Among Wolves

Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power

Timothy Pachirat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351329620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Summoned by an anonymous Prosecutor, ten contemporary ethnographers gather in an aging barn to hold a trial of Alice Goffman's controversial ethnography, On the Run. But before the trial can get underway, a one-eyed wolfdog arrives with a mysterious liquid potion capable of rendering the ethnographers invisible in their fieldsites.

Presented as a play that unfolds in seven acts, the ensuing drama provides readers with both a practical guide for how to conduct immersive participant-observation research and a sophisticated theoretical engagement with the relationship between ethnography as a research method and the operation of power. By interpolating "how-to" aspects of ethnographic research with deeper questions about ethnography's relationship to power, this book presents a compelling introduction for those new to ethnography and rich theoretical insights for more seasoned ethnographic practitioners from across the social sciences. Just as ethnography as a research method depends crucially on serendipity, surprise, and an openness to ambiguity, the book's dramatic and dialogic format encourages novices and experts alike to approach the study of power in ways that resist linear programs and dogmatic prescriptions. The result is a playful yet provocative invitation to rekindle those foundational senses of wonder and generative uncertainty that are all too often excluded from conversations about the methodologies and methods we bring to the study of the social world.

ACT FIVE: A NATURAL HISTORY OF FIELDWORK¹

…the confusion of fieldwork, its inescapable reflexivity.

James Clifford, “Notes on (Field)notes” (1990: 54)

The field did to Maritya what the field always does: it scoured her and revealed the person underneath the encrusted layers of culture and ingrained habit and prejudice.

Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork: A Novel (2007: 37)

Scene

Lights come up on Piers Vitebsky, Karen Ho, and Timothy Pachirat walking with the wolfdog by the edge of Keuka Lake.

PIERS VITEBSKY: I’m so glad to be out of that barn. It was getting stuffy with all those ethnographers in there.

TIMOTHY PACHIRAT: It’s gorgeous here.

KAREN HO: Yes, something so pleasant about the combination of water, light, and vineyards.

TIMOTHY: This whole turn of events has been a bit mind-blowing. It was bizarre enough to receive that letter from The Prosecutor inviting us to meet here for a trial, but then to have a talking wolfdog show up on top of it?

PIERS [bending to pick up a smooth pebble]: I know, it’s certainly a strange set of circumstances to meet in.

[Skips pebble across the water. Wolfdog looks at the pebble skipping, then at Piers, and growls.]

TIMOTHY: She seems angry.

KAREN: Yes, she does. What’s it like, Piers, to have an ethnographic informant travel all this way, to meet you, as it were, on your own territory?

PIERS: It’s a nice reminder that the borders between our fieldsites and the rest of our lives are a lot more porous than we think they are. But I never thought I’d have that border crossed by a one-eyed wolfdog who can see the future!

TIMOTHY: I think it’s perfect. I’m increasingly interested in interspecies and multispecies relationships, and I think it’s fantastic that a very anthropocentric method, ethnography, is now faced with a crisis instigated by a future-telling canine.

KAREN [correcting him playfully]: Lupus-Canine.

TIMOTHY [repeating]: Lupus-Canine.

KAREN: So we only have a few hours to deliberate about the potion. Shall we get started?

PIERS [wearily]: Ah, I was hoping for some downtime. Candidly, I found a lot of our prior discussions a bit too abstract. Maybe I’m just romanticizing the past, but seems to me it used to be that ethnographers just went out and did their ethnographies. We didn’t sit around for years and publish untold quantities of books debating the meta-level theory and the power implications of the method. We just went out and did it!

KAREN [laughing]: Yeah, I hear you Piers. But there were all kinds of dangers in that kind of “just do it” approach as well, not least of which is that novice ethnographers often had no idea at all what they were up to!

PIERS: But isn’t that just it, though? Isn’t that process of figuring it out as you go part of the initiation rite into ethnography?

TIMOTHY: I certainly went through it. And let me tell you, it wasn’t enjoyable in the least.

PIERS: But what’s the alternative? That we claim to be able to actually prepare students for the inexhaustible range of things they will encounter in the field? Hey, students! Take my seminar, do these readings, follow steps A through Q, and presto, you are prepared for ethnography!

TIMOTHY [shaking his head slowly]: No, I don’t even think that’s what’s happening. I mean, it would be great if there were more opportunities for students to get a kind of practical, hands-on training. Not as a way of providing a formula, and not as a way of completely preparing them in some kind of ironclad sense, but in order to sensitize them to the kinds of enduring tensions they are likely to encounter.

KAREN: Right, a kind of condensed “natural history” of the ethnographic research process. And I agree with both of you, really. I do think, Piers, that what’s been happening lately, in anthropology training at least, is that we’ve become engrossed with meta-theoretical discussions about ethnography, and less concerned, or less able to be innocently concerned, with the conduct of ethnographic field research itself. And so, you do get courses on ethnography now where the discussion centers on the colonial legacies of ethnography and the legitimacy of the method itself, but without any observation exercises that would allow students to experience something of the method before they do fieldwork for their dissertation projects. Ironic for a method and discipline that place so much value on the experience-near!

TIMOTHY: I think it signals the conflicted place that anthropology finds itself in.

PIERS: It seems actual methods classes are now more likely to be taught outside of the discipline of anthropology, in places like sociology and even political science!

TIMOTHY: I think that’s accurate. In my political science graduate seminars on political ethnography, both at The New School and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a significant proportion of the students come from anthropology and sociology departments.

KAREN: Yes, I think there needs to be a balance, really, in any pedagogy about ethnography. It’s absolutely important to convey the conflicted history and the theoretical concerns about ethnography, and it’s also important to make sure that students have some experience of what it is to do immersive research. But it’s also important to acknowledge—and I think this is your point, Piers—that there’s no substitute for the actual conduct of ethnography itself and that much is often learned in the first full-bodied ethnographic research project that one undertakes, most often as a Ph.D. candidate.

TIMOTHY: It really is a central paradox of how ethnography is actually taught and reproduced, this sink-or-swim approach to training. Years of graduate coursework prepare students theoretically and conceptually for navigating the central questions of a discipline, but the actual doing of the ethnography is regarded as something of a make-or-break ritual, a coming-of-age, a trial by fire in which the researcher either is or is not successfully metamorphosed into an ethnographer.

KAREN: And in addition to the danger of failing to attain the coveted status of “ethnographer” in that trial by fire, there’s always an opposite danger, so well captured by Mischa Berlinski’s Martiya van der Leun in his lovely novel, Fieldwork.²

PIERS: Who?

KAREN: Martiya van der Leun. She’s a fictionalized anthropology Ph.D. student at Berkeley who travels to Northern Thailand to do research on animist beliefs amongst the highland peoples there. She ends up becoming so immersed in her research world that she murders one of the American Christian missionaries who is trying to persuade her research subjects that they can overcome the demonic spirits that control their lives by converting to Christianity.

TIMOTHY: Ah, yes, she “goes native.”

KAREN: Well, that’s a really racialized and colonialist catch phrase—“going native.” But, yes, the point is that she loses all perspective as a researcher. In essence, she gives up her positionality as a researcher.

TIMOTHY: In addition to the traditional trial-by-fire approach to fieldwork, with its attendant dangers of not quite being immersed enough and being overly immersed, there’s yet another irony in how ethnography is taught and reproduced.

KAREN: What’s that?

TIMOTHY: There’s no time like graduate school for the kind of headlong, complete immersion required by an ethnographic project. Post-Ph.D. fieldwork—the increasingly rare one-year sabbatical notwithstanding—tends to be less prolonged, less extensive, and more amenable to the rhythms of a professionalized academic life, not to mention the constraints of non-academic adulthood. Thus, the paradox that it’s one’s first experience of extended ethnographic fieldwork that ends up being the most formative in its consequences for one’s sense of self, reputation, and career.

PIERS: That’s so true. But as you know, in the case of The Reindeer People, I spent twenty years off and on amongst the Eveny in Siberia. During this time, my personal life also continued. In fact, I dedicate an entire chapter, “Bringing My Family,” to the experience of having my family live for a summer in one of the reindeer camps.

TIMOTHY: That’s one of the reasons why I think you’re an exception that proves this general rule, Piers.

PIERS: Yes, I was highly anxious about having my family there, but it was the only way I could continue to do immersive fieldwork and still be a part of their lives. More importantly, it represented a critically important opportunity to integrate two parts of my life. “My quest to understand the Eveny had taken me away from home for months at a time, year after year, and I felt that my family would be less likely to resent these people if they had lived with them…. Bringing together people from two separate parts of one’s life also involved another kind of risk. Would the herders and my family like each other? Would they judge each other by inappropriate standards? How would I keep my family from becoming anxious or unhappy, and showing me up in a bad light? How would their more direct behavior find common ground with Eveny reserve, and how might this affect my future research? Having studied the lives of these people who opened up their homes to me, I would now have my own intimate life scrutinized, under very demanding conditions. Not only might my family reveal aspects of me that I may have wished to conceal, they would also see through any persona I might have developed in front of the herders. Perhaps I was even more concerned with the effect on our hosts than on my family. On this landscape, even the smallest group of helpless outsiders would put a strain on the resources of a camp; I could always reason with the family later.”³

KAREN: It really is exemplary, Piers, what you did and how much of it you offer up to the reader, implicitly bringing in yet another set of eyes to watch you not only as an ethnographer, and not only as a father and a partner, but also as an ethnographer, father, and partner all at once! There is a lot of vulnerability in that chapter.

PIERS: I really didn’t see a choice, Karen. Rather than give up ethnographic fieldwork or give up my family, I decided to try to integrate the two as much as possible, and to make that integration a further source of reflection in the finished ethnography itself.

KAREN: You learned all kinds of things, both about the Eveny and about your own family, that you couldn’t and wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

TIMOTHY: A contrarian might ask, why is it laudable? Why is it necessarily better to bring one’s family to the field, much less to dedicate an entire chapter in your finished ethnography to that experience? But to me, those worries harken back to a fantastical mindset in which the ethnographer tries to be as unobtrusive and invisible as possible.

PIERS [chuckling]: An account, you could even say, enabled by an invisibility potion?

KAREN [laughing too]: Ha ha, good one, Piers! Way to stay on topic!

TIMOTHY [still deep in thought, as if the interruption hadn’t occurred]: I’m not suggesting that all et...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Preface
• Dramatis Personae
• Act One: Wolfdog
• Act Two: Fieldwork Invisibility Potion
• Act Three: Science Fantastic
• Act Four: Ethnography and Power
• Act Five: A Natural History of Fieldwork
• Act Six: The Trial
• Act Seven: Among Wolves
• References
• Index