Expert for a Day: The Ethnography of Experts, Elites, and Other Non-Subalterns

• In Event: 422 - Regular Session. Ethnography/Ethnographic Studies 1

Abstract

Ethnography has garnered renewed recognition and increased methodological reflection within sociology. A central concern of current debates has been ethnography’s status and the nature of its claims. Can ethnography – typically bounded in time, space, and scope – speak to larger debates, if not theory, and if so, how? Various essays over the past decade have sought to define and promulgate new analytics and horizons for sociological ethnography. What this most recent discussion within sociology has not had, in contrast to neighboring fields like anthropology, is sustained critical discussion on the relationship between the social status of ethnographers and that of their subjects, particularly when “studying up.” In this essay, we make a case for the value and specificity of the sociological ethnography of non-subalterns and track the implications of this move. Echoing C. Wright Mills, we argue for the importance of ethnographies of the socially powerful and their worlds and that this more symmetrical approach can provide insights made unavailable by the exclusive focus on the poor or disenfranchised. We maintain that with the move toward the ethnography of non-subalterns research becomes more complicated as the researcher can no longer claim a monopoly on issues of representation and as sites and vernaculars become less accessible. This exercise suggests a more reflexive and empirically eclectic ethnographic practice that challenges assumptions of sociologists grown lazy on the study of the less powerful. Ultimately, our paper mediates on the promise and politics of ethnography in an era dominated by experts and elites.

Authors

• Diana Bevin Graizbord, Brown University

• Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, Brown University

• Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Brown University