Of Rhetoric and Representation: The Four Faces of Ethnography

Abstract

Influenced by the new literary movement and postmodernism, in the 1990s sociologists began to reflexively examine their writings as texts, looking critically at the way they shape reality and articulate their descriptions and conceptualizations. Advancing this thread, in our presidential address we offer an overarching analysis of ethnographic writing, identifying four current genres and deconstructing their rhetoric: classical, mainstream, postmodern, and public ethnography. We focus on the differences in their epistemological, organizational, locational, and stylistic self-presentations with an eye toward better understanding how these speak to their intended audiences, both within and outside of the discipline.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This Address was presented at the joint annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society and the North Central Sociological Association in Chicago, IL, April 2007. We would like to thank Mitch Duneier and John Van Maanen for suggestions they made to earlier drafts of this article.

NOTES

Notes

¹ When we selected the “Art of Sociology” as the theme for the 2006 Midwest Sociological Society's annual meeting, we received several angry letters and other anecdotal feedback from people who refused to attend a conference that focused so strongly on such “trivial” matters.

² We refer here to the type of sociology that lies at the hegemonic center of the discipline: highly quantitative, positivistic, strongly worded in the rhetoric of science, using sophisticated statistical techniques, often relying on large data sets that have been precollected, most often practiced in large research universities in the Midwest (and some other regions), and appearing in what is usually referred to as the discipline's holy triumvirate of journals, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces. This appellation of “mainstream” is related to, but not wholly the same, as what we refer to as mainstream ethnography.

³ Atkinson (1990:46) refers to this rhetorical minimization of the authors' presence as the “degree zero” of writing.

⁴ There is no hard-and-fast rule about where ethnographies get published. It is possible, but unlikely, for a classically written ethnography to be accepted in a mainstream generalist or specialty journal, unless the editor comes from an ethnographic background. However, even though the late Spencer Cahill, a classically trained ethnographer, edited Social Psychology Quarterly for three years (2004–2006), few classical or even mainstream ethnographies were published under his tenure. Despite the ecumenical statements made by most editors of mainstream journals (see, e.g., Jacobs 2004), relatively few classical ethnographies (or ethnographies of any ilk) appear in these venues (some mainstream editors note that few are actually submitted and that there is no systematic bias against qualitative work in their journals). Those that survive the editorial process are often shaped into mainstream formats.

⁵ Apparently, the exhaustive literature reviews in these articles have become so commonplace and, perhaps, burdensome for some, that Fine (2007:2), upon taking over the editorship of Social Psychology Quarterly, had to admonish potential submitters to “shorten their literature reviews, [merely] nodding at the past.”

⁶ We are well aware of the published contretemps that occurred between Loïc Wacquant (2002) and public urban ethnographers Kathy Newman, Elijah Anderson, and Mitch Duneier in his scathing review of their books. Elsewhere, Adler and Adler (2005a), we have outlined our disagreements with Wacquant's attacks on these three scholars. However, from personal communications, anecdotes, and corridor talk we have heard among ethnographers that Wacquant's problems with public urban ethnography, as illustrated by these three exemplars, are not isolated to him. Thus, we feel that we are representing a portion of the scholarly population who agree with much of Wacquant's criticisms, even if we have distanced ourselves from them in large part.

⁷ Interestingly, of the three books highlighted here, Bourgois' is the one only published by a university press (the others are trade publications). Greater theoretical development is likely to have been sought by such reviewers and editors. Nevertheless, as we define it, Bourgois' book still fits the criteria of public ethnography.

⁸ This, of course, represents our own genre and, perhaps, our bias. There are, no doubt, people who practice other forms of ethnography, and sociology more generally, who disagree.