Ethnography

The Place: Wood Ranch, The Grove. Los Angeles, California. Outside patio.

The Time: Sunday afternoon, approximately 3 to 4 pm.

The Scene: As I begin recording my observations, there are only a few other tables on the patio that are occupied other than the one I sit at alone. The smell of smoked meat is heavy in the air. Two of the tables have families dining, both with children, and at the third table, a bit separate from the families, sits an older couple. This older couple is probably in their sixties, maybe seventies, and appear to be having a causal, light-hearted conversation. The man is dressed in khakis, the woman in black slacks and both wear polo t-shirts. They are drinking what appears to be iced tea. When their food arrives, it is one of the larger barbeque combo dinners and they are sharing the plate. At the end of their meal, they split desert (looks like the apple or peach cobbler) and the man orders coffee. They are at the table for the entire hour, and are still there when I finish recording. The first of the families, the one closer to where I sit, consists of two middle-aged adults and one male child, maybe five or six. The adults are both wearing jeans; the woman in a pink blouse and the man in a button-down shirt. The child wears a stripped t-shirt and jean shorts, and spends most of the time watching something on a tablet device, kicking his feet back and forth under the table. The coloring packet and crayons provided by the restaurant are left untouched, pushed off to the side. The adults mostly talk to each other, only occasionally asking their child a question or two. The man’s cell phone, an iPhone in a black case, sits on the table, and he checks it a few times, at one point spending a few minutes on it. The wife orders the BBQ half-chicken, the husband a tri-tip sandwich with coleslaw and their son eats half of the kid’s portion of the baby-back ribs with fries and then leaves the rest, returning to the tablet. They leave as soon as they are finished eating, about a half hour into my observation. He pays. As they walk out together, I notice that she is carrying two bags – one from Nordstrom’s and the other from Cost Plus World Market. The Nordstrom’s bag has huge text on the front advertising their “Anniversary Sale”. The second family sits further back. This couple is younger, maybe in their late twenties or early thirties, and they have two children, one young enough to be in a high chair and the other probably around four or five. The child in the high chair is playing a game with his parents: he grabs things while they attempt to keep him from grabbing things. The older child, a girl in a t-shirt and skirt, is also high-spirited and at one point runs off from the table. The father runs off to catch her. The mother spends some time attempting to calm the younger child, who shrieks a few times. She has a glass of red wine in front of her. They have asked for the kid’s meal to come first: the kid’s mac and cheese with a side of broccoli. When their food finally comes – a small salad for the wife and beef ribs for the husband – the two children have already finished eating, and seem to be becoming restless again. When the server drops the bill, the wife leaves with the children first, pushing the younger one in a large black stroller. As she walks away, she is dialing something on her cell phone. The husband pays the bill, finishes the wine and then leaves. The floor underneath their table is littered with food and bits of trash.

The Meaning: The notion that shocked me the most from my observations was that there seemed to be little to no significant conversation between the families. The older couple obviously had no children to contend with and thus spent most of their time speaking to each other. However, the two families seemed disconnected from one another. The mere presence of so many tech devices leads me to considering their importance in these peoples’ lives. Cultural studies that rely on a consumption-based focus suggest that meanings are “produced, altered and managed at the level of use” (Barker 50). When tech ownership is decreed by a vast array of television commercials, magazine advertisements and the idea that everyone and their grandmother now has the particular device, owning a cell phone or gadget is almost paramount to one’s livelihood. Perhaps then the Marxist notion that culture is “expressive of social relations of class power” (Barker 56) is shifting in meaning. One can no longer argue that cell phones are the cultural property of one class or another for cell phone ownership seems widespread. The Nielsen Company’s 2010 fact sheet on technology reported that mobile phone users in the United States was around 223 million, with an estimated base of 300+ million by mid-2011 (2010 Fact Sheet 1). In contrast, the 2010 Census reported that the national population was almost 309 million (United States 1). The potential of these two figures reaching an even ratio suggests that cell phone usage is not a distinguishing characteristic of any particular class, but has been commoditized to be an attribute of the culture as a whole. Obviously then what separates class is what sort of cell phone that can be purchased – the latest iPhone 4 is more expensive than the flimsy Nokias that often come free with cellular plans, for example. The first family’s child not only spent most of his time on his tablet, but the father played with his cell phone several times during the meal. I noticed that the wife did not oppose either her husband or her son’s use of technology during the meal and I must assume this is normal for her life. This certainly speaks to Raymond Williams’s notion of culture being composed of everyday occurrences, and being “ordinary… in every mind” (Barker 42). In this digital age where technology is so prevalent in our lives, I suppose one might not think twice about allowing tech to disrupt dinner.

The second fact that startled me was the conventionality of parental roles between the two families. In both families, the husband paid the bill. Obviously I am unsure as to who was the main breadwinner in each of the families, as getting the answer to that question would have provoked potentially embarrassing social drama. However, it seemed to me that in each family, it was the woman who was doing most of the care-taking of the children. As Simone de Beauvoir points out, each couple stands as “a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together” (5) and yet there seems to still be an inequality in how everyday life is handled. Thinking back to William’s culturalism as the everyday occurrences, if this is how everyday life is played out in countless restaurants across the country, then we would have to agree with de Beauvoir in that women hold a second-class position in our society. They are, as de Beauvoir points out with the title of her essay, the “second sex” because women are “defined and differentiated with reference to man” (3). However, these people probably do not think along the rigid lines of Hegel’s master/slave complex, for today’s man does not necessarily target woman as inferior “for today they are too thoroughly imbued with the ideal of democracy not to recognize all human beings as equals” (de Beauvoir 8). Each woman holds her own identity and has her place in the culture, and yet each sex relies on each other, as women have “not been socially emancipated through man’s need – sexual desire or the desire for offspring” (de Beauvoir 5). But man often stands separate from woman. Thus, I am only left to consider de Beauvoir’s declaration that “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him” (3). Accordingly, in the second family, the wife took the children out of the restaurant and the husband was left alone at the table for a few minutes while he paid the bill and drank the rest of the wine. He was allowed a brief repose of silence and civility, while she had to wrestle with two fidgety, half-screaming children and the conventionality of high-chairs, strollers and her primary roles as wife and mother.



Works Cited

Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory & Practice. 3rd ed. London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2008. Print.

de Beauvoir, Simone. Introduction: Woman as Other. The Second Sex. 1949. Printed Excerpt. 

United States Census Bureau. "2010 Census Data." 2010.census.gov. n.d. Web. 25 July 2011. 

< http://2010.census.gov/2010census/data/>

2010 Media Industry Fact Street. USA: The Nielsen Company, 2010. Web. 25 July 2011. 

< http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/press/nielsen-fact-sheet-2010.pdf>