Abstract
In their famously combative exchange in the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) in 2002, one of Loic Wacquant’s many charges against Elijah Anderson, Mitchell Duneier and Katherine Newman is a putative lack of critical distance from their research participants. Wacquant’s accusation is that all three authors detail rather than explain the behaviours and orientations of their research subjects and present (at least some of) them in a manner that is naively and needlessly favourable. The goal of ethnographic research, he argued, ‘is not to exonerate the character of dishonoured social figures and dispossessed social groups’, or to ‘attract sympathy for their plight’, as such, but to describe and dissect the ‘the social mechanisms and meanings that govern their practices, ground their morality […] and explain their strategies and trajectories’ (Wacquant, 2002: 1470).
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Further readings
Any ethnographer will benefit from reading the argument between Wacquant and Duneier referred to in the chapter:
Duneier, M. (2002) ‘What Kind of Combat Sport Is Sociology?’ American Journal of Sociology, 107, 6 (May 2002), 1551–76.
Wacquant, L. (2002) ‘Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, Morality, and the Pitfalls of Urban Ethnography’, American Journal of Sociology, 107, 6 (May 2002), 1468–1532.
Also recommended
Malcolm, J. (1990/2012) The Journalist and the Murderer (London: Granta).
Waldram, J. B. (2012) Hound Pound Narrative: Sexual Offender Habilitation and the Anthropology of Therapeutic Intervention (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
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© 2015 Ben Crewe and Alice Ievins
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Crewe, B., Ievins, A. (2015). Closeness, Distance and Honesty in Prison Ethnography. In: Drake, D.H., Earle, R., Sloan, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403889_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403889_7
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