Finding Secrets and Secret Findings: Confronting the Limits of the Ethnographer’s Gaze

  • Deborah H. Drake
Chapter
Part of the Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology book series (PSIPP)

Abstract

Ethnography, inevitably, can only provide a partial account of the culture, society or field under study. James Clifford (1986: 7) wrote, ‘Even the best ethnographic texts … are systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot fully control.’ Here, Clifford was referring to the construction of ethnographic writing and the fact that ethnographers inevitably must translate the reality of informants into a finished, narrative account. It is the ethnographer who ultimately chooses what to include or exclude in their authored expression of the cultures, lives and meanings that were observed and described to them in the field. Far from threatening the empirical value of the ethnographic endeavour, its partial nature can mirror ‘the partiality of cultural and historical truths, the ways they are systematic and exclusive’ (p. 6). Hammersley and Atkinson (1995: 255) argue, ‘The relationship between the ethnographic text and its subject-matter may not be entirely straightforward. But it is not totally arbitrary … There are social actors and social life outside the text, and there are referential relationships between them.’

Keywords

Staff Group Ethnographic Work Collegial Relationship Prison Staff Prison Life 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Further reading

  1. Ferrell, J. and Hamm, M. S. (eds) (1998) Ethnography at the Edge: Crime, Deviance, and Field Research (Boston: Northeastern University Press).Google Scholar
  2. George, K. M. (1993) ‘Dark Trembling: Ethnographic Notes on Secrecy and Concealment in Highland Sulawesi’, Anthropological Quarterly, 66, 4, 230–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. Sim, J. (2003) ‘Whose Side Are We Not On: Researching Medical Power in Prisons’, in S. Tombs and D. Whyte (eds) Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful: Scrutinizing States and Corporationsk (New York: Peter Lang).Google Scholar
  4. Verdery, K. (2013) Secrets and Truth: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police (New York: Central European University Press).Google Scholar

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Copyright information

© Deborah H. Drake 2015

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  • Deborah H. Drake

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