delgado: People had to imagine what the future of Boston would look like, and they submitted it through our website into images.

Erin Murphy: Oh…

Dr. María Vidart-Delgado: We would go and print those images, and dress up as gallerists from the future, and hang them on the spaces that people reimagined. And we were walking around with a suitcase and big wigs and everything, and people would come and talk to us.

But one of the things about Boston is that it is incredibly segregated. The neighborhoods are very segregated, right? It's just like you have the Colombians in one neighborhood, the Dominicans, the Vietnamese... everyone is in their own little neighborhoods. That creates ideas of who belongs and who doesn't belong in different spaces.

For the 10-year arts and cultural plan was that in many ways everything is, like, all of the cultural services in Boston, or many of them, are located around downtown Boston, or what we conceive of Boston. But in places like Mattapan and Dorchester, which are down in the south, if you're not familiar with Boston... those neighborhoods are traditionally immigrant neighborhoods. There have been many waves of immigrants. There's like a Black and Latino populations in those neighborhoods, and folks didn't feel like they could access any of the cultural services — or art services.

It was like, "Hey, I may have my own cultural practice, artistic practices. I enjoy the arts. I do all of these things, but there's not place in the city for me to do that."

Erin Murphy: I think that kinda gives me a little bit clear of a picture of the community that you were having to observe.

Dr. María Vidart-Delgado: That was a while ago. That has started to change. You'll see kinda festivals in different parts of the city, and there's more kind of like a... yeah — there's more access to resources as well, from cultural organizations.