Her Hair
I didn’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable by staring, so I zeroed in on a woman in a bright red coat who had her back to me. She appeared to be a customer wandering through the apparel section in the rear of the store. Her hair caught my attention because I found it to be attractive. She had the kind of bouncy, nicely styled hair we see in shampoo commercials. Her hair was a natural-looking golden blonde, although it was obvious that blonde was not her natural color, for underneath the lighter highlights, it was a much darker shade of brown. The highlighted strands were not uniform in color, but rather included both highlights (lighter shades of blonde) and lowlights (darker shades of blonde). Her locks cascaded about five inches past her shoulders in loose, buoyant curls. The curls accentuated layers that were cut to frame her face. With the sides cut shorter than the back, her hair formed a nearly perfect u-shape as it lay on her coat. As she admired a collection of sweatshirts hanging on the wall, I walked around to get a look at the front of her hair. I noticed she had no obvious part dividing one side of her hair from the other, but more of her hair hung to the left side of her face. She also did not have short-cut bangs to cover her forehead; instead her bangs hung on either side of her chin. Her hairline went straight across her forehead, and did not curve or form any kind of widow’s peak. At one point, she ran her fingers through the roots of her hair and I noticed her hair sprang up and lay back down on her shoulders in a fluffed sort of way. Her hair moved freely in a bouncing motion as she moved her head from side-to-side. In my admiration of her hair, I surmised that she probably spent a lot of time and money to make her hair look so nice.
Reflections
At the start of this practice session, I mistakenly thought taking ethnographic fieldnotes would be rather easy, but once I got into the “field” and began jotting, I quickly learned I was going to need a lot of practice to perfect my note-taking skills.
I began taking fieldnotes in the entryway of the bookstore. I walked out into the vestibule between the two sets of doors at the entrance and started to jot down as many details as I could take in. Then, I continued to record descriptive details as I walked into the main part of the bookstore. My jottings started off with a lot of descriptive details: explaining what display tables looked like and what products they held. I wanted to record as much data as a I could, so I was not discriminate about which details I jotted down. I also wrote as quickly as I could. I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, my handwriting is so messy–I certainly hope I will be able to read this later.” I remember feeling overwhelmed with the amount of detail I wanted to take in.
After I got a bit more comfortable recording general descriptions of my surroundings, I began to jot down how areas were related spatially to one another. For instance, I recorded which book sections were next to which (e.g. “Science Fiction” was adjacent to “Graphic Novels”). I also noticed how customers navigated through the space. At this point, I was still acting as a conspicuous “fly on the wall”–milling around with my nose buried in my little notebook.
As I got closer to the Information Desk, I heard three employees having a conversation. I spent about three minutes eavesdropping on their conversation before I built up the nerve to be a become a participatory observer. I introduced myself as a student, and asked if I could speak with them and ask them some questions. The employees humored me by pleasantly allowing me into their conversation and answering my questions. I asked them about their positions and job duties in the bookstore and their status as students at the University. Our conversation was brief and cut off when a customer approached the desk and asked where she could find the novel Catching Fire. I didn’t take notes during our conversation, but instead rushed off to jot down as many details as I could remember after the conversation was over. I was satisfied I had remembered some key elements of our brief discussion, but upset with myself for not noticing key details like the names on their name badges.
The last details I recorded in my fieldnotes had to do with the hair of one of the bookstore customers. At this point, I felt more comfortable jotting details and felt I did a better job recording details about this customer’s hair than I did with other parts of this assignment.
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