Table Of ContentNew Perspectives in Political Ethnography
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New Perspectives
in Political Ethnography
Edited by
Lauren Joseph
Department of Sociology
Stony Brook University
Matthew Mahler
Department of Sociology
Stony Brook University
Javier Auyero
Department of Sociology
Stony Brook University
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Lauren Joseph Matthew Mahler
Sociology Dept. Sociology Dept.
SUNY-Stony Book SUNY-Stony Brook
Stony Brook 11794-4356 Stony Brook 11794-4356
Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected]
Other Email: Qualitative_Sociology@notes.
cc.sunysb.edu
Javier Auyero
Sociology Dept.
SUNY-Stony Brook
Stony Brook 11794-4356
Email: [email protected]
ISBN-13: 978-0-387-72593-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-0-387-72594-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007931383
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Contents
Introduction: Politics under the Ethnographic Microscope. . . . . . . . . 1
Javier Auyero and Lauren Joseph
1. From Confusion to Common Sense: Using Political Ethnography
to Understand Social Mobilization in the Brazilian Northeast. . . . . . . 14
Wendy Wolford
2. Losing Face in Philippine Labor Confrontations: How Shame
May Inhibit Worker Activism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Rosanne Rutten
3. Radical Outcasts Versus Three Kinds of Police: Constructing
Limits in Japanese Anti-Emperor Protests. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Patricia G. Steinhoff
4. Honor and Morality in Contemporary Rural India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Pamela Price
5. Routing Confl ict: Organized Violence and Clientelism
in Rio de Janeiro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Enrique Desmond Arias
6. Vicious Virtuous Circles: Barriers to Institution-Building
after War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Tammy Smith
7. Are National Politics Local? Social Movement Responses
to the 2004 US Presidential Election. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
Kathleen M. Blee and Ashley Currier
vv
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vi Contents
8. Professional Performances on a Well-Constructed Stage:
The Case of an Institutionalized Advocacy Organization. . . . . . . . . . . 180
Mirella Landriscina
9. Field Research During War: Ethical Dilemmas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Elisabeth Jean Wood
10. Politics as a Vocation: Notes Toward a Sensualist
Understanding of Political Engagement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Matthew Mahler
11. Afterword: Political Ethnography as Art and Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Charles Tilly
About the Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
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Contributors
Enrique Desmond Arias, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of
New York, New York
Javier Auyero, Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook,
New York
Kathleen M. Blee, Department of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania
Ashley Currier, Department of Sociology and Women’s Studies, Texas A&M
University, College Station, Texas
Lauren Joseph, Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook,
New York
Mirella Landriscina, Department of Social Sciences, St. Joseph’s College, Brook-
lyn, New York
Matthew Mahler, Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook,
New York
Pamela Price, Department of South Asian History, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Rosanne Rutten, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of
Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tammy Smith, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Stony
Brook, Stony Brook, New York
Patricia G. Steinhoff, Department of Sociology, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii
Charles Tilly, Department of Social Sciences, Columbia University, New York,
New York
Wendy Wolford, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Elisabeth Jean Wood, Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut
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Introduction: Politics under the
Ethnographic Microscope
Javier Auyero and Lauren Joseph
Go and sit in the lounges of the luxury hotels and on the door-
steps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on
the slum shakedown; sit in the Orchestra Hall and the Star and
Garter Burlesque. In short, gentlemen, go get the seat of your
pants dirty in real research.
Robert Park
The revival of ethnographic research within sociology is undisputed. New journals, new
books from major presses, and new hires at top research departments all attest to the
renewal, growth, and increasing relevance of the ethnographic craft among sociologists.
As ethnography is (re)gaining a well-deserved prominence within the discipline its
empirical focus, theoretical underpinnings, and narrative styles are also expanding – tra-
ditional forms of ethnographic inquiry now coexist with more experimental ones.
From dealing drugs (Bourgois 1995), to emigrating and immigrating (Fitzgerald
2006; Smith 2006), prostituting (Murphy and Venkatesh 2006), working off the
books (Venkatesh 2006), boxing (Wacquant 2003a), dancing (Wainwright et al.
2005), glassblowing (O’Connor 2006), designing objects (Molotch 2005), provid-
ing services in luxury hotels (Sherman 2007), and street vending (Duneier 2000) –
the list of activities and subjects upon which ethnography has focused its attention
in recent years is virtually inexhaustible. Ethnographers have been heeding Park’s
advice: they have gotten the seat of their pants dirty in a myriad of places, research-
ing all sorts of (more or less exotic) practices.
Yet, at a time when few, if any, objects are beyond the reach and scrutiny of
ethnographers, it is quite surprising that politics and its main protagonists (state offi-
cials, politicians, and activists) remain largely un(der)studied by ethnography’s main-
stream. It is indeed fair to say that both routine (party, union, NGO) and contentious
(social movement and other forms of collective action) politics are far from the top of
contemporary ethnography’s agenda. One figure should suffice to illustrate politics’
marginal status among sociological ethnography: out of 215 articles published in the
last 10 years in sociology’s main journal devoted to ethnography, the Journal of
Contemporary Ethnography, only 15 focus on politics as their main subject (see
Hunter 1993; Ostrander 1993 for some of the few prior exceptions). It is time to move
politics out of the shadows and into the center of ethnographic attention.
1
L. Joseph et al. (eds.), New Perspectives in Political Ethnography.
© Springer 2007
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2 J. Auyero and L. Joseph
True, during the last decades a number of notable books have ethnographically
explored the workings of both ordinary and extraordinary forms of political action.
James Scott (1987), Robert Gay (1994), Faye Ginsburg (1989), Paul Lichterman
(1996), Nina Eliasoph (1998), Richard Wood (2002), Ben Kerkvliet (2005), Adam
Ashforth (2005), and Gianpaolo Baiocchi (2005) are some of the authors who
come, or should come, immediately to mind; but these writings are too few and too
far between to constitute a coherent corpus of ethnographic work – similar to the
body of, say, ethnographies of poverty enclaves (Bourgois 1995; Sharff 1998;
Newman 2000; Venkatesh 2002; Dohan 2003; Young 2003) or factory life (expanding
from Roy ([1954] 2006) through Burawoy (1982) to Salzinger (2003) ).
Let us take a very basic, agreed-upon, definition of ethnography as:
social research based on the close-up, on-the-ground observation of people and institutions
in real time and space, in which the investigator embeds herself near (or within) the
phenomenon so as to detect how and why agents on the scene act, think and feel the way
they do (Wacquant 2003b, p. 5).
One would expect that this mode of inquiry would be one of the preferred tools
among those for whom the study of politics is their profession – that is, political
scientists and political sociologists. After all, ethnography is uniquely equipped to
look microscopically at the foundations of political institutions and their attendant
sets of practices, just as it is ideally suited to explain why political actors behave
the way the do and to identify the causes, processes, and outcomes that are part and
parcel of political life. But here, as with many other scholarly matters, common sense
serves as a less than reliable guide. A closer examination reveals that ethnography is
far from the favorite mode of analysis among political scientists and political
sociologists, for whom surveys, secondary data (usually culled from newspapers),
formal modeling, and statistical approaches constitute the standard methodological
tools. To witness: peruse the issues of the American Journal of Political Science and
the American Political Science Review for the last 10 years (1996–2005). Out of a total
number of 569 and 369 articles, respectively, only one article relies on ethnography as a
data-production technique (Soss 1999). Unfortunately, however, in concentrating,
almost exclusively, on the models, charts, regressions, and correlations of standard
political research, social science has missed a significant aspect of the ongoing reality
that is politics: namely it has missed the nitty-gritty details of politics, its “day-to-day
intricacies” (Baiocchi 2005, p. 16), its “implicit meanings” (Lichterman 1998), its
passions, and its sacrifices (Mahler, this volume); in other words, the pace of politi-
cal action, the texture of political life, and the plight of political actors have all been
cast into the shadows created by the unnecessary and deleterious overreliance on
quantitative methods in both political science and political sociology.
This volume aims to address this double absence: of politics in ethnographic
literature and of ethnography in studies of politics. Focusing on case studies from
around the world, the chapters in this book draw upon close-up observation of politics
in action to scrutinize the dispositions, skills, desires, and emotions of a variety of
political actors and the meanings that they attach to their practices.
Large-scale political transformations have ground-level sources and effects. The
ethnographic microscope serves to capture these quite well. We do not believe that
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Introduction: Politics under the Ethnographic Microscope 3
ethnography is the only way of studying politics. But the chapters included here
reinforced our conviction that ethnography provides the “thickest” form of political
information (Geertz 1973; Ortner 2006).
The chapters included in this volume are significantly revised and expanded ver-
sions of chapters first published in a double special issue of the journal Qualitative
Sociology. In their attention to the microscopic aspects of politics, the chapters in
this volume demonstrate that ethnography is particularly well-equipped to capture
“the practice of politics (strategic choices), the signification of these practices (cul-
ture/meaning-making)” as they unfold (Blee and Currier, this volume), and the confu-
sions, emotions, and uncertainties that, although inherent in all forms of political
action, conventional political analysis tends to dismiss (or ignore) as either “noise”
or anecdotal information with no relevance for what “really” matters (Wolford, this
volume). Ethnography is also particularly useful to capture changing and/or persist-
ent beliefs and their relationship to specific practices (Price, Rutten, Smith, all this
volume) and the nitty-gritty details and effects of different forms of political action,
networks, and tactics (Arias, Landriscina, Steinhoff, all this volume).
There are three other areas to which political ethnography can make a really
useful contribution. Since they are not covered in the chapters included in this book,
we would like to briefly summarize what we see as research topics for future
ethnographic research on politics. Let us call them: repertoires-in-the-making,
clandestine-connections-count, and official-rhetoric-confronts-daily-experience.
Repertoires-in-the-Making
Understood as the set of routines by which people get together to act on their shared
interests, the notion of repertoire of collective action (first coined by Tilly 1977, and
then deployed by a series of scholars, Traugott 1995) invites us to examine patterns
of collective claim-making, regularities in the ways in which people band together to
make their demands heard, across time and space. The notion brings together
different levels of analysis ranging from large-scale changes such as the develop-
ment of capitalism (with the subsequent proletarianization of work) and the process
of state-making (with the parallel growth of the state’s bulk, complexity, and
penetration of its coercive and extractive power) to patterns of citizen–state interaction.
This term exhorts us to conceptually hold together macrostructures and microprocesses
by looking closely at the ways in which big changes indirectly shape collective
action by affecting the interests, opportunities, organizations, and identities of
ordinary people. Furthermore, the notion makes clear the need for a simultaneous
analysis of diachrony and synchrony with its emphasis on both the forms of protest
and at their transformation.
The term repertoire is eminently political and cultural. Political, in that this
set of contentious routines (1) emerges from continuous struggles against the state,
(2) has an intimate relationship with everyday life and routine politics, and (3) is
constrained by patterns of state repression. Cultural, in that it focuses on people’s
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