Voice of the Object: Art Psychotherapy and Translating Cultures

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Voice of the Object: Art Psychotherapy and Translating Cultures
Margaret Hills de Zarate
Abstract
This chapter gives an overview of research in progress. Part of a three-year project
funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) it focuses on Italian
migration and the processes involved in the trangenerational mediation of Italian
identity through material culture in Argentina. Workshops with objects, group
discussions and interviews, provide an accessible way to explore cultural translation,
are described. The relative low cost of these methods allows for ease of
dissemination, encourages sharing and increases the potential to generate dialogue
and discussion. Previous experiences of ethnographic fieldwork as a
researcher/practitioner serve to illustrate my developing ethnographic stance.
Keywords
Translation, culture, migration, ethnography, participation, objects, material culture,
trangenerational, Argentina
Introduction
In the world increasingly characterized by transnational and globalized connections,
the need for understanding and communication within, between, and across diverse
cultures is stronger than ever. The Arts and Humanities Research Council
‘Translating Cultures’ research theme proposes that this need can be addressed by
studying the role of translation, understood in its broadest sense to include the
transmission, interpretation and sharing of languages, values, beliefs, histories,

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narratives and life stories and the vehicles of translation, such as art, performances,
objects and other cultural artefacts. ‘Translation’ is thus conceived as relating to
processes that are not exclusively inter-lingual (between languages) but also those
processes that are intermedial (between media) or intercultural (between cultures) and
encompass issues such as the ‘untranslatable’, and the impact of what is transformed,
gained or lost in the process of translation (Forsdick 2014). I propose that these
processes have clear parallels to those at play in the practice of a culturally sensitive
art psychotherapy informed by ethnographic and socio-cultural perspectives.
Overview of Research
My research is located in the ‘Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility,
Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures’ research project, one of the three
large grants under the overarching Translating Cultures theme. It involves researchers
at four UK universities: Bristol, Warwick, St Andrews and Queen Margaret
University, and a number of academic and community partners across the world all
engaged in the investigation of practices of linguistic and cultural interchange and the
exploration of the ways in which cultural translation intersects with linguistic
translation in our everyday lives. While this specific project focuses on the case of
Italian mobility, identity and translation in modern Italian cultures it is intended to
provide a template from which to develop a new paradigm for the work of modern
language studies and its applications in the 21st century through the close study of
Italy’s particular and complex history of migrations (Burdett 2014). The potential for
this development will be through the generation of multiple case studies of Italian
migration across the world, from Argentina to Ethiopia, that will contribute towards a
larger category of research, which in turn aims to generate new understandings of

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cultural translation in all its multiple manifestations in the context of our rapidly
changing globalized world (Flyvbjerg 2006; Blommaert and Dong Jie 2010). The
aims of this research theme are multiple and far reaching with the exploration of key
concepts such as multiculturalism, multilingualism, tolerance, intolerance and identity
at its core. These concepts and my specific focus on intermediality, which in this
research involves and seeks to examine the relationship between the visual and the
verbal and the movement from one representation to another, have implications for
practice of art psychotherapy.
My own work as a co-investigator in this research project focuses on
transgenerational Italian migration in South America taking four major sites as
specific areas of study; Buenos Aires in Argentina, São Paulo in Brazil, Montevideo
in Uruguay and Valparaiso in Chile. The methodology for my current research in the
‘Transnationalizing Modern Languages’ research project ’ has evolved from previous
ethnographic research undertaken in Cuba, the Republic of Georgia, Colombia and
Ukraine and involves a range of approaches to community participation in researching
the lived experience of participants and involving them directly in the co-creation of
the research. These participative approaches include workshops, focus groups and
individual interviews. The examples referred to here are limited to fieldwork in
Argentina.
Italians in Buenos Aires
The history of Italians and of Italian culture in Argentina has its roots in multiple
experiences of mobility and transnationalism that can be traced back to the 17th
century. However the large-scale migration of Italians can be described as occurring

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in distinct waves; 1876-1895 mainly from the northern regions of Piedmont, Veneto
and Lombardy, 1895-14 when migration patterns shifted to rural and former
independent Southern Italy, especially Campania, Calabria and Sicily and finally in
the years following the end of World War II, 1946-1957 (Mignone 2008; Devoto
1984, 2006). As Schneider (2000) notes ‘the massive movement of peoples in search
of a better life in the 19th and early 20th centuries was the product of specific internal
factors of poor areas in Europe, which could not provide subsistence for their
population and repressed demands for redistribution of wealth’ and the opportunities
offered by the rising economies in the New World’ (Schneider 2000: 61).
Transatlantic networks informed Italians, of the economic opportunities in Argentina
in both commercial and agricultural sectors of what was then a booming economy.
The great majority of Italian immigrants to Argentina arrived as poor, often illiterate
unskilled or semi-skilled workers many of them peasants or agricultural workers. In
general Northern Italians went to rural Argentina whereas South Italians tended to go
to cities, particularly Buenos Aires (Schneider 2000). In Buenos Aires, at the turn of
the century Italians joined the growing urban economy and found occupational niches
such as tailors, and fruit and vegetable vendors and contributed largely to the rise of
manufacturing, mechanical, food processing, textile and furniture-making industries
(Schneider 2000). An urban industrial elite developed, largely of Italian origin. It
maintained strong links of patronage with the local Italian working class, its
workforce and consumers, through the control of numerous mutual aid associations
(società di mutuo soccorso or sociedades de socorros mutuos) (Scarzanella 1981;
Devoto 1984). It was with the collaboration of these societies that I gained access to
my respondents whose membership was largely descended from the two main Italian

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populations Friuli Venezia and Calabria referred to in the literature. As most arriving
immigrants spoke regional dialects of Italian they found it easier to communicate in
Spanish, which became their shared language.
Methodologies: Ethnography and Ethnographic and Participatory Approaches
The methodology for my current research in the ‘Transnationalizing Modern
Languages’ research project ’ evolved from previous ethnographic research
undertaken in Cuba, the Republic of Georgia, Colombia and Ukraine.
Ethnography quite literally means to ‘write’ (or represent) a culture. It is not a specific
data collection technique but rather a multiple technique approach, by which the
ethnographer can adapt and draw upon a mix of methods appropriate to a situation.
Research and data collection takes the form of diverse experiences, workshops,
encounters, relationships, observations, and conversations as opposed to closely
structured interviews as it is only as the conversations and interviews progress that the
next question emerges (Parthasarathy 2008), an inductive approach not dissimilar to
that adopted by the therapist as reflexive practitioner (Finlay 2008:3). As Hoey (2014)
points out ‘an ethnography may be defined as both a qualitative research process or
method (one conducts an ethnography) and product (the outcome of this process is an
ethnography) whose aim is cultural interpretation’ (Hoey 2014:1). The ethnographer
goes beyond reporting events and details of experience. Like the psychotherapist the
ethnographer attempts to understand how these events or reported experiences
represent what Geertz (1973) has called ‘webs of meaning’ referring to the cultural
constructions by which we live and the analysis of them. Ethnography like

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psychotherapy is therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an
interpretative one in search of meaning (Hoey, 2014; Seeley 2004, 1999). These
‘webs of meaning’ or ‘significance’ underlie society, human interactions including
our thoughts and emotions by ‘providing a background set of assumptions and values
that set restraints on human functioning and orientate us to what is meaningful’ (Tsoi
Hoshmand, 2006: 188).
Our assumptions and values extend to material culture which focuses on objects, their
properties, the materials that they are made of, and the ways in which these materials
are central to an understanding of culture and social relations (Woodward 2013)
including the making of and relationship with images and artefacts. The cultural
dimensions of material and visual cultures as represented in art making through
choices of materials, subject matter and the use of symbols and metaphor must,
therefore, be considered in art psychotherapy practice Bird 2012; Hogan 2015; Hogan
and Pink 2011; Hocoy 2005; Hocoy 2002; Landes 2012) if art psychotherapists are to
engage in any meaningful way with clients from different backgrounds to their own.
Shweder ’s (1991) definition of the field of cultural psychology as ‘the study of the
ways subject and object, self and other, psyche and culture, person and context, figure
and ground, practitioner and practice, live together, require each other, and
dynamically, dialectically, and jointly make each other up’ is helpful in outlining
what this involves (Shweder 1991:73). Moreover, it describes ‘a non-reductionistic
approach to understanding the interrelatedness of aspects in the human domain’ of
interest to psychotherapists, ethnographers and social scientists (Tsoi Hoshmand
2005:2).

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Fieldwork
Fieldwork is one of the key principles of ethnography whereby the ethnographer
spends extended periods of time in the everyday environment of a culture or group of
individuals under study collecting data. However, as Blommaert and Dong Jie (2010)
point out this is true only to some extent for while one should, of course, ‘return from
the field loaded with bags full of ‘data’: raw and half-processed materials that reflect
and document the realities in the field… fieldwork should not just be reduced to data
collection, because essentially it is a learning process’ (Blommaert and Dong Jie
2010: 27). Apart from an initial period of prolonged fieldwork in Havana (Hills de
Zárate 2010, 2011) most of my research has involved shorter periods of immersion,
due to limited economic resources and work commitments (Hills de Zárate 2012). In
such situations I have used an ethnographic approach congruent with what Jeffrey and
Troman (2004) describe as a ‘compressed time mode’ which involves a shorter period
of intense ethnographic research in which ‘researchers inhabit a research site almost
permanently for anything from a few days to a few months, involve themselves in the
life of the inhabitants, and seek access to as many site contexts and people as
possible’. I have also employed a ‘selective intermittent time mode’ where the length
of time spent doing research is longer but with a very flexible approach to the
frequency of site visits (Jeffrey and Troman, 2004: 538-540).
As a health care professional I was granted immediate entry to both the site and
population and attached to a multidisciplinary team looking at the potential
implementation of art therapy within existing psychosocial models of practice with
refugees in diverse settings such as the Republic of Georgia, Colombia and Kenya.

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However, to be able to do this it was essential to understand the context in which this
could be achieved and also to identify what approach to art therapy might be
beneficial given the multiple issues at play such as safety, temporality, continuity,
confidentiality and culture. Access to multiple gatekeepers in the multidisciplinary
team in turn facilitated direct access to key members within the communities.
A gatekeeper is an individual who facilitates access to the site and to participant
subjects. Such a role implies someone with authority or ownership in line with the
existing cultural norms of the research setting, which in my case were mainly other
health care professionals or aid organisations (Sanders, 2006). However, as Christian
(2012) notes ‘depending on the place, nature and participant body of research
subjects, the role of gatekeeper can be anything from one of simple formality to one
of extraordinary complexity, where sought after access is deeply embedded into the
research project such as when gate-keepers are also participants and subjects’
(Christian, 2012: 2).
Case Vignette: Are you a Journalist?
One example of this involved working with a group of adolescent boys one of whom
occupied various roles in my research; key informant, gatekeeper and latterly co-
researcher. As gatekeeper he introduced me to his family and other community
members and when I decided not to take photographs following a conversation with a
local man about press coverage, which revealed that many journalists had visited the
camp and that their presence had been experienced, as intrusive and their reports
inaccurate and misrepresentative, he took over the role and as a co-researcher the
collection of visual material relating to this piece of work providing an insight into the

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camp based on what he thought was important for others to be aware of and which
might otherwise have remained invisible to me. As I did not know what I did not
know I had to rely on my respondent to show me (Lincoln and Guba 1985: 269).
Ultimately, the researcher’s ability to navigate through gatekeepers at many levels
and of varying connectivity to the research subject community is essential to any
fieldwork success (Christian, 2012) While I cannot claim to have ‘planned’ this
particular interaction such an approach is in keeping with participatory research
methods that are geared towards ‘planning and conducting the research process with
those people whose life-world and meaningful actions are under study’ (Bergold &
Thomas 2012: 1).
This particular episode occurred during what Whitehead (2005) refers to the ‘initial
ethnographic tour ‘of the research site in rural or small communities. Often
conducted as walks, the ethnographer may begin ‘unstructured or natural
conversational interviews’ with people encountered or a member of the community
will engage the ethnographer in conversation. Through such processes the
ethnographer ‘may eventually identify participants for further semi‐structured
or even structured interviews, as well as meet additional community members’
(Whitehead 2005:16). Conversations such as the ‘are you a journalist conversation’
described would I think fit Whitehead’s definition of a ‘natural conversational
ethnographic interview’, as the discourse is similar to what naturally occurs in
a conversation and usually occurs when the ethnographer is simply another
participant in a conversation as indeed I was. However, as Whitehead (2005) goes
on to point out, once in the field one is alert to material that pertains to the object of
one’s research.

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‘Ethnographers having some idea of what it is that they want to learn in the
setting, aspects of their research concerns are never far from their
consciousness, even though the conversation or the activity maybe primarily
social or informal. Because some form of research paradigm is part of an
ethnographer’s consciousness, she or he are not only alert when something
emerges in the conversation in which they don’t quite understand, but also
when the conversation seems to be moving into an area related to that
research paradigm’ (Whitehead 2005:16).
Having gained entry, in my case to Italian communities in Buenos Aires, the next step
is to proceed to collect the material required in order to answer one’s research
questions. This requires a research methodology and underpinning any methodology
is a set of epistemological positions and values as expressed through the approaches I
have adopted.
Participatory Approaches to Research
Participatory research can be regarded as a methodology that argues in favour of the
possibility, the significance, and the usefulness of involving research partners in the
knowledge-production process (Bergold, 2007). Participatory approaches are not
fundamentally distinct from other empirical social research procedures; there are
numerous links, especially to qualitative methodologies and methods. Participatory
research involves collaborative research activities. Especially in health research,
funders now recognize that the involvement of service users in the research process
makes good sense. Public and patient involvement (PPI) in research is now explicitly

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required by most funding bodies (Cook 2012). Approaches, which seek to close the
gap between ethnography and community engagement, include Community-based
Ethnographic Participatory (CBEP) research that focuses on culture and cultural
interpretation and uses a participatory process undertaken with community members
(Israel, Eng, Schulz and Parker 2013) However, CBEP is usually large scale, long
term and involves a team of researchers including both academic and community
members (Parrado, McQuiston & Flippen 2005; Austin 2003; Lassiter 2000). My own
experience is closer to that described by Cheney (2011) who used a participatory
ethnography approach in a six-week period in the field involving young local people
as research assistants in assessing orphans’ needs in Africa and who states that ‘the
truth is that every research participant, every friend and cultural guide, is a
collaborator in building our cultural interpretations’ (Cheney, 2011: 170). In
developing my own ethnographic stance, I have found the voice of Barbara Tedlock
(1991) reassuring.
‘However the discipline (of ethnography) may develop historically, there currently
exists a (new) breed of ethnographer who is passionately interested in the co-
production of ethnographic knowledge, created and represented in the only way it can
be, within an interactive Self/Other dialogue’ (Tedlock, 1991:82).
In my current research, I have employed a ‘selective intermittent time mode’ (Jeffrey
and Troman, 2004) i.e. blocks of immersion in the field coupled with visits to the sites
of emigration in Italy as a means of sensitizing myself to environments left behind or
in the case of transgenerational migration imagined cultural landscapes. Contact with
key respondents, who are invited to ‘write into’ transcriptions of interviews, has been

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maintained through the Internet. I have also focused on material culture and the world
of objects as a medium of cultural translation.
Objects
The Transnationalizing Modern Languages research involves an examination of the
role of objects in mediating constructions of identity in relation to transgenerational
migration. One research question is how processes of translation occur within
material culture, in particular, those processes that are intermedial. Intermedial
(between media) is when we speak about objects, or (at the risk of being fanciful)
when the object speaks to us.
The relationship between people and objects has been the focus of material culture
studies defined by Miller (1983) as ‘an ‘integrative’ field, drawing across disciplines
to examine ‘a core relationship between objects and people’ (Miller 1983: 5). The
literature pertaining to this ‘integrative field’ emanates from a variety of sources
including history, art history, art, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology,
anthropology and cultural studies, that is, the same range of disciplines that inform the
discipline of art psychotherapy. One example is Miller’s ethnographic study of a
London street, a collection of thirty narrative portraits of individual homes, the people
that live in them and their possessions. He argues that human relationships are central
to modern life and that material culture is fundamental in underpinning these
relationships. Miller’s study focuses on people’s relationships with material objects,
which are viewed as ‘an integral and inseparable aspect of all relationships’ (Miller,
2008: 286). The central thrust of his research is to ‘challenge our common-sense

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opposition between the person and the thing, the animate and the inanimate, the
subject and the object’ (2010: 5).
In conducting his research Miller asked people about the interiors of their homes, the
decoration, the choices that had been made and the objects displayed. By enquiring
about things, as opposed to more direct personal questions, he found that people
shared a great deal more about themselves than they otherwise might have in a more
traditional interview. One advantage of adopting this ‘unusual perspective’, (Miller
2010) but which should come as no surprise to art therapists, is that these apparently
mute, inanimate forms, often ‘spoke’ more easily and eloquently to the nature of
relationships than people themselves. Another, but unexpected outcome, was that
participants in the study often used the encounter as an occasion to re-examine and to
some degree, to re-evaluate their lives (Miller, 2008: 296).
In defining objects as ‘things’ or ‘stuff’ Miller takes a view, which I sympathise with,
in that he refuses to offer a clear definition of what constitutes these objects arguing
that ‘to try to determine the exact criteria by which some things would be excluded, as
perhaps less tangible, or too transient, would be a hopeless exercise’ (Miller, 2010: 1).
Between April and May 2015 I ran a series of workshops in Buenos Aires and
Cordoba in Argentina entitled ‘Objects, mementoes and narratives: an exploration of
transgenerational identity’ which were advertised as follows:
‘The specific objective of this workshop is the exploration of transgenerational
identity as mediated by objects and our use of them. Objects, from photographs to the
souvenir or memento, and the practices associated with them; function as vehicles that
facilitate the expression of cultural identity. Participants are invited to bring a
personal item, which represents their relationship, real or symbolic, with the concept
of heritage and identity. The orientation workshop will be dynamic, practical and

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thematic although essentially non-directive. Participants should be prepared to
participate in the experience of artistic creation and be willing to share and exchange
their experiences with others i’.
The objects that participants brought to these workshops were varied beyond any
expectation. For the purposes of this chapter I will briefly discuss one workshop held
in Moron, a town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires where the following objects were
brought:
‘A tiny souvenir of a Sicilian horse and cart carefully repaired: a coffee grinder, a
coffee pot, and a beautifully preserved dress that had once belonged to one
participant’s grandmother who had been a seamstress. Photographs, a photograph
album from Japan, certificates, passports and a tiny plate’ii'.
IMAGE 9.1 NEAR HERE
All of these objects corresponded, if not to a person, to a sense of identity. One
respondent who was willing (amongst many) to be interviewed about the connection
between object and life history was interviewed following the workshop. An
important culture bearer (Friedman 1994) was her grandfather Ruggerio Vannella
whose photograph she brought to the group. A gypsy from Mola di Bari and a
musician, his granddaughter training to be a medical doctor, carries his name and a
powerful sense of personal identity related to him and the objects left behind
following his death. One thought which arose and which was reiterated in another

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interview with a retired doctor was that these relationships of caring or witnessing
caring had informed their choice to become doctors.
IMAGE 9.2 NEAR HERE
Intermediality
The link between the object, and what it represents involves the translation of material
culture to a narrative. In order to conceptualise this relationship, the concept of
intermediality is needed. Intermediality is a way of understanding the relations
between two (or more) media, such as writing, speech and images, or the
transgression of boundaries between them. As previously noted ‘translation’ is
conceived as relating to processes that are not exclusively inter-lingual but also those
processes that are intermedial, between different media, (Forsdick, 2014) and these
processes are at play in the workshop scenarios such as the one previously described
when we imbue our material world and the objects within it with narrative. However,
these processes can be safely harnessed to explore other social phenomena beyond the
clinical setting if the focus of the research is inductive, that is to say that the
researcher does not attempt to impose a priori interpretations on the material which
surfaces. Examples of similar research include Miller (2005, 2008, 2010) and Turkle
(2011) who has published a collection of autobiographical essays, on the evocative
nature of things, by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers trace the power of
objects in their lives, objects that Turkle (2011) classifies according to the association
and the meaning attributed to it by the author. Turkle (2011) invites us to consider
objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought and
presents us with objects of discipline and desire, objects of history and exchange,

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transition and passage, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our
relationship to things.
Literature is replete with such explorations as in Proust, or Walter Benjamin’s ‘Berlin
around 1900’ the greater part of which was written when Benjamin lived in exile in
Paris, Benjamin attempts to reconstruct his own past life, as well as the life of an
epoch, as they were shaped by a city. Unpublished in his own lifetime, Benjamin uses
the objects, interiors and experiences of his childhood to explore the relationship
between people, memory and things. One object, the ‘reading box’, a box full of
lettered tablets with which to form words, stands out, of which he writes:
‘Everyone has encountered certain things which occasioned more lasting habits than
other things. Through him or her, each person developed those capabilities, which
helped to determine the course of his life…none of the things that surrounded me in
my early years arouses greater longing than the reading box’ (Benjamin, 2006: 16).
Benjamin’s account of the reading box, which he goes on to describe in detail is, I
think, an example of what Miller (2010) is referring to when he states that people not
only make things, but things make people. By this Miller is referring to the way in
which we are unconsciously shaped by the things that surround us in an exterior
environment that habituates and prompts us (Miller, 2010: 51). In developing his
theory of things, Miller acknowledges his debt to the French anthropologist and
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who defines this exterior environment as 'habitus… a
durable, transposable system of definitions' acquired initially by the young child as a
result of the conscious and unconscious practices of her/his family (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1992: 126-7). Habitus is "embodied history, internalised as second nature
and so forgotten as history" (Bourdieu, 1990: 56). In other words, habitus is
historically conditioned and deeply internalised, thus forming a kind of second nature

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and giving our thoughts feelings and actions their apparently 'natural', or 'spontaneous'
character. The habitus is a generative rather than a fixed system: a basis from which
endless improvisations can derive, a 'practical mastery' of skills, routines, aptitudes
and assumptions which leave the individual free to make (albeit limited) choices in
the encounter with new environments or fields. Written in exile from a world he could
never return to memory is conceived as a palimpsest in which Benjamin peels away
of the layers of history to expose the foundational traces of his early life, the reading
box, and a return to the primary habitus (Sleight, 2006).
Reflexivity
The degree of involvement which ethnography involves requires considerable
flexibility and reflexivity. A reflexive approach in ethnography enables one to
understand how the researcher who is also a practitioner, has an impact on those
researched. It also implies that the researcher with such a background should
interrogate their own beliefs and feelings in the same way that they interrogate those
of others (Arber, 2005). This process has much in common with the reflective practice
and reflexive thinking, which are essential components of therapy as both the
therapist and researcher become a part of the very process that she or is trying to step
back from and observe (Dallos and Stedmon, 2009).
Dallos and Stedmon (2009) suggest that reflective practice in psychotherapy is best
seen as a successive process of analysing and reanalysing important episodes of
activity, drawing on multiple levels of representation including propositional,
autobiographical and ethical knowledge and helpfully distinguish personal reflection
from personal reflexivity.

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The term personal reflection is used to refer to the spontaneous and immediate act of
reflecting in the moment and restricted to describe reflection in action, most usually
during therapy, but also applied to other professional contexts such as supervision,
consultation, teaching and learning. Personal reflection typically encompasses self-
awareness of bodily sensations and emotions and the attentional focus on memories,
experiences and cognitions as evoked during in-the-moment reflective episodes. In
contrast, personal reflexivity refers to the act of looking back over, or reflecting on,
action. This implies a meta-theorized processing of events retrospectively, where the
original episode of reflection becomes the object of further conscious scrutiny.
Personal reflexivity is primarily a conscious cognitive process whereby knowledge
and theory are applied to make sense of remembered reflective episodes. This draws
on multiple sources of prior knowledge, including model-specific theories of
psychological processes, a theorized understanding of one’s own social status and
situation in terms of gender, class and ethnicity, and self-narratives that represent
autobiographical accounts that story our own life experiences. Thus ‘personal
reflexivity’ refers to ‘the way that the [therapist or researcher] acknowledges how her
own agendas, experiences, motivations and political stance contribute to what goes on
in work with clients (Dallos and Stedmon, 2011).
Both personal reflection and reflexivity are involved in ethnography: the former in
relation to being and doing in the field and the latter in the learning and making sense
of the material collected there. These are also elements of autoethnography.
Evocative or Analytic Autoethnography

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Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that combines characteristics of
ethnography and autobiography within the creative and performing arts as a research
tool (Pace 2012). However, while autoethnography is now established as a useful
research method it has also been criticised for its rejection of traditional analytic goals
such as abstraction and generalisation (Anderson 2006a; Atkinson 2006). Ellis (2004)
argues that autoethnographies do contain analytic elements in the sense that ‘when
people tell stories, they employ analytic techniques to interpret their worlds’ (2004:
195-196). However, this form of analysis does not sit comfortably with the realist or
analytic tradition. On the subject of generalisation, Ellis argues that it is possible to
generalise from an autoethnography, but not in a traditional manner. The
generalisability of an autoethnography is tested by readers as they determine if the
story speaks to them about their experience or about the lives of others they know’
(Ellis 2004: 194-195). The autoethnographer does not privilege traditional analysis
and generalisation. Anderson (2006a) has expressed concerns about certain aspects of
the ‘evocative or emotional’ autoethnographic method championed by Ellis and
Bochner (2000) and other symbolic interactionists with postmodern or
poststructuralist sensitivities (Denzin 2006). Anderson (2006) while applauding
efforts in articulating and exemplifying this emergent research method has also
expressed fear that ‘evocative or emotional autoethnography’ may have the
unintended consequence of eclipsing other visions of what autoethnography can be
and of obscuring the ways in which it may fit productively in other traditions of social
inquiry (Anderson, 2006a, p. 374). Dissatisfied with the limitations that evocative
autoethnography places on researchers who want to practise autoethnography within a
realist or analytic tradition, he proposes an alternative research method that is
committed to an analytic agenda named ‘analytic autoethnography’ to distinguish it

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from the ‘evocative or emotional autoethnography’ promoted by Ellis and Bochner
(2000).
‘The purpose of analytic ethnography is not simply to document personal experience,
to provide an “insider’s perspective,” or to evoke emotional resonance with the
reader. Rather, the defining characteristic of analytic social science is to use empirical
data to gain insight into some broader set of social phenomena than those provided by
the data themselves’ (Anderson 2006: 386-87).
Ellis and Bochner (2006) and Denzin (2006) have opposed Anderson’s proposal on
the grounds that it could dilute the current meaning of the term ‘autoethnography’; it
could contain, limit or silence the researcher’s self in the research context; and it
could reduce publishing opportunities for those who seek to practice evocative
autoethnography. Other ethnographers such as Charmaz (2006) and Pace (2012) have
welcomed it. In my own research I am currently looking at both models but given that
my work is part of a contribution to a greater whole, that of the ‘Transnationalizing
Modern Languages’ project, veering towards Anderson’s proposal to use grounded
theory at the stage of analysis of the data collected in diverse sites over the life of the
project. Some Art Psychotherapists have used elements of autoethnography to great
effect (Hocoy 2006; Schaverien 1998) in relation to a cultural identity.
Generalisation
It is important to emphasise that the object of investigation in ethnography is always a
uniquely situated reality: a complex of events, which occurs in a totally unique
context – time, place, participants, even the weather. The ethnographer is always

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working in a series of conditions that can never be repeated. Even if events look or
seem to be the same they never are because they are different events happening at
another time. This brings us to the issue of representativeness. What sort of relevance
do these very specific snapshots of reality have and how confidently can
generalisations be drawn from the data collected? The answer lies in the fact that
ethnography is an inductive science, that is: it works from empirical evidence towards
theory, not the other way around. You follow the data, and the data suggest particular
theoretical issues (Bloommaert and Dong Jei, 2010). This approach has clear
parallels with the practice of art psychotherapy if we follow the information and
material provided by the patient, which in turn suggests the therapeutic intervention.
The discrete ethnography is presented, as a case study, which ‘properly understood, is
not simply the report of an event or incident. To call something a case is to make a
theoretical claim – to argue that it is a ‘case of something’, or to argue that it is an
instance of a larger class’ (Shulman, 1986: 11). The data becomes cases of larger
categories by applying theoretical models to them; theory is the outcome of a
theorisation of your data, you ‘theorise them into a case’, so to speak. As Shulman
(1986) points out ‘Generalisation does not inhere in the case, but in the conceptual
apparatus of the explicator’ (Shulman, 1986: 12). This is an important point:
generalisation is perfectly possible, and it depends on the theoretical apparatus that
you bring to bear onto your data including the theoretical frameworks studied prior to
starting fieldwork which have been more or less determined by your particular
research preparation and the formulation of your research goals. In my own work,
both as a therapist and as a researcher, a psychosocial framework, involving
understanding human beings as simultaneously biological, emotional, social and
cultural and positions the individual in networks of interpersonal relationships,

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organisations, and cultural/political/economic systems has been crucial to practicing
inter-cultural art psychotherapy. It is an approach, which encourages multi-
disciplinarity and crosses the disciplinary boundaries that hinder the development of
the knowledge and evidence base for psychosocial practice in the pubic sphere. In
practice in the field it translates into a way of working which is congruent with a
collaborative participatory approach in humanitarian fieldwork (ALNAP, Groupe
URD, 2009) and the Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Programming for
Refugee Operations guidelines issued by the UNHCR (2013). In relation to the
experience of transgenerational migration, my generalisations will be about such
issues and my case studies will belong to a larger category of psychosocial research.
As Blommaert and Dong Jei (2010) observe this does not occur just at the end of the
research trajectory as theoretical frameworks have been explored prior to starting your
fieldwork, and many of the choices made in the process of formulating the research
aims (what you hope to achieve) and objectives (the steps you take to achieve your
aims).
Discussion
My ongoing research necessarily involves an examination of the approaches and
processes outlined in this chapter. Exploratory workshops with art therapy students on
the subject of transgenerational identity in relation to objects have proved illuminating
in exploring processes of translation between media in art psychotherapy.
Understanding of the role of the intermediaries who perform the work of
translation:

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(i) in the case of art psychotherapy this involves the triangular relationship between
client/therapist in relationship to each other and to the image (Schaverien 1991) and
the relationship of the image to the mental image (Bolle 2015) (ii) in ethnography
planned group discussions involving objects provide an accessible way to explore
transgenerational cultural translation, encourage sharing and increase the potential to
generate dialogue and discussion (O’ Reilly 2005)
Reflection on the vehicles of translation, such as narratives, performances,
objects and other cultural artefacts:
(i) in art psychotherapy, the image or object produced within or brought to the
therapeutic setting, functions as a vehicle of translation as does its accompanying
narrative and the potential therein for elaboration and exploration (ii) in the object
workshops these same processes were at play but in the very different context of
planned discussions with already existing groups of people who knew each other and
had some relation to the topic I was pursuing(O’Reilly 2009: 76). On no occasion
was the proposition that experiences of transgenerational migration could be mediated
through an engagement with objects or images, responded to as anything out of the
ordinary (Williams 1989). The transcription of discussion groups and interviews is
ongoing and involves another layer of translation, from object to narrative, Spanish to
English. However, preliminary findings suggest:!
(1)!that!making!links!between!object,!image!and!developing!accompanying!
reflective!narratives!is!not!a!rarefied!pursuit!but!a!very!ordinary!human!
phenomenon that can be successfully incorporated into participatory ethnographic
research.

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(2) that most of these object narratives are about meaningful relationships with people
which concurs with Miller’s finding ‘…that the people who successfully forge
meaningful relationships to things are often the same as those who forge meaningful
relationships with people, while those who fail usually also fail at the other, because
the two are much more akin and entwined than is commonly appreciated’ (Miller
2008:105).
WORD COUNT: 6240
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i!Translated!from!the!original!Spanish!by!the!author!
ii!Authors!field!notes.!