Abstract
This is a comment suggesting that Jerolmack and Khan’s article in this issue embodies news from “somewhere,” in arguing that ethnography can emphasize interaction in concrete situations and what people do rather than what they say about what they do. However, their article also provides news from “nowhere,” in that ethnography often claims to prioritize in situ organization while dipping into an unconstrained reservoir of distant structures that analytically can subsume and potentially eviscerate the local order. I elaborate on each of these somewhere/nowhere ideas. I also briefly point to the considerable ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research of the last several decades that addresses the structural issue. Such research, along with other traditions in ethnography, suggest that investigators can relate social or political contexts to concrete situations provided that there is, in the first place, preservation of the parameters of everyday life and the exactitude of the local order.
Colin Jerolmack and Shamus Khan (2014; hereafter, J-K) critique interviews as a method of data collection, arguing that attitudes and behavior are at best weakly linked and therefore are likely to tell us little about why people do what they do. One reaction I have is that they overstate the case and fail to discuss the ways in which interviews can be useful.
I also see J-K’s article is also a piece of advocacy. For field researchers and others whose aim is to capture the lived experience of attitudinal states, J-K recommend the study of interaction, as it happens rather than in terms of what subjects may report about their everyday lives. I read their article as one who is embedded in the traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis as well as Goffmanian “interaction order” theorizing. Consequently, my other reaction is to be utterly sympathetic with their recommendation. That said, the ethnographic approach they so strongly recommend deserves the same scrutiny they have given interviews. This comment is an initial effort to do just this—closely scrutinize what they say.
Two themes (captured in the title of this article) underlie my analysis. There is news from “somewhere,” in that ethnography can emphasize interaction and what people do rather than what they say about what they do, and provide findings about the social organization of everyday experience as it is lived concretely and in situation-specific terms. However, there is also news from “nowhere,” in that ethnography often prioritizes, as I show in the J-K’s own work, in situ organization while dipping into an unconstrained reservoir of background meanings that analytically can subsume and potentially eviscerate the local order. Social structure and meaning come to assume an existence in a nebulous realm akin to the “ether” of our digital world. Subsequently, I elaborate on each of these somewhere/nowhere ideas. I also briefly discuss the considerable research of the last several decades that addresses the structural issue, a literature that J-K do not cite, much less examine.
News From Somewhere: Ethnographic Findings
The primary target for the J-K critique is the sociology of culture. Scholars in this tradition can (and do, in this special issue) speak for themselves, although it might be observed that J-K “have paradigms to grind,” as Goffman (1981:68) once observed about an unfortunate review of his work. That is, it is not clear to me that the criticized works are fundamentally flawed so much as they represent different approaches to the sociology of attitudes and behavior, approaches from which we can learn substantive things that might be valid on their own terms and possibly even complementary rather than competitive with findings from the approach J-K advocate.
Jerolmack and Khan are part of a recent generation of talented ethnographers, and instead of getting on the plain of cultural sociology, it is to their own work with which I want to engage initially. Both authors have a recent ethnographic monograph, and in each, indeed, there is news from somewhere in the literal sense of that term. Khan (2011) takes us to the world of elite education at St. Paul’s School, a private boarding institution in Concord, New Hampshire. In the 1990s, Khan attended this high school, which is remote both geographically and socially because it is an elite and mostly upper-class institution. In 2004 to 2005, he went back as field researcher in a teaching role, and now Khan’s (2011) monograph from this experience gives us vivid social pictures at that place of the students, the students’ dealings with staff and faculty, their dress for and conduct at mealtimes, their gendered approaches to sex and sexuality, and their talents for showing a stance of knowledgeable comportment that often is devoid of substance. Most prominently, Khan documents how students from advantaged backgrounds learn to embrace an ethic of success based in their own effort rather than by embracing and touting one’s class-based origins and rights. Students develop an orientation to hard work rather than connections for making their way, and a kind of ease whereby they could be equally comfortable in casual encounters as well as the most formal settings. The students also learned—as a contradictory feature of their ease—to erase the visibility of the exertions on behalf of its display.
Where Privilege notably represents a study of inequality by contributing to the sociology of elites (rather than studying the poor), and draws our attention to a particular somewhere, Jerolmack’s (2013) remarkably wide-ranging study is not about a site and instead means traveling to many places where his central phenomenon is the relationship between humans and pigeons. We travel with Jerolmack from Greenwich Village in New York to the Piazza San Marco in Venice, to Trafalgar Square in London, to Berlin, as he examines the cross-species encounters that constitute a piece of the urban fabric in each of these places. Jerolmack insightfully portrays how adherents as well as opponents to the ways of cross-species interactions render as concretely meaningful the everyday worlds in these varied sites.
News From Nowhere: Social Structure in the Ether
In their ethnographic studies, Jerolmack and Khan each have provided the scholarly world and other readerships with impressive sociological work, highlighting social relations in the settings and spaces they study. So let us return to the topic of their article, where they state a “guiding principle behind most ethnography” to the effect that “our social world is generated and maintained through interaction.” As such, with “whatever disposition or repertories of thought an action people bring to a social situation,” social order is “locally constituted,” with “in situ actions” being “guided and constrained by the ‘demand characteristics’ of the situation (including the actions of others) …” (J-K: 197). Here, we get into something of a bind and it slips into their writing in a way that might be missed without a careful parsing, although this bind represents a central dilemma of sociological inquiry. For the quoted sentence seems to suggest that there is both local constitution (demands of the situation) and external constraint (dispositions) in everyday scenes involving social conduct.
Sociological theory and research have ways of solving this dilemma in discussions about how to reconcile agency and structure (Emirbayer and Mische 1998; Rawls 1987) but rehearsing those here is not called for. Rather, I would suggest that Jerolmack and Khan—in their separate work and in their joint article—exhibit a tendency that is pervasive when there are theoretical and empirical issues concerning local constitution and external constraint. The problem of balancing these divergent analytical orientations is either ignored altogether or not given adequate attention as investigators forge their empirical inquiries. This permits a kind of free rein in deciding when and how to pay attention to local constitution, and then permissively reverting to explanations based on structural constraints as when making assertions about dispositions that arise from such constraints (cf. Maynard 2003:Chapter 3).
Interlude: Examining the Local Order of Interaction
Drawing on Goffman (1983b), there are three ways in which investigators examine local social order. These ways can be arranged on a continuum (see Figure 1) where local order (a) has an integrity in its own right that blocks or operates independently of externally based structures, (b) has disparate relations to social structures because of a kind of “loose coupling” in which participants manage the variety of externalities brought to situated action according to circumstantial contingencies, and (c) straightforwardly manifests social structural conditions, “as indicators, expressions or symptoms of social structures such as relationships, informal groups, age grades, gender, ethnic minorities, social classes and the like, with no great concern to treat these effects as data in their own terms” (Goffman 1983b:2).
Local order in relation to social structure.
By a careful reading of their separate investigations, we can place both of our present authors on this continuum and then review what their current article says.
On the right-hand side because it is a conservative position—it conserves the dominance of external structures relative to the interaction order—is the perspective in which interaction is nearly an artifact relative to social structures. Khan’s (2011:116) work fits most easily here, as he readily asserts how “… our bodies are expressions of the larger power relations of society, and each act of the body works to express itself relative to its own position within these power relations.” On the other hand, Jerolmack’s (2013) study represents a more loose-coupling approach. Social relations are related to structural elements but, as in the case of gender or ethnicity, also transcend them. Thereby centrist in empirical inquiry, Jerolmack nevertheless leans toward the right in his theoretical statements. That is, wanting to capture “interactions from the actor’s point of view” Jerolmack (2013:13–14) sees participants’ interpretations as patterned by the social environments in which they are embedded, including, for example, dispositions “… that appreciated the physical aspects of the hobby” (Jerolmack 2013:101) or “social contexts” that “… structure whether or not people welcome the presence of the ‘wild’ in city streets” (Jerolmack 2013:17).
Now, we can see how both the conservative and the loosely coupled approaches to agency and structure may provide for news from nowhere. When we read about inscriptions on bodies, or dispositions, contexts, and conditions that drive what people experience and do, the actual practices of human actors disappear into the ether—a domain that can become as obscure and remote as the cyberspace through which our e-mail comes and goes. But whereas as the technicians of the web may know the actual paths of cables, wires, routers, and geographically dispersed servers through which our e-mail travels, sociologists who claim to know the distant regions that determine our everyday experience, the overt courses as well as hidden mechanisms by which those regions affect the social world, and just what the effects are on conduct, often avoid concrete specification of those regions, routes, mechanisms and, in particular, their exact interactional outcomes. Moreover, when ethnographic investigators go after the holy grail of disposition or habitus rather than in situ constitution, they often must rely on the very techniques the J-K article decries: interviewing. And then the explanatory effort can come to overshadow the asserted concerns with local organization of action and interaction.
Somewhere: Alternatives on the Left of the Local Order Continuum
Let me now return to interaction order and ethnomethodological analyses. I do this not to grind paradigms but because J-K casually and approvingly refer to these enterprises at several points. Interaction order analysis “is a key component of explaining social action and how it relates to accounts” (p. 181), and ethnomethodology, they assert in a footnote about how ethnographers can claim access to social realities, aims to capture “… the ‘ordinary world’ and the actor’s point of view,” while being “skeptical of methods and claims that are abstracted from the lived experience of actors” (p. 205).
Here is the rub. Whereas the works they cite were published in 1983 (Goffman) and 1967 (Garfinkel), it needs to be recognized that there have been developments in interaction order analysis and ethnomethodology in the decades since these fine early statements were published. The J-K article’s ritual invocation of formative texts is all too familiar. One reads, becomes enthused about, and cites the canonical work but then gives up on doing or seeing, for the long term, what it leads to. Developments in Goffmanian inquiry include the study of presuppositions involved in language use (Goffman 1983a) and of the practices involved in “footing” and establishing participation frameworks (Goffman 1979) through alignments and stances relative to the production or reception of an utterance (Goodwin and Goodwin 1992). Inquiries in the ethnomethodological field include methods for studying social actions in talk and embodied behavior—methods, not incidentally, which have provided for what the J-K article valorizes in terms of generalizable findings. The most influential area of ethnomethodologically inspired inquiry has been that of conversation analysis (Maynard 2013). Relevant to ethnographic approaches to interaction is the subfield’s extensive consideration of the systematic ways for dealing with tension between agency and structure, ways that preserve the concrete order of local situations when relating it to more distal structures of the society (Boden and Zimmerman 1991; Drew and Heritage 1992).
For actual people, there is no escape from the concreteness of what one says or does and how the other reacts so as to co-constitute just what the saying or doing comes to be for their course of action together. The J-K article (pp. 196, 205–208) astutely recognizes this matter, especially in abjuring the cognitivist leanings in cultural sociology, but then contradicts itself in the very same pages by going into the ether and reverting to statements about ethnography’s ability to “adjudicate” whether sayings and doings of subjects correspond, its capacity to analyze unconscious cognitive and behavioral dispositions, and its facility for uncovering “hidden dispositions.” The strategy for doing all this is what elsewhere has been called longitudinal ethnography (Corsaro 1996; cf. Maynard 2003:78)—studying social groupings and situations over time. Although I agree that this strategy is an extremely important way in which ethnography and the study of interaction can coalesce for purposes of sociological inquiry, a crucial provision is that the analytic control be exerted over what the investigator can assert such that internal contexts of interaction and the integrity of local orders are preserved before statements about external determination are pursued (Schegloff 1997). That is, specifying a methodological strategy that brings forth interactional features in a reliable sense allows for a subsequent step in which social structural analysis can be applied to further situate those features.
Using the ethnographic terms of Duneier (2007), upon whom J-K also draw for their article, let me turn to a connected way of putting these methodological matters. In reviewing the work of Carol Stack and Elliott Liebow, Duneier (2007:35, 36) suggests that it is important to study “patterns on the ground,” which is done by way of “shoe leather” research—taking the time to “follow individuals in their networks, groups, and communities.” Shoe leather effort highlights the importance of detailed ethnographic evidence, which eventually can be related to political contexts in which mundane affairs occur. However, this is different from pursuing whether people do what they say, trying to find unconscious and otherwise hidden motivating factors involved in social action, or explaining why people do what they do according to habitus or dispositions or other extrinsic matters.
One of Duneier’s (2007) points, as I understand it, is that as larger political contexts become altered, the organization of daily life may also change. However, to appreciate such change analytically the investigator must know, in the sense of being answerable to, the parameters of everyday life in their exactitude so that political contexts can be properly mapped onto them. Accordingly, ethnography of the type that Duneier and others engage in can join with interaction order and ethnomethodological analysis and vice versa, as these enterprises share an orientation to autochthonous detail and specificity.
Conclusion
In addressing the attitude–behavior problem (ABC), the J-K article obliquely raises another daunting challenge. To the extent that a goal of ethnography is to analyze interaction, it must address systematic ways in which to cross the boundary between local order and external structure, preserving in situ forms of social organization through which actual participants collaboratively produce social actions and social life in the first place. In their future work, I hope that Jerolmack and Khan are persuaded to use their estimable talents to address this challenge head on. That would be exciting news from somewhere.
Footnotes
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 publication of this article.