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Ethnography

DOI: 10.1177/1466138103004001001 2003; 4; 5 Ethnography

Loïc Wacquant Ethnography

Ethnografeast: A Progress Report on the Practice and Promise of

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EthnografeastA progress report on the practice and promise ofethnography

■ Loïc WacquantUniversity of California-Berkeley, USA

Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris, France

On 12–14 September 2002, the journal Ethnography and the Center forUrban 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 collectivestock of the past achievements, to reflect on the contemporary practice, andto sketch the future promise of ethnography as a distinctive mode of inquiryand form of public consciousness. For that purpose, ethnography wasdefined, in catholic fashion, as social research based on the close-up, on-the-ground observation of people and institutions in real time and space, inwhich the investigator embeds herself near (or within) the phenomenon soas to detect how and why agents on the scene act, think and feel the waythey do. Drawing on and projecting forth from their own fieldworkspanning the gamut of topics and styles, the participants were invited toexamine the epistemological moorings, methodological quandaries, repre-sentational devices, empirical and theoretical (im)possibilities, as well as thechanging politics and ethics of ethnography at century’s dawn. And in theprocess 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 dialogueacross three divides that, although widely recognized as arbitrary, continue

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to impede the development of field-based social inquiry – as they do researchbased on other methodologies. The first is the continuing split betweennational traditions, and the mutual ignorance and symbolic imperialism itfosters (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 25–29), which was lessened by conven-ing scholars coming not only from the four corners of the United States butalso from London, Stockholm, Paris, Sâo Paulo, and Cape Town. Thesecond is the separation of disciplines: the main impulse behind theconference was to get a group of anthropologists and sociologists who seri-ously practice and think about fieldwork to come not face to face but sideby side; to suspend lingering disdain, distrust and doubt, and to removetheir professional blinders so as to get each to acknowledge and engage thevaried approaches and productions of their twin colleagues in a way thatwas routinely done a century ago by the Durkheimians (as attested byMauss, 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 remarkablerenewal and growth of ethnography over the past decade has touched anunprecedented variety of knowledge domains ranging from education, law,media and science studies to geography, history, management and design, togender studies and nursing.3 Far from being an extinct or endangered species,as the prophets of postmodern gloom would have us believe, ethnography isa proliferating animal that walks on multiplying feet. But, for reasons havingto do with its intellectual history and institutional ecology, its two main legsremain anthropology and sociology (Stacey, 1999). Indeed, the premise andwager of the ‘Ethnografeast’ was that the most promising route for strength-ening and enriching the craft of field inquiry at this particular juncture liesnot in grand theoretical elaborations, worried epistemological disquisitions,or deliberate rhetorical innovations (however important these may be in theirown right, and they are) but in the long overdue, systematic and self-conscious braiding of actually existing traditions of fieldwork across thatartificial disciplinary divide as anthropologists ‘return home’ and sociologists‘go global’ (Peirano, 1998 and Gille and Ó Riain, 2002).

Third, and by design, the conference brought together the diversity ofstyles of ethnographic work – modern, neomodern, and postmodern; posi-tivist, interpretive and analytic; phenomenological, interactionist andhistorical; theory-driven and narrative-oriented; local, multi-sited, andglobal –4 as conduced by authors who draw on the broadest array oftheoretical traditions in the social sciences, from Marx and Merleau-Pontyto Bourdieu and Blumer to Goffman and Geertz, and seek to amplify orrectify intellectual currents as varied as the Chicago school, feminism(s),identity politics, organization theory, and postcolonialism. This threefoldcommitment to internationalism, interdisciplinarity rooted in a vigorous

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and rigorous dialogue between sociology and anthropology, and pluralismin genres and theoretical suasions is epicentral to the mission of Ethnogra-phy. It sets the editorial policy and defines the distinctive intellectual stanceof the journal in the ever-more cluttered space of social scientific produc-tion. And it will continue to guide its efforts to stimulate and disseminateinnovative fieldwork stamped by theoretical sensitivity, empirical commit-ment, and civic relevance.

The ‘Ethnografeast’ started off with a session titled ‘Suspended BetweenTheory and Fiction’, in which sociologist Michael Boris Burawoy presentedthe case for theory-driven ethnography carried out under the banner ofscience while anthropologist Ruth Behar advocated a humanistic approachbased on story-telling closer to writing and film. The Behar–Burawoypairing was meant to incarnate the two poles of the craft, that of expla-nation and interpretation, experiment and narration, observer concept andnative percept, and to invite each to recognize, exchange with, and learnfrom 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 historyand theory in ethnography. Presentations were based on completed orongoing research into subjects as variegated as drug addiction in San Fran-cisco and crime in São Paulo, the politics of medicine in Haiti and theaesthetics of death in Nepal, sentiments in French families and gender inMexican factories, morality among American physicians and ‘zombies’ inpost-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 theother somber. The first was to Michael Boris Burawoy, who received aspecial award in recognition of 25 years devoted to teaching, practicing, andpromoting ethnography at Berkeley. So much so that one could argue thathe has single-handedly created a ‘Berkeley school’ of field research, withroots in Manchester by way of Lusaka, Chicago, Budapest and Syktyvkarin Northern Russia, mating the ‘extended case method’ of Jaan van Velsenand Max Gluckman to the theoretical agenda of an epistemologically astuteand empirically aware Marxism scouring the globe in stubborn search forthe ‘politics of production’ (Burawoy, 1998 and 2000a). Bridging the gapbetween anthropology and sociology, as well as between theory andmethod, Burawoy has not only produced classic field studies of laborand working class (de)formation under capitalist evolution and Soviet in-volution (see Burawoy, 1996, for a reflexive recapitulation). He has trainedcohorts of first-rate ethnographers who have gone on from beingclose collaborators in a revolving ‘ethnographic cooperative’ (Burawoy etal., 1991; Burawoy et al., 2000) to influential authors with their own agenda

Wacquant ■ Ethnografeast 7




and voice and working at the four corners of the earth. And, whether oneadmires or deplores his obdurate insistence on the centrality of class andcapitalism, Burawoy has time and again demonstrated the scientific andpolitical pertinence of field inquiry to the ongoing ‘great transformations’of our epoch, thus setting high standards for an ethnography alive to itscivic responsibility.5

The second dedication was to Pierre Bourdieu, who agreed, in summer of2001, to come to Berkeley for the ‘Ethnografeast’ and to deliver a closingaddress on ‘Ethnography as Public Service’. His sudden and untimely passingin January 2002 not only robs the social sciences and humanities of one oftheir most innovative and influential practicioners. It deprives activists fightingfor social justice around the world of an engaged intellectual who was deeplycommitted to making the results of social inquiry inform and impact demo-cratic struggles. And it leaves many of us bereft of an irreplaceable friend andwonderful human being. Pierre Bourdieu was an inventive and iconoclasticscientist who transformed social science by fusing rigorous theory with preciseresearch, including ethnography, which he taught himself in the late 1950scrisscrossing the countryside and delving into the urban slums of colonialAlgeria in the grisly conditions of the war of national liberation.6

In the introduction to his 1963 book Travail et travailleurs en Algérie,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 meaningthat patterns of action and belief acquire in the ‘concrete cases’ that quan-titative techniques parse, aggregate and correlate (Bourdieu et al., 1963:9–13). And he dutifully followed his own prescription: Bourdieu resortedto detailed and sustained in situ observation in every one of his majorstudies thereafter, from the dissection of gender relations and kinshipstrategies in his native village of Béarn to the analysis of taste in the makingof class and of the rituals of consecration of the ‘state nobility’ to the diag-nosis of novel forms social suffering in societies wracked by economicderegulation and welfare-state devolution (Bourdieu, 2002; 1979[1984];1989[1996]; Bourdieu et al., 1993[1997]). Bourdieu was the first scholarto truly reunify sociology and anthropology in his practice since theclassical 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 oncequipped ‘hommage égale fromage’), the conference included ‘an eveningwith 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 Artby 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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experiences, purposes, and views liable to clarify its standards and to makethe case for the renewed vigor and centrality of ethnography to socialresearch, as well as for its pertinence to social policy and citizenship after aprotracted period of solipsistic doubt and nihilistic rumination. If anything,the three days of lively debates before a packed room and the subsequentexchanges they triggered through manifold media offered irrefutable proofthat reports of the ‘death of ethnography’ have been wildly exaggerated –they turn out to be little more than the prescriptive cries of those who, havingstopped doing fieldwork, need to make an epistemological virtue out of theirprofessional surrender. They confirmed that field inquiry is a diverse enter-prise admitting of a variety of standards of production and evaluation butone endowed with a strong core of common epistemological and operationalprinciples readily apparent in its finished products.8 And they made it clearthat the balance sheet of similarities and differences between sociologists andanthropologists active in the field tilts decisively in favor of the former:indeed, there was more dispersion of style, focus and concern within each ofthe disciplines than between them. What separates sociologists andanthropologists are the ready-made problematics they inherit, the universeof 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 thedistinct career tracks they follow. Shed this professional garb (or armor) andthey turn out to be not sister disciplines but identical twins.

The three papers by Ruth Behar, Mary Pattillo, and Gary Fine featuredin this issue form the first of several installments of contributions to the‘Ethnografeast’. It is hoped that publication of these presentations will helpextend and enlarge the animated discussion of the distinctive problems andpromise of ethnography that took place in Berkeley. (Ethnographywelcomes reactions and commentaries that take up central issues addressed– or evaded – by several papers). And that it will feed intellectual exchangesacross disciplinary boundaries liable to erode the arbitrary mental andprofessional divisions that hamper the full blossoming of an ethnographicsocial science.

Appendix: Summary Program of the Ethnografeast

Day 1 – Thursday 12 September 2002

1 Suspended between theory and fictionRuth Behar (University of Michigan): ‘Adio Kerida: Ethnography withoutBorders’Michael Burawoy (University of California–Berkeley): ‘Standing on theShoulders of Giants: Bringing Theory and History to Ethnography’





8–11pm, Wheeler Auditorium: An evening with Pierre Bourdieu – USAPremiere of Pierre Carles’ ‘Sociology is a Martial Art’, introduced byChancellor Robert Berdahl and followed by a debate with director PierreCarles and Linda Williams (Chair of UC–Berkeley Film Studies).

Day 2 – Friday 13 September 2002

2 Dissecting violencePhilippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg (University of California–San Fran-cisco): ‘Heroin, Crack and Homelessness in Black and White: A Photo-Ethnography from San Francisco’Martín Sánchez-Jankowski (University of California–Berkeley): ‘The Roleof School Violence in Leveling Aspirations and Curtailing Mobility amongthe Poor in Two American Cities’Teresa Caldeira (Universidade São Paulo, University of California–Irvine):‘Crime and Rights in Contemporary Brazil’Paul Farmer (Harvard University): ‘Toward an Ethnography of StructuralViolence: Haiti and Beyond’

3 Bonds and divisions: kinship, gender, classFlorence Weber (Ecole normale supérieure–Paris): ‘Sentiments, Strategiesand Models in the Ethnography of Kinship and Kin Dependency’Leslie Salzinger (University of Chicago): ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t:Masculinity at Work’Sherry Ortner (Columbia University): ‘New Jersey Dreaming: TheoreticalIntentions and Field Lessons of a “Native Ethnographer” ’Discussant: Raka Ray (University of California–Berkeley)

4 The contested politics and ethics of field workMary Pattillo (Northwestern University): ‘The Politics (Mine and Theirs) of“Revitalizing” Black Chicago’Ruth Horowitz (New York University): ‘On the Uses and Abuses ofMembership: Dynamics and Ethics of Participation in the Regulation ofMedicine’Nancy Scheper-Hughes (University of California–Berkeley): ‘Rotten Trade:Global Justice and the International Traffic in Human Organs’Discussant: Laura Nader (University of California–Berkeley)

9–11pm, 160 Kroeber Hall: Screening of Ruth Behar’s ‘Adio Kerida’,followed by a debate with Ruth Behar and José David Saldívar (Chair ofUC–Berkeley Ethnic Studies).

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Day 3 – Saturday 14 September 2002

5 Bodies, senses, selvesLoïc Wacquant (University of California–Berkeley, Centre de sociologieeuropéenne–Paris): ‘ “Suffering Beings”: Ethnography as Embedded andEmbodied Social Inquiry’Robert Desjarlais (Sarah Lawrence College): ‘A Phenomenology of Dying:Subjectivity and Death among Nepal’s 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 California–Berkeley)

6 From site(s) to history and back to theory (2–5pm)Ulf Hannerz (Stockholm University): ‘Being There . . . and There . . . andThere! Reflections on Multisite Ethnography’Calvin Morrill (University of California–Irvine), David Snow (University ofCalifornia–Irvine) and Leon Anderson (Ohio State University): ‘ElaboratingAnalytic Ethnography: Linking Field Work and Theoretical Development’Paul Willis (Wolverhampton University): ‘Autonomy and Determinacy inUnderstanding Cultural Practices’Jean Comaroff (University of Chicago): ‘Ethnography on an AwkwardScale: The View from the South-African Postcolony’

Notes

1 The journal expresses its appreciation to the following institutions, all atthe 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 Studyof New Inequalities, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the FrenchStudies, Film Studies, and Ethnic Studies Programs, and the Office of theChancellor. Extramural support from the Lal Foundation, the HolbrookFoundation, and the French Consulate is gratefully acknowledged. I wouldlike to personally thank my co-organizers, Martín Sánchez-Jankowski andNancy Scheper-Hughes, for their patience and persistence, and MaureenFesler for her flawless management of the event.

2 Several anthropologists noted aloud that it was the first time in their careerthat they found themselves in a conference room with throngs of socio-logists. Conversely, the sociologists candidly confessed to being unfamiliarwith some of the idioms and concerns of anthropologists as expressed atthe lectern and from the floor during discussion. Professional gatherings





of anthropologists rarely include more than a token sociologist and viceversa.

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) andSchlecker 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) forgender; 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 theinterdisciplinary volume on social change in Eastern European societiesafter the Soviet collapse (Burawoy and Verdery, 1999); and, for a collec-tive appraisal and critique of his work by sociologists, the articles byRobin Leidner, Jennifer Peirce, Heidi Gottfried, Gay Seidman, StevenPeter Vallas, and Leslie Salzinger in Contemporary Sociology (2001,30–5, September 2001, 423–444), as well as Burawoy’s (2001b) ownpara-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 textsby Bourdieu drawn from his early fieldwork in Algeria and in his nativeregion of Béarn in Southern France, as well as critical analyses of theirtheoretical and empirical import.

7 The movie was screened before a full house on the opening evening of theconference in Wheeler Auditorium; it was introduced by ChancellorBerdahl and followed by a debate with director Pierre Carles and LindaWilliams, Chair of Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

8 The full conference program, with biographical sketches, draft papersand/or abstracts of the presentations is available on line at http://cue.berkeley.edu.

References

Adler, Patricia A. and Peter Adler (1999) ‘The Ethnographer’s Ball – Revisited’,Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28(5): 442–50.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1979[1984]) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgementof Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1989[1996]) The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field ofPower. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre (2002) Le Bal des célibataires. La crise de la société paysanneen Béarn. Paris: Seuil/Points.

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Bourdieu, Pierre, Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet and Claude Seibel (1963)Travail et travailleurs en Algérie. Paris and The Hague: Mouton and Co.

Bourdieu et al. (1993[1999]) The Weight of the World: Social Suffering inContemporary Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Burawoy, Michael Boris (1996) ‘From Capitalism to Capitalism via Socialism:The Odyssey of a Marxist Ethnographer, 1975–1995’, International Laborand Working-Class History 50: 77–99.

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Cottle, Simon (2000) ‘New(s) Times: Towards a “Second Wave” of NewsEthnography’, Communications 25(1): 19–41.

Gille, Zsuzsa and Seán Ó Riain (2002) ‘Global Ethnography’, Annual Reviewof Sociology 28: 271–295.

Herbert, Steve (2000) ‘For Ethnography’, Progress in Human Geography 24(4):550–568.

Goodale, Mark and June Starr (eds) (2002) Practicing Ethnography In Law.London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (eds) (1997) Anthropological Locations:Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press.

Mayne, Alan and Susan Lawrence (1999) ‘Ethnographies of Place: A NewUrban Research Agenda’, Urban History 26(3): 325–348.

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Round and Round: A Case for Ethnographic Studies in Migration’, Progressin Human Geography 24(1): 71–89.

Peirano, Mariza G. S. (1998) ‘When Anthropology is at Home: The DifferentContexts of a Single Discipline’, Annual Review of Anthropology 27:105–128.

Roper, Janice M. and Jill Shapira (2000) Ethnography in Nursing Research.Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Rosen, Michael (2000) Turning Words, Spinning Worlds: Chapters in Organiz-ational Ethnography. London: Routledge.

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