On the Rhetoric and Politics of Ethnographic Methodology

In a variety of ways, all ethnographies are politically cast and policy relevant. Each of three recurrent political rhetorics is related to a unique set of fieldwork practices. Ethnographies that report holistically on journeys to “the other side†build policy/political significance by contesting popular stereotypes. Theoretical ethnographies draw on political imagination to fill in for a lack of variation in participant observation data and to model an area of social life without attempting to rule out alternative explanations. Comparative analytic studies build political relevance by revealing social forces that are hidden by local cultures. Each of these three genres of ethnographic methodology faces unique challenges in relating fieldwork data to politically significant explanations. By shaping the ethnographer’s relations to subjects and readers, each methodology also structures a distinctive class identity for the researchers—as worker, as aristocrat, or as bourgeois professional.