Ethnography in a Bar
Recently we made an acquaintance with a new research assistant of SESL, Marika Sharashenidze. And she is beautiful, too! On the 17th of October, at a scheduled SESL seminar, she presented the results of her ethnographic research, “Clothing as Symbol and Meaning in A Houston Bar: What clothing choice for bar goers reveals.”
Marika was interested in what kind of clothes people wear to the bar, what affects their choice, and how the bar culture is formed. Generally speaking, public places in the United States are segmented by their ethnicity, sexuality and economic status. For her study, she selected a rather unusual bar noutsoH. Unlike the bars in the center, anyone can come to noutsoH: this bar is full of trinkets, curiosities, furniture, statues and other things that aren’t normally needed in a typical bar. Among the local residents, noutsoH is known as a “hipster bar”. In this context, a “hipster” is a person who believes that he doesn’t follow the flow, keeps away from the mainstream, but actually they reproduce the dominant values in their buying tendencies.
True hipsters can also argued that this term and its identity have been integrated and adapted by large companies, which have popularized “hipsters” and now use they for profit generation. However, others think that simple non-buying of products produced by large companies can turn a person in a hipster. In other words, Marika studied not just consumerism in the nightlife, but also the idea of “not being in the mainstream.” Her key research questions: What do people think about their choice of clothes? Just how independent are their in this choice? How their decision to go to notsuoH affects their desire to wear a specific kind of clothes? How does this kind of clothes characterize the environment in notsuoH?
In her study, she applied a range of ethnographic approaches: Anderson, A Place on the Corner (2003); Rallis and Rossman (2003) Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes; the guide by Whyte (1984).
As a result, she identified two types of bar visitors: Non-regular perception and Regulars. The first group don’t visit the bar in their working clothes (uniforms); they care about the clothes they wear; and they try to correspond to the image of a bar. The second group is less concerned with their choice of clothes; they put on what they like and what they want to wear. Of course, there were also visitors who didn’t fall into either of these categories (break in the trend). These were mostly drunks and homeless who don’t have much choice in what they wish to wear.
Presentation by Marika generated a lot of interest. First of all, this study was conducted in the US; and secondly, she used a rather time-consuming and complex qualitative research method: observation that lasted 4 months.