Abstract
Despite recent interest in political ethnography, most of the reflection has been on the ethnographic aspect of the enterprise with much less emphasis on the question implicit in the first word of the couplet: What is actually political about political ethnography and how much should ethnographers pre-define it? The question is complicated because a central component of the definition of what is political is actually the struggle to define its jurisdiction and how it gets distinguished from what it is not. In this article we aim to show how ethnography can actually lead us out of this conundrum in which the political is paradoxically both predefined and, at the same time, the open question that leads the process of inquiry. We do so by advancing a formal and relational approach that provides us with procedural tools to define the nature and specificity of the political bond not ex ante, but rather during the process of research itself. In the first part of the article we historicize the development of political ethnography as a distinct avenue for inquiry and show what have been the challenges to its normalization. This is followed by the article’s main section, which focuses on the four ways in which what is political has been conceptualized in contemporary socio-ethnographical literature. In the conclusion of the article, we advance a lowest common denominator definition proposal, with examples from other scholars as well as from our own research to illustrate how this approach would work.
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Notes
Bourdieu and Wacquant call for a “genetic and political sociology of the formation, selection, and imposition of systems of classification” that make up distinct political fields (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 14).
This last point has been central to the analysis of political philosopher Claude Lefort (1981) for whom the political is the name of the symbolic reconstitution of the social, after the body of the king-ruler became separated from the social body. As such, the political is conceptualized always as an empty place, without a privileged location and always vulnerable to contestation. To a certain extent the main political issue for Lefort is the dispute for the jurisdiction of the political. To be blunt here, what most ethnographies usually take for granted is what we—taking a page from philosophers like Lefort and Schmitt—would like to find ways to research from the ground up. The political (le politique) became the popular term to describe the notion of a symbolic form that institutes society yet is not equivalent with society itself. Furthermore, the pre-modern theologico-political could not function without a representation of unity. Lefort, relying significantly on Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, argues that through the image of the king’s doubled body European societies represented themselves to themselves. Through the doubled nature of the king’s body, society is represented and therefore social identity is secured. As such, the body of the king is not simply an empirical concept but is the means by which society institutes itself. To destroy this symbol is to dis-incorporate or disembody society’s unity; it leads to the appearance of individuals and to disconnecting power from a specific body that represents the social whole. This leads to Lefort’s famous assessment of modernity: “Power [now] appears as an empty place and those who exercise it as mere mortals who occupy it only temporarily or who could install themselves in it only by force or cunning. There is no law that can be fixed, whose articles cannot be contested, whose foundations are not susceptible of being called into question. Lastly there is not representation of a center and of the contours of society; unity cannot now efface social division.”
According to Galison, “Two groups can agree on rules of exchange even if they ascribe utterly different significance to the objects being exchanged; they may even disagree on the meaning of the exchange process itself. Nonetheless, the trading partners can hammer out a local coordination, despite vast global differences. In an even more sophisticated way, cultures in interaction frequently establish contact languages, systems of discourse that can vary from the most function-specific jargons, through semi specific pidgins, to full-fledged creoles rich enough to support activities as complex as poetry and metalinguistic reflection” (Galison 1997, p. 783).
Recent classics within urban ethnography have focused not on this directly but rather on its absence: the accent is on exclusion and the retirement of formal organizations from the sphere of action of the State and civil society. Though often not labeled explicitly as political ethnography, these works deal with the political as a particular effect/consequence of the exclusion of the polis and retrenchment/retirement of the sphere of policy from the lives of the poor. Key examples of this use of political are seminal books like Philip Bourgois’s In Search of Respect, Sudhir Venkatesh’s American Project, and Loic Wacquant’s Body and Soul, as is Pine’s (2012) ethnography of “making do” in Naples. Ethnographies that deal with welfare recipients; entrepreneurs of the informal economy; or the internal fight for honor, status, and recognition within racialized impoverished and disintegrating communities are all examples of this type of use of the political. In most cases there is an allusion to the transformation of structures at the macro level (e.g., the hollowing out and roll back of the State, neoliberal policies) that produce effects at the level of the observed interaction. Again, the emphasis is less on the mechanisms and the meso level when compared to Polis and more on how the alluded changes result in the framing ecology (the hyper-ghetto), certain observable practices, modes of individuation (the hustler, the gang leader) and strategies for action. The retrenchment of formal institutions in these cases has resulted in an absence of a shared definition of what constitutes politics, whom to link to, how to solve, and how to organize (all dimensions present at work in Polis). It is in this vacuum then that some activities usually presented at the level of the economy—or as status games—gain political salience. If the political theorist to invoke here is Thomas Hobbes, it is less because the war of the poor against the poor resembles the homo homini lupus he so brilliantly discussed but rather because the retrenchment resulted in an absence of shared definitions about politics as defined in this paragraph.
Despite their claims to having an open theoretical menu, their work still reproduces to a certain extent the opposition between the grounded and the extended case method, by thinking that ECM theories cannot be abducted. Most of the article’s examples are from “surface/narrative” theories: phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology. They do not delve in depth about what would happen if you try to take that approach with theories at the level of the actor, the actor’s motivations and cultural repertories; with normative takes on political life; or with dispositions, symbolic misrecognition, hegemony.
This last point is particularly important if we are going to understand the agent’s own attributions of meanings to particular situations. It has been interesting to notice that while some of the work reported upon here is based on a cultural sociology of democracy (Poletta 2012), scholarship has nevertheless made of meaning not a structuring force but rather an environment, a result of past structural arrangements, or an instrument for action.
Returning to past fieldwork as a source of inspiration is less common in sociology than in anthropology (e.g., Hannerz 1980; Sansone 2003; Gutmann 2005), despite some notable exceptions (Burawoy on the Extended Case Method or the “revisit,” for example; recent cases include Auyero’s Patient of the State, and his article with Benzecry—Auyero and Benzecry 2017—on how dispositional sociology helps us to understand the continuity on time of patronage politics).
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Benzecry, C.E., Baiocchi, G. What is political about political ethnography? On the context of discovery and the normalization of an emergent subfield. Theor Soc 46, 229–247 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9289-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9289-z