Political Methodology Committee on Concepts and Methods Working Paper Series

12

January 2007

Methods are not Tools Ethnography and the Limits of Multiple-Methods

Research

Edward Schatz

University of Toronto

(ed.schatz@utoronto.ca)

C&M The Committee on Concepts and Methods www.concepts-methods.org

IPSA International Political Science Association www.ipsa.ca

CIDE Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences www.cide.edu

Editor

Andreas Schedler (CIDE, Mexico City)

Editorial Board

José Antonio Cheibub, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

David Collier, University of California, Berkeley

Michael Coppedge, University of Notre Dame

John Gerring, Boston University

George J. Graham, Vanderbilt University

Russell Hardin, New York University

Evelyne Huber, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

James Johnson, University of Rochester

Gary King, Harvard University

Bernhard Kittel, University of Amsterdam

James Mahoney, Brown University

Cas Mudde, University of Antwerp

Gerardo L. Munck, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Guillermo O’Donnell, University of Notre Dame

Frederic C. Schaffer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ian Shapiro, Yale University

Kathleen Thelen, Northwestern University

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1

Ethnography and the Limits to Multiple-Methods Research

Academic political science was recently the site of a “raucous rebellion” in which

critics appealed for a more “ecumenical” political inquiry that would not seek to mimic

approaches found in the natural sciences (Monroe 2005). The rebellion appears to have

subsided, as some of the critics’ ideas were absorbed by the discipline’s major

institutions, and some of the critics themselves came to sit prominently among the

discipline’s decision-makers.1 In this sense, it may be that APSA’s corporate structures

began to catch up with rest of the discipline, in which a “methodological divide” is less

pronounced than some assume.2

Alongside some institutional change, we also witnessed normative change in the

discipline’s intellectual culture. An expressed commitment to “problem-driven” research

reflected the desire to view research methods as being in the service of social inquiry,

rather than driving such inquiry. And such a normative change received broad support (at

least rhetorically), as even strong proponents of positivist social science began to

advocate greater eclecticism in methods.3

The change was not merely rhetorical. In comparative politics (the site of the most

vibrant recent debates about methods and methodology), more and more dissertations

claimed to involve multiple methods of inquiry. David Laitin (1998) began to use and

advocate a triumvirate of methodologies—rational choice, narrative, and manipulation of

quantitative data—as the path to theory building. Robert Bates et. al (1998) began an

effort to combine rational choice and narrative. Badredine Arfi (2005) called for the

combination of insights from literary criticism with computer-aided “fuzzy logic.” The

list goes on. Only in the American politics subfield was intellectual ferment about

1 The Perestroika listserv, once active with a variety of calls for institutional reform and academic papers justifying or legitimating such change, has become decidedly inactive since 2003 or so. See also Hochschild (2005) on the creation of a new APSA journal, Perspectives on Politics—one example of the mainstreaming of critics’ ideas for reform. 2 This point is illustrated in Grant (2005). 3 David Laitin, for example, has argued that “ethnography and rational choice play complementary roles in the logic of discovery” (2006: 27), even as he sounds a note of caution about the “chance for success” that each method enjoys (2006: fn1, 33).

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methods and methodologies minimal (Bennett, Barth, and Rutherford 2003).4 This

subfield aside, it had become unpopular to be associated with one method of inquiry.

Nothing better captures this normative sea-change than the ascendant view of

research methods as “tools” in a “toolbox.” The implication was that the capable

researcher—who would necessarily be equally trained in Bayesian statistics, participant

observation, interview techniques, discourse analysis, and so on—would simply reach for

the tool appropriate for her current research problem. And, while some simple household

chores could be completed with the aid of a single implement, most complex tasks would

require the use of a variety of tools.

In this paper, I accept the value of the toolbox metaphor but attempt to define its

limits. To be clear at the outset: this is not an attempt to diminish multiple-methods or

problem-driven research. The disciplinary developments on these fronts represent distinct

improvements in how political science tackles its research; they are symbolic of crucial

changes to inquiry about political life. This is, however, an attempt to recognize the

practical and intellectual incommensurabilities that necessarily rear their heads.

Ultimately, to recognize the limitations of the metaphor is to find ways to build a more

eclectic, problem-driven discipline.5

I explore these limitations by considering ethnography’s place in academic

political science. By ethnography, I mean approaches that rely centrally on person-to-

person contact as a way to elicit insider perspectives and meanings. (This definition is at

some odds with common uses of the term in both anthropology and political science, as I

address below.) I argue, along with proponents of the toolbox metaphor, that

ethnographic approaches may be combined usefully with other methods. But, I argue that

there are limits, some of which are practical. For example, becoming trained in and

employing any research method takes time and involves sunk costs. As a result, it

becomes difficult to combine methods that lack core similarities.

Other limits are epistemological. The claims to knowledge embedded in

ethnography can be reconciled easily with some methods, less easily with other methods. 4 The methodological critiques of those in subfields of public policy (Yanow 1996; Schram 2004; Soss 2000: 17-25) and political behavior (Cramer-Walsh 2004) did not appear fundamentally to change how most Americanists pursued their research. 5 I discuss the important difference between practices at the level of individual researchers and those at the level of the discipline in the conclusion.

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Recent multiple-methods work by Ashutosh Varshney illustrates the challenges. None of

this should suggest insuperable obstacles, but it should counsel realism about the

possibilities for multiple-methods research. In the conclusion, I suggest that while some

researchers may successfully combine methods in their individual research projects,

eclecticism in methods and methodology at the discipline-wide level is a more productive

goal. This implies that ethnography’s contribution to political research may be more

pronounced when ethnographic work stands alone, rather than when it is used in direct

combination with other methods in a single, discrete research project.

The Toolbox Metaphor and Legitimacy

Scholars who criticized the hegemony of quantitative methods used a variety of

strategies to legitimate their work in the face of what they perceived to be a hostile

professional environment. Some argued that ascendant approaches (largely rational

choice and statistics) privilege the study of quantifiable phenomena, thereby leaving

aside important phenomena that do not lend themselves to quantification (Kasza 2002;

Schatz and Schatz 2003). Others argued that commonly used quantitative approaches can

easily mislead—either because they underemphasize the path-dependency that

characterizes the development of human communities (Pierson 2004) or because they

make problematic assumptions about the homogeneity of variables (Ragin 2000; Schram

2004).

The deploying of the “toolbox” metaphor was another of these strategies (Bayard

de Volo and Schatz 2004; Anderson 2005). If a method was a tool in a toolbox, each was

suited to address different questions about political life. A problem-driven researcher (far

more desirable than her/his methods-driven counterpart) would reach for the tool/s that

were best suited to addressing the topic at hand. The metaphor elegantly suggested that

research topic be privileged over research method and nicely tapped into a variety of

other calls for disciplinary reform (Shapiro 2005).

Much of the professional value of the toolbox metaphor consisted of its ability to

legitimate non-ascendant methods as equal to ascendant methods. And it suggested that

those laboring in the hegemonic tradition need not fear. The metaphor did not

recommend replacing quantitative-methods hegemony with qualitative-methods

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hegemony; it was not a call to the barricades. Rather, the toolbox suggested that the

discipline’s major stakeholders could embrace the eclecticism and methodological

pluralism that would result from the critics’ version of reform. As a legitimating strategy,

the toolbox metaphor served a valuable purpose.

As an injunction for the shape of research within the discipline, however, the

“toolbox metaphor” had and continues to have crucial shortcomings. These shortcomings

boil down to this: a research method is not a “tool” in the sense that the metaphor

suggest. The extended example of ethnography used in political research makes the point.

The first section below describes the foundations of ethnography in political

analysis. The second examines the trade-offs involved in choosing to become an

ethnographer (rather than another type of researcher) or to use ethnographic approaches

(rather than other approaches). The third examines the transformation of ethnography

when it is used in the context of multiple-methods research. The final section argues that

an ethnographic shift in research methodologies may be more appropriate than designing

multiple-methods research.

Foundations of Ethnography

It is worth pausing to ask, “What is ethnography?”6 Ethnography is sometimes

mistakenly conflated with the whole range of qualitative methods. Even those who treat

the subject at length sometimes introduce slippage. For example, at the end of a book-

length treatment of the subject, Hammersley (1992) equates ethnography with a “case-

study.” Woodruff (2006: 13), to take another example, suggests that ethnography is “the

interpretation of meaningful action.”7 To the extent that one likens ethnography to the

case study, discourse analysis, metaphor analysis, and archival work, one is at best

making a claim about family resemblances.

A more common gloss on ethnography links it to participant observation.8 In

participant observation, the researcher seeks to develop verstehen (Weber 1949) based on

6 Harold Orlans, in an insightful posting on the Interpretation and Methods Listserv from 21 April 2006, suggests that the “essence” of ethnographic research is constantly changing by those claiming to conduct it. I acknowledge this concern but can only flag it here. 7 Woodruff’s definition downplays those many aspects of culture and meaning that could have latent, potential, or indirect effects on behavior. 8 Bayard de Volo and Schatz (2004), for example, largely emphasize this link.

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direct observations gleaned from partaking in subjects’ everyday realities. This use of the

term implies that only such observation helps to reconstruct insider viewpoints,

overlooking the possibility that strategies other than participant observation may in some

cases be useful and appropriate. Schatzberg (2001), to whom I return below, is one

example of an author who gleans insider perspectives through documentary sources

rather than through participant observation.

Even cultural anthropologists, for whom ethnography is the defining feature of

scholarly inquiry, face a dizzying array of uses for the term. Broad definitions often

result. Fetterman (1989: 11) suggests that ethnography is “the art and science of

describing a group or culture,” a definition that presupposes a priori understandings of

“group” and “culture.” Over the years, this has proved deeply problematic, as even

seemingly pristine and isolated “tribes” are, upon further examination, revealed to be less

than discrete. As Edmund Leach once argued, “[T]he ethnographer has often only

managed to discern the existence of a tribe because he took it as axiomatic that this kind

of cultural entity must exist.”9 To describe a group can be no more than to impose a

categorical groupness that the researcher takes for granted. The same can be said for how

“culture” is treated in political science; it is usually reified, naturalized, rarely

problematized, and leaves little room for individual agency (Wedeen 2002).

Indeed, because of a commitment to studying groups and cultures but a

simultaneous self-consciousness about doing so, today’s cultural anthropology—while

retaining ethnography at its core—simultaneously questions it. Recent discussions of

“reflexivity” that address the researcher’s role in the production of knowledge (e.g.,

Davies 1999),10 and “multi-sited” approaches that seek to link the local to the regional

and global (Marcus 1998; Comaroff and Comaroff 2003) underscore the central but

ambiguous place of ethnography in contemporary anthropology.

I prefer to define ethnography as an approach that relies centrally on person-to-

person contact as a way to elicit insider perspectives and meanings. This definition

implies that ehnography involves both a process and an end-goal. The process includes a

9 Leach, cited with emphasis added, in Tapper (1983: 51) 10 A Russian joke captures the impact of the ethnographer on his research setting: “Q: What is the traditional social structure of the Chukchi [a northern Siberian indigenous group]? A: a mother, father, grandparents, eight children, and an anthropologist.”

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practical reliance on person-to-person interaction (as opposed to work with paper

documents, electronic files, computer manipulations, or cultural artifacts). This close

contact with other human beings may entail some combination of participant observation,

non-participant observation, certain types of interviews (Spradley 1979), and focus

groups, among other methods. Ethnography consists of a cluster of methods, rather than a

single one.11

The end-goal of this person-to-person contact is to discover emic (i.e., insider)

perspectives and meanings. The range of emic perspectives discovered is, of course,

merely a fraction of the complexities of any human community. Nonetheless, the variety

of motivations, self-understandings, and contextual variables that become apparent

through ethnography may frustrate the researcher interested in generating analytic

coherence. Thus—at various points between the outset of research and reporting the

results—the researcher necessarily brings analytic categories to bear as s/he makes sense

of these emic perspectives. But, in the process of this sense-making, the ethnographer is

far likelier to seize upon indigenous categories than to employ categories derived from

alien contexts (Schatzberg 2001; Pouliot 2006).

Ethnographies are commonly held to champion the disempowered and the

dispossessed. Because ethnography pays attention to, and takes seriously, the

predicaments of ordinary people, it is often regarded as an agent of social change on their

behalf. It is thus no accident that ethnographic methods are often combined with

progressive social agendas, such as that offered by Shdaimah, Stahl, and Schram (2006).

But this is only one possibility among many. Ethnographers and ethnographic knowledge

were part and parcel of the European colonial enterprise (Said 1979).12 To this day, states

may employ ethnographers to “discover” (often construct) traditions that serve to

legitimate an elite’s authority.13 Moreover, large corporations now employ researchers

who use ethnographic techniques to learn the behavior of ordinary people—as a way to

improve marketing appeals.14

11 This makes ethnography closer to an epistemology or a methodology, rather than a research method, narrowly defined. 12 See also Hirsch (2005) on ethnographic knowledge in the construction of the Soviet state-empire. 13 For one example from post-Soviet Kazakhstan, see Schatz (2004). 14 Thanks to comments by Dorian Warren and Dvora Yanow on the Interpretation and Methods Listserv for revealing this interesting development.

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Sunk Costs and Truthful Consciousness

Given the above understanding of ethnography, how can we locate its use within

political science research? I will argue that to be a political ethnographer (my short-hand

for the scholar who uses ethnography to address political questions) means to engage in

at least two major trade-offs, which I detail below. What ultimately distinguishes the

political ethnographer is the assumption that individual testimony is valuable.

In his characteristically wry fashion, Ernest Gellner (1983: 37) once commented

that “false consciousness is not the universal human condition, it is merely a common

one.” But how common is it? Under what conditions should the researcher expect an

individual’s testimony about his/her social or political situation to yield important

information, and under what conditions might such testimony mislead? This is ultimately

an empirical question, but the political ethnographer begins with the assumption that such

testimony is worth mining for its truth-value.

This assumption derives from the ethnographer’s approach to two trade-offs. The

first is practical. The typical political ethnographer must learn the complexities of a

context—the language, the cultural assumptions, and the history—even before beginning

first-hand research. While non-ethnographers may also learn languages, cultures, and

histories to a degree, the ethnographer often faces particularly significant time

commitments that as a practical matter preclude or at least postpone the development of

other analytic skills. This trade-off is the normal stuff of professional development, and

some mixture of personal inclination, happenstance, and formal training creates a

political ethnographer rather than, say, a statistician.

This practical trade-off does not end when entering the research context (i.e., the

“field”). The researcher usually invests months if not years developing relationships of

trust with research subjects and refining her/his knowledge of the research context. This

is justified by a related trade-off: ethnographers are often interested in the particular

rather than the general, in “internal” rather than “external” validity, and in the agent-

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centered rather than the structural.15 Given this practical investment of time and energy,

most scholars build entire careers on their graduate school training.16

This leads to the second trade-off. Most generically put: to develop research skills

is also to create sunk intellectual costs. In other words, a particular research style can be

habit-forming. Few scholars move effortlessly between the rigors of post-modernism and

those of positivist social science; the logics, styles of inquiry, requirements, meanings,

and rewards vary too widely. Moreover, rarely do benefits accrue to the individual

researcher for cross-methodological work; in this sense, habits that develop early in one’s

professional career tend to have considerable staying power.

The ethnographer’s suspicion that person-to-person research conducted at close-

range will generate important information about politics may be quickly challenged by

the statistician, who might insist that descriptive information from an informant without a

sense of that informant’s representativeness and the validity of his/her account is not

worth the (considerable) effort.17 The political ethnographer’s response is three-fold.

First, s/he is less concerned with representativeness than with identifying processes.

Second, claims to representativeness (or accusations of non-representativeness) are

predicated upon pre-determined categories—categories that more often than not are the

constructions of a usually-alien researcher. As Fenno (1990: 59) puts in his political

ethnography of US Congressional representatives, “If I had been certain about what types

of representatives and what types of districts to sample, I would already have had

answers to a lot of the questions raised in this book.” Finally, the ethnographer has a

variety of micro-level strategies of triangulation which enable her both to know how an

individual’s subjective position maps onto larger social and political landscapes and to

discover the degree of validity in any individual account. She hardly flies blind.18

15 In the conclusion I suggest that ethnography as attention to insider meanings need not be particular, agent-centric, or averse to generalization. 16 David Laitin is among the exceptions, having changed geographic (from Africa to the ex-USSR) and methodological (from ethnography and narrative to greater emphasis on game theory and statistics) focus. See Qualitative Methods (2006). 17 Public-opinion research based on face-to-face interviews is a possible exception here, but the requirements of aggregating numerical data severely limit the type of person-to-person research that can be conducted. 18 On the related questions of validity and generalizability, see Hammersley (1992).

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Unlike the ethnographer, the statistician believes strongly in cumulative

knowledge, in the homogeneity of categories, and in the possibilities for generalization of

epistemic knowledge. S/he lacks faith in the veracity of individual-level accounts of

political reality, and is likely to dismiss individual accounts as biased, unrepresentative,

simply misinformed, or—in the crude language of statistics—“noise.” Ultimately, the

political ethnographer assumes that (unless proven otherwise) his/her informant offers a

truthful picture of his/her own reality, while the non-ethnographer assumes (unless

proven otherwise) that such informants are likely to mislead, through some combination

of false consciousness and unrepresentativeness.19

When faced with an inconsistency between statistical and ethnographic data, the

ethnographer finds fault with the quantitative indicators, with the source of the data, or

with the mathematical or categorical assumptions made to manipulate the data. The

statistician faced with the same inconsistency, by contrast, criticizes the biased sample

and the “subjective” nature of observational data. Add to the mix institutional

considerations—hiring choices, tenure decisions, peer reviews, and the like—and even

seemingly small decisions create a significant rift between those laboring in the

ethnographic tradition and those doing other kinds of work.

Two Types of Political Ethnographer

One way to understand ethnography’s position is to consider Aristotle’s

distinction between phronesis (grounded knowledge) and episteme (abstract knowledge).

Most ethnographers would agree with Flyvbjerg (2001), who argues that while both

phronesis and episteme are valuable, social science’s great strength lies in the former

rather than the latter. That is, they find much value in producing contextualized, rather

than decontextualized knowledge.20

19 It is theoretically possible to imagine splitting the difference. An individual could be described as being in some ways representative of a particular group. His/her testimony can be described as an accurate reflection of some political or social reality. Here, Ragin (2000) is correct to probe the possibilities for thinking of data as partially in and partially out of a variety of categories. One need not view the world in binaries—either the data is accurate or it is false. All data have some truth-value. But, social scientists make decisions. To describe the partial truth-value of a piece of ethnographic data is to exclude a discussion of other data. At some point, the ethnographer privileges ethnographic data, while the statistician privileges quantitative data. 20 For a debate on the applicability of Flyvbjerg’s distinction to political science, see Schram (2004) and Laitin (2003).

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While equating the ethnographer with phronetic research is a useful first cut, it

may be simplistic. Is the political ethnographer uninterested in abstract theorizing, in

developing generalizations, and in speaking across cases? Rarely so. Most political

ethnographers are not wedded to an endlessly and irreducibly complex local reality. What

distinguishes the political ethnographer is resistance not to generalization per se but to

rushing prematurely to generalization. This caution against hasty abstract theorizing

represents an unwillingness to dismiss individual voices as rooted in false consciousness

and local context as mere “noise.”21 As noted above, the political ethnographer rather

assumes that an individual’s consciousness stands to be mined for its truth value.

The fact that political ethnography is distinctive should not obscure its variety.

This variety turns on how the ethnographer answers a simple question: is ethnography

valuable in and of itself, or only to the extent that it serves broader research goals? Is

ethnography intrinsically valuable?

On one hand of a continuum is the intrinsic-value ethnographer. S/he maintains

that the very use of ethnographic methods adds important value to the research endeavor.

To conduct ethnographic research on human subjects is to grant legitimacy to their

predicaments and concerns; to do so is necessarily to bypass top-down, often state-driven

imperatives. To publish ethnographic work is to let the subject speak, giving voice to the

powerless, subaltern, and understudied; it is therefore an inversion of the usual

relationship between the researcher and the researched. In turn, letting the subject speak

may have implications for policy. When welfare recipients, victims of shantytown

violence, or women who have lost children in civil wars are allowed to speak for

themselves, their predicaments are brought to light, where they otherwise would remain

in shadow.22 The value of such research thus inheres in the combination of normative

commitments and analytic insights.

At the other end of the continuum is the extrinsic-value ethnographer. S/he

believes that ethnography is valuable only to the extent that it serves an external

purpose—typically, that of generating epistemic knowledge about social or political life. 21 Today’s statistician is less likely to declare a person’s position “false” than to declare it “an outlier.” The normative judgment lying behind both sets of terminology is that attitudes approaching the mean are to be preferred. 22 On welfare recipients, see Soss (2000). On shantytown violence in Brazil, see Arias (2004). On mothers who lost children in Nicaragua, see Bayard de Volo (2001).

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The ethnographer here suggests that a theory without conceptual space for emic

perspectives is a partial theory, at best. For examples, theories of why people mobilize,

why religious and civic commitments clash or do not, and why ethnic groups do or do not

engage in conflict must contend with knowledge about how people understand their own

identities, roles, and preferences.23

Whereas the first type of ethnographer does not concern herself with a positivist

drive to develop decontextualized laws governing social and political life, the latter type

might strive for such generalizations but only if they save conceptual space for the role

that emic perspectives play. The core epistemological-ontological commitments of the

ethnographer, however, do not disappear, and even the extrinsic-value ethnographer

returns to a central choice to privilege abstract knowledge or contextual knowledge.

Abstract Knowledge and Ethnography

While the pursuit of abstract knowledge does not categorically preclude the types

of things that ethnographers do—especially consider insider meanings—such pursuits

make it very difficult to do so. The extrinsic-value ethnographer is put in a bind that the

intrinsic-value ethnographer escapes.24 I will suggest that the ethnographer who tries to

pursue epistemic knowledge ends up in one of two places. Either s/he ignores these emic

perspectives in pursuit of epistemic knowledge, or s/he ultimately privileges emic

perspectives and therefore can offer only a corrective to abstract theorizing. I use top-

notch research by Ashutosh Varshney and Jessica Allina-Pisano, respectively, to

illustrate.

What Happens to Ethnography in Multiple-Methods Research

Ethnographers, by their nature, are multiple-methods researchers. Participant

observation is often at the core, but even participant observers are smart to consider

relevant statistical, archival, experimental, and other data. But while the value of

23 On culture and identity in social mobilization, see Swidler (1986). On civic and religious commitments in Senegal, see Villalón (1995). On ethnic conflict and peace, see Kaufman (2001). 24 The intrinsic-value ethnographer, for his part, must convince those without an inherent interest in the subject that his subject deserves attention. Even if one studies violence or poverty—issues with a normative dimension that should speak for itself—it may still not be clear why a study of violence or poverty of one group deserves more attention than a similar study of another group.

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combining methods that share core epistemological-ontological commitments is clear, the

utility of combining methods from very different research traditions has yet to be

demonstrated. As an example of recent multiple-methods research illustrates, the value-

added from ethnographic work runs the risk of evaporating when combined with methods

that lack core similarities. In this section, I examine work by Ashutosh Varshney. I argue

that Varshney’s use of ethnography is subsumed by his larger epistemological-

ontological commitments.25 In other words, the type of targeted ethnography performed

projects like Varshney’s fundamentally transforms what it means to be an ethnographer.

Ethnography is reduced from being both an end-goal (production of insider meanings)

and a process (person-to-person contact) to simply the latter.

Like David Laitin (1998), Varshney (2002) offers a serious attempt to harness the

power of multiple-methods approaches. Varshney begins by asking a question: what

produces interethnic peace in some Indian cities, while other Indian cities spiral into

interethnic violence?26 Arguing that attention to the micro-level is required to tease out an

answer, he uses ground-level techniques (principally interviews, though some oral

histories, as well) among his methods to test an explanation for why ethnic violence

became endemic in Aligarh, Hyderabad, and Ahmenabad, while it remained uncommon

in Calicut, Lucknow, and Surat. Ultimately, he comes to the conclusion that certain types

of civic engagement are likely to maintain peace among ethnic rivals, while other types

are less likely to do so. This argument could easily “travel” to contexts far beyond the

subcontinent—something that makes it a first-rate book in comparative politics.

His entire research design has rightfully been lauded for its willingness to attend

to micro-political factors (King 2004), but it is worth asking what occurs to his ground-

level techniques in the course of research. On one hand, his targeted ethnography helps

Varshney to distinguish between superficially similar cases and account for outcomes

that otherwise would be paradoxical. It helps him to accomplish a “process tracing” that

links his independent variables (types of civic engagement) and dependent variables

(ethnic peace or violence). Without this, there would be an enormous empirical gap.

Ground-level techniques here are in the service of the largely deductive logic of the

25 For a similar argument about David Laitin’s work, see Hopf (2006). 26 “Ethnic” is Varshney’s preferred term for the divide between Hindus and Muslims in India.

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research; they are not used to pursue knowledge inductively. And, even if induction plays

role in the actual accumulation of knowledge on a topic, presenting one’s work as

deductive has come to be the preferred rhetoric.27

On the other hand, several things occur to the subjects under study with such a

targeted use of ground-level techniques.28 First, the study’s focus begins narrow and

remains narrow; he is interested what drives the production of inter-ethnic violence or the

maintenance of inter-ethnic peace. He proceeds in the following way. First, he constructs

an event-history dataset of violence in India that helps him to determine which cases he

will use for ground-level study. Then he examines the secondary literature (archival

records, newspaper and other periodical accounts) on these cases. Finally, he conducts his

field research that involves human subjects (elite interviews, semi-structured interviews

with a sample of ordinary people). Though in no way is Varshney insensitive to the

tragedy that is ethnic conflict, once he has contact with his research subjects, they are

essentially useful as founts of information to test his variables.29

Second, the subjects of the study—when they appear—do so in a “flattened” way.

Varshney claims that his sampling technique for interviews—using illiteracy to guide the

sample—allows him to “hear the voices of the subaltern” (20). But, while these voices

may have informed Varshney’s background thinking, they are scarcely heard in any

direct way. Oral histories (as opposed to more structured interviews) are not cited

individually (though they are cited as a group—e.g., fn10, 344; fn5, 352), and when

evidence from interviews with ordinary people is used, what makes it to print are the

responses to quantifiable (i.e., closed-ended) questions (e.g., 126-27).

Nothing is wrong with this. Faced with an array of trade-offs, Varshney has made

reasonable choices.30 Varshney’s goal is clearly to contribute to knowledge about the

production of ethnic conflict, as a way to have a say in its prevention. And this goal runs

27 In a spirited defense of his own work, Laitin (2006: 31-2) contends that his central insight from his 1998 book—namely, that a new identity of “Russian-speakers” was emerging in ex-Soviet states—came directly from (inductive) fieldwork. If this is the case, then it is a puzzle why the book is couched in the rhetoric of a priori deductive theorizing. Laitin (personal communication) has pointed out that all social science involves both deduction and induction. This is surely true, but it says nothing about the role, sequencing, or proportions of inductive versus deductive thinking. On these latter issues, see Pouliot (2006). 28 My own work (Schatz 2004) is not at all immune from the shortcomings that I identify here. 29 Varshney might respond that testing such variables helps to tease out explanations that, ultimately, could guide conflict-prevention programs in the future. 30 See Varshney (2006) on basic trade-offs involved in the design and execution of any research project.

14

up against the goal of letting individuals speak. Indeed, Varshney contrasts what he does

to what an ethnographer does: “[H]aving been trained as [a social scientist], I thought my

comparative advantage lay in social science, not in constructing ethnographies or writing

fiction (xiv).”31

In this sort of multiple-methods research, however, insider meanings cannot be

given adequate expression. To attend to insider meanings, Varshney would have had to

do at least some of the following: a) let his subjects identify what being a Muslim or

Hindu means, what violence and peace mean, and what civic engagement means—rather

than positing these categories a priori; b) let his subjects identify reasons for ethnic

conflict and accept these reasons as—at least in some part—valid,32 and c) let his subjects

identify the conditions under which ethnic conflict is a salient topic and what related

social facts his subjects associate with the topic. Whereas the outsider with a research

agenda is understandably determined to elicit responses on a particular subject, ordinary

people typically have a complex array of associations and considerations.

These associations and considerations are the normal stuff of everyday life, no

matter the analytic parsimony the researcher seeks. When I described Varshney’s book to

my (educated, non-specialist) neighbors in Toronto who are originally from the Calicut

region, they responded by insisting that most people actually do not think about ethnic

violence or peace; they are more concerned with getting their next meal. The contours of

an ethnography need not be dictated by the subjects’ point of reference, but they ought to

carve out space for it. A purer ethnographic account would give pride of place to emic

perspectives, but when ethnography is subsumed by a very different logic, such an

account is not possible.

None of this should be construed as a call for ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967)

in political science. While Varshney proposes, however, to steer a middle course between

“stylized facts” and “thick description” (21), his is a causal story about independent and

dependent variables. It is not a narrative about particular people in particular places at

particular times. In the end, Varshney’s commitment to causal social science determines

31 The implication that ethnography is opposed to, rather than a type of, social science is one that might be questioned. 32 See Tilly (2006) for a thought-provoking examination of how and why people give the reasons and explanations that they do.

15

how he uses ground-level techniques. If the first ingredient for ethnography (person-to-

person contact) enters the stew, the second (attention to emic perspectives) does not.

I have defined ethnography as involving a process and an end-goal. When

ethnography is combined with other methods, the proportions of process and end-goal

change dramatically. In the Varshney case, ethnography is reduced to ground-level data-

gathering techniques; the goal of explicating insider meanings practically disappears.

When well executed, such research adds empirical flesh to theoretical relationships and

may offer opportunities to perform “process tracing” in empirical situations. But the

limits are also clear: larger epistemological-ontological commitments subsume

ethnography. Typically, such commitments hold little space for attention to insider

meanings.33 Varshney’s theory of ethnic peace/conflict is an important contribution to the

literature, but it holds preciously little room for the human beings who dot his analytic

landscape.

Ethnography as Corrective

If Varshney is ultimately not a political ethnographer, Jessica Allina-Pisano is.

Allina-Pisano’s (2004) ethnography is of the extrinsic-value type; she attends to ground-

level realities and insider meanings as a way to engage epistemic knowledge. More

specifically, she uses ethnography to call into question a widespread theory about post-

Soviet economic transitions.

Based on ground-level familiarity with agricultural reform in post-Soviet Ukraine,

fluency in the region’s languages, and carefully cultivated trust of her informants, Allina-

Pisano demonstrates that local authorities resisted neo-liberal economic reforms for

reasons that an ungrounded theoretical literature overlooks. They were not seeking rents

or intentionally thwarting market-based reforms for political reasons; rather, they sought

to protect Soviet-era rural institutions which “served as socioeconomic anchors for their

communities, providing employment, social services, inputs for household production,

and food for urban populations” (557).

33 Multiple-methods research conducted in a disciplinary climate where attention to causal theory-building is the overriding priority means that ethnography—unless it stands alone, a point to which I return later—is overwhelmed by positivist commitments.

16

This conclusion has enormous implications for how we think about post-

communism. It implies that market-oriented reforms, to be successful, require attention to

both local leaders and ordinary people. It suggests a different way of thinking about the

value-rationality of post-communist elites. That they are self-serving, even corrupt,

individuals is one possibility; Allina-Pisano’s work suggests quite different ones. In the

end, her willingness to embark on grounded, ethnographic study allows us to turn

received theorizing about post-communist economic reform on its head and open a

window for developing related research projects.

But, like all extrinsic-value ethnographers, Allina-Pisano is in a bind. Her

commitment to abstract theorizing rubs up against her commitment to grounded empirical

work, and the ethnographer will privilege the latter. Thus, when interviewing local elites,

Allina-Pisano accepts the veracity of statements made by former collective farm heads,

who claimed to have the best interest of their local communities at heart. The statistician,

by contrast, would be far likelier to assume “false consciousness” or its strategic cousin,

outright deceit, on the part of the farm head. These fine choices about how to interpret

individual testimony are often made at the margins, but they have a profound impact on

the reported results of research and—more to the point—on how research is designed and

executed in the first place.

The political ethnographer can usefully call into question existing epistemic

knowledge, and this—as the Allina-Pisano case illustrates—is a valuable service. But to

question existing epistemic knowledge is not to develop new epistemic knowledge.

Indeed, the logic of extrinsic-value ethnographic work requires that any cross-contextual

generalization be based on data derived from ethnographic work conducted on other

particular contexts. Unless and until entire armies of political ethnographers conduct well

coordinated research across a variety of contexts, the prospects for such decontextualized,

ethnographic theorizing would appear distant, at best.

The extrinsic-value ethnographer also knows that her research cannot be

replicated sensu stricto. She has conducted unique conversations and, while the

transcripts of those conversations or the fieldnotes of the ethnographer could be read, the

very questions asked (rather than those not asked!) by the ethnographer have an effect on

the course of the conversation. What specific effect they have is an empirical question,

17

but it certainly complicates efforts at comparison across cases; no two ethnographers

conducting face-to-face research are able to institute even the quasi-experimental controls

required by scientific orthodoxy.34

Ground-level work like Allina-Pisano’s performs a crucial function: it keeps those

bend on abstract, decontextualized theorizing in check. It forces them to consider

alternative renderings of empirical reality. It asks them to interrogate assumed causal

relationships. It raises the possibility that ascendant knowledge can be based on specious

conclusions. Such work potentially generates new directions for decontextualized

research. It is thus crucial—in my view—that such research remain prominent among the

things that social scientists do.

But while crucial, ethnography as a corrective is a self-limiting project. How will

future decontextualized theorizing on post-communist economic transitions proceed?

Even with such an important corrective as Allina-Pisano’s, it probably will not attend to

emic perspectives. Put most bluntly, subsequent epistemic theorists will likely amend

their coding of the Ukrainian case, but they are unlikely to change the factors routinely

considered in the course of a typical research day. The difficulty of reconciling large-N

and ethnographic work always seems to rear its head.

Conclusion: A Call for Ethnography as an End-Goal

The toolbox metaphor has performed a valuable legitimating function for non-

ascendant methods and their practitioners in political research. The problem with the

metaphor, however, is that it wrongly implies that multiple-methods research is

necessarily preferable to other kinds of research. The example of ethnography shows that

an approach can be fundamentally transformed and its value reduced (rather than added),

when combined with other approaches. In such cases, ethnography runs the risk of

becoming merely a process of face-to-face research, rather than also being an end-goal of

exposing insider meanings.

This implies a need to advance what I have called intrinsic-value ethnography. I

imagine an academic political science that has space for a variety of ethnographic (not to

34 See Heider (1988) on how to think about reconciling divergent ethnographic accounts of the same context.

18

mention non-ethnographic) approaches—both intrinsic-value and extrinsic-value. This is

a call for an ethnographic shift at the discipline-wide level, as a way to counter what

Schram (2004: 417) calls a “scientistic drift.” This shift would not reduce ethnography to

face-to-face data-gathering; rather, it would centrally consider emic perspectives—even if

this means disengaging from the logic of causality-oriented social science. After all, as

Dvora Yanow suggests, ethnography is a “sensibility”35 more than a method.

Advancing intrinsic-value ethnography is important not only for those who are

already doing this sort of work; it is crucial even for non-ethnographers. We know that

emic perspectives are a crucial part of human communities, and social and political

processes, but we also know that the central preoccupation with causal theorizing makes

it difficult to consider insider meanings. Put most crudely, given the difficulty of

plugging emic perspectives into a regression equation, one must either ignore them

entirely or create a space for research that attends to them.

In this regard, while multiple-methods research may be useful at the level of the

individual research project, a discipline-wide eclecticism is preferable (Herrera 2006a).

Such eclecticism would preserve a space for stand-alone ethnographic work.36

Ethnography should not be the single goal of political science research, but it should be

among the goals of political science research.37

And we have successful examples of ethnographic work that puts person-to-

person contact into the background but nonetheless considers insider perspectives.

Schatzberg (2001), for example, uses a variety of documentary sources—especially a

close and systematic reading of local newspapers—to offer a general characterization of

political culture across a broad swath of sub-Saharan Africa. His is a consummate

ethnography, to the extent that it is a book about how and why people view authority as

legitimate. But it is ethnography as an end-goal rather than a process, since person-to-

person contact is not the central research method.38 Likewise, if we view ethnography

simply as a process, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) does not qualify. But, if 35 Yanow, personal communication 36 By “stand-alone,” I simply mean ethnography that is published separately from non-ethnography. 37 It is appropriate for some research to put insider meanings into the background. Most research in political economy, for example, would likely eschew insider meanings, even given central insights of work in this area that considers insider meanings (Herrera 2006b; Mwangi 2006). 38 While he relies largely on the close study of texts and symbols, his work is built upon decades-long contact with people from across the region.

19

ethnography is the end-goal of locating emic perspectives, Scott’s account is pure

ethnography, describing the internal logic by which the modern state operates, as well as

the excesses to which it can succumb.

Both Scott and Schatzberg have an ethnographic sensibility, and both have built

their studies on decades-long contact with ordinary people. Like their work, successful

work on public rituals and symbolism (e.g., Edelman 1964; Aronoff 1993; Kubik 1994;

Jourde 2005) is not derived ex nihilo from the symbolic realm; rather it constructed based

on ground-level perspectives. As Aronoff (1993: 6) puts it, to study symbols requires “the

researcher’s observing and recording the usage of the symbols in the context of ongoing

social relationships.”

The risk, of course, is that stand-alone, intrinsic-value ethnography could be

marginalized by those in the discipline who do not believe that ethnographic work has

inherent value. The risk is real, and it implies responsibilities. The ethnographer faces the

responsibility to make her/his research both intelligible and relevant to the non-

ethnographer. S/he need not assume positivist logic or vocabulary, but s/he should be

sure to address abiding questions about political and social life whose relevance are

widely recognized.

At the same time, the non-ethnographer faces the responsibility to read widely

and to consider ways of using stand-alone ethnographic research to inform his/her (often

positivist) studies of politics. Simultaneously, s/he must resist the temptation to view

stand-alone ethnography as “merely” exploratory research, as “simple” hypothesis-

generation, and therefore as somehow inferior.

Both the ethnographer and the non-ethnographer must find ways to read broadly

across an eclectic and broad political science. Substantive and methodological

specialization is desirable (Morrow 2003), but only if the discipline simultaneously

encourages much boundary crossing (Drezner 2006). I sense that professional political

scientists are up to the task.

20

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