Role of ethnographic argument in the prediction and/or creation of social futures

Abstract

In this paper I question a number of assumptions often made within mainstream sociology about time, the nature of society and about methodology. The first is that quantitative methods and especially statistically based analyses are always more scientific and/or reliable bases for action than well-researched and argued (in a literal sense) qualitative judgements collectively made in situ.

Acknowledgements

The underlying argument presented in this paper was inspired or reinforced by the material presented in ‘The Manchester School’, a series of papers published in Journal Social Analysis (2005), 49(3), edited by T. M. S. Evens and Bruce Kapferer, which also includes Frankenberg (2005). In 2006 this volume was also published in book form by Berghahn, Oxford.

Notes

1. Women were, of course, not the only source of strangers in sacred lore. One might also cite the strange life of Abram/Abraham, the cross-national life experience of Joseph, and the controversial ambiguous origins of Moses.

2. The first issue of the Academy of Social Sciences journal 21st Century refers only to the South East-based head-in-the-heavens Jewish émigrés and seems to ignore the feet-on-the-ground but still theoretically informed who were mostly émigrés and Northern-based to boot!

3. For the limitations of this reservation, see Coetzee (2003) and Haraway (2003).

4. On the importance of shared time, see Fabian (1983, 1991); and on the archetypical intellectual stranger and refugee, the isolated, dissenting, excluded from home, expelled-to-abroad, Jew, see Slezkine (2004).

5. Village on the Border was first published in 1957 and reprinted in 1990 with additional material and an additional introduction. The book also contains I: ‘Village on the border: a text revisited’ (pp. 169–193) followed by II: ‘Participant observers’ (pp. 194–199) and III: ‘Taking the blame and passing the buck: the carpet of Agamemnon’, an essay on the problems of responsibility, legitimation and triviality. Communities in Britain was first published in 1966 and reprinted in 1967, 1970 and 1971. In 1994 it was reprinted with a new appendix as ‘Sex and gender in British community studies’ (pp 297–325), which was reprinted from Leonard & Allen (1991).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ronnie Frankenberg

*19 Keele Rd., Newcastle under Lyme, Staffordshire, UK ST5 2JT. Email: [email protected]