Breaking the Ethnographer’s Frames

Abstract

This article assesses the use of auto-driven photo elicitation among children Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka. Comparing the data previously collected from word-only interviews with the data collected from auto-driven photo-elicited interviews, the author discusses how the latter field method tended to evoke greater descriptions from the research participants, how the descriptions were more emotionally charged than word-only descriptions, and how the autodriven approach was an effective means of bridging the culturally distinct worlds of the researcher and the researched.