Toward a Speculative Ethnography

• In Event: 35.067 - Rethinking Ethnography in the Posthuman Turn

Abstract

Objective
The paper explores the influence of speculative, materialist and posthuman theory on qualitative methodology, and considers the implications for ethnography as one of its founding frameworks. It asks how ethnography might be transformed by incorporating a speculative analysis of its own metaphysical grounds, and considers how a speculative ethnographic method might contribute to posthuman and process-oriented ontologies. What happens to ethnography when it gives up the colonial project of observation, description and categorisation in favour of empirical and ontological experimentation? The paper draws on Whitehead’s non-anthropocentric concept of ‘societies' to propose an ethnography that accounts for both the speculative and the empirical dimensions of social processes. Specifically, the paper proposes ‘speculative interpretation’ as a method for attending to more than human societies across scales, dimensions, and temporalities of experience.

Theoretical Framework
The paper draws on process-orientated philosophy (Deleuze, 2001; Whitehead, 1978) to investigate how ethnographic methods are changing - possibly beyond recognition - under the influence of speculative and posthuman ontologies. It addresses the problematic status of the social within Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy (eg Deleuze and Guattari, 1991) where, in contrast to philosophy, art and science, the social sciences lack positive determination (Brown, 2009) and are too often perceived as the ‘orphan stepchildren’ of continental theory (Bonta, 2009). It is here that Whitehead’s (1978, 1967) speculative empiricism introduces alternative possibilities for studying the social outside of anthropocentric and humanistic conventions. Whitehead’s notion of ‘society’ applies to all forms of experiential assemblages that share a common causal lineage, regardless of spatio-temporal scale, degree of sentience, or gradation of complexity. Thus, a human body/mind would be considered a society, as would a carbon dioxide molecule, a classroom full of children, or a grove of trees.

Three key requirements for a speculative ethnography are considered: (a) moving beyond restricted conceptions of the social sciences as the domain of common-sense, communication and professional servitude to the state; (b) the study of inhuman societies of which the human forms an irreducible element, and (c) methods that account for both the speculative and empirical dimensions of the social.

Mode of Inquiry and Data Sources
The paper is primarily conceptual, but also reassembles some fragments of qualitative data from completed ethnographic studies in schools, universities, and community spaces, to exemplify the notion of speculative interpretation.

Argument
The paper proposes a revised conceptualisation of interpretation as speculative practice, capable of addressing the critiques of representationalism and anthropocentrism that have been levelled at ethnography. Speculative interpretation decentres the agency of the human interpreter, orients to expression as force and generative intensity rather than representation (Lecercle, 2002), and taps into the virtual dimension of social processes and events. The paper argues that the liminal status of ethnography can move between the materiality of immersion in ‘the field’ and the virtuality of concept formation and ontological experimentation.

Significance
The paper contributes to the development of a genuinely speculative empiricism for social research, and asserts the continuing contribution that ethnographic method can offer in the wake of the ontological turn.

Authors

• Maggie Maclure, Manchester Metropolitan University

• David Rousell, Manchester Metropolitan University