shadowing: warrants for intersituational variation in ethnography

Article

Shadowing: Warrantsfor IntersituationalVariation in Ethnography

David Trouille1 and Iddo Tavory2

Abstract

This article makes the case for shadowing as ethnographic methodology:focusing attention on what occurs as interlocutors move among settings andsituations. Whereas ethnographers often zoom in on one principal set ofsituations or site, we argue that intersituational variation broadens anddeepens the researcher’s ethnographic account as well as affording impor-tant correctives to some common inferential pitfalls. We provide fourwarrants for shadowing: (a) buttressing intersituational claims, (b) deepeningethnographers’ ability to trace meaning making by showing how meaningsshift as they travel and how such shifts may affect interlocutors’ under-standings, (c) gaining leverage on the structure of subjects’ social worlds, and(d) helping the ethnographer make larger causal arguments. We show theuse value of these considerations through an analysis of violence and informalnetworks in an ethnography of immigrant Latinos who met to socialize andplay soccer in a Los Angeles park.

Keywords

ethnography, intersituational variation, interaction, immigration, violence

1 James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA2 New York University, New York City, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

David Trouille, James Madison University, 204 Sheldon Hall, MSC 7501, Harrisonburg, VA

22801, USA.

Email: [email protected]

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The article makes the case for shadowing as ethnographic methodology:

focusing attention on what occurs as interlocutors move among settings and

situations. Whereas ethnographers often zoom in on one principal site—the

proverbial ‘‘street corner’’ that was the inspiration for much of the socio-

logical tradition of ethnography—we argue that intersituational variation

(Tavory and Timmermans 2013) broadens and deepens the ethnographic

account by tracing how selves and meanings emerge and provides new

insights into social worlds and processes. More specifically, shadowing

focuses attention on the methodological and theoretical import of one form

of intersituational variation—the ongoing movement among social contexts

that marks the lives of all but those encapsulated in total institutions (E.

Goffman 1961).

Throughout the article, we argue that while sustained attention to one site

produces the ‘‘thick description’’ that distinguishes ethnographic research

and allows ethnographers to show how meaning emerges in interaction, it

can also limit and mislead the researcher. While some questions are best

answered within the boundaries of one situation, circumscribing the research

in such a way can lead to faulty assumptions about the broader meaning of

our observations. Ethnographers, for example, all too easily assume that

action in one situation translates to similar actions in another or fail to see

how an unspoken awareness of other contexts of action shapes both meaning

and selfhood even in the situations they richly describe. And while attending

to intersituational variation is no panacea, it provides some important

correctives.

With the rich discussions of method in ethnography, the relative neglect of

this form of intersituational variation is surprising. Even when ethnographers

write about the importance of getting beyond a particular set of situations,

they often do so not by tracing the way people move among situations in their

everyday lives, but by following immigration trajectories, or how objects

take shape and are transformed in commodity chains (see, e.g., Haugerud,

Stone, and Little 2000; Tsing 2004). And, even when ethnographers do trace

the movement among contexts in everyday life, the methodological reasons

for doing so are underplayed. Thus, the discussions of moving among situa-

tions in transnational ethnographies of global elites seem to assume that

when the lives we look at are ‘‘local,’’ one situation will do (see, Hannerz

2003); similarly, Duneier’s (1999) call for an ‘‘extended place method,’’

while important, aims not so much to provide intersituational variation, but

to check on our data, much as a good investigative journalist would do. The

closest discussion in ethnographic methodology has been the call for mobile

methods (see, e.g., Kusenbach 2003, 2012), meant to supplement the usual

2 Sociological Methods & Research



locations of urban ethnography. Yet this is but one form of intersituational

variation, with a highly specific set of ethnographic warrants: the attempt to

uncover the lived phenomenology of space (see Kusenbach 2003; see also

Katz 1997).

The relative paucity of methodological writings does not, of course, mean

that shadowing is a novel endeavor. Some ethnographers do follow their

research subjects across settings and situations (see, e.g., Duneier 1999; A.

Goffman 2014; Shapira 2013; Smith 2006, 2014); many other ethnographers

conduct some form of shadowing. And yet, in most ethnographies, these

forays are brief, conducted during the later stages of research, and are pre-

sented as more of an afterthought than as a primary source of data. The real

action, so to speak, rarely extends beyond the situational walls of the research

site, despite ethnographers’ professed interest in painting a wider picture than

that available from the particulars of the site.

Thus, for example, in two deservedly well-regarded ethnographies—A

Place on the Corner (Anderson 1978) and Slim’s Table (Duneier 1992)—

the authors present observations taken away from the bar and restaurant they

studied as a way to buttress the narrative they tell about the African American

men they spent time with. Anderson goes to a party with one of the friends he

made on the corner; Duneier goes to the home of his primary interlocutor. In

both cases, these forays are not often repeated or systematic. And yet, some

of the most memorable and meaningful data emerge from the ethnogra-

phers’ short ventures away from the principal site of study. Shadowing in

both these cases deepens the readers’ understanding of the site the ethnogra-

phers initially describe and how it fits into the subjects’ ongoing lives. In

Anderson’s case, it allows him to show the anxieties of social status as his

friend presents him as his educated ‘‘cousin,’’ which then reflects back on the

fragile bravado of the street corner. In Duneier’s case, it allows him to deepen

his account of his interlocutor’s enactment of respectability and ties the diner

and home into an interlocking moral project of self.

If shadowing can potentially be both analytically important and shed light

on the characters the ethnographer describes, why is it relatively rare? If it

provides some of the best ethnographers with some of their most luminous

data, why is there so little discussion of it? While part of the answer has to do

with the specific theoretical aims of the ethnographer, another has to do with

the more practical concerns. To put it bluntly, following interlocutors across

multiple settings and situations is hard work. Shadowing requires the ethno-

grapher to develop new relationships and entry points which can take con-

siderable time and emotional effort. And then, there’s the equally pragmatic

question of where to go and whom to follow, as possibilities can appear

Trouille and Tavory 3



endless. Understandably, many ethnographers generally focus on one setting

or activity.

Despite these practical concerns, we argue that there are good theoretical

and empirical reasons to shadow interlocutors across settings and situations.

We present four intertwined warrants for shadowing as ethnographic meth-

odology: (a) buttressing intersituational claims that ethnographers routinely

make but more rarely empirically defend; (b) deepening our ability to trace

meaning making by showing how meanings shift as they travel and how such

shifts may affect interlocutors’ initial understandings—thickening the work

of thick description; (c) allowing us to gain leverage on the structure of

subjects’ social worlds by outlining the ways in which people expect mean-

ings to shift, and the patterned ways in which they understand meanings in

relation to each other; and (d) helping the ethnographer make the case that

the general condition that they study (e.g., poverty, racial segregation, and

migration) affects disparate facets of subjects’ lives, thus strengthening the

claim that the condition powerfully shapes their world—a claim that is

hampered when ethnographers focus on only one facet of their interlocutors’

lives.

The rest of the article spells out these warrants theoretically and then uses

the empirical work of one of the authors—an ethnography of immigrant

Latinos who met to socialize and play soccer in a Los Angeles park—in

order to demonstrate the intellectual utility of such an approach.

First Warrant: Shoring up Intersituational Claims

As ethnographers intermittently point out, one of the strengths of participant

observation is that rather than accessing what people say in experience-

distant situations (such as surveys or interviews), the ethnographer witnesses

what people actually do. In its latest incarnation, the problem of extrapolat-

ing action from such contexts of talk has been dubbed ‘‘the attitudinal fal-

lacy’’ (Jerolmack and Khan 2014). Interviews and surveys, the authors argue,

provide researchers with access to vocabularies of motives (see Mills 1940)

or, at best, general attitudes. But, following writers such as LaPiere (1934)

and Deutscher (1966, 1973), Jerolmack and Khan note that it is often tricky

to make inferences from talk to action. The problem is that interviews or

survey situations are specific, experientially distant, and well bounded. To

generalize from one situation (and a relatively odd and reflexive one, at that)

to other situations and arenas requires a leap of faith that is often unwar-

ranted. People can say (both to others and perhaps to themselves) that they do

not care about race, yet discriminate in job interviews (see Pager and Quillian




2005); conversely, people may profess racist attitudes and jettison their

intolerance when encountering the face of the other (LaPiere 1934; see also

Levinas 1981).

Although some sociologists argue that the notion of the attitudinal fallacy

has been overstated (see, e.g., Dimaggio 2014; Lamont and Swidler 2014;

Vaisey 2014), it raises an important set of questions. If we follow the logic of

Jerolmack and Khan’s argument, it is not simply an ‘‘attitudinal fallacy’’

that they identify. Rather, it is an instance of a much wider empirical

challenge—that of inferring from what people say and do in one situation

something about what they say and do in another. If ethnographers are

seriously in doubt about the move from circumscribed interviews or survey

situations to moments of ‘‘action,’’ they should be equally worried about

their own craft.

This is because ethnographers quite often extrapolate from one set of

situations to a very different set of contexts. And yet, theoretically, there is

no reason to think that the very same arguments that sow the seeds of doubt

for the relationship between interviews and situated action would not be

equally relevant for inferring from one context of action and interaction to

another. Contexts of action are highly varied. Action itself is a vague socio-

logical term, both unclearly demarcated from ‘‘talk’’ (which, in many situa-

tions, is action) and capturing anything between a bar fight to a wink. And,

for all this, ethnographers routinely assume that readers would understand

something general about the ethnographer’s interlocutors’ lives through the

window the ethnographer provides to a relatively limited set of (usually)

public situations. For example, studies that have shown how seemingly dis-

organized gatherings of poor men on ‘‘the corner’’ are actually socially

organized assume that such organization says something general about other

contexts of poverty, unemployment, or crime; ethnographers of religion have

often looked at religious services to make general claims about religion, and

the list goes on.

We can see how pervasive this challenge is by looking at the study of

sports and poverty, a site we will return to in the ethnographic section below.

Thus, a common trope in such work is that by engaging in sports—even

violent sports—young poor men pull themselves out of the violent context of

the neighborhood. Thus, for example, Wacquant (2004) quotes a number of

young boxers from the gym he worked in who all say how boxing in the gym

allowed them to move away from criminal forms of violence, quotes at

length a conversation with the trainer who claims this to be the case, and

notes that ‘‘Many professionals willingly confess that they would likely have

turned to a life of crime if not for the discovery of boxing’’ (p. 27).




And yet, of course, Wacquant is not conducting an ethnography of ‘‘the

street.’’ And although the people he spends time with go in and out of the

street and the gym, he sees them when they are performing a particular self,

within a particular context. This, we should emphasize, does not mean that

the context of the boxing gym is not an interesting one, that the men he talks

to are being untruthful, or that if Wacquant were to shadow them he wouldn’t

find that boxing affords some of the boxers a way out of other forms of

violence. And yet, exactly because the ethos of the gym stresses control and

changes in rhythms and lifestyle that should take place outside the gym (e.g.,

the ban on sex or junk food before a fight), it gives rise to predictable

narratives of redemption and of strong intersituational coherence.

Moving among contexts would have likely made Wacquant’s story more

complex both ethnographically and morally. If some boxers would avoid

violence through the gym, others may simply be getting better at it. Thus,

for example, in the epilogue to Bourgois’ (2003) In search of respect, he tells

of an encounter with a baseball-bearing young man on his way to collect

money from someone who owes him cash, bragging about going to play

baseball ‘‘with a nigga’s head.’’ As they talk, the young man begins speaking

enthusiastically about his boxing training regimen, and how he stopped

smoking and drinking sweetened drinks on orders from his trainer. This,

however, has little to do with the avoidance of violence, as ‘‘with a mische-

vious wink, he tells us not to tell his trainer, but that he is trying to build his

strength and punch with enough force and precision to break someone’s neck

with one punch’’ (Bourgois 2003:344-45).

This is, again, not to call into question Wacquant’s remarkable work on

the development of the pugilistic habitus or on the centrality of the gym in

many boxers’ lives. But understanding how the discipline engendered in

boxing and the very craft of boxing itself is intertwined with the street would

have required a slightly different research design. Seen through the lenses of

this first warrant, shadowing buttresses the study’s validity in cases in which

the specific situation is leveraged to make claims about other situations—

either in claiming that the situation affects these other moments or in claim-

ing that a specific situation can serve as a synecdoche for a whole fabric of

situations.

There are certain forms of intersituational variation that the ethnographer

cannot access—the movement from school years to the job market, for

instance, just takes too long to make intersituational variation a viable strat-

egy (see, e.g., Khan 2011; Lareau 2003; cf. Black 2009; Smith 2006, 2014).

Moving among some other situations simply takes extra work. If ethnogra-

phers truly care about the relationship between what people say they do and




what they do—between one set of situations and another—then being able to

empirically trace whether what happens in Situation A is transferable to

Situation B is a warrant for shadowing.

Second Warrant: Meaning and Variation(or a Wink and a Blink)

Perhaps the most celebrated warrant for ethnographic work is the ability of

the ethnographer to explicate local meaning-making processes—to provide

‘‘the native’s point of view.’’ Precursors to this warrant appear already in

Weber’s (2011) Verstehen method of historical sociology as well as in Ken-

neth Pike’s (1967) differentiation between ‘‘emic’’ and ‘‘Etic’’ perspectives.

It was then developed and popularized by Clifford Geertz’s (1973) celebrated

borrowing of the term thick description from philosopher Gilbert Ryle.

Ryle’s (1971) example of the meaning of a wink, a parody of a wink, a

practicing of a wink, and so on, is still instructive. To figure out whether

someone winks or blinks, whether they wink or parody somebody else’s

blink, whether they are practicing winking, or actually winking, is a very

different endeavor than to thinly explain ‘‘what happens’’ when they perform

the action. Thick description requires us to explicate how people intend their

actions will be understood and the shades of meanings with which they

imbue the act.

Providing such ‘‘thick’’ description compels us to take what people say

about what they do quite seriously. Whether we study winks or Berber sheep

trading, we need to understand how people learn to make sense of their

worlds and how they creatively enact meaning. As ethnographers enter the

contexts of meaning making and witness how such meanings are enacted and

how they crystallize, they are uniquely situated to provide thick description.

Thus, in some quarters, thick description became practically synonymous

with the craft of ethnography. And yet—whether or not we agree that ethno-

graphy is synonymous with the explication of local meaning—there is a

sense in which Geertz may inspire ethnographers with false confidence. The

notion that if we just hang out ‘‘there’’ for long enough, we will get what

people mean by their actions is slightly misleading, at least if we do not

carefully specify where there is and how this there is related to other sites and

meanings.

The problem here is not so much that people may not tell the researcher

the ‘‘truth’’ or that they will opt for a facile vocabulary of motive when

pressed to tell themselves stories about themselves. The potential limitation

we would like to point out is rather that meaning is always ‘‘oversaturated’’




(see Marion 2002; Tavory and Timmermans 2014; Timmermans and Tavory

2012). Although meanings are made in situations, they shift as actors move

through time and contexts, so that what something ‘‘means’’ is far from

simple. And, much as any sign is defined against a background of its relation-

ships to other signs (de Saussure [1916] 1986), it is also located in relation to

the same sign in diverse situations (Tavory 2014).

The relationship among situations is important for ethnographers studying

meaning for a few reasons. First, by moving among situations, ethnographers

can attend to axes of variation they would otherwise likely ignore. For

example, Robert Smith’s (2006) understanding of how second generation

Mexican American boys and girls negotiate gender shifted as he went with

the families to Mexico. Among other considerations, he observed how trans-

national life generated conflict over gendered roles and expectations in his

interlocutors’ lives. The axis of ‘‘Mexican’’ and ‘‘American’’ notions of

masculinity and femininity would not have fully occurred to him had he only

followed the young people in New York City or their parents’ birthplace in

Mexico. Once he realized this axis of variation existed, however, he could

see how they attended to it in multiple settings.

Second, there is a temporal dimension to meaning. Is, for example, a

flirtation an interlude to a romantic involvement, or is it a way to pass time

that plays with never-fulfilled possibilities? In such an ambiguous context,

the answer depends not so much on the situation itself but on what happens

later on. In moments of ‘‘local action’’ (Leifer 1988), meaning is often held in

abeyance. Moreover, even in unambiguous situations, meanings often

change with the passage of time, and such changes can come to be them-

selves expected: A wink that parodies another party’s wink (as Ryle

describes) can be considered a light hearted spoof in the moment but later

understood as a cruel put-down. As action is propelled toward possible

futures, the question of the ‘‘true’’-situated meaning becomes obviously

fraught.

Lastly, meanings are not locked in specific situations but are regularly

transposed. As theorists of practice and meaning have argued (see, e.g.,

Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984; Sewell 1992), creative change often occurs

precisely through such transpositions. And although these theorists stressed

the transpositions of different meaning structures, it is also the case for

ostensibly similar meanings among situations. Indeed, such situational trans-

positions are the necessary condition for humor and metaphor (Tavory 2014),

as they are for everyday problem solving and creativity.

In short, meanings shift among situations, are defined by their relationship

to these other situations, are often made retroactively, and can always be




potentially transposed. If one warrant for ethnographic work is to provide an

analysis of local meaning, then missing the meanings of transpositions and

metaphor, hidden variation, or the way that possible future meanings invade

the present impoverishes the understanding of meaning. Ethnographers

would miss the ways in which different forms of meaning making bleed into

one another in surprising ways (see, e.g., Wagner Pacifici 1994), the subtle-

ties of humor and metaphor, as well as sets of meaningful differences that

they simply wouldn’t otherwise conjure. While the construction of situated

meaning is important, these intersituational hues give meaning making much

of its dynamism and multivocality.

Third Warrant: Shadowing and the Fabricof Social Worlds

In the previous warrant, we assumed that ethnographers trace meaning as an

end in itself. Yet when ethnographers think about thick description, they

often blur meaning and personhood. They describe particular meaning-

making contexts and situations, but also particular actors who transcend

these situations. But for a handful of strict methodological situationists

inspired by ethnomethodology and talk-in-interaction (see, e.g., Brubaker

et al. 2006; see also Sacks 1979), ethnographers seldom assume that the self

emerges only in the specificities of the situation in which it is elicited. In the

words of Dr. Seuss, ‘‘a people house has people too.’’

As a way to flesh out this assumption, it is instructive to return to the work

of Clifford Geertz. Thus, when Geertz describes the meanings of the Balinese

cockfight in his (1973) essay ‘‘Deep Play,’’ he purports to tell readers not

only something about the cockfight but also something about the Balinese

themselves. They are, after all, the ones who ‘‘read’’ their cultural texts in

particular ways. The meanings that people creatively construct and evoke

thus provide the ethnographer with a window into their lives: whether it is the

tension between politeness and ‘‘animal nature’’ or the structure of loyalties

within and among villages. It is in this sense that much of ethnography has a

humanistic streak: Because meaning making and personhood are inter-

twined, when ethnographers study meaning, they study it in relation to a

specific social world and the people who inhabit it.

Shifting the analytic lens from meaning to personhood may seem to be

relatively minor. After all, since people are the ones who make meaning, it is

obvious that if we trace meaning making, we already know something about

the people making it. And yet, in the move from meanings to people, we

necessarily move from the ways in which meanings are actually made and




understood to the ways in which social worlds are structured. It has become

somewhat of a truism to note that as people move among situations, they also

shift their identifications. It is not only meanings that changes among situa-

tions but also—if often subtly—actors themselves (see, e.g., Simmel 1964;

White 1992).

If part of the warrant of ethnography is to gain an appreciation for the lives

of the interlocutors the ethnographer tells the reader of, then moving among

situations becomes crucial. This is because, in most cases, the social lives of

the people the ethnographer writes of rhythmically shift among situations

and identifications. Thus, for example, Tavory (2016) found that Orthodox

men in Los Angeles who worked secular jobs had to juggle very different

selves—during their working hours they often had non-Orthodox friends and

interests and were defined by their job and work history as much as (if not

more than) by their religion. When they came home, however, they often had

to erase this working world, alongside its camaraderie and meaning, and re-

erect the symbolic boundary between Jew and non-Jew.

As this example demonstrates, shifts among selves and situations are pre-

dictable. And, as actors move among these situations, they construct a pat-

terned fabric of situations and selves. To take another example, Duneier (1999)

shows how one unhoused man he worked with, Mudrick, juggled his life on the

streets and his relationship to his granddaughter who did not see him as a

‘‘homeless person.’’ Understanding Mudrick requires understanding him as he

is on the street, as he acts when his granddaughter sometimes comes to the

corner, and as he acts when he goes to see her. Thus, even a relatively minor

foray in a book that is generally situation based provides a depth that recasts

the way that the reader encounters the men Duneier describes.

In short, then, shadowing reveals the way that people move through social

life, and how such movements are followed by shifts in meaning and selfhood.

Instead of assuming that the situation provides a window into a life, ethno-

graphers can opt for the much more conservative (and much more interesting)

assumption: that it is not a single situation, but the predictable rhythm of

situations and selves that defines the lives of the actors they follow.

Fourth Warrant: The Wider Pictureand Causal Narratives

The last warrant we highlight moves from ethnographers’ units of analysis to

the general claims they often attempt to make. Whereas interactions, situa-

tions, meanings, and people are often the units of analysis that ethnographers




use, ethnographers (like other social researchers) are often after a different

prize: a wider social pattern that emerges through the ethnographic detail.

Thus, for most ethnographers, the specific situation and social world they

study is portrayed as a synecdoche for a general condition (see Small [2009]

for the challenges such a position entails). This form of rhetorical induction

(Edmondson 1984) is not the only form of generalization possible: Some

ethnographers use the empirical case to construct theory on a more abstract

level; still others really are interested in telling the story of a particular social

world they have been privy to. However, the majority of ethnographers (at

least in sociology) investigate a set of local conditions that they see as

standing for a more general empirical set of determinants. Through the

ethnographic, they can show the causal power of the general condition in

the minutiae of everyday life.

This causal relationship between specific observations and general social

forces may seem like a truism—and one that is repeatedly attacked by meth-

odologists at that. But seen from this angle, what shadowing potentially

allows ethnographers to do is twofold. First, shadowing allows them to make

a stronger causal case by showing how the same sets of pressures become

consequential in different ways in different situations. Thus, for example,

one of the key rhetorical moves in Alice Goffman’s (2014) recent On the Run

occurs when she shows how police surveillance affects romantic relation-

ships in the neighborhood she studied. The reader could have easily imagined

that in a situation of intense police surveillance, young black men learn to run

from the police or that they routinely expect to be profiled. It is far more

jarring to see how young women use the warrants for young men’s arrest both

as leverage against the men they are involved with and as ways to show

commitment and love (by, e.g., attending their trials or visiting them in jail).

If the condition the ethnographer studies shapes their subjects, showing

the effects of the same condition across situations buttresses their claim for

its general power to shape the social world. Rather than being only able to

make a case that the general social pressure affects a specific set of situations,

the ethnographer creates variation within the study. And while the ‘‘scope

conditions’’ of the study are still limited, the proliferation of effects strength-

ens the plausibility of the ethnographers’ claims within the study.

Second, intersituational variation can also show that a given social con-

dition has not only surprising but contradictory effects. Thus, David Halle’s

(1984) America’s Working Men, an ethnography of chemical factory workers

in the late 1970s, owes much of its power to its ability to move between the

work and the household. As Halle shows, although the work is blue-collar

factory work, the people he met lived a very different life outside the factory.




Working in a relatively well-paid unionized job, their salaries allowed them

to buy houses in neighborhoods that were mixed working class and lower

white-collar. The wives of the factory workers often worked office jobs and

saw themselves as occupying the middle class; their pastimes were both

‘‘working-class’’ and ‘‘suburban middle-class’’ pastimes, blurring white- and

blue-collar identifications and patterns of consumption. This is clearly a case

in which shadowing provides a richer picture of both meaning and person-

hood (as stressed above). However, by moving from the workplace situation

to the home, Halle simultaneously provides a portrait of a point in American

history of class relations, the tail end of a time in which workers could

maintain a ‘‘dual life’’—hovering between working-class and middle-class

identifications. This dual life, as Halle shows, is precisely what defined these

families—staying with one situation would not have simply been partial but

distorted.

In short, then, by opening up novel axes of variation that are hidden from

any one vantage point, shadowing allows ethnographers to provide a more

compelling account of the general condition they attempt to describe. By

showing variation in the ‘‘effects of a cause’’ (see, e.g., Morgan and Winship

2007), the ethnographer ends up shoring up the causal narrative they construct

at the most general level that the ethnography often attempts to address.

Park Life: Shadowing in Action

To illustrate the utility of shadowing, we draw upon the first author’s ethno-

graphic work. The project investigated the social world of a long-standing

pickup soccer game and accompanying sociable interactions in a Los

Angeles public park—and through it the experience of immigration of the

Latino working-class men who mostly played in the park. Inspired by the

tradition of streetcorner ethnography, Trouille conducted initial fieldwork

primarily in the park. And, over five years of participant observation, he

generated a wealth of data about the meaning and use of the public park.

As we show below, although Trouille spent years in the park, moving

beyond the situation deepened his understanding of park life and its place in

his interlocutors’ social worlds. Although it quickly became obvious that

park interactions were much more than an isolated world of leisure, moving

beyond the situation allowed the author to see how the park was connected to

other aspects of the men’s lives, thus also shifting his understanding of the

site itself. Moving beyond the situation also presented new axes of variation,

which further deepened his understanding of local constructions of meaning

in action that were invisible from one point of view.




First, however, a brief note on what shadowing involved. Over time, after

he had spent almost two years in the park, Trouille gradually accompanied

the men away from the park. This mainly involved following the men at work

on home improvement jobs and when socializing away from the park, pri-

marily in bars, restaurants, and other public settings. He also accompanied

the men on their daily rounds: commuting to work, buying supplies, going to

court, and picking up children from school. Shadowing opportunities grew

out of the park but also required Trouille to develop new relationships and

points of entry. Some attempts were more successful than others, and the

author was unable to observe men at work in restaurants, another principal

source of employment, or spend extended periods of time with them at home

or in their neighborhoods. As in every new overture in an ethnographic site,

some ‘‘moves’’ were blocked—some men simply didn’t want him around in

other situations, even if they were happy to spend time with him in the park,

some situations were off-bounds. And yet, despite these challenges and

limitations, shadowing proved important both to understand park life itself

and to understand the men who came to the park.

Work at Play and Play at Work

First, when shadowing men at work on home improvement jobs, Trouille

began to see how the park provided a setting in which men developed

employment opportunities. Enmeshed in the informal economy and without

access to formal credentials, credit checks, or insurance policies, the men

depended on networks and resource exchanges to make ends meet. Park life

thus served not only to bring the men together but provided a staging ground

where they built reputations and gauged the trustworthiness of others—a

pressing concern when referring and recommending in the informal labor

market.

As the men learned to play together, they learned other things about one

another. For example, beer money was a recurrent source of drama and

disagreement at the park. In some cases, the men used levels of contribution

as proxies for work character, even if the facts were not always clear. Arana,

for example, was frequently criticized for never putting in money for beer,

despite being one of the first to request one. Many men, including those

without firsthand experience working, hiring, or recommending him, drew

from his park demeanor to speculate about his professional integrity. As one

example, when the author asked someone why he did not take up Arana’s

offer of employment, he responded: ‘‘How am I going to work for him, he

doesn’t have one cent for beer,’’ a comment that reflected less on Arana’s




financial state than on his willingness to contribute to the group. The presumed

relationship between the park and work also operated in other ways. In contrast

to Arana, Motor was often cited for his generosity and commitment to park life

when the men endorsed him as a boss or recommended him for work. For

example, when Mike asked around about Motor’s carpentry skills—his land-

lord was looking for someone to replace a fence—several men referenced his

dedicated management of a park-based soccer team in supporting his hire.

Much of the practical resources that emerged, however, were more a by-

product of being together than the result of calculated behavior or strategic

tests of character. For example, someone learned about a job opening after a

restaurant worker was playfully urged to ‘‘go wash dishes’’ when he misfired

a shot during the soccer games. The men also learned about each other’s

work in everyday conversations and from a range of professional indicators,

from work clothes to nicknames like ‘‘Locksmith’’ and ‘‘Policıa.’’

This, however, did not mean that leisure time was simply a preparation for

work, a future resource for interaction and camaraderie in another situation.

The park also served as something for coworkers to talk about while on the

job, a point of connection and a source of entertainment that guarded against

the drudgeries of workaday life. To take one example, the author joined two

men in lively conversation about a recent arrest at the park for alcohol

consumption, as they painted the exterior of an apartment building in the

scorching sun. The men even called men they anticipated were in the park to

see if the police had returned. As was often the case, the men also went to the

park for their lunch break to see if they had missed any of the action,

returning to work with fresh materials to pass the time.

The men explicitly anticipated these sociable connections on the job. For

example, when Muneco asked Cabro if he would help him install a sign,

Cabro, who was sitting with a group of men at the park, joked: ‘‘You must be

getting lonely.’’ As the two men headed to the parking lot, one of the men

told Cabro to tell Muneco about a goal he scored during the midday soccer

games; another playfully requested that they bring back beer when they

finished. In another case, a group of amused men speculated that Valderama

and Mi Chavo would have a lot to talk about the following day at work, as

they play wrestled on the grass. That the men would often drive out of their

way to pick someone up at the park to help on a job—rather than hiring

someone at a more proximate day laborer site—was also revealing of park-

based ties at work.

Interactions in the park thus had a transcendent meaning that was usually

not spoken of. Although players interacted with and assessed each other as

players, they also interacted with each other as potential job providers and




job seekers, as coworkers as well as co-players. A reputation, then, trans-

cended its situation. As we noted in the third warrant above, people expect to

move among situations and, as we show here, they also expect others to move

with them. This, then, affects the way they understand each other’s actions.

Moreover, it is not that ‘‘play’’ is simply a testing ground for work. Rather,

people in both situations talk about, anticipate, and act in relation to the other.

The swirl of fun and competition at the park, in particular, took on new

meanings in the context of employment exigencies.

The intertwining of work and leisure was, in retrospect (though only in

retrospect), to be expected. But connecting the two worlds allowed Trouille

to say something more general about the men’s lives. As opposed to seeing

networks as innocently there or passively reproduced, he discovered how

migrants manufacture a basis and foundation for networking and making new

ties in their everyday lives. Contrary to scholarly and popular images, many

of the men did not arrive in Los Angeles with dense social networks at their

disposal. Categorical attributes assumed to generate ties (such as ethnicity,

class, or even hometown) were usually insufficient bases for sustaining old

connections or for forming new relationships. By charting the conditions and

contexts of interaction that gave rise to the men’s social ties and resource

exchanges, a general set of pressures and processes across situations came

into clearer focus, something that became crucial in the ethnographic work as

a whole. The different situations, then—as we argue in the fourth warrant—

became indicative of this wider emphasis on the making and sustaining of

social networks in immigrants’ lives.

These considerations already show that action in the park had implicit

meanings that were not always obvious—reputations transcended the park,

being a ‘‘good participator’’ (or a bad one) had reverberations for other

situations. But shadowing also shed light on the meaning of activities in the

park by providing new, and unexpected, axes of variation that would have

been invisible if the author remained in the park. Below we discuss one such

set of meanings—how an intersituational analysis of violence contextualizes

the meaning and organization of park fights.

The Park as a Place to Fight

That Nelson and Tico were arguing during the midday soccer games was not

surprising, as the two men frequently quarreled on the field. Despite a history

of problems, the two men had never traded punches, preferring to spar

verbally. On this day, Nelson, who was almost a foot smaller and a hundred

pounds lighter than Tico, was determined to settle the simmering conflict




with physical violence. Yet, as soon as he moved aggressively toward Tico,

several men blocked his path, urging him in Spanish to ‘‘let it go.’’ Tico, who

at first seemed uninterested in fighting, soon demanded that the men ‘‘let him

go,’’ adding that he was going to teach the ‘‘little boy’’ a lesson.

As expected, Tico’s taunts further enraged Nelson who aggressively tried

to push past the men’s clutches. With growing calls from onlookers to ‘‘let

them’’ fight, the men’s resolve weakened and Nelson burst toward Tico. The

crowd quickly circled around the two men as they exchanged a messy flurry

of punches and kicks. At first willing to let them fight freely, three men

physically intervened when Tico picked Nelson up and prepared to slam him

against a fence lining the field. In the commotion, Nelson fell to the ground

and Tico delivered a quick succession of kicks to his head. As Tico moved

to inflict more damage, several men forcefully pushed him away. Tico did

not resist the intervention but loudly warned: ‘‘Nobody get involved, let him

fight, he provoked me.’’ Nelson, dazed but back on his feet, made a half-

hearted attempt to counterattack, but relented when his path was also

blocked. As his demeanor suggested, the short-lived fight was over. Several

men crowded around him, offering their support and prognoses. A few even

congratulated him for his efforts, patting him on the chest and back, despite

the defeat. Valderama, with his arm around Nelson’s, commented: ‘‘Don’t

worry, you fought like a man.’’ Then, pointing to his bloody nose, he added:

‘‘That’s nothing, it’s over.’’

Tico, for his part, walked in a circle, fuming yet triumphant. He was

particularly angry at the men who stopped the fight and criticized his aggres-

siveness. Sensing that the crowd was turning against him, he reminded them

that Nelson was the instigator: ‘‘He wanted to fight, everyone saw it. I told

him not to.’’ When someone informed him that he had probably broken

Nelson’s nose, Tico replied: ‘‘That’s what he gets for getting involved in

the affairs of men (‘cosas de hombre’).’’ Tico’s summation, however, was far

from the final word on the matter, as the men debated and dissected the latest

park fight for weeks to come.

The fight between Nelson and Tico was one of forty-eight violent con-

frontations the author witnessed during his five years in the park. In addition,

he heard about twice as many fights, including some that occurred during

fieldwork and others from years before he arrived. He also witnessed and was

told about numerous ‘‘near’’ fights that approached but did not cross the

threshold into physical violence. Approximately two-thirds of park fights

occurred in the context of the soccer games, the remaining third within the

swirl of off-field interactions in the park. Some physical altercations were

primarily the product of the moment—a hard clash on the soccer field or




spontaneous disagreement—while others revealed a deeper history, the cul-

mination of brewing tensions and past problems.

Interpretations of what constituted a fight varied, but the men frequently

defined physical altercations in terms of ‘‘meter manos’’ (putting hands on

someone), which the men acknowledged by warning others not to ‘‘touch

me’’ and in seeking retribution for being hit. In contrast, the men rarely

described an unanswered blow as a fight and the author never observed

combatants attacking unwilling known opponents beyond an initial shove

at the park. The vast majority of antagonistic altercations did not escalate into

physical combat but hovered at the zone of face-saving bluster and bravado.

For example, men would put the onus on others to ‘‘hit me’’ (pegame) or find

respectable ways not to fight in the heat of the moment.

At first, the author found the sporadic violence frightening. And yet, to his

surprise, the men talked about the park as a relatively ‘‘safe’’ place to fight, at

least in terms of physical damage. This is not to say the men did not occa-

sionally hurt each other—black eyes, scratched faces, and chipped teeth hap-

pened—but nothing so serious as to require an emergency room visit. Over

time, the author came to appreciate the performative quality of occasional park

fights. As in Nelson and Tico’s fight, he observed how violence in the park was

controlled, monitored, and usually broken up before long. The men also antici-

pated a degree of restraint by their opponent, as their long-standing use of the

park generated a regular community of interaction that shaped the form that

violence took. That is, the men’s repeated interactions in the park—whether

when they played soccer or when they socialized over beers—created an

ordered and meaningful form of local life. Players knew each other well and

were held responsible for their actions if they planned on returning.

Thus, although fight-based reputations were rarely unequivocal signs of

strength or weakness, fights were strung into a history that the men used

along with other information to evaluate themselves and others (which was

especially important in light of their employment-based ties and anticipations

described above). For example, some men were considered ‘‘hot heads’’ too

dangerous to bring on the job because of past conflicts, whereas others forged

deeper connections on the battlefield and in how they negotiated their post-

fight relationships. While it is hard to tease out the direct relationship

between conflict and collaboration at the park, it was certainly not a barrier,

as many prior foes subsequently socialized and worked together. That is, the

same context that allowed for new ties to form at the park facilitated a

relatively ‘‘constructive’’ kind of violence to boil over on occasion.

As a way into the intersituational analysis of violence, it is worth noting

that the men themselves talked about park violence in relation to other




contexts. For example, the men talked about the park as relatively ‘‘nice’’ and

safe. This characterization contrasted with their depictions of decrepit and

underresourced city parks, especially those closer to their places of work and

residence. The park certainly did not resemble the street, another public

setting that was occasionally the stage of violent interactions in the men’s

lives, especially for those who frequented rougher sections of the region. Not

only did park violence contrast with the cutthroat world of fighting described

in studies of inner-city violence (see Anderson 1999; Contreras 2013; Jones

2010), but also with what the men experienced or anticipated away from the

park. Many of the men shared stories of vicious beatings and robberies they

fell victim to or heard about in other sections of the city, including where they

lived, and claimed to avoid certain areas and situations because of the threat of

violence.

However, it was only after the author followed the men on their nightly

rounds, especially in bars and walking the streets late at night, that he

observed firsthand how threats and behaviors actually differed outside the

park—sometimes in ways that confirmed the men’s mythic tales of Los

Angeles violence, but also in other, more surprising ways. As the author

gradually discovered, park fights were one of a series of situations in which

the men encountered and enacted violence.

For example, after hours of drinking in an infamous ‘‘cantina,’’ one of the

park players, Locksmith, became embroiled in an argument with someone

sitting at the bar. Although it wasn’t clear why, Locksmith had clearly

angered the stranger who stepped off his bar stool and threatened to

‘‘matarte’’ (kill you) if he did not immediately leave. In the commotion, a

large and increasingly impatient bouncer, who had already intervened on

Locksmith’s behalf several times that evening, grabbed him by the back of

his jacket and forcibly expelled him from the bar. As the author helped him

up from the sidewalk, Locksmith told him that the man by the bar had a knife

on him, which is why he did not meet his challenge. Locksmith also informed

him that the same bouncer had pepper sprayed him the last time he was at the

bar, which would have further decreased his odds of success. When the

author naively recounted the story at the park, many of the men castigated

him for going to the bar, especially with Locksmith, a known brawler. The

message was clear: He was safe in the park, but not elsewhere, and he was

fortunate to have escaped unscathed. Even more, as the people in the park put

it, he was a fool to believe that bar fights resembled park fights.

In another instructive incident, the author was walking out of a liquor

store with four men from the park around two in the morning when they

encountered approximately ten young Latino men they later identified as




‘‘cholos’’ (gang members). The area was dark and there was limited room to

pass along the crowded sidewalk. Tough stares and defensive postures were

exchanged as they crossed paths. ‘‘Accidental bumps,’’ the trigger of many

fights (Katz 1988), were narrowly averted. Immediately after passing them,

the young men turned in their direction and shouted explosive warnings and

insults in Spanish and English. The park men never broke stride and hurried

to Chepon’s house around the corner. In the safety of his backyard, they

nervously laughed about the incident.

In these two incidents, the men avoided confrontation. Faced with uncer-

tain odds, at least in the two cases above, players assumed the worst and

avoided potential harm.

The peril and uncertainty of these events began to illustrate what was

different about park fights. In these tense instances of stranger interactions,

it was unclear how violence would unfold. Even if it was not clear that the man in

the bar confrontation really had a knife on him or whether the young men were in

fact cholos—maybe the men were simply saving face when dodging conflict—

anonymity made it all the more dangerous. The men simply did not know the

risks, especially as the odds were not clearly stacked in their favor. There was

not the same expectation of restraint and control that the men could count on in

the park.

Some men even mocked park fights or local tough guys within a broader

context of violence. For example, Brujas, who lived in a notoriously rough

area of Los Angeles by MacArthur Park, loved to talk about the time Polo

and Pisa Muerto visited him at his home. In contrast to their bold park

demeanors, Brujas painted a very different picture of their behavior in his

neighborhood: ‘‘You see Pisa here all big and bad but he was so scared he

didn’t want to go to a [local] bar,’’ preferring to drink beers in his home. As

for the usually verbose Polo: ‘‘He barely said a word, nothing but silence.’’

These stories were especially instructive for men who had less experience in

settings and situations Brujas and others insinuated were more ‘‘real’’ in their

violence than park fights and helped to confirm what the author suspected

about the men’s shifting behaviors he observed firsthand.

Anonymity, however, cuts several ways. While it can be a source of

danger and fear, it can also prove liberating and intoxicating. In the park,

combatants usually negotiated the new meaning of their postfight ties within

a context of joint pasts and presumed futures. More generally, conflict cre-

ated a history of adjustments and attachments that sustained the men’s com-

mitment to each other and the group. For example, when recounting their

park friendships, the men often pointed to past problems, usually a fight, to

explain how much they had been through and overcome with particular men.




Recurrent stories and debates recycled and reinvigorated the men’s fighting

pasts as well. Tico brought this starkly home to the author when he casually

put his arm around him and joked: ‘‘You know I wanted to kick your ass

when you first started playing here.’’ Fight stories and legacies also covered

incidents from years in the past, providing ‘‘narrative payoff’’ for those who

had not fought in years. Descriptions and evaluations of fights, however,

were often a source of debate and division, which was precisely what made

park fights so compelling and distinctive. The men anticipated their fights to

be talked about, thereby infusing their decisions and actions with greater

meaning and longevity. Yet, despite the drama that inevitably ensued, most

men appeared willing to overlook past problems after they fought. For exam-

ple, while Nelson and Tico publicly feuded for years, the author found that

they managed to relate much more amicably after the fight described at the

beginning of this section.

In contrast, a key seduction of anonymity, such as in bar fights or crowd

violence, is the relative freedom and spontaneity that comes with fighting

someone who is unknown, as risky as it may be (Conley 1999). While

strangers also have to work together to create the type of fight they are

seeking (Jackson-Jacobs 2013), consequences are generally not rooted in

how they relate going forward. Without the prospects of future interaction,

the perceptions of one’s combatant are far less important, whether on the

winning or losing end of the exchange.

The author thus also witnessed and heard about the flipside of fighting

strangers when shadowing the men away from the park—when they were the

aggressors rather than those avoiding conflict. For example, when a group of

men stepped out of an unmarked bar in the early morning hours, Motor

confronted a man walking by them for seemingly unprovoked reasons. Motor

repeated the provocative accusation, ‘‘que pedo?’’ (what’s the problem?), as

he urged the unsuspecting stranger to make a move. That he was drunk and

five of his friends stood behind him presumably encouraged him. As he

probably anticipated, the man hurried past them without reacting to the

challenge. While Motor’s predatory behavior would have likely received

censure at the park, the men laughed and encouraged his abuse in this situ-

ation. Motor’s actions were especially striking, since he was usually a

‘‘peacemaker,’’ stopping fights in the park rather than provoking them.

Another incident Trouille heard about from several sources also illustrates

what is potentially different about fighting strangers. Half a dozen men went to

a bar after a steady afternoon of drinking beer at the park. Soon after their

arrival, they picked a fight with two unfamiliar men. The confrontation spilled

out onto the street. In a scene that was vividly recounted for months at the park,




Beavis pulled one of the men out of a car—as, they claimed, he was trying to

retrieve a gun—and repeatedly kicked him in the head, leaving him bloody and

apparently unconscious on the pavement. Like the individual Motor taunted,

the men remained strangers before, during, and after the fight.1

In these incidents, the men revealed an enthusiasm for violent behavior

and a disregard for its possible consequences that the author did not observe

or hear about at the park. While park fights started for seemingly silly

reasons, they were not as arbitrary and aggressive as these attacks. For

example, the author never witnessed someone at the park randomly pick a

fight, as Motor did, much less an adversary who was clearly outmatched and

uninterested in fighting. And, in any case, onlookers would have certainly

intervened and not allowed such unilateral aggression at the park. Strangers,

in contrast, promised a noncommittal relationship.

In fact, the only carnival-like brawl the author witnessed at the park involved

a group of unfamiliar Egyptian men in town for an event. In this explosive

confrontation, which spilled out of problems during an impromptu soccer game

between the two groups, park regulars exhibited an uncharacteristic eagerness

and abandon in using violence at the park. For example, one park regular

struck an unsuspecting foe in the head with his clenched fist, an unprece-

dented ‘‘sucker punch’’ that continued past the point of ‘‘defeat’’ with a

flurry of kicks. While at first treating this episode as an outlier to be ignored,

given the violence he observed when shadowing the men outside the park, it

suddenly fell into a familiar pattern. As the men recognized when they talked

about it retrospectively, these contexts of action allowed for, even

demanded, different behaviors and identifications than what the author gen-

erally observed in the park. Under the right circumstances, it appeared,

peacemakers were capable of remorseless and unprovoked violence.

Park fights generally differed from these scenarios, whether anonymity

was experienced as a source of fear or freedom. This is not to suggest that the

men were perpetual victims or perpetrators of violence as they traveled

through the city—these incidents were also rare—but to explain what was

contextually unique about fighting in the park.

Shadowing revealed the uniqueness of park fights in two ways. First, the

author’s understanding of the meaning of violence in the park changed as he

moved among situations. Some fights were more anonymous than others;

some violence initiated by the men was completely unprovoked, whereas in

other settings conflict was avoided at all costs. These sets of semiotic rela-

tionships were far from obvious in the park.

Indeed, the axis of provoked/unprovoked violence did not even occur to

the author while he stayed in the park, and the importance of anonymity,




while obvious in hindsight, came to the fore much more powerfully as he

witnessed intersituational variation. And, once he attended to these axes of

variation, he realized that these shaped the ways in which men in the park

talked about violence. As men moved among situations, these hidden axes of

variation framed the meaning of violence by contextualizing it for the actors

themselves.

Second, remaining within the situation, the author could have easily

assumed that men in the park always controlled their violence and that the

park provided men with the opportunity to enact a ‘‘safe masculinity’’—

where they could be both violent and physically safe. And although this was

undoubtedly the way violence operated in the park, this wasn’t the case

elsewhere. In contrast to such an image of sports and violence (see, e.g.,

Brooks 2009; Wacquant 2004), the examples above show how precarious

such assumptions regarding the effects of one set of situations on another

truly are. As situations changed, both the possibilities of violence and the

selves that ‘‘park men’’ occupied changed with them. Blustering fighters

suddenly became tame; peacemakers initiated unprovoked violence.

Conclusions

As we have argued, producing intersituational variation by shadowing inter-

locutors among situations holds some promise. While the warrants provide

theoretical reasons for this to be the case, the final cash value of this approach

can be seen in the empirical. This is evident both in the way such intersitua-

tional forays play out in previous ethnographic work, as it is in the case of

immigrants’ park life and violence. It is not simply that shadowing provides a

more extensive picture but that it provided a different one. To draw an

analogy from painting, shadowing not only enlarges the canvas but also

changes the details we draw.

Like every deepening relationship, shadowing is hard work. Initial contact

is one of the hardest emotional challenges of ethnographic work. It is a point

rife with insecurities and rejections. Once an ethnographer plants him or

herself in a situation, it is easier to simply ‘‘return’’ to the scene.

Shadowing requires ethnographers to ask whether they can move to new

situations, something that puts them up, once again, for rejection. It is prob-

ably for this reason that shadowing usually happens at the tail end of an

ethnographic project, when a relationship becomes deep enough to transcend

its situational underpinnings.

The challenges—both in terms of time and in terms of emotional vulner-

ability—are thus substantial, and in many cases, the payoff is not




immediately apparent. Taken ad absurdum, it may seem that we simply push

ethnography to give a ‘‘complete’’ picture of the social world the ethnogra-

pher sets out to describe—something that is both impossible and analytically

nonsensical. In a short story, Borges tells of an attempt to make a ‘‘perfect’’

map, as big as the area it describes. The results are dismal: ‘‘The following

generations ( . . . ) saw that that vast map was useless, and not without some

pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the inclemencies of sun and

winters. In the deserts of the west, still today, there are tattered ruins of that

map . . . ’’ (Borges 1999:325). There are no perfect maps, and there cannot be

a perfect ethnography. In order to tell a coherent narrative, ethnographers

must shave off aspects of the world they are enmeshed in.

For all that, we argue that the form of intersituational variation we empha-

size here is important for diverse theoretical reasons and for a variety of

ethnographic projects. It is important methodologically, as a way to temper

assumptions about the ways in which one situation can be transposed upon

others; it is important for semiotic considerations, as a way to understand

local meaning; it is important as a way to understand people and their social

worlds; and it is often a powerful way to construct and buttress overarching

causal narratives. As such, it both provides ethnographers a way to buttress

claims of the study’s validity and offers fruitful ways to think beyond the

specific case. Like other forms of intersituational variation evidenced in the

work of life-course ethnographers who follow actors for long stretches of

time (Black 2009; Smith 2006, 2014), or ethnographers who follow objects

over multiple sites (see, e.g., Haugerud et al. 2000; Tsing 2004), shadowing

is a way to generate new forms of variation, and thus deepen our understand-

ing of the social worlds we study.

Not all projects require shadowing. Some questions are neatly contained

within the narrative arc of a set of unfolding situations; other questions span

temporalities that make intersituational variation irrelevant for all but a

handful of long-haul ethnographers. And yet, many projects would be deeply

enriched by shadowing and its possibility should thus be, at the very least, a

methodological and theoretical question ethnographers grapple with.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,

authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or pub-

lication of this article.




Note

1. While the author learned about the men’s actions in this case secondhand, the

outlines of the incident were confirmed by multiple actors and seemed reasonable

in light of what he observed in the park and elsewhere.

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Author Biographies

David Trouille is an assistant professor of sociology at James Madison University.

He is currently finishing a book manuscript on the relationships between leisure,

immigration, and network formation in Los Angles and researching temporary agri-

cultural labor in Virginia. His work was previously published, among other places, in

Qualitative Sociology and City & Community.

Iddo Tavory is an assistant professor at NYU. His book Abductive Analysis (co-

authored with Stefan Timmermans) presents a pragmatist approach to the relation

among theory, method and observations in qualitative research (University of Chi-

cago Press, 2014). His second book, Summoned, is an ethnography of an Orthodox

Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles, as well as a treatise on the patterning of inter-

action, identification, and social worlds (University of Chicago Press, 2016). His

work was previously published, among other places, in the AJS, ASR, Sociological

Theory, and Theory and Society.




shadowing: warrants for intersituational variation in ethnography

Documents