The other week when I taught at the art school on the one famous ethnography of cruising in public park restrooms, after doing Socratic method and unearthing a number of problem areas with the scholarship, I checked in with students to see how many had gone through the scholar's excerpted notes and tried to figure out what the people he observed were doing in any given moment and whether he had theorized the culture accurately from his observations.
The answer?
No-one had tried visualizing.
So, I asked for volunteers, cleared out a space in the center of the room, set up chairs to represent the restroom stalls and urinals, and then read a photostat copy of the guy's ethnographic fieldnotes from an inset in the book as students moved around accordingly.
At each step, we tried to interpret the people's behavior in terms of the guy's overarching theory (negotiation for oral sex, active strategies for fellators to go up to men standing at urinals, etc.).
Believe it or not, I think the students got a ton out of it!
And, the guy's overarching theory held and was very illuminating, at least to interpret the one situation we staged.
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