the ethnos in the polis: political ethnography as a mode of inquiry

© 2008 The AuthorsJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 139–155, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00053.x

Blackw ell Publishing LtdOxfo rd, UKSOCOSo cio lo g y Co m pass17 51-9020© 2007 The Autho rJo urnal Co m p ilatio n © 2007 Blackw ell Publishing Ltd05310.1111/j.17 51-9020.2007 .00053.xNo vem ber 200700139???155???Orig inal ArticlesThe Ethnos in the PolisThe Ethnos in the Polis

The Ethnos in the Polis: Political Ethnography as a Mode of Inquiry

Gianpaolo Baiocchi*1 and Brian T. Connor2

1 Brown University 2 University of Massachusetts, Amherst

AbstractIn the social sciences, there is renewed attention to political ethnography, a researchmethod that is based on close-up and real-time observation of actors involved inpolitical processes, at times even extending the definition of these processes to movebeyond categories of state, civil society, and social movements. This article examinesthe emergence of political ethnography from a number of disciplinary locations,such as political science, the cultural turn in sociology, and anthropology, and showsthe value of this new approach for understanding how politics work in everyday life.

Introduction

Political ethnographies are a relative novelty for the social sciences. Theyare new in that there is today a resurgence of ethnographic studies thatdeal with the formal province of political sociology or political science:states, nations, social movements, political culture, and revolutions. In thelast 15 years, these have included studies like Lancaster’s (1988) ethnographyof Managua neighborhoods during the revolution; Brown’s (1997) studyof AIDS activism in Vancouver; Auyero’s (2001) study of Peronist networksin Argentina; Lichterman’s (1996) ethnography of forms of activist com-mitment; Eliasoph’s (1998) study of political apathy; Wood’s study offaith-based community networks (2002); and Glaeser’s (2000) study ofpolice officials in postreunification Germany, among many others. It hasalso included special issues of journals like the Journal of ContemporaryEthnography special issue on the ‘Far Right’, and two issues of QualitativeSociology dedicated to political ethnography. As an indicator of the noveltyof these studies, the introduction to the special issue of QualitativeSociology1 by Auyero (2006, 257) states that ‘politics and its main protagonists(state official, politicians, and activists) remain un(der)studied by ethnography’smainstream’. A set of reflections in States and Societies, the political sociologynewsletter, has practitioners of political ethnography reflecting on thechallenges of ‘risking inconvenience’ by undertaking ethnography andjustifying and publishing such work in a subfield whose mandate is to

140 The Ethnos in the Polis

© 2008 The Authors Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 139–155, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00053.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

‘study the “big” world of power and institutions, not the “small world”of everyday interaction between ordinary people’ (Lichterman 2005a, 1–2).

Yet such ethnographies have been around for a long time, even if notalways prominently recognized as central to sociology and allied disciplines.In anthropology, concerns with forms of authority and power date to thefounding of the discipline, and are the analytical focus of many studies inthe post–World War II period. In addition to the Manchester schoolethnographies, like Epstein’s Politics in an Urban African Community (1958),postwar investigations of clientelism and ‘pathological’ social formations,like Banfield’s Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958) or Lewis’s FiveFamilies (1959), are essentially political ethnographies. In sociology, underthe guise of community studies, since the 1930s scholars have engaged indirect observation of neighborhood activists, political networks, and theday-to-day life of politics. Many of the most famous such studies, such asRobert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown studies (1929, 1937), Hunter’s studyof Atlanta (1953), or Vidich and Bensman’s study of Candor, New York(1956), had strong, if not explicit ethnographic components. The Lynds,for example, emulated the ‘approach of the cultural anthropologist’ (1929,3) in describing the modes of behavior that prevailed in Muncie, Indiana.

It is clear that ethnography, ‘close-up, on-the-ground observation ofpeople and institutions in real time’ where the investigator detects ‘howand why agents act think and feel’ (Wacquant 2003, 5, cited in Auyero2006) can offer special insights for the study of politics. If we think of thestudy of politics broadly as the study of societal power (its distribution,reproduction, and transformation) and the structures, institutions, move-ments, and collective identities that both maintain and challenge it, theethnographic gaze can mean any one of the following:

1 Studying politics, defined as the events, institutions, or actors that arenormally considered ‘political’ (e.g., social movements, or states), but inan ethnographic way: at a smaller scale and as they happen. We call thisversion ethnographies of political actors and institutions.

2 Studying routine encounters between people and those institutions andactors, encounters normally invisible in nonethnographic ways (e.g., theencounter between organized social movements and nonparticipants; orthe encounters with state bureaucracies or welfare agencies). We referto this version below as encounters with formal politics.

3 Studying other kinds of events, institutions, or actors altogether, thatwhile invisible from nonethnographic vantage points, are of consequenceto politics in some way (e.g., apathy, or nonparticipation in socialmovements). Below, we call this the lived experience of the political.

Many political ethnographies do not exclusively fall into one or theother category; instead, we use these categories as a heuristic device. Thefirst category might more readily come to mind as constituting politicalethnography, but we make the argument that the second and third


The Ethnos in the Polis 141

versions are also important. The first version includes studies of socialmovements, revolutions, civil society organizations, although ‘under themicroscope’, detailing the experiences and processes taking place in thoseinstitutions or among the actors in question (Auyero 2006). For example,Lichterman’s (2005b) account of various protestant volunteering and advocacyprojects shows that group customs that invite reflective and critical discussioncontributed to the formation of successful external ‘bridges’ or ties.

The second and third versions might be less readily considered politicalethnography, but are just as important in the insights they provide aboutpolitics. The second version, encounters with formal politics, moves away fromthe inner workings of recognizable actors and institutions in politics, like statesand social movements, and toward their boundaries. These ethnographiesprincipally include studies of encounters with states or state bureaucraciesas well as the study of the blurry boundaries between those formal institutionsand informal politics, such as the ‘grey zones’ of clandestine politicalactivity (Auyero 2007) or participants at the edge of social movements(Wolford 2005). The third version, the lived experience of the political, takesthe broadest definition of what constitutes the political. Objects of studyinclude studies of apathy, instead of engagement, or of conversations at sitesordinarily thought to be nonpolitical. But in these cases, the ethnographerthen makes the analytical link to political culture, or nation, or anotherrelevant political process. In this latter definition, it is not that political actorsas understood by the discipline may have fuzzy boundaries examined upclose, but that the everyday in itself becomes a politically relevant site,whether or not recognizable ‘political actors’ are present. Navaro-Yashin(2002), provides a an example of this style of political ethnography, wherefashion shows and sporting events, among other mundane places, becomesites where the political can emerge through discourse, actions, or both.

Political ethnographers often make the claim that the ethnographic gazecalls into question many of the assumptions of traditional political studies,and that this can call for a significant retheorization. The advantages ofpolitical ethnography, as alluded to in this introduction, are multiple. The firstadvantage is that ethnographic studies of politics can provide an understandingof how state, national, or global actions play themselves out on local stages(Burawoy 2000; Scott 1986). Another advantage is that practices in thepolitical realm can be examined. Questions such as how do people (not)get involved in politics can be answered by studying how individualsnegotiate their actions in regards to political issues in their everyday lives(Auyero 2003; Eliasoph 1998). Finally, both of these advantages get backto the idea of the lived experiences of the political. Where previous studiesof politics used broad strokes to paint a picture of political life, politicalethnography allows the researcher to bring up the mundane details thatcan affect politics, providing a ‘thick description’ where one was missing.In this sense, ‘political ethnography provides privileged access to its processes,causes, and effects’ of broader political processes (Tilly 2006, 410).



In this essay, we review the state of political ethnography, brieflyconsidering its origins before considering contributions along the threelines above. Our discussion is interdisciplinary, but in the final section ofthe essay, we also consider some disciplinary conventions in sociology,political science, and anthropology, and how these shape how authors havejustified the status of their works within these disciplines. We will be thusclosely attentive to whether, and how, political ethnographers speak backto central questions in the discipline, scrutinizing strategies of justification,the rhetorical moves by which authors assert the value of their findingsas relevant to the discipline (Law 2004). The goal of this abbreviatedessay is to convey some of the excitement of this interdisciplinary mode ofinquiry and discussion, and to introduce some exemplars to an audienceof ethnographers and others. What we do not do is to provide a thoroughpicture of all, or even most, political ethnographies. The limited size ofthis review prevents us from discussing many more interesting works, ordiscussing the ones we address in more detail. We also limited our discussionto the English-language literature, full aware of exciting studies in otherlanguages.2

The origins of political ethnography

Like in sociology, anthropology counts with an earlier tradition of politicalethnographies, many of them in the manner of the Manchester school,and many under the rubric of political anthropology (Vincent 1990;Werbner 1984). Manchester school scholars, under the influence of MaxGluckman, developed a distinctive structuralist style of anthropology withtheir investigations of British Central Africa. They concerned themselveswith forms of authority in traditional societies as well as with changingpractices and conflicts that result from colonial pressures, and were oftenstructural functionalist in theoretical orientation. For example, Epstein’s(1958) study of a mine township in the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesiatraces emergent forms of urban organization among Africans, like unionsor welfare organizations, that transcend but do not fully displace tribalallegiances as a means of integration. Another classic political ethnographyis Banfield’s (1958) postwar study of Italian peasants, finding the moralorder that guided a social formation mired in patronage and clientelism.

As mentioned, the so-called community studies in sociology oftendeployed ethnographic methods and often addressed local politics andlocal political culture, albeit sometimes in an oblique manner. So whileSuttles (1968) is mostly concerned with the ‘social order of the slum’ inSouth Chicago, the moral universe that residents create for themselves, hedoes describe institutional arrangements and communication patterns thatreproduce this order, concerns that are shared by contemporary Foucauldianscholars. Later community studies, like Kornblum’s (1974) and Bailey’s(1974), more explicitly address political questions. Kornblum is concerned



with explaining the absence of ‘a powerful working class movement whichcould be called socialist in the United States’ (1974, vii), while Bailey wantsto shed light on the ‘practical and theoretical significance of Alinsky-typegroups’. To answer these questions, these researchers engaged in detailedparticipant observation, although in combination with other methods,and aimed at making more generalizeable claims, and counting on therepresentativeness or typicalilty of the fieldsite, as was the hallmark ofcommunity studies. Community studies declined in importance in sociologyin subsequent years, which helps account for their relative absence indiscussions of political ethnography, as does the fact that they sometimestended to address political issues obliquely and usually did so through thelens of the category of community, which many contemporary researcherswould find excessively homogenizing.

Another precursor to contemporary political ethnographies is to befound in the number of studies dealing with politics that in the 1980s and1990s, that while interview based, increasingly emphasized individualexperiences and meaning. Cultural sociologists, in particular, werebeginning to pay increasing attention to the importance of the meaningof social action to the actors involved. Civic life and the basis for solidaritywas the overarching concern for Bellah and his collaborators (1985).Bellah et al.’s investigation of the nature of the relationship between publicand private life in the contemporary USA is concerned with understandingaction in the public sphere, and ‘the resources Americans have for makingsense of their lives, how they think about themselves and their society,and how their ideas relate to action’ (Bellah 1985, ix). The research forthe book relies on participant observation in civic and political organizationsas well as interviews, and some of the chapters present ethnographicevidence, the specificity of the cases is less important as the book isvery much aimed at exploring ‘representative issues in representativecommunities’ (p. ix).

Social movement scholars were also increasingly attentive to individualactors as well as meaning-making, especially under the guise of ‘framesanalysis’ (Gamson et al. 1982; Snow and Benford 1988). McAdam’s studyof ‘Freedom Summer’ (1988), for example, explored the biographical rootsof activism in depth, and relies in large part on the understanding ofparticipants to make sense of events. It is based on a sample of interviewees,divided between those who attended and those who signed up for, butdid not take part of Freedom Summer. Gamson’s study (1992) of how‘average working people’ ‘talk politics’ relies on the observation of ‘peergroups’ – a variant of the focus group, in which a small group of peerstalks in a nonbureaucratic setting and the facilitator plays a minor role inkeeping the conversation going. Concerned with distorted views of themass public that portrays the average person as a passive consumer of mediainformation, as well as with understanding the sort of political consciousnessthat can lead to collective action, Gamson presented his participants with



topics and observed how talk naturally occurred, coding it for frames.While neither study was ethnographic, they were both very much concernedwith individual acts of meaning-making, which will become importantfor subsequent ethnographies.

Political ethnography (1): Political actors

A first strand of political ethnographies is made up by studies of collectiveactors like social movements, neighborhood associations, and otherexpressions of civil society. Political ethnographers have asked questionsabout the meaning of such association – at times dialoguing with Gramsciand other theories of culture and power, and at times dialoguing withtheories of civic association. These scholars have argued that ethnographyallows us to answer a number of questions simply not accessible by othermeans (Lichterman 1996). As all of these ethnographies attest, projectsabout ‘ways of doing politics’, practices, and performances require a certainamount of observation of these as they happen, and where they happen.Studies of language and culture have to pay attention to the internalcoherence of cultural codes but also to the unspoken, performative, andstructuring elements of these codes, the ‘extralinguistic’ factors, as theimplicit rules of who can and cannot speak, who determines the rules of‘proper’ speech, and access to proper ways of speaking, and strategies ofpresentation of the (political) self (Eliasoph 1998). In recent years, US-basedstudies have joined a resurgence in interest in ethnographies of politicsand social movements in the Global South, especially among the LatinAmerican urban poor, also largely inspired by concepts of civil society(Arias 2006; Auyero 2001; Baiocchi 2005; Gay 1994; Mische 2006).

One strand of questions has been about everyday meanings and commonsense in the crafting of political identities. Why, ethnographers have asked,do certain political group identities make more sense than others? Inpointed contrast to approaches that focus on ‘objective’ opportunity structuresor the assumed rationality of collective actors as a way to explain collectiveaction, political ethnographers often focus on everyday meanings instead.For example, Rubin’s (1997) study of the emergence of Coalition of Workers,Peasants, and Students of the Isthmus (COCEI) as a major political partyin Juchitán, Mexico, gives a rich historical account of how the leftist partywas able to make a stronghold in the poor region. In using grassroots tacticscentered around Zapotec ethnicity, COCEI was able to organize supportagainst the traditional, corporatist governing practices of the InstitutionalizedRevolutionary Party (PRI). Rubin uses interviews and archival researchto show what issues COCEI focused on to gain support, and also whyresidents supported or did not support the party’s actions. Hansen (1999)studies the emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India through archivalrecords and fieldwork, to show how Hindu nationalist parties like theBharatiya Jonata Party (BJP) were able to gain power in the Indian



government in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The nationalist parties, Hansenclaims, used narratives based in the moral superiority of (middle-class)Hinduism, separating their moral high ground from the lower classes andother religions, in particular Islam. For example, the Hindu parties usedthe construction of a temple in Ayodhya as a means to foster a national,moral community. A brick drive was started where towns collected bricksand performed a ceremony around them before being sent to the templesite. The drives were most successful in areas with high Muslim populations.Religious antagonism was used here as a means to foster a nationalismbased most strongly on Hinduism, relegating non-Hindu Indians as second-class citizens. Here, national parties use everyday experiences with otherssuch as Muslims or lower-class people as a means of mobilizing support forHindu nationalism. Glaeser (2000) examines the creation of East and WestGerman identities among the police forces in postunification Germany.Basing his study on a Potsdam and Köpenick police station, Glaeser usesinterviews and observation to see how Germans use space, language, andactions to identify and deal with the change to a unified German state. Asopposed to studies that look at how citizens manage this divide, Glaeserinstead looks at police officers, showing how people who represent the statecome to terms with their employment position in regards to national identity.

Eliasoph (1998) uses political ethnography to understand why individualstry to remove themselves from voicing political beliefs in public venues.Eliasoph examines this problem from a number of sites – PTA meetings,a local bar, and even an environmental activist group – to see howindividuals created communities, but without overtly politicizing thosecommunities. Perhaps the most odd example of this came from theenvironmental movement studied. This group used tactics of individualizingthe problems of environmental damage as a way to create change. Insteadof utilizing political discourses on the environment, individuals learned to‘speak for themselves’, focusing on the self and one’s own reasonings, allthe while trying not to speak for others in the community (Eliasoph 1998,207–8). The result was a difficulty in debating with public officials, whoused science and technical information to oppose the activists’ goals andinterest-based demands. Politics, Eliasoph argues, has now taken a turn in thepublic sphere where it is increasingly difficult to actively engage in directpolitics using a language of moral right. Now public political discussionstend to focus on individualized, interest-based reasonings of political beliefs.

Auyero’s investigation of ‘political clientelism’ among the urban poorin Villa Paraíso, a shantytown on the outskirts of Buenos Aires is alsoexemplary. Based on extensive fieldwork among the poor and localbrokers, Auyero investigates the meaning of these networks and exchanges.Clientelism has long been a theme for political scientists who observedthat, as an asymmetrical relationship, perpetuates the social standing ofboth patron and client, and is sometimes seen as something akin to ‘falseconsciousness’. But by observing it closely and unpacking its meanings for



poor participants, something other than simple social reproduction emerges.Clientelist exchanges, or as Auyero prefers, instances of ‘problem solvingthrough personalized political mediation’ (2001, 210) reflect agency andimprovisation of the poor, and are crisscrossed by ‘enduring and long-lasting relationships, narratives, and identities’ (2001, 213) and the ideathat problems can be solved through personal mediation with successfuloutcomes is becoming an ‘uncontested part of life in shantytowns’.

In a similar vein, Gutmann (2002) explores the ‘popular politics’ ofMexico’s urban poor, avoiding the both pitfalls of presenting them as‘marginal’ (as had been the case in the 1960s and 1970s) or of romanticizingthe resistance inherent in their daily practices (as is the case in what theauthor calls ‘resistance theory’) by taking the reader on a journey throughthe political lives of the residents of colonia Santo Domingo, a working-classneighborhood in Mexico City. This bottom-up study of the myriadmeanings of democracy in this neighborhood considers when, how, andwhy residents do and do not participate in ‘politics’. In a pointed breakfrom social movements approaches, Guttman poses the important and seldomaddressed question of why people do not participate in protest or otherforms of political activity, reminding us that when social movements arepresented as the main actors in books about urban Latin America theyconstitute even in the best scenarios but a fraction of the urban population.

Political ethnography (2): Encountering formal politics

In contrast to ethnographies that focus on civil society actors and networks(and in which the state often plays a prominent role as a target), otherpolitical ethnographies have focused on everyday encounters with formalpolitical institutions, often focusing on encounters with the state. Theseinteractions can center around issues such as labor, work, and other placeswhere individuals must interact with the state and state officials (Gupta 1995;Kerkvliet 2005; Taussig 1980). In many of these ethnographies, politics isnot considered solely as a top-down repressive force where subjects eitherconsent or resist; instead politics is a process where subjects interact withvarious political institutions, sites, and actors, from which the subject candesire, and be disciplined, to be a productive citizen, docile body, or evenactivist. Foucault’s writings on issues such as biopower, surveillance, andgovernmentality play a guiding role in many of these works. The managementand governance of subjects and populations is the common Foucauldianelement in these writings. These various political studies use Foucault inmyriad ways; some concentrate on how politics is part of everyday life(Mahmood 2005; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Taussig 1997), others use Foucaultin issues surrounding politics and globalization (Inda 2005; Ong 1999, 2003),and others attempt to build their own theories of politics, eschewing mostof their empirical work in order to focus on the creation of their theories(Chatterjee 2004; Hansen 1999; Inda 2005; Ong 1999; Taussig 1997).



A good example is Ong’s (2003) study. Ong’s theoretical choice toexamine how Foucault’s technologies of governance work in Cambodianimmigrants’ experience of citizenship in the USA is less a test of theoryand more of a plotting of the ‘concrete assemblages produced by convergingrationalities ...’ (p. 10). The first portion of the book deals with thehistorical situation in which thousands of Cambodians fled their countryand ended up in the USA. Combining historical documents with refugeenarratives, Ong shows the direct processes and causes of Pol Pot’s regimethat lead to people fleeing Cambodia. The rest of the book examines thepractices Cambodian refugees did and were exposed to and the technologiesof government that helped them negotiate the changes resulting frommoving to a postindustrial state. One particular practice centered aroundthe efforts to become self-reliant. The idea of self-reliance was stressed bymost of the institutions the refugees dealt with. Social services like welfarehelped with refugees transitioning from peasants to ‘low-wage workers’(p. 277). Health services taught refugees about regulating the body, especiallythrough birth control, These and other institutions all preached self-relianceas a necessary tool for survival in America. Ong discusses the difficultyand strategies many refugees used in their transition from top-down,repressive society in Cambodia to the self-regulatory, disciplinary lifestylethat various institutions kept insisting was how one should live in theUSA. The self-constitution of these refugees in America was governedthrough their encounters with state bureaucracies, religion, and work, allaiming to create productive members of society. Ong’s work ethnographicallydetails how Cambodian refugees became citizens; not just in the legalsense of citizenship, but also in the moral and ethical sense of howCambodians could become ‘worthy’ citizens.

Another exemplar is the study by Corbridge et al. (2005). Resultingfrom 3 years of research in Eastern India, the book combines results ofhousehold surveys, extensive taped interviews, but relies heavily on fieldobservations in five sites in three states. Like some of the contemporaryanthropological interventions discussed here, the book is engaged withFoucault, Scott, and a range of postcolonial theories. Reversing Scott’s (andFoucault’s) gaze on how states see populations, the study is concerned withhow the view from below, or ‘the myriad ways that the state comes into view’(2005, 7). The central arguments of the book are developed in its sectionson its fieldwork, carried out in sites where ‘pro-poor governance’ schemeswere carried out. The story is told in each community from three vantagepoints: from the point of view of encounters with development and‘empowerment’ schemes; from the point of view of career paths of civilservants; and finally, from the point of view of poor-state encounters that aremediated by local political societies. Participation in pro-poor participatoryschemes is slight, and largely understood as an ineffective vehicle. Some ofthe most interesting insights from the research have to do with the way thatstate-poor encounters are embedded in local political contexts. In one field



site in West Bengal, for example, an area dominated by the Communist Party(CPI-M), and where the poor are dependent on party elites, participation inlocal village councils did not directly impact major decisions, but the polit-ically charged atmosphere meant that acts of impropriety or embezzlementcame to light and occasioned political responses by the dominant party.

Political ethnography (3): The lived experience of the political

A third strand of political ethnography focuses on the everyday and itsrelationship to politics. Everyday life in relation to politics has no singularmeaning for these authors, but ethnographies have often highlighted howsome of the most seemingly mundane aspects of life become rooted inpolitics of the state or nation (in particular the nation). Here, statebureaucracies, social movements, or nongovernmental organizations are notnecessarily found. Sporting events (Navaro-Yashin 2002), ritual (Taussig1997), religious groups for women (Mahmood 2005), and even life in afactory and its housing (Pun 2005) all provide sites away from the stateand traditional social movements/civil society to show how deeply thepolitics of a nation imbues its subjects with certain discourses and practices.

Donham (1999) uses history and ethnography to study how the peopleof Maale dealt with the transitions of rule in Ethiopia, from anti-modernreligious missions to communist attempts at reform and modernization.Transitioning between Maale and Addis Ababa, Donham provides a richunderstanding of how state politics and policies emanating from the capitolaffect the everyday lives of people in a remote area of Ethiopia. In Turkey,Navaro-Yashin argued that secular and Islamic cultural and political forceswere found in some of the most mundane aspects of life in Turkey.Department stores, fashion shows, and markets all became venues wheresecularist and Islamic values could be marketed and made part of the‘normal’ politics and values of Turkey. Other spaces or more sacred nationalsymbols also became places for Turks to claim a secularist or Islamicidentity. For example, after the 1994 elections, when the secularist regimewas replaced by an Islamic one, there was an increase in the number ofstatues being built for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern(secular) Turkey. The increase, as Navaro-Yashin claims, comes from thefact that many secularists were worried about what would happen toTurkey with a religious political party in power, and wanted to ‘reproduceTurkey’s secularist history into the future’ (2002, 89). By claiming Ataturkas a symbol of secular Turkey, secularists attempted to portray the historyof the nation as a secular one, and cast the new Islamic regime as apossible threat to the history of the nation.

Wedeen’s (1999) study in Syria practiced a politics ‘as if ’ under Asad’sregime. Combining both archival research and ethnography, Wedeenexamines discourses, spectacles, and individuals’ interpretations of them to



understand how a repressive, totalitarian regime is able to remain in powerwith relatively little threats to power. Her theory rejects hegemony-basedand discipline-based theories on action, claiming that people in Syrianeither fully believe in what they do or say at political rallies or in frontof government officials, nor do they whole heartedly provide a counter-hegemonic politics. This ‘as if ’ can be seen in the spectators at publicevents meant to show the greatness of Asad and Syria. Even though Wedeenlearned that many of the participants secretly criticized the regime, theystill participated in the events as if they were staunch supporters of Asad.In this case, subjects are neither coerced nor disciplined to a real positivebelief in the regime. At the same time, no strong counterhegemonicmovement was present threatening to topple the regime. Instead, individualsnegotiated a space of relative domination and freedom by practicing apolitics of ‘as if ’ without fully accepting nor rejecting Asad’s regime.

Contexts of justification

Political ethnographies are a largely interdisciplinary affair. Even a cursorylook at citations in the ethnographies in this review will attest to a livelydebate across and against disciplinary and area-study boundaries. But politicalethnographers often write from within disciplines that vary in theirevaluations of what constitutes an acceptable contribution to knowledge orscience. According to the standards of positive science, which exert influencein political science and sociology, ethnographies are at a disadvantage:they can be lacking in terms of representativeness, reliability, and replicability(Burawoy 1998, 26). Here we briefly review disciplinary trends in howpolitical ethnographers justify their theoretical contributions.

In political science, where ethnographic methods are relatively rare,ethnography is often deployed as a means of providing a contextualized‘value added’ to studies on politics (Bayard de Volo and Schatz 2004; Fenno1986). There appear to be two main ways in which this ‘value added’ isgiven: through historicizing and contextualizing the ethnographic case(Laitin 1986; Pereira 1997; Rubin 1997; Schatz 2004), and by usingethnography in a mixed methods approach, where the multiple methodsare generally used to test some middle-range theory relevant to the case(Bayard de Volo 2001; Laitin 1986, 1998; Pereira 1997; Stokes 1995).Political scientists that use a mixed methods approach often combineethnographic fieldwork and interviews with survey data (Laitin 1998;Pereira 1997; Stokes 1995). This is generally done as a way to improvethe validity of a study (Bayard de Volo and Schatz 2004, 270). Tyingethnographic case data with either large national surveys or of surveys ofthe population being studied helps create results that speak not only to theparticularities of the site, but also to a broader spectrum. In some cases,the ethnographic data become less important to the whole narrative, andthe distinctiveness of ethnographic insights less central to the theoretical



claims. While at times mixed methods can produce a more thoroughknowledge of a population being studied, the reliance on nonethno-graphic methods can also push the insights of ethnography aside.

In sociology, ethnographies have a long-standing position within thediscipline, and while by no means a central method, ethnographies constitutean established approach. By and large, political ethnographers withinsociology do not claim their sites are representative, but do make broadertheoretical claims. A usual overture to disciplinary standards by politicalethnographers within sociology is to express appreciation for the limits oftheir case while emphasizing the additional insights gained by this casestudy. A master methodological trope for sociological–political ethnographiesis Burawoy’s proposal of the ‘extended case method’ (Burawoy 1991, 1998,2000), in which contradictions or empirical anomalies in the case takecenter stage and force our attention to the case at hand with a view toreconstructing theory. Explanations founded on historically specific casesare thus significant for the theory by virtue of their uniqueness (Burawoy1991, 280). Theoretical reconstructions in these ethnographies might bethought of as middle-range interventions, which are neither too broad intheoretical scope, nor too narrow in situating the circumstances.3

Political ethnographers within anthropology are least concerned withjustification or the standards of positive science because ethnography itselfis in a position of dominance within the discipline. Some of the ethno-graphies we review in this essay place a great deal of importance on sites,relegating theoretical claims to a lower priority. But contemporary ethno-graphers often make big theoretical claims. In contrast to authors withinsociology, contemporary political ethnographers within anthropology makebolder theoretical claims, dialoguing with ‘grand’ theories, as opposed toengaging with middle-range approaches. ‘This challenge,’ as Tsing (1993,31) notes, ‘requires turning one’s back on the analytic distinction betweentheory and ethnography, in which the former looks out confidently fromthe particularized and unself-conscious world of the latter.’ Anthropologistsare using their fieldwork to not only ‘test’ theories like an extended casemethod, but also to have a dialogue directly with entire theories, not justtestable fragments of larger theories (like theories on globalization, modern-ization, etc.). For example, Navaro-Yashin (2002) engages with Foucaultand Zizek to show how symbols of both the secular and Islamist regimesin have become a part of everyday life for people living in Turkey, andoffers reflections on the nature of modernity in that context. In thesecases, theory is used in a conversant sense – not tested, but used to explainthe situation and provide further insights into the theories used.

Conclusions

We concur with the evaluations of others who have examined the field,and agree that political ethnography can bring unique insights and that



political ethnographers are producing exciting studies that challenge receivedwisdom. Whether examining constituted political actors or simply eventsand moments that constitute the political, political ethnographers have atonce given us better understanding of actors and institutions as well aschallenged the presumed unity and coherence of these actors. Whetherinvestigating the fuzzy boundaries of categorical actors like states or socialmovements, the importance of meaning to political action, or the politicalnature of the everyday, political ethnographers continue to push ourunderstanding of politics forward. We have reviewed ethnographies ofrecognized political actors like social movements, ethnographies ofencounters with the state, and ethnographies of the every day that arepolitical.

We have also sketched out some disciplinary trends in the deploymentof political ethnography, and these might be thought of as disciplinarystyles. In reviewing and discussing these styles, it has not been our intentionto assert the superiority of one over another or even less, to reproducethe distinctions between them. Attention to what ethnographers dowhen they study politics and how they dialogue back to theory shows arange of styles and approaches. One need not subscribe to radicalphilosophy of science to recognize that these methodological stances tosome extent shape substantive findings. Political ethnographies withinpolitical science occupy the least privileged position within the threedisciplines. Nonetheless, these ethnographies stress the historical con-textualization needed to understand current political situations beingstudied. As a disciplinary style, we also find ethnographies being used inconjunction with other methods, with the intention of providingfuller, more complex, and possibly more valid or generalizable studies.Sociology gives us a nuanced method of testing theory with theextended case method, and political ethnographies in this style areattentive to extant theory but also call into question received wisdom.In anthropology, we find authors who are attentive to the everyday andwho bring a number of insights about its relationship to politics, oftenoutside of traditional settings like social movements or bureaucracies.In terms of relationship to theory, anthropology has authors who provideinsights based on careful interpretation of practices in sites and someauthors who engage in grander theorization; from this vantage point, thekind of theory testing of sociologists or political scientists might appearformalistic.

Short Biographies

Gianpaolo Baiocchi (PhD 2001: University of Wisconsin) writes onpolitics, culture, and theory. His most recent book, Militants and Citizens:The Politics of Participation in Porto Alegre, was published by StanfordUniversity Press.



Brian T. Connor is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the Universityof Massachusetts, Amherst. His primary research areas are culture, theory,and politics.

Notes

* Correspondence address: 240 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. Email: [email protected].

1 To be published as an edited volume.2 A small sampling of non-English works follows. In Portuguese, see Zaluar (1994) and Goldman(2003); in French, see Abeles (1989) and Briquet (1997); in Italian, see Gribualdi and Musella(1998) and Bassi (1996); in Spanish, see Isla and Taylor (1995) and Marcos (2006); in German,see Heidemann (2002) and Amborn (1993).3 General theory is used here as a foil of middle-range theory. Middle-range theorizing, madepopular by Merton ( [1949] 1967), follows the belief that older, grand theories were tooencompassing for empirically based social scientists to test. Less explanatory and grandiosetheories, based on particular contexts and settings, are offered as a better epistemological basefor social scientific research. General theory (or grand theory) does not specify the exact placeswhere the theory can or should be applied. It crosses contexts, settings, individuals, andinstitutions.

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the ethnos in the polis: political ethnography as a mode of inquiry

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