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What did we say they've said? Four encounters between theory, method and the production of data
Abstract
Following Reed (2010, 2011), we can think of ethnography as the encounter between two sets of meanings: those of the ethnographer on those of the subjects whose lives are being studied. If we are able to recognize the contested, unfinished, reflexive and complex character of how people think about themselves, we should be able to imagine ourselves in the same terms and go into the field armed with a theoretical helmet with interchangeable lenses, imagining which theoretical concepts would best fit the case. In this paper, I develop how this approach finds a fruitful analogue in psychoanalysis as a practical endeavor that produces a particular kind of truth; what we can learn from that equivalency; how this epistemological approach works in parallel to Reed’s plea for theoretical pluralism; and what are then the consequences of this book for practitioners of cultural ethnography.
... Interestingly, interviewees often resisted our requests to identify patterns or generalizations in their clinical experience, replying that they can only think case by case. This was a revealing contrast in the forms of knowledge at play between sociologists and psychoanalysts(Benzecry, 2017;Craciun, 2016). ...
This article examines valuation and payment practices of psychoanalysts in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Psychoanalysts do not use explicit sliding scales but rather reach an agreement about fees in conversation with the patient. This negotiation is conducted with some principles of gift-giving, where parties try to give more, rather than through competitive bargaining (an inverted bazaar). Drawing on the sociology of money, morals and markets, and valuation studies literatures, I distinguish four factors to explain this: 1) Some formally produced prices as well as market mechanisms shape benchmarks for fees, but the peculiar service psychologists offer (which makes quality judgments hard), the way patients and therapists are matched, and the lack of public information about prices allow for high flexibility in price-setting; these are structural factors that remain unsaid in the conversation on fees. 2) A professional narrative that highlights a responsibility towards patients that should not be contaminated by economic interest. 3) Psychoanalysts’ elaborations on the meanings of the payment, which should reflect the uniqueness of each patient and the bond analyst-patient and symbolize the patient’s commitment to treatment, involving a cost and a loss beyond the economic. 4) The prevalence of cash, face-to-face payment without intermediaries, which helps desacralize the analyst and disentangle the session from the rest of the economic life of the analyst, but impedes evading moralization of the transaction. Payments in psychoanalysis are delicate arrangements, and analysts often stress about valuation and payments. They have to be careful to ensure this flexibility results in morally acceptable transactions.
... As a qualitative interpretive approach has been employed, the language and terminology of positivist and quantitative methodologies-such as data and data analysis-are used with caution. While these terms originate from positivist paradigms, they remain compatible with the phenomenological approach (Benzecry, 2015;Paterson & Higgs, 2005). ...
This research project deals with the important topic of palliative care services in regional New South Wales (NSW), Australia. There is an increasing emphasis on meeting the healthcare needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities in Australia. Negotiating the point of culturally appropriate care and the transition to palliative care requires effective communication and sensitivity to socio-cultural, religious, spiritual and linguistic needs. This can be a challenging process for clinicians, patients, and families.
Employing Leininger’s Trans-Cultural Theory, Engel’s biopsychosocial model and Fricker’s concept of “epistemic injustice” in context with healthcare for marginalised migrant groups, this exploratory empirical case study was undertaken in three towns of the Riverina region of NSW (Wagga Wagga, Griffith, and Albury). A burgeoning population group of Punjabi Indians residing in the Riverina region was chosen for this study. Group interviews were conducted with six locally based Punjabi Indian families that had experienced care services at their local residential aged care services. To complement and provide a more comprehensive picture, group interviews were also conducted with care staff (nurses and personal care assistants) of residential aged care facilities (RACFs) in the same towns.
In line with the exploratory nature of this research, a qualitative approach was adopted utilising an interpretive phenomenological methodology in the design, implementation and presentation of findings of the research. The informants in the research were selected through a non-random, purposeful selection process. Thematic analysis was used to determine the major findings of this study.
The study identified barriers to appropriate and equitable palliative care and services for regionally based Punjabi Indians, with important implications for the wider CALD population. The study argues that the dominant medical knowledge base in context to palliative care services does not adequately account for experiences of the CALD population. To build a stronger foundation for the quality of culturally appropriate care, the palliative care sector must undertake fundamental change. Central to this re-envisioned approach is respect for cultural and religious practices that one is required to follow at end of life. The study proposes strategies to strengthen palliative care delivery models in regional areas of NSW by providing insight from consumers’ and care providers’ perspectives on processes that continue to be recommended in state and national policies as best-practice palliative care for people from diverse backgrounds. The study recommends a human rights framework where stronger ethics of care and cultural respect is demonstrated through the palliative care service delivery model.
... As proponents of this reflexive position argue, if one wishes to truly be interpretative, one must aim to reconstruct these landscapes of meaning (Voyer and Trondman, 2017). Understanding that questions pertaining to 'what is going on' are, as Benzecry stresses, 'more a horizon of intelligibility than a potential to be fulfilled' (Benzecry, 2017). ...
Over the past 30 years, the translocal Salafi movement has expanded rapidly across Indonesia. Propagating a strict ‘literal’ interpretation of Islam, Salafis place strong emphasis on separating themselves from un-Islamic (non-Salafi) society. However, the daily implementation of such rigid boundaries remains rife with tension, depending less on Islamic scripture and more upon how adherents interpret it in a given time and place. A reflexive approach to ethnography provides a unique tool to examine and make visible these anxieties, placing the ethnographer at a vantage point to observe the communal interactions through which religious ethics are given meaning. By reflecting upon my study of the al-Hasanah mosque in Yogyakarta, I describe the ways my informants and I negotiated each other’s presence and how this illuminated the struggles to create a Salafi selfhood and modern religious ethic.
Purpose
The authors introduce a recurrent section for the Journal of Organizational Ethnography which scrutinizes the various manifestations and roles of failure in ethnographic research.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors peruse a wide body of literature which tackles the role of failure in ethnographic research and draw on the experiences to argue for a more sustained and in-depth conversation on the topic.
Findings
“Failure” regularly occurs in ethnographic research, yet remains under-examined. Increased discussion on the topic will enrich debates on methodology and fieldwork in particular.
Originality/value
While various scholars have commented on the role of “failure” in ethnographic research, an in-depth and sustained examination of the topic is lacking.
Many ethnographers had to reconceptualize or withdraw from their fieldwork due to COVID-19. While the process of exiting the field has always interested ethnographers, the pandemic has spurred further thinking about the complexity of this element of the research process. This paper adds to the conversations around leaving a field site by unpacking the different situations that can trigger departure. Using data from our experience conducting ethnographic fieldwork before and during the pandemic to further our understanding of the complexity of exiting the field, we explore the concept of field collapsing events by elaborating on the differences between interruptions and disruptions. It is not the case that one form of stoppage has more weight, merit, or impact on an ethnographic project. Instead, we argue that to parse out the complexities of exiting the field, we must create more clarity around the kinds of exits that ethnographers experience.
Decimated and dispossessed, the Khoisan of South Africa were assimilated alongside several others into the racial group ‘Coloured’ during colonialism and apartheid. Many no longer think of them as a distinct collective, particularly in urban settings, but an increasing number of people are identifying as Khoisan in the post-apartheid era. ‘Khoisan revivalism’ entails cultural performances and campaigns for socio-economic development and recognition. Many Khoisan revivalists also claim indigenous rights, traditional leadership titles and land. I draw primarily on longitudinal fieldwork in Cape Town to scrutinize Khoisan revivalism’s origins, appeal and political aspirations. I focus on the various ways historical events, figures and practices inform diverse articulations of Khoisan indigeneity. In practicing a form of “therapeutic history” (Niezen 2009), Khoisan revivalists are primarily seeking a relatable connection with the past and select sources, mediums and content accordingly. In simultaneously replicating, disregarding and appropriating colonial representations, Khoisan revivalists produce a ‘subversive authenticity’. Against the backdrop of the South African politics of indigeneity, Khoisan revivalism not only embodies an empowering potential, but also poses a range of conundrums in the realm of entitlement claims.
We analyze the relations between ethnographic data and theory through an examination of materiality in research practices, arguing that data production is a form of material theorizing. This entails reviewing and (re-)applying practice-theoretical discussions on materiality to questions of ethnography, and moving from understanding theory primarily as ideas to observing theorizing in all steps of research practice. We introduce “pocketing” as a heuristic concept to analyze how and when ethnographic data materializes: the concept defines data’s materiality relationally, through the affective and temporal dimensions of practice. It is discussed using two examples: in a study on everyday architectural experience where ethnographic data materialized as bodies affected by architecture; and in a study on digital cooperation where research data’s materialization was distributed over time according to the use of a company database. By conceptualizing data’s materiality as practice-bound, “pocketing” facilitates understanding the links between data and theory in ethnographic data production.
Feminist standpoint theory and critical realism both offer resources to sociologists interested in making arguments that account for causal complexity and epistemic distortion. However, the impasse between these paradigms limits their utility. In this article, I argue that critical realism has much to gain from a confrontation with feminist theory. Feminist theory’s emphasis on boundary-crossing epistemologies and gendered bodies can help critical realism complicate its notion of the bifurcation between epistemology and ontology. But taking feminist theory seriously also involves careful attention to the risks of epistemic violence, to questions about credible witnesses. I argue that both paradigms will be improved by better theorization of (1) ideology as part of social ontology and (2) interactions between the context of knowledge production and social ontology. Attending to what is missing, distorted, or occluded between the knower, knowledge, and object of knowledge can provide resources for theorizing social ontology.
This text is a first attempt to reflect on the practice of research, and the theories involved on it, of its author over the last thirty years. A reflective practice that seeks to identify a perspective and evolution, with the aim of improving, through a kind of critical re-vision, opening new paths and perspectives identifying their limits and their potential for the future. I submit it now publicly to discussion with the fundamental objective of enriching these reflections and collecting comments and ideas that can enrich, expand and, above all, improve it.
From a self-reflexive point of view the author questions the problem of silence in the ethnographic research and production of the ethnological knowledge. She analyses different types of silence which she has encountered during field research of folklore and beliefs and memories on the WW II and afterwards. The silence extends from intentionally keeping a secret, especially in the field of belief practices, to silence as consequences of traumas and incompatible memories.
Field relationships shape the questions that researchers ask and the theories they develop. This article compares my interactions with research participants in a study of white supremacists with those in a study of mainstream grassroots activists. It demonstrates how expectations and negotiations with research participants affect theorizing by channeling what researchers are primed to see, what they notice, and what they understand as a puzzle to be investigated.
‘Theory’ is one of the most important words in the lexicon of contemporary sociology. Yet, their ubiquity notwithstanding, it is quite unclear what sociologists mean by the words ‘theory,’‘theoretical,’ and ‘theorize.’ I argue that confusions about the meaning of ‘theory’ have brought about undesirable consequences, including conceptual muddles and even downright miscommunication. In this paper I tackle two questions: (a) what does ‘theory’ mean in the sociological language?; and (b) what ought ‘theory’ to mean in the sociological language? I proceed in five stages. First, I explain why one should ask a semantic question about ‘theory.’ Second, I lexicographically identify seven different senses of the word, which I distinguish by means of subscripts. Third, I show some difficulties that the current lack of semantic clarity has led sociology to. Fourth, I articulate the question, ‘what ought “theory” to mean?,’ which I dub the ‘semantic predicament’ (SP), and I consider what one can learn about it from the theory literature. Fifth, I recommend a ‘semantic therapy’ for sociology, and advance two arguments about SP: (a) the principle of practical reason—SP is to a large extent a political issue, which should be addressed with the help of political mechanisms; and (b) the principle of ontological and epistemological pluralism—the solution to SP should not be too ontologically and epistemologically demanding.
The island of Corsica has long been a popular destination for travelers in search of the European exotic, but it has also been a focus of French concerns about national unity and identity. Today, Corsica is part of a vibrant Franco-Mediterranean social universe. Starting from an ethnographic study in a Corsican village, Corsican Fragments explores nationalism, language, kinship, and place, as well as popular discourses and concerns about violence, migration, and society. Matei Candea traces ideas about inclusion and exclusion through these different realms, as Corsicans, "Continentals," tourists, and the anthropologist make and unmake connections with one another in their everyday encounters. Candea's evocative and gracefully written account provides new insights into the dilemmas of understanding cultural difference and the difficulties and rewards of fieldwork.
Many scholars and citizens alike have counted on civic groups to create broad ties that bind society. Some hope that faith-based civic groups will spread their reach as government retreats. Yet few studies ask how, if at all, civic groups reach out to their wider community. Can religious groups--long central in civic America--create broad, empowering social ties in an unequal, diverse society? Over three years, Paul Lichterman studied nine liberal and conservative Protestant-based volunteering and advocacy projects in a mid-sized American city. He listened as these groups tried to create bridges with other community groups, social service agencies, and low-income people, just as the 1996 welfare reforms were taking effect. Counter to long-standing arguments, Lichterman discovered that powerful customs of interaction inside the groups often stunted external ties and even shaped religion's impact on the groups. Comparing groups, he found that successful bridges outward depend on group customs which invite reflective, critical discussion about a group's place amid surrounding groups and institutions.
In this outstanding reinterpretation - and extension - of the Critical Theory tradition, Craig Calhoun surveys the origins, fortunes and prospects of this most influential of theoretical approaches. Moving with ease from the early Frankfurt School to Habermas, to contemporary debates over postmodernism, feminism and nationalism, Calhoun breathes new life into Critical Social Theory, showing how it can learn from the past and contribute to the future.
Translated from the English by Konstantin Yanakiev.
This article evaluates the claims of a small but active group of culture scholars who have used theoretical models of bifurcated consciousness to allege important methodological implications for research in culture. These scholars, whom I dub ‘cognitive culturalists’, have dismissed the utility of in-depth interviewing to access the visceral, causally powerful level of ‘practical consciousness’. I argue these scholars are misguided in their diagnosis of a problem (interviews can only access people's after-the-fact rationalizations), and their vision of a solution (culture scholars need to access the ‘snap judgments’ that map onto the subterranean level of practical consciousness). I contend these flaws are tied to a limited understanding of the kind of information available in interviews, particularly the in-depth interview subjected to interpretive analysis. Using data from a recent book project on commitment, I elaborate on four kinds of information harbored in interviews: the honorable, the schematic, the visceral and meta-feelings. I rely on these forms of data to argue for scholars to expect, and to use analytically – rather than strive to ‘solve’ theoretically – the contradictory cultural accounts that our research subjects evince. Furthermore, I demonstrate how interpretive interviewing allows researchers access to an emotional landscape that brings a broader, social dimension to individual motivation.
Since World War II methods have advanced very quickly in sociology and social science, while this has not been the case with theory. In this article I suggest that one way of beginning to close the gap between the two is to focus on theorizing rather than on theory. The place where theorizing can be used in the most effective way, I suggest, is in the context of discovery. What needs to be discussed are especially ways for how to develop theory before hypotheses are formulated and tested. To be successful in this, we need to assign an independent place to theorizing and also to develop some basic rules for how to theorize. An attempt is made to formulate such rules; it is also argued that theorizing can only be successful if it is done in close unison with observation in what is called a prestudy. Theorizing has turned into a skill when it is iterative, draws on intuitive ways of thinking, and goes beyond the basic rules for theorizing.
This article presents an ethnography and analysis of the formations in which the latest Argentine literary ideas and intellectuals are shaped. In trying to understand the end, during the 1990s, of the polemic as the main mechanism of self-regulation in the field of literature, I focus on two questions: (1) How did a ‘new’ intellectual generation both reproduce and transform itself during those years? (2) What processes did the writers involved use to transcend the previous schism, while reproducing artistic value in the field? I suggest the answer to both is through sociability organized in public events. Presenting data from several years of ethnography of the Buenos Aires literary scene, my interest is to show the production of circles of sociability that resulted in more solidarist than conflictive strategies in the production of literary value.
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.
A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. In both cases, it is friction that produces movement, action, effect. Challenging the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a "clash" of cultures, anthropologist Anna Tsing here develops friction in its place as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. She focuses on one particular "zone of awkward engagement"--the rainforests of Indonesia--where in the 1980s and the 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, a province, or a nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforest includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students, among others--all combining in unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out.
My own recently completed ethnographic study of a poor public housing development in Chicago provides the empirical frame for an examination of the social production of the ethnographer from the informants' point of view. I argue that reconstructing the informants' point of view - in this case their perceptions of the fieldworker as, variously, academic hustler, `nigger just like us' and `Arab' - can aid the researcher in determining patterns of structure and meaning among the individual, group, and/or community under study. This article reflects on informants' construction of my subsumption within a field of social relations in which the `hustle' was a dominant organizing principle.
In the production of knowledge about social life, two social contexts come together: the context of investigation, consisting of the social world of the investigator, and the context of explanation, consisting of the social world of the actors who are the subject of study. The nature of, and relationship between, these contexts is imagined in philosophy; managed, rewarded, and sanctioned in graduate seminars, journal reviews, and tenure cases; and practiced in research. Positivism proposed to produce objective knowledge by suppressing the nonlogical and nonobservational aspects of the contexts. Attacks on positivism disputed the effectiveness and rationality of this strategy. Thus “postpositivism” can be understood as a series of attempts to reconstitute the relation between the contexts as the basis for accurate social knowledge. Two of the most important of these attempts—grounded theory and postmodern anthropology—are considered, and a synthesis, which draws from the insights of cultural sociology, is proposed.
This article gives an ethnographic account of the several processes under which a charismatic conductor is de-legitimized, exploring the relationship between institutions and charisma in an art world where the authority of the cultural producer is diminished by the management of everyday interaction. The article shows how, in Argentina, the politics of musical conducting are shaped by four institutional worlds. They range from the macro economic cultural policies of the diverse state agencies to the everyday interaction world of orchestra musicians, and include meso-processes and mechanisms like the field of musical conducting. This article explores the structure and ideologies of the four institutional worlds, their interplay, the concrete practices that shaped them, their struggles, and how they overlap in causing the diminishing power of charisma. In undertaking this endeavor, the article systematizes the existing sociological corpus on the orchestral world in order to sketch a more complex and complete picture of hierarchies and interactions.
The following is a sociological report on a particular segment of an opera audience. Its purpose is to explicate the processes
of initiation in an activity typically considered “high culture.” It differs from other accounts of cultural consumption in
that it is concerned not with the correspondence between social background and taste, but with the processes whereby taste
is assembled. Drawing upon an 18-month-long ethnography on opera fans in Buenos Aires, this paper has two aims. First, it
shows that passionate opera fans enjoy opera based on their belief that opera is something that needs to be learned in order
to be properly enjoyed. Second, it describes three diverse instances in which people learn about opera. Furthermore, this
paper also has a theoretical objective: to extend and refine the classic model of affiliation and initiation into cultural
practices established by Howard Becker with his case study of marijuana use.
History, we are often taught, is driven by vast social, political, and economic forces. But each political event, each war, each clash in the streets or at the picket lines, is experienced by individuals. It is this profound bond between public history and personal struggle, Alessandro Portelli contends, that gives oral history its significance and its power. In The Battle of Valle Giulia—the title comes from an Italian student protest of the 1960s—Portelli reflects on how to connect personal memories with history, how to fittingly collect and represent the complexity of memory. Crossing cultures, classes, and generations, he records the private and singular experiences of Italian steelworkers and Kentucky coal miners, veterans and refugees of World War II, soldiers who fought in Vietnam, Italian resistance fighters and Nazis, and members of student movements from Berkeley to Rome. By listening to those whom others presume are "without historical memory"—such as youthful protesters, or the rural Tuscan women who saw every father, son, and brother killed by Nazi soldiers—Portelli clarifies the process by which narratives come into being as oral history, and he illustrates the differences and distances between story-telling and history-telling. Portelli's articulate discussion of dialogue, representation, narrative and genre link historical analysis with literary and linguistic theory and with the concerns of contemporary anthropology.
The first edition of this book profoundly challenged and divided students of philosophy, sociology, and the history of science when it was published in 1976. In this second edition, Bloor responds in a substantial new Afterword to the heated debates engendered by his book.
Drawing on more than four decades of experience as a researcher and teacher, Howard Becker now brings to students and researchers the many valuable techniques he has learned. Tricks of the Trade will help students learn how to think about research projects. Assisted by Becker's sage advice, students can make better sense of their research and simultaneously generate fresh ideas on where to look next for new data. The tricks cover four broad areas of social science: the creation of the "imagery" to guide research; methods of "sampling" to generate maximum variety in the data; the development of "concepts" to organize findings; and the use of "logical" methods to explore systematically the implications of what is found. Becker's advice ranges from simple tricks such as changing an interview question from "Why?" to "How?" (as a way of getting people to talk without asking for a justification) to more technical tricks such as how to manipulate truth tables. Becker has extracted these tricks from a variety of fields such as art history, anthropology, sociology, literature, and philosophy; and his dazzling variety of references ranges from James Agee to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Becker finds the common principles that lie behind good social science work, principles that apply to both quantitative and qualitative research. He offers practical advice, ideas students can apply to their data with the confidence that they will return with something they hadn't thought of before. Like Writing for Social Scientists, Tricks of the Trade will bring aid and comfort to generations of students. Written in the informal, accessible style for which Becker is known, this book will be an essential resource for students in a wide variety of fields. "An instant classic. . . . Becker's stories and reflections make a great book, one that will find its way into the hands of a great many social scientists, and as with everything he writes, it is lively and accessible, a joy to read."âCharles Ragin, Northwestern University
Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences
- I Reed
On the centrality of the classics
- J Alexander
Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings
- M Weber