Ethnographic Paradox

• In Event: 20209 - Flesh and Blood Sociology: Ethnographic Practice Today

Abstract

This paper evaluates the productivity of verbal accounts in ethnographic work—not so much for the consummate interviewer but for the emerging and inveterate ethnographer. The appraisal begins by evaluating the tendency, among ethnographers, to describe the method as “a way of seeing.” Ethnography’s ocular-orientation encourages the expectation that visualist data and analysis would robustly characterize ethnographic work in print. However, in some case quotation inundates textual representation. I identify the ethnographic paradox precisely as this incongruency between the ocular-centric conceptualization of the method and ethnographic text inundated by quotation. To give flesh to the paradox, we turn to a line-by-line reading of William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society, an extraordinary, classic work. Given a reading sensitive to sensorial description and context, Whyte’s ethnography points to the importance of other sensory powers that might improve strategies for validation, theory testing, and substantive advancement. The ethnographic paradox, in the end, suggests caution toward an over-reliance on denotative, transcription-like data. It gestures toward a need for invention of new metaphors to describe the method. By aligning conceptualization with practice, scholars may resolve paradoxical contradictions in current circulation.

Author

• Aaron Benavidez, Harvard University