Abstract
All matters related to ethnography flow from a decision that originates at the very beginning of the research process—the selection of the basic object of analysis—and yet fieldworkers pay scant attention to this crucial task. As a result, most take as their starting point bounded entities delimited by location or social classification and in so doing restrict the kinds of arguments available to them. This article presents the alternative of relational ethnography. Relational ethnography involves studying fields rather than places, boundaries rather than bounded groups, processes rather than processed people, and cultural conflict rather than group culture. While this approach comes with its own set of challenges, it offers an ethnographic method that works with the relational and processual nature of social reality.
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Notes
These days, it seems every sociologist thinks herself or himself a relational thinker (Fourcade 2007; Swartz 2013). Perhaps this is especially true of ethnographers. But simply observing the social world, notebook in hand, does not automatically promote relational sociology. We can analyze ethnographically social interaction without adopting a relational perspective. We can study social relationships in an un-relational way.
Burawoy (1991, pp. 273, 280) comes close—even mentioning the “orienting level of analysis” adopted by various ethnographic approaches and comparing extended case method’s “object of analysis” with grounded theory’s—while stopping short of calling into question the fundamental constitution of ethnographic objects. Burawoy’s eye is trained on the relation between the ethnographic case and theory, historical processes, and macro-structural forces. By “orienting level of analysis,” Burawoy means an argument’s relation to the micro or macro; by “object of analysis,” he means the stuff fieldworkers use to make arguments. The present essay, by contrast, deals with a level of analysis a few strata below those taken up by Burawoy. If Burawoy is concerned primarily with the back end of ethnographic methodology—how fieldworkers use data to make arguments and amend theory—I am concerned primarily with the front end: how fieldworkers construct their basic objects of analysis. For Burawoy, it is not important that one chooses to study a group of ironworkers, only that one selects a group that maximizes the potential for theoretical reconstruction and that one “seeks to uncover the macro foundations” of the workers’ lives (p. 282). For me, it is important that one chooses to study a group of ironworkers.
Who cannot help but wonder, after reading such a captivating account, if the field site found the ethnographer not the other way around? Anthropologists of the classical generation often reserved their most sentimental language for “the encounter.” Here is Malinowski (1984 [1922], p. 4): “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dingy which has brought you sails away out of sight.” Here is Powdermaker (1966, p. 51): “This way my first night in Lesu alone. As I sat on the veranda of my thatched-roofed, two-room house in the early evening … I asked myself, ‘What on earth am I doing here, all alone and at the end of the world?’”
Yet another approach to the study of how organizational actors coordinate action involves tracing the trajectories of organizational actors across fields to increase understanding of organizational fit, misfires, and the social production of certain ways of thinking. Glaeser (2000) observes how outlooks and mannerisms cultivated by East and West Germans before the fall of the Berlin Wall continue to divide Germans postunification. Desmond (2007) shows how the upbringings of rural, working-class men imbibe them with certain skills and dispositions that prepare and precondition them for working dangerous and demanding jobs.
Deener (2012) is a contemporary example of a relational ethnography of the ecological variety. Citing Zorbaugh as a model, Deener describes his approach like this: “If I wanted to make sense of this Los Angeles community where immigration, homelessness, countercultural movements, gentrification, and African American segregation have converged in close proximity, I needed to study different neighborhoods, think more clearly about what is happening in each one, and examine the relationships between them” (pp. xii-xiii).
In Burawoy’s (1998, pp. 16, 2) approach, ethnographic inquiry is steered by “our favorite theory … [which] can span the range from the folk theory of participants to an abstract law. We require only that scientists consider it worth developing. … The extended case method … [aims] to extract the general from the unique, to move from the ‘micro’ to the ‘macro’, and to connect the present to the past in anticipation of the future, all by building on preexisting theory.” Nothing could be more straightforward than suggesting ethnography should be informed from the start by something that is known about the social world (also known as “theory”) and that it seek to deepen and extend that knowledge. What is of more concern from the perspective of this essay is Burawoy’s (1991, p. 282) charging fieldworkers to discover the “macro foundations” of the “micro” world. This position privileges the macro over the micro, seeing the macro as that which is global, causal, and historical and the micro as that which is local, descriptive, and current (Katz 2002; Tavory and Timmermans 2009). Accordingly, it encourages ethnographers to modify systemic accounts of social life that revolve around macro constructions (e.g., nation-state) and explain human interaction by reference to external forces generated by those constructions. The field site is always a “case” or “instance” of something larger, and the ethnographer can observe effects but cannot document causes. Yet, as Collins (1988, pp. 245–246) has argued, “the macro-social world … consists of human beings interacting; what is macro is their patterns across time and space. … To speak of a ‘world system’ or anything else is just a gloss, a verbal category we use for convenience in summarizing such patterns.” The structure is in the social relations; connections between micro situations are the building blocks of macro patterns. This perspective is not reductionist—Collins repeatedly points out the irreducibility of some macro features—nor does it lead us to the “interactionist” or “ethnographic” fallacy, whereby you “define reality [only] by what you see” (Duneier 1999, p. 343): history, theory, and social-scientific knowledge are crucial to constructing the ethnographic object. But it does privilege transactional accounts built on relational mechanisms. “In a relational view, inequality[, for example,] emerges from asymmetrical social interactions in which advantages accumulate on one side of the other, fortified by construction of social categories that justify and sustain unequal advantage. … Explanation of inequality and its changes must therefore concentrate on identifying combinations and sequences of causal mechanisms—notably exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation—within episodes of social interaction” (Tilly 2005, pp. 100, 107).
More than anyone else, ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts have “buried themselves in the fullest detail of the object”—by refusing, e.g., “to dismiss what persons said or how they said it as ‘just as manner of speaking’” (Schegloff 2007, p. 465)—and in so doing have shown that the categories people deploy in everyday conversation can illuminate the broader social relations around which they organize their lives. As Zimmerman and Wieder (1977, p. 199) learned in their insightful ethnography of marijuana smoking, for example, “treating informants’ statements as quasi-social-scientific observations diverts attention from a research task prior to the determination of the truth of a given account, namely, the specification of how to hear remarks like, ‘You can’t help but get stoned,’ or ‘smoking is spontaneous,’ that is to locate their sense within the context of the social arrangements of which they are a part and which they describe. Such statements are not so much propositions advancing truth-claims as they are instructions informing the initiate or the outsider how to ‘see’ or ‘understand’ events from the point of the native.”
One can begin with a group or place but not end there. A fieldworker may start by setting herself or himself down among a particular group or within a particular neighborhood, but as the fieldwork progresses, she or he may branch out to other groups, settings, and contexts, exploring other positions in the field. What begins as a group- or place-ethnography may transform into a relational inquiry.
In other words, if Whyte was surprised it was because his conception of what constituted a “slum” was the same as that of city planners. Constructing one’s object of analysis offers the researcher an opportunity to break with such common preconceptions and to increase one’s mindfulness of the assumptions that undergird research questions. But this does not mean that we should always avoid addressing directly questions initially formed by policymakers or vocal segments of the public. Doing that would risk undermining sociology’s contribution to the public conversation and one of ethnography’s primary warrants: to challenge stereotypes about stigmatized groups and humanize the degraded (Katz 1997). And it would be wrong to think that questions that emerged from social-scientific research and theory were not themselves products of cultural presuppositions created within one’s own discipline. This is why Bourdieu (2000 [1997]) observes that common sense assumptions preconstruct our objects of inquiry at three distinct levels. The first level concerns our social unconscious, our race, class, gender, education, religion, and so on—our position in the social space. The second level concerns our disciplinary unconscious, how our training as sociologists or anthropologists profoundly shapes what we see and fail to see in the field. The third level concerns the scholastic unconscious: the collection of unspoken presuppositions that accompany the intellectual’s privilege “to withdraw from the world so as to think it” (Emirbayer and Desmond 2012, forthcoming). Breaking with the first level only to overlook the second and third just means choosing one type of presupposition (e.g., intellectual) over another (e.g., social). The goal is to attempt to master one’s presuppositions as much as possible; to be critical about the terms we employ; and sometimes to pose different questions from those prepackaged for us.
This saying—a twist on Durkheim’s (1982 [1895], p. 35) well-known injunction that “social facts must be treated as things”—has been attributed to Melvin Pollner (Douglas Maynard, personal communication, May 24, 2010).
People respond to structural conditions, like food scarcity or concentrated disadvantage, with patterned actions and beliefs. Lewis (1959) thought those patterned actions and beliefs themselves become sentient and help to reinforce the conditions that originally produced them. It is in this moment of sentience that those actions and beliefs are thought to constitute something like a “culture”—enduring and shared views and practices—instead of something more fleeting and circumstantially necessary. Omitted from this model are institutions that occupy a space between people and structural conditions and that encode disadvantage in peoples’ language, habits, belief systems, and practices. Resource-poor schools in low-income neighborhoods often leave children with subpar language and critical thinking skills (Paulle 2013). Those deficits will remain even if those children relocate to safe and wealthy neighborhoods later in life. To think of those school-conditioned speech patterns and belief systems as evidence of a “culture of poverty,” the invention of poor families themselves, is to overlook the mark left by broken cultural institutions through which low-income families pass. We do not think that the rich are rich because they invented a “culture of affluence” but because they pass through elite institutions that modify their behavior, habits, and worldviews, and this constellation of skills and ways of being, in turn, eases their entrance into other elite institutions (Khan 2012). What might be viewed as a “culture of affluence” is, simply, affluence; and “many of the features alleged to characterize the culture of poverty…are simply definitions of poverty itself” (Stack 1974, p. 23). Students seeking to understand the cultural dimensions of economic deprivation, stability, or luxury would gain more from mapping the linked ecology of institutions that help determine one’s social trajectory than presupposing the existence of bounded economic groups with shared values and practices.
It is telling that Abbott’s (1997) essay championing a kind of relational sociology that values spatial and temporal contexts begins by reviewing Chicago School ethnographies that pioneered such an approach but ends by promoting only historical and quantitative methods, as if contemporary ethnography has nothing to contribute to this perspective.
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Acknowledgments
For thoughtful comments on previous drafts, I thank Javier Auyero, Rogers Brubaker, Sébastien Chauvin, Jane Collins, Mustafa Emirbayer, Marion Fourcade, Colin Jerolmack, Jack Katz, Michèle Lamont, Ching Kwan Lee, Douglas Maynard, Ashley Mears, Andrew Papachristos, Iddo Tavory, Christopher Winship, the Theory and Society reviewers, seminar participants at the University of Amsterdam and UCLA, and students in my Ethnographic Fieldwork seminar.
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Desmond, M. Relational ethnography. Theor Soc 43, 547–579 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9232-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9232-5