Ethnography recent issues

Introduction

Anderson, E. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:02:11 PST

The Chicago School and the roots of urban ethnography: An intergenerational conversation with Gerald D. Jaynes, David E. Apter, Herbert J. Gans, William Kornblum, Ruth Horowitz, James F. Short, Jr, Gerald D. Suttles and Robert E. Washington

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:02:11 PST

Urban ethnography and research integrity: Empirical and theoretical dimensions

Short, J. F., Hughes, L. A. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:02:11 PST

Problems of data reliability and validity continue to plague the social and behavioral sciences. Enhanced reliability of quantitative data has been achieved by such means as greater attention to instrument construction and testing, improvements in survey technology and sampling of targeted populations, and careful operationalization of theoretical ideas. The integrity of much quantitative research is compromised, however, when quantitative measures lack validity, especially when properties of groups and other collectivities are measured by responses obtained from individuals. Ethnographic and other forms of observational data offer important correctives to this problem. We illustrate the interplay of quantitative and qualitative research methods by examining studies extending ideas from Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street to ‘neighborhood codes of violence’, the violence-avoiding function of street codes, and special problems of evaluation research as they apply to programs designed to control street gangs.

'Senseless' violence: Making sense of murder

Duck, W. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:02:11 PST

This article, based on an ethnographic study conducted over a three-year period in an impoverished, predominately African American and Latino neighborhood in the northeastern US, describes how a drug gang narrative was created by the police and prosecutors to explain a series of unsolved murders. The narrative that the authorities constructed retroactively tied these unrelated crimes together by connecting them to neighborhood drug dealers whom they construed as a gang. Through this narrative, the authorities were able to prosecute all the cases in sequence and deploy a series of defendants and witnesses to win convictions — even in cases where they had little evidence. Murders like these are typically described by law enforcement agencies and the media as ‘senseless’ acts of ‘random violence’. When examined with ethnographic detail, however, these acts of murder turn out to have motives that community members understand but have nothing to do with gang activity.

Primary groups and cosmopolitan ties: The rooftop pigeon flyers of New York City

Jerolmack, C. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:02:11 PST

This article examines a group of working-class men who breed and fly pigeons from their rooftops in New York City. It explores how the flyers experience their neighborhoods through their animal practices and shows how ethnic whites transmitted this practice to non-whites. It also documents their gatherings at a pet shop, where the flyers campaign for status based on their birds’ performance. These men form a distinct collective that is strongly rooted in their solitary animal practices but is given meaning largely through social interactions. Most community studies find conflict among different working-class racial-ethnic groups who share urban neighborhoods, but pigeon flying fosters solidarity among Italian, Hispanic, and African American New Yorkers of varying ages. The study highlights how animal practices can organize social relationships and connections to the environment and demonstrates that shared everyday activities can be as vital as ethnicity or class in primary group formation.

Taking chances: The experience of gambling loss

Avery, J. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:02:11 PST

This article conceives of heavy gambling loss as a phenomenon driven by situational antecedents located in the foreground of the experience itself, rather than being deeply determined by background factors like biological inclinations or psychological pathologies, as the prevalent biomedical model of pathological gambling assumes. Drawing on naturalistic accounts from first-hand observation, this analysis focuses on the internal states of players as they move through distinct stages endemic to gambling, and, specifically, gambling loss. I argue that structuring the experience in this way plays an important role in showing how ethnographic methods that attend to experiential processes and their situational dimensions enable us to reconceptualize what are seen as individual problems or, in this case, pathologies.

Open mic: Professionalizing the rap career

Lee, J. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:02:11 PST

How do the meanings of a Hip Hop venue change over the aspiring rapper’s career? This article draws on four years of ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with inner-city men who rap at Project Blowed, a Hip Hop ‘open mic’ in South Central Los Angeles. While rappers initially view Project Blowed as a place to hone their performance skills and earn the respect of their peers, they hope to move beyond it and make money in the music industry. ‘OGs’, senior rappers, who continue to participate in this scene mentor younger rappers, but may also become examples of the dead-end careers that up-and-coming rappers hope to avoid. This article explores how participants’ perceptions of this venue are linked to their changing perceptions of others in the scene.

'Mama's family': Fictive kinship and undocumented immigrant restaurant workers

Kim, E. C. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:02:11 PST

Undocumented workers create social cohesion, which serves as a source of solidarity and identification for individuals who are otherwise pushed to the periphery by the dominant society. This article is based on a larger study examining the personal, social, and working lives of undocumented restaurant workers using an ethnographic approach in conjunction with the life history method. Based on observation of their day-to-day interactions in the restaurant and in conversations, this article discusses the ‘family’ or fictive kin relationship they establish with their co-workers and their employer. Despite their illegal status and low earnings, this group of undocumented workers is able to maintain their dignity, find ways of bringing joy to their lives, and attain a sense of belonging. Integration into the restaurant’s pseudo-family averts feelings of frustration and loneliness that are often the consequences of marginalization.

Parking lots and police: Undocumented Latinos' tactics for finding day labor jobs

Cleaveland, C., Pierson, L. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:02:11 PST

Lacking access to legal residency and to regular employment, undocumented Latinos in the USA often find work as day laborers. Some suburban towns have tried to force Latinos out by enacting statutes to restrict their movement and their search for jobs. How do day laborers, who are conspicuous because of their racial-ethnic and language differences, find work by meeting employers in public spaces despite legal restrictions against their presence there? This comparative ethnography of day laborers in Freehold, New Jersey, and Manassas, Virginia, shows that workers engage such tactics as avoiding police and showing deference to white residents while battling for leverage when negotiating wages.

Ethnography, interaction and ordinary trouble

Emerson, R. M. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:02:11 PST

With the increased popularity and spread of sociological ethnography, one of the core elements of classic Chicago-style fieldwork — an abiding commitment to examine ongoing social interaction — has sometimes slipped from sight. One fruitful way of increasing sensitivity to and insights into interactional processes is to look at ordinary, small troubles, the often fleeting moments of upset and disruption that arise routinely in many interactions and are often quickly resolved, leading only to small adjustments and changes in life circumstances. By way of example, this article analyzes the ordinary troubles that arise between college roommates, focusing on two distinctive interactional features of these troubles: the obscuring of action components in low-visibility responses, leading to the appearance of passivity or inaction; and the varying and often shifting normative accents that can mark responses to ordinary troubles.

The role of theory in ethnographic research

Wilson, W. J., Chaddha, A. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:02:11 PST

Scholars, including urban poverty researchers, have not seriously debated the important issues that Loïc Wacquant raised in his controversial review of books by Elijah Anderson, Mitchell Duneier, and Katherine Newman concerning the disconnect between theory and ethnographic research. Despite the tone of Wacquant’s review, we feel that he made a contribution in raising important issues about the role of theory in ethnography. The responses to his review that address this issue, especially those by Anderson and Duneier, are also important because they help to broaden our understanding of how theory is used in ethnographic research. What we take from this exchange is that good ethnography is theory driven, and is likely to be much more reflective of inductive theoretical insights than those that are purely deductive. Moreover, we show that in some ethnographic studies the theoretical insights are neither strictly deductive nor inductive, but represent a combination of both.

Two cases of ethnography: Grounded theory and the extended case method

Tavory, I., Timmermans, S. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:29:08 PDT

A B S T R A C T Sociological ethnography largely draws upon two epistemologically competing perspectives — grounded theory and the extended case method — with a different conceptualization of sociological case-construction and theory. We argue that the sociological case in the extended case method is foremost a form of theoretical framing: relying on theoretical narratives to delineate the boundaries of an empirical field. Grounded theory follows the tenets of Chicago School ethnography where the sociological case is elicited from ethno-narratives of actors in the field: the institutionally and interactionally delimited ways members in the field ‘case’ their action. This difference in sociological casing, in turn, is reflected in the ways theory is used. Where the extended case method uses theoretical narratives as a denouement of the case, grounded theory employs theory to construct a grammar of social life.

Testing prices in markets: How to charter a tanker

Forsberg, P. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:29:08 PDT

A B S T R A C T This article is written to follow up on a discussion initiated by Callon and Muniesa (2005) who criticized the distinction between pure calculation (assumed in neoclassical economics) and pure judgment (assumed in ethnographic studies). They suggested a third perspective: calculations are performed by technological devices. Furthermore, they call this process ‘the qualification process’ and claim that it brings calculation and judgment together. However, in this third perspective, the meaning of judgment is reduced and has become synonymous with making distinctions. I argue that an understanding of real markets must consider two parallel processes: a ‘calculative process’ and a ‘judgmental process’. In the real market both a ‘calculative process’ and a ‘judgmental process’ involve a process where the buyer and seller ‘test’ different prices. When it comes to the judgmental process storytelling is an indispensable cultural tool. This is demonstrated using field material collected at a tanker chartering firm.

Interview with an ancestor: Spirits as informants and the politics of possession in North Maluku

Bubandt, N. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:29:08 PDT

A B S T R A C T This article explores the relationship between spirit possession, politics and subjectivity. Based on an account of two possession ceremonies on the island of Ternate in eastern Indonesia, I show that as spirits are being conjured up for political reasons, they partake in a spiritual politics in which they are both instruments and actors. Methodologically, I use these accounts to suggest the need to treat spirits as informants. From this I develop a critique of the continuing link between the anthropological concept of the informant and conventional ideas about bounded subjectivity, a link that remains unquestioned despite much contemporary anthropological research into the complexity of lived subjectivity. Analytically, I argue that treating spirits as informants reveals how possession rituals construct and make intelligible a particular relationship between politics, experience and emerging democracy in Indonesia. Treating spirits as ‘methodologically real’ therefore has important analytical consequences for how we understand their political efficacy.

Public ethnography as film: Michael Apted and the Up! series

Burawoy, M. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:29:08 PDT

Interview with Michael Apted

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:29:08 PDT

The Seven Up! films: Connecting the personal and the sociological

Thorne, B. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:29:08 PDT

A B S T R A C T Michael Apted’s documentary film series, which tracks 14 British children as they move from ages seven to 49, connects the personal with the sociological. Organized around the phenomenology of ‘growing older together’ (Schutz, 1976), the films invite emotional identification as they go about exploring unique, shared, and fluctuating experiences of the self. The documentaries resonate with the work of ethnographers who revisit the field, who seek to craft coherent narratives from a surplus of material, and who confront ethical problems as they investigate the private lives of subjects. The Seven Up! linear narrative of social class determination loosened in subsequent films as contingency, variation, and the dynamics of gender, generation, and parenting came more fully into view. The films embed tensions between linear and contingent, open-ended forms of temporality, juxtaposing varied forms of time: subjective (with fluctuating orientations of consciousness), physical aging, personal maturation, life course, biographical, historical, and generational.

Michael Apted's Up! series: Public sociology or folk psychology through film?

Duneier, M. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:29:08 PDT

The accidental ethnographer and the accidental commodity

Willis, P. — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:29:08 PDT

Michael Apted responds

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:29:08 PDT

The cultural politics of gesture: Reflections on the embodiment of ethnographic practice

Herzfeld, M. — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:51:51 PDT

Ethnographers enter the field as legible signs of otherness to their interlocutors. In this article, I explore the ramifications of my personal experience of being variously `read' in the course of encounters in Bangkok, Thailand, to show how a gradual process of bodily inculcation can reduce the sense of difference and partially overcome the expectations induced by phenotype in particular, leading to greater access to the protected zones of cultural intimacy (including recognition of the newcomer's linguistic capacities). Such transitions also entail a learned increase of ease with informal modes of embodiment, as opposed to postures signaling varieties of power that are intrusive and palpably foreign to local experience. The processes of mutual recognition thus described are embedded in political relations of international as well as inter-personal significance. They thus have multi-faceted consequences for the outcomes and implications of our research.

Survival, an Israeli Ju Jutsu school of martial arts: Violence, body, practice and the national

Cohen, E. B.-O. — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:51:52 PDT

Nationalism is the untenable union of the impersonal, mechanistic, bureaucratic logic of the state and the intimate, emotional, organic logic of the nation. While practicing martial arts, the participants at the Israeli Survival School of Ju Jutsu create a utopian Israeliness, using bits of state-national understandings to form a family-like organicity. At the North Indian school of wrestling described by Joseph Alter, too, an organic utopian nationalism is practiced into existence through meticulous care for the body itself. A comparison between those modes of embodying the national, set in very different cultural and national realities, reveals not only different understandings of the national and of its organic nature, but also different uses of semiotic mechanisms. Whereas the Israeli world of the Survival School is based on representation, the Indian one is constructed from the body and the environment, set in dense connectedness forming this world in and of itself.

The civil restraining order application process: Textually mediated institutional case management

Adams, J. — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:51:52 PDT

Although the civil restraining order is the most commonly sought legal initiative to combat intimate partner violence in British Columbia (BC), no known qualitative research has assessed the application process, and previous quantitative research presents mixed findings. Using interviews, observations, and textual analyses, this institutional ethnography critically analyzes the civil restraining order application process in the BC Provincial Court. Particular attention is paid to disjunctures between abused women's experiential knowledge and what becomes formally known to practitioners who manage their cases. Findings unveil that abused women's lived experience with violence is transformed and shaped into accounts in which their safety needs disappear. Court practitioners become immersed in textually mediated activity within a legal ruling apparatus that emphasizes timely completion of a large quantity of cases, with little or no commitment to quality solutions.

Creole in Cape Verde: Language, identity and power

Carter, K., Aulette, J. — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:51:52 PDT

Cape Verde is an island country 450 kilometers off the coast of Senegal, West Africa. Creole is the common language throughout Cape Verde but Portuguese is the official language, the language of its colonizer. Through surveys and interviews, this article reveals the power inequalities that exist among Cape Verdeans because of language use. We particularly explore the perceptions of the significance of speaking Creole in order to fully understand the culture of Cape Verde. As a way to investigate the importance of Creole to Cape Verdean identity, we focus on the use of Creole proverbs and sayings by the women in Cape Verde as they express solidarity, provide support, and show criticism of power structures in the society. Through their use of Creole, Cape Verdeans are preserving their history and local identity as different from their colonizers as well as using the language and the proverbs as ways to challenge the dominant contemporary power structures.

`How many cases do I need?': On science and the logic of case selection in field-based research

Small, M. L. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:08:23 PST

Today, ethnographers and qualitative researchers in fields such as urban poverty, immigration, and social inequality face an environment in which their work will be read, cited, and assessed by demographers, quantitative sociologists, and even economists. They also face a demand for case studies of poor, minority, or immigrant groups and neighborhoods that not only generate theory but also somehow speak to empirical conditions in other cases (not observed). Many have responded by incorporating elements of quantitative methods into their designs, such as selecting respondents `at random' for small, in-depth interview projects or identifying `representative' neighborhoods for ethnographic case studies, aiming to increase generalizability. This article assesses these strategies and argues that they fall short of their objectives. Recognizing the importance of the predicament underlying the strategies — to determine how case studies can speak empirically to other cases — it presents two alternatives to current practices, and calls for greater clarity in the logic of design when producing ethnographic research in a multi-method intellectual environment.

Open veins: Spirits of violence and grief in Venezuela

Ferrandiz, F. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:08:23 PST

Transnational processes of stigmatization and criminalization of poverty associated to neoliberal models of development unfold locally in various modalities and intensities of de-pacification of everyday life. In this framework, this article presents the case study of a well-known spirit possession devotion in Venezuela, the cult of María Lionza, where the enormous symbolic, structural and repressive pressure exerted on shantytown dwellers, particularly male youngsters, is recycled — in a sort of corporeal videoclip — in a cluster of controversial and highly spectacular ritual practices based on self-mutilation and bloodletting. Using Eduardo Galeano's celebrated dictum of the `Open Veins of Latin America', taken in this article both metaphorically and literally, these intense rituals are understood as deeply embodied roadmaps to everyday violence and stigma, in the context of barrio — shantytown — male youth cultures and re-elaborations of popular memories of slavery and legendary sagas.

Reconsidering retaliation: Structural inhibitions, emotive dissonance, and the acceptance of ambivalence among inner-city young men

Garot, R. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:08:23 PST

Contemporary criminology directs a great deal of attention toward the factors which may lead to crime and violence, but little attention to individuals in circumstances which fit all the necessary conditions but who abstain from criminal or violent acts. This is in marked contrast to the law and society literature, where `lumping it' (Felstiner, 1974) has long been recognized as the overwhelming default response in most disputes. This article examines this criminological gap, exploring the emotive dissonance and ambivalence experienced by young men who abstain from retaliating due to structural constraints. Each one, faced with an agonizing loss, is compelled to seek violent retaliation against the antagonist perceived responsible for the loss. Yet each is constrained by their enmeshment in the local social structure and the potential havoc that such violence might bring. Furthermore, by focusing primarily on moments of violence, criminology misses the enormous range of nonviolent moments, among both violent offenders and others. Exploring each consultant's existential gap will enrich our understanding of the criminological gap between independent and dependent variables, toward appreciating the agency and resourcefulness of young men caught in potentially violent dilemmas.

Living for the weekend: Youth identities in northeast England

Winlow, S., Hall, S. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:08:23 PST

Consumption and consumerism are now accepted as key contexts for the construction of youth identities in de-industrialized Britain. This article uses empirical evidence from interviews with young people to suggest that claims of `new community' are overstated, traditional forms of friendship are receding, and increasingly atomized and instrumental youth identities are now being culturally constituted and reproduced by the pressures and anxieties created by enforced adaptation to consumer capitalism. Analysis of the data opens up the possibility of a critical rather than a celebratory exploration of the wider theoretical implications of this process.

Moods behind the silences

Williksen, S. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:08:23 PST

This article reflects on encounters that took place while doing fieldwork in Fiji. The writer thinks back on moods and acts that were, and still are, only partly understood. The writer has in earlier works discussed how Fijian people adhere to strict rules for body comportment and social intercourse, not least in their elaborate ceremonies that seem to continue unabated even in the urban areas. These rules are related to the status hierarchy of the chiefly system where communal values of kinship and social obligations reign supreme. Togetherness and a constant adjustment to others' expectations are the norms. A person seems hardly ever to be alone or free from obligations or duties to perform in one way or the other. This article, however, is a more personal account of people who became friends of the writer during fieldwork and yet in certain aspects, as the writer thinks back, remain riddles.