The Origins of the Video‐Cued Multivocal Ethnographic Method

In 1982 I began using classroom videos as cues for ethnographic interviews. My colleagues and I asked practitioners in three countries to respond to videos shot in their own and each other’s preschools. The video cues worked to produce conversations that we used in our 1989 book Preschool in Three Cultures to present perspectives on the same events by cultural insiders and outsiders. This article tells the story of the origins and evolution of the Preschool in Three Cultures method, a video‐cued ethnographic method that has multiple influences, including Margaret Mead’s use of film in comparative ethnography, psychological anthropology’s use of projective tests, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and multivocality, and Linda Connor’s video‐cued interviewing of a Balinese shaman.