Ethnography

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Ethnografeast : A Progress Report on the Practice and Promise of

Ethnography
Loc Wacquant
Ethnography 2003 4: 5
DOI: 10.1177/1466138103004001001

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graphy
Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com Vol 4(1): 514[14661381(200303)4:1;514;035380]

Ethnografeast
A progress report on the practice and promise of
ethnography

Loc Wacquant
University of California-Berkeley, USA
Centre de sociologie europenne, Paris, France

On 1214 September 2002, the journal Ethnography and the Center for
Urban Ethnography at the University of California, Berkeley, held an inter-
national conference on Ethnography for a New Century: Practice, Predica-
ment, Promise.1 The purpose of the three-day event was to take collective
stock of the past achievements, to reflect on the contemporary practice, and
to sketch the future promise of ethnography as a distinctive mode of inquiry
and form of public consciousness. For that purpose, ethnography was
defined, in catholic fashion, as social research based on the close-up, on-
the-ground observation of people and institutions in real time and space, in
which the investigator embeds herself near (or within) the phenomenon so
as to detect how and why agents on the scene act, think and feel the way
they do. Drawing on and projecting forth from their own fieldwork
spanning the gamut of topics and styles, the participants were invited to
examine the epistemological moorings, methodological quandaries, repre-
sentational devices, empirical and theoretical (im)possibilities, as well as the
changing politics and ethics of ethnography at centurys dawn. And in the
process to illumine its relation to and its uses of fiction, philosophy,
medicine, statistics, political economy, feminism, history, and theory in fast-
changing academic worlds and societal landscapes.
The spirit of the conference was one of open and attentive dialogue
across three divides that, although widely recognized as arbitrary, continue

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6 E t h n o g r a p h y 4(1)

to impede the development of field-based social inquiry as they do research

based on other methodologies. The first is the continuing split between
national traditions, and the mutual ignorance and symbolic imperialism it
fosters (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 2529), which was lessened by conven-
ing scholars coming not only from the four corners of the United States but
also from London, Stockholm, Paris, So Paulo, and Cape Town. The
second is the separation of disciplines: the main impulse behind the
conference was to get a group of anthropologists and sociologists who seri-
ously practice and think about fieldwork to come not face to face but side
by side; to suspend lingering disdain, distrust and doubt, and to remove
their professional blinders so as to get each to acknowledge and engage the
varied approaches and productions of their twin colleagues in a way that
was routinely done a century ago by the Durkheimians (as attested by
Mauss, 1913) but that, for reasons having to do with the accumulated acci-
dents of academic and political history, is rarely done in earnest today.2
Needless to say, numerous other disciplines are concerned by the concep-
tual and practical issues on which the conference fastened: the remarkable
renewal and growth of ethnography over the past decade has touched an
unprecedented variety of knowledge domains ranging from education, law,
media and science studies to geography, history, management and design, to
gender studies and nursing.3 Far from being an extinct or endangered species,
as the prophets of postmodern gloom would have us believe, ethnography is
a proliferating animal that walks on multiplying feet. But, for reasons having
to do with its intellectual history and institutional ecology, its two main legs
remain anthropology and sociology (Stacey, 1999). Indeed, the premise and
wager of the Ethnografeast was that the most promising route for strength-
ening and enriching the craft of field inquiry at this particular juncture lies
not in grand theoretical elaborations, worried epistemological disquisitions,
or deliberate rhetorical innovations (however important these may be in their
own right, and they are) but in the long overdue, systematic and self-
conscious braiding of actually existing traditions of fieldwork across that
artificial disciplinary divide as anthropologists return home and sociologists
go global (Peirano, 1998 and Gille and Riain, 2002).
Third, and by design, the conference brought together the diversity of
styles of ethnographic work modern, neomodern, and postmodern; posi-
tivist, interpretive and analytic; phenomenological, interactionist and
historical; theory-driven and narrative-oriented; local, multi-sited, and
global 4 as conduced by authors who draw on the broadest array of
theoretical traditions in the social sciences, from Marx and Merleau-Ponty
to Bourdieu and Blumer to Goffman and Geertz, and seek to amplify or
rectify intellectual currents as varied as the Chicago school, feminism(s),
identity politics, organization theory, and postcolonialism. This threefold
commitment to internationalism, interdisciplinarity rooted in a vigorous

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Wacquant Ethnografeast 7

and rigorous dialogue between sociology and anthropology, and pluralism

in genres and theoretical suasions is epicentral to the mission of Ethnogra-
phy. It sets the editorial policy and defines the distinctive intellectual stance
of the journal in the ever-more cluttered space of social scientific produc-
tion. And it will continue to guide its efforts to stimulate and disseminate
innovative fieldwork stamped by theoretical sensitivity, empirical commit-
ment, and civic relevance.
The Ethnografeast started off with a session titled Suspended Between
Theory and Fiction, in which sociologist Michael Boris Burawoy presented
the case for theory-driven ethnography carried out under the banner of
science while anthropologist Ruth Behar advocated a humanistic approach
based on story-telling closer to writing and film. The BeharBurawoy
pairing was meant to incarnate the two poles of the craft, that of expla-
nation and interpretation, experiment and narration, observer concept and
native percept, and to invite each to recognize, exchange with, and learn
from the other. Sessions held on the ensuing two days addressed violence,
social divisions and bonds (kinship, class, and gender), the ethics of field-
work, and the body and the senses, before returning to the role of history
and theory in ethnography. Presentations were based on completed or
ongoing research into subjects as variegated as drug addiction in San Fran-
cisco and crime in So Paulo, the politics of medicine in Haiti and the
aesthetics of death in Nepal, sentiments in French families and gender in
Mexican factories, morality among American physicians and zombies in
post-apartheid South Africa, and the occupational habits of school adminis-
trators, mushroom collectors, urban planners, professional boxers, inter-
national journalists, and global organs traffickers.
The conference opened on a double dedication, the one joyful and the
other somber. The first was to Michael Boris Burawoy, who received a
special award in recognition of 25 years devoted to teaching, practicing, and
promoting ethnography at Berkeley. So much so that one could argue that
he has single-handedly created a Berkeley school of field research, with
roots in Manchester by way of Lusaka, Chicago, Budapest and Syktyvkar
in Northern Russia, mating the extended case method of Jaan van Velsen
and Max Gluckman to the theoretical agenda of an epistemologically astute
and empirically aware Marxism scouring the globe in stubborn search for
the politics of production (Burawoy, 1998 and 2000a). Bridging the gap
between anthropology and sociology, as well as between theory and
method, Burawoy has not only produced classic field studies of labor
and working class (de)formation under capitalist evolution and Soviet in-
volution (see Burawoy, 1996, for a reflexive recapitulation). He has trained
cohorts of first-rate ethnographers who have gone on from being
close collaborators in a revolving ethnographic cooperative (Burawoy et
al., 1991; Burawoy et al., 2000) to influential authors with their own agenda

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8 E t h n o g r a p h y 4(1)

and voice and working at the four corners of the earth. And, whether one
admires or deplores his obdurate insistence on the centrality of class and
capitalism, Burawoy has time and again demonstrated the scientific and
political pertinence of field inquiry to the ongoing great transformations
of our epoch, thus setting high standards for an ethnography alive to its
civic responsibility.5
The second dedication was to Pierre Bourdieu, who agreed, in summer of
2001, to come to Berkeley for the Ethnografeast and to deliver a closing
address on Ethnography as Public Service. His sudden and untimely passing
in January 2002 not only robs the social sciences and humanities of one of
their most innovative and influential practicioners. It deprives activists fighting
for social justice around the world of an engaged intellectual who was deeply
committed to making the results of social inquiry inform and impact demo-
cratic struggles. And it leaves many of us bereft of an irreplaceable friend and
wonderful human being. Pierre Bourdieu was an inventive and iconoclastic
scientist who transformed social science by fusing rigorous theory with precise
research, including ethnography, which he taught himself in the late 1950s
crisscrossing the countryside and delving into the urban slums of colonial
Algeria in the grisly conditions of the war of national liberation.6
In the introduction to his 1963 book Travail et travailleurs en Algrie,
his first methodological notations, Bourdieu called for a forthright
collaboration between statistics and sociology, by which he meant inten-
sive field studies that are alone capable of ferreting out the social meaning
that patterns of action and belief acquire in the concrete cases that quan-
titative techniques parse, aggregate and correlate (Bourdieu et al., 1963:
913). And he dutifully followed his own prescription: Bourdieu resorted
to detailed and sustained in situ observation in every one of his major
studies thereafter, from the dissection of gender relations and kinship
strategies in his native village of Barn to the analysis of taste in the making
of class and of the rituals of consecration of the state nobility to the diag-
nosis of novel forms social suffering in societies wracked by economic
deregulation and welfare-state devolution (Bourdieu, 2002; 1979[1984];
1989[1996]; Bourdieu et al., 1993[1997]). Bourdieu was the first scholar
to truly reunify sociology and anthropology in his practice since the
classical generation in which his work was anchored and the Ethno-
grafeast was a means to acknowledge and advance on the path he cleared.
In lieu of a tribute or homage (something he profoundly disliked: he once
quipped hommage gale fromage), the conference included an evening
with Pierre Bourdieu in the form of the official U.S. premiere of the award-
winning documentary on his life and thought, Sociology is a Martial Art
by Pierre Carles (2001).7
By convening this gathering of anthropologists and sociologists com-
mitted to the craft, Ethnography sought to provoke a confrontation of

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Wacquant Ethnografeast 9

experiences, purposes, and views liable to clarify its standards and to make
the case for the renewed vigor and centrality of ethnography to social
research, as well as for its pertinence to social policy and citizenship after a
protracted period of solipsistic doubt and nihilistic rumination. If anything,
the three days of lively debates before a packed room and the subsequent
exchanges they triggered through manifold media offered irrefutable proof
that reports of the death of ethnography have been wildly exaggerated
they turn out to be little more than the prescriptive cries of those who, having
stopped doing fieldwork, need to make an epistemological virtue out of their
professional surrender. They confirmed that field inquiry is a diverse enter-
prise admitting of a variety of standards of production and evaluation but
one endowed with a strong core of common epistemological and operational
principles readily apparent in its finished products.8 And they made it clear
that the balance sheet of similarities and differences between sociologists and
anthropologists active in the field tilts decisively in favor of the former:
indeed, there was more dispersion of style, focus and concern within each of
the disciplines than between them. What separates sociologists and
anthropologists are the ready-made problematics they inherit, the universe
of references and studies they build on, and the idiom in which they articu-
late their questions, as a result of the separate training they receive and the
distinct career tracks they follow. Shed this professional garb (or armor) and
they turn out to be not sister disciplines but identical twins.
The three papers by Ruth Behar, Mary Pattillo, and Gary Fine featured
in this issue form the first of several installments of contributions to the
Ethnografeast. It is hoped that publication of these presentations will help
extend and enlarge the animated discussion of the distinctive problems and
promise of ethnography that took place in Berkeley. (Ethnography
welcomes reactions and commentaries that take up central issues addressed
or evaded by several papers). And that it will feed intellectual exchanges
across disciplinary boundaries liable to erode the arbitrary mental and
professional divisions that hamper the full blossoming of an ethnographic
social science.

Appendix: Summary Program of the Ethnografeast

Day 1 Thursday 12 September 2002

1 Suspended between theory and fiction

Ruth Behar (University of Michigan): Adio Kerida: Ethnography without
Borders
Michael Burawoy (University of CaliforniaBerkeley): Standing on the
Shoulders of Giants: Bringing Theory and History to Ethnography

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10 E t h n o g r a p h y 4(1)

811pm, Wheeler Auditorium: An evening with Pierre Bourdieu USA

Premiere of Pierre Carles Sociology is a Martial Art, introduced by
Chancellor Robert Berdahl and followed by a debate with director Pierre
Carles and Linda Williams (Chair of UCBerkeley Film Studies).

Day 2 Friday 13 September 2002

2 Dissecting violence
Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg (University of CaliforniaSan Fran-
cisco): Heroin, Crack and Homelessness in Black and White: A Photo-
Ethnography from San Francisco
Martn Snchez-Jankowski (University of CaliforniaBerkeley): The Role
of School Violence in Leveling Aspirations and Curtailing Mobility among
the Poor in Two American Cities
Teresa Caldeira (Universidade So Paulo, University of CaliforniaIrvine):
Crime and Rights in Contemporary Brazil
Paul Farmer (Harvard University): Toward an Ethnography of Structural
Violence: Haiti and Beyond

3 Bonds and divisions: kinship, gender, class

Florence Weber (Ecole normale suprieureParis): Sentiments, Strategies
and Models in the Ethnography of Kinship and Kin Dependency
Leslie Salzinger (University of Chicago): Now You See It, Now You Dont:
Masculinity at Work
Sherry Ortner (Columbia University): New Jersey Dreaming: Theoretical
Intentions and Field Lessons of a Native Ethnographer
Discussant: Raka Ray (University of CaliforniaBerkeley)

4 The contested politics and ethics of field work

Mary Pattillo (Northwestern University): The Politics (Mine and Theirs) of
Revitalizing Black Chicago
Ruth Horowitz (New York University): On the Uses and Abuses of
Membership: Dynamics and Ethics of Participation in the Regulation of
Medicine
Nancy Scheper-Hughes (University of CaliforniaBerkeley): Rotten Trade:
Global Justice and the International Traffic in Human Organs
Discussant: Laura Nader (University of CaliforniaBerkeley)

911pm, 160 Kroeber Hall: Screening of Ruth Behars Adio Kerida,

followed by a debate with Ruth Behar and Jos David Saldvar (Chair of
UCBerkeley Ethnic Studies).

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Wacquant Ethnografeast 11

Day 3 Saturday 14 September 2002

5 Bodies, senses, selves

Loc Wacquant (University of CaliforniaBerkeley, Centre de sociologie
europenneParis): Suffering Beings: Ethnography as Embedded and
Embodied Social Inquiry
Robert Desjarlais (Sarah Lawrence College): A Phenomenology of Dying:
Subjectivity and Death among Nepals Yolmo Buddhists
Gary Alan Fine (Northwestern University): Towards a Peopled Ethno-
graphy: Analyzing Small-Group Culture
Akhil Gupta (Stanford University): Bodily Practices and Rebirth
Discussant: Lawrence Cohen (University of CaliforniaBerkeley)

6 From site(s) to history and back to theory (25pm)

Ulf Hannerz (Stockholm University): Being There . . . and There . . . and
There! Reflections on Multisite Ethnography
Calvin Morrill (University of CaliforniaIrvine), David Snow (University of
CaliforniaIrvine) and Leon Anderson (Ohio State University): Elaborating
Analytic Ethnography: Linking Field Work and Theoretical Development
Paul Willis (Wolverhampton University): Autonomy and Determinacy in
Understanding Cultural Practices
Jean Comaroff (University of Chicago): Ethnography on an Awkward
Scale: The View from the South-African Postcolony

Notes

1 The journal expresses its appreciation to the following institutions, all at

the University of California-Berkeley, for making the conference possible:
the Survey Research Center, the Departments of Sociology and Anthro-
pology, the Institute for the Study of Social Change, the Center for the Study
of New Inequalities, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the French
Studies, Film Studies, and Ethnic Studies Programs, and the Office of the
Chancellor. Extramural support from the Lal Foundation, the Holbrook
Foundation, and the French Consulate is gratefully acknowledged. I would
like to personally thank my co-organizers, Martn Snchez-Jankowski and
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, for their patience and persistence, and Maureen
Fesler for her flawless management of the event.
2 Several anthropologists noted aloud that it was the first time in their career
that they found themselves in a conference room with throngs of socio-
logists. Conversely, the sociologists candidly confessed to being unfamiliar
with some of the idioms and concerns of anthropologists as expressed at
the lectern and from the floor during discussion. Professional gatherings

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12 E t h n o g r a p h y 4(1)

of anthropologists rarely include more than a token sociologist and vice

versa.
3 See, among a flurry of recent works, Walford (2001) and Zou and Trueba
(2002) for education, Goodale and Starr (2002) for law; Cottle (2000) and
Schlecker and Hirsch (2001) for media and science studies; Herbert (2000)
and McHugh (2000) for geography; Mayne (1999) for history; Wasson
(2000) for design and Rosen (2000) for management; Wolf (1996) for
gender; and Roper and Shapira (2000) for nursing.
4 Adler and Adler (1999) provide a different taxonomy of breeds of ethnogra-
phers, all of which were represented at the Ethnografeast.
5 Read, among more recent papers, Burawoy (2000b and 2001a) and the
interdisciplinary volume on social change in Eastern European societies
after the Soviet collapse (Burawoy and Verdery, 1999); and, for a collec-
tive appraisal and critique of his work by sociologists, the articles by
Robin Leidner, Jennifer Peirce, Heidi Gottfried, Gay Seidman, Steven
Peter Vallas, and Leslie Salzinger in Contemporary Sociology (2001,
305, September 2001, 423444), as well as Burawoys (2001b) own
para-reflexive piece on his predecessor industrial sociologist and ethnog-
rapher Donald Roy.
6 A future special issue of Ethnography on Pierre Bourdieu in the Field
(scheduled for Spring 2004) will feature several original ethnographic texts
by Bourdieu drawn from his early fieldwork in Algeria and in his native
region of Barn in Southern France, as well as critical analyses of their
theoretical and empirical import.
7 The movie was screened before a full house on the opening evening of the
conference in Wheeler Auditorium; it was introduced by Chancellor
Berdahl and followed by a debate with director Pierre Carles and Linda
Williams, Chair of Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
8 The full conference program, with biographical sketches, draft papers
and/or abstracts of the presentations is available on line at http://
cue.berkeley.edu.

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