Abstract
Much contemporary ethnography hopes to engage with a community to justify social critique. Whether from problem selection, interpersonal rewards, or a desire for exchange, researchers often take the “side” of informants. Such an approach, linked to “public ethnography,” marginalizes a once-traditional approach to fieldwork, that of the ethnographic stranger. I present a model of scholarly detachment and questioning of group interests. Drawing on my own experiences and those of members of the Second Chicago School, I argue for an approach in which an unaffiliated observer questions community interests, arguing that skepticism of local explanations can discover processes shared by other scenes and can develop transsituational concepts. While the ethnographer can be seduced into sharing a group’s perspective, observational distancing can mitigate this. In an approach I label skeptical ethnography, the ethnographic stranger avoids partisan allegiance in the field and at the desk. Skepticism of local interests must be combined with an epistemic generosity that recognizes that all action, whether seemingly righteous or repellent, responds to an interaction order.
What would ethnography be without commitment to the lifeworlds of our informants? How can detachment be justified? Given the benefits of intimate involvement, how can ethnographers avoid being seduced into embracing a group’s agenda? What might a skeptical ethnography entail? To address these questions, I emphasize the importance of observational and analytic distance in contrast to a desire for immersion and an allegiance to group interests. Local affiliation can be trumped by a commitment to generalizations among groups (Zerubavel 1980). To this end, I describe the role of stranger in the field and skeptic at the desk: detached observation and interpretation. 1
Public, participatory, and emancipatory ethnographies are on the march, an approach given impetus by Burawoy’s (2005) influential American Sociological Association presidential address. Public sociology demands personal immersion and valorizes political critique. Through sympathetic attachments, ethnographers hope to reveal and alter socially malign conditions. As Small (2015:353) points out, many (most?) ethnographers attempt to “humanize” their informants, taking the side of their economically, culturally, and politically disadvantaged informants (see Ralph 2015:445). Ethnographers know the answer to Becker’s (1967) query, “Whose Side Are We On?” Becker is correct in arguing that neutrality is an illusion, 2 but by treating this commitment as a goal and not a challenge, the ethnographer becomes, in effect, the mouthpiece of the observed group by denouncing those structural forces that contribute to the group’s marginalization. Bias becomes a feature, not a bug. This socially engaged approach is consistent with the ameliorism of the First Chicago School, reimagined by critical theory. Yet despite the desire to pick sides, one legitimate answer to Becker’s question, “Whose Side Are We On?” is ours, but this requires that we recognize what kind of side ours is. What does it mean to be an honest broker, even if value neutrality is impossible?
Given the divisions of progressive politics and community activism (Vargas 2016), no agreement exists on what constitutes proper representation, particularly in urban ethnography. However, there is widespread agreement that ethnographers have a moral obligation to take the side of those they study. The debates are fierce (Rios 2015; Wacquant 2002), but whether particular works are colonialist—or worse—each ethnographer believes that she is fairly representing the community to a callous outside world. 3 Yet while pure neutrality is not an option and an apolitical stance is political, this does not mean that ethnography must—or should—be explicitly political.
In contrast, I describe an approach to ethnography that stands apart from this now widely utilized perspective that depends on the field-worker’s appreciation and defense of community aspirations. We must recognize Davis’s (1973) influential distinction between the Convert and the Martian—the newly minted insider, desiring to embrace a novel role, and the resolute outsider, determined to remain alien. Call them the devoted and the skeptical. I justify a stance that privileges detachment—observational and analytical—between researcher and researched. 4
While one often feels warm regard for one’s informants, this sentiment should not override the recognition that all groups are morally complex and contain elements that are embarrassing, disagreeable, or dangerous. But the issue goes deeper. Our ethnographic goal should not be (or should not only be) to assess the worthiness or the depth of oppression of our informants but rather to discover the processes that link (or separate) the dynamics of that community to other social worlds.
The questioning, agnostic (“honest broker”) approach once accorded primacy—notably by scholars of the Second Chicago School—is now seen as problematic, lacking the right vision for the right community (Ralph 2015). If one can never fully separate one’s politics from one’s analysis, one should challenge oneself to be seen as a scholar who refuses to put her values into service of a community but watches carefully and precisely from the side. As a result, this article is an act of methodological recovery. A detached model of fieldwork can—and should—be one model for research. Referencing my own research and those of other field-workers, I defend the stranger and the skeptic and discuss how one can guard against the gravitational pull of immersion.
A theoretically-centric model has roots in Simmelian analysis (Zerubavel 1980), Second Chicago School grounded theory (Fine 1995), and anthropological ethnoscience (Goodenough 1971). It builds on the skepticism of Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen, and even Robert Merton. The detached researcher desires to uncover patterns of social life, transcending local and taken-for-granted explanations. Our first responsibility is to generalize from cases, telling about society from rich local accounts (Becker 2007, 2014). The grounded theory approach of Glaser and Strauss (1967) and their constant comparative method is crucial; the researcher searches for contexts, similar in interactional structure, from which to draw comparisons (Fine 1992a). The skeptical ethnographer searches for the broadest scope conditions (Foschi 1997), examining generic social processes (Prus 1987).
By proposing a skeptical ethnography, I do not deny that social justice can fall within the ethnographic mission, but I argue that analytic detachment builds sociology, treating the ethnographer as ethnologist, a scholar committed to “watching closely” without entering the zoological cage (Nippert-Eng 2015). 5 Our central responsibility is to undercut surface, consensual claims, including those arising from the theorist’s study. Disciplines thrive when they question the taken-for-granted. We see this in the work of Hughes (1971), who developed generalizable concepts from the examination of occupations, manual labor, and medicine, such as that of “dirty work” (Fine 1995). While not ignoring the perspectives of those he studied, Hughes proudly viewed interaction orders from the outside, finding startling structural, cultural, and interactional similarities. Hughes’s students developed overarching approaches such as labeling theory (Becker 1963) and dramaturgical theory (Goffman 1959) that have been integral to a sociological imagination. Incongruous juxtapositions are powerful, as when Goffman (1961) linked mental hospitals, concentration camps, and summer camps to show the structural similarities of total institutions. Becker’s (1970) discussion of “conventional crime,” linking call girls, aircraft mechanics, and antitrust violators, reveals how certain “crimes” can be treated as expected features of occupational worlds.
I learned my skepticism at the knee of Erving Goffman, 6 inspired by Asylums, his set of ethnographic essays depicting the interaction routines of doctors and patients in mental hospitals (the latter alternately “clients” or “prisoners”) in mental hospitals. In examining Little League Baseball teams, restaurant kitchens, and meteorological offices, I explored the development of local cultures—idiocultures—a concept that applied to gangs as well as to Jesus’s disciples, boards of directors, and submarine crews. What is crucial is a determination to understand processes that transcend the ethnographic site, an ironic stance that questions the differential moral evaluation of groups with similar interactional dynamics. In refusing to embrace either internal or external judgments, these strategies of observation and representation permit skepticism without derision.
I embrace the tradition that asserts that distance between researcher and informant is crucial to conceptual development. The presentation of analytic detachment utilizes ironic contemplation by emphasizing parallels—a satiric vision in which similarities shape the most unlikely neighbors (Fine 1994; Fine and Martin 1990). Yet we must not ignore the risks of the outsider role. In rejecting the invitation to belong and to defend, we can become so skeptical that we become “anti-native,” suspicious of the interests of those we study. Too cynical and we become convinced that whatever local communities claim for themselves is naive, duplicitous, or corrupt. Our views, based on disciplinary knowledge, must be justified through a theoretical warrant. Ethnographic skepticism depends on recognizing that our own perspective deserves as much skepticism as those observed.
I divide ethnographic detachment into challenges of observation and of inscription: gathering and presenting data. I begin by describing the value of social distance from collecting data as an ethnographic stranger and then how observations are transformed by the analytic skeptic.
Becoming a Stranger
Schutz (1944:499), writing of the stranger role, asserted that the stranger “has to place in question what seems unquestionable to the in-group.” While the stranger has been a central trope for social theorists interested in belonging and cohesion (Simmel 1950; Levine 1977), the stranger role carries methodological implications for ethnographers. The stranger is not merely a theorist’s armchair conceit; it suggests a linkage between data collection and theory generation as Tim Hallett and I suggest in theorizing the methodology of the stranger (Fine and Hallett 2014).
As with all concepts, we must recognize the fuzzy boundaries of the term stranger, particularly as related to research in one’s own society. Strangeness is not a discrete category, but a position on a set of multidimensional continua (Ralph 2015; Small 2015). Are urban ethnographers strangers? Perhaps they don’t belong to the local community they observe, requiring that they have much to learn. But their experiences, moderated through age, race, class, education, and gender (and the other elements that constitute a self) create an epistemic relationship to a site of study. Alice Goffman (2014) was a millennial Philadelphian like her informants. Her gender provided experiences that she shared with some in her site. Yet her class and education separated her. Vargas (2016) was a Latino Chicagoan from a working-class background like some of the gang members he studied, but with different occupational aspirations. I had played chess—never competitively—but, like many informants in the chess world, I was educated, white, male, and middle class. Were we strangers? Being a stranger is not a characteristic of the ethnographer, but a relational category that depends on how one connects to others. A stranger is a label awarded by oneself and others to characterize a form of relational intimacy and intuitive knowledge.
While relational intimacy with informants does not presume analytic sympathy, this is often the case. As a moral and a practical matter, it is difficult to critique those with whom one has close affection. While one should never betray trust, one should never place oneself in a situation in which being candid is taken as a betrayal. Revealing a desire to learn about a world can be consistent with friendly acquaintanceships, a point that is always central to my introductions in youth baseball, high school debate squads, art schools, or chess teams. But this is the starting point of inquiry, not its end.
The stranger role was once treated as natural, as unambiguous, and as methodologically necessary. This was true of sociology’s first iconic ethnography, Street Corner Society. Whyte (1943) exemplified the friendly, but ironic, stranger, never quite fitting into Boston’s North End, but skeptically amused by actions and values of the corner boys (Boelen 1992). In depicting preadolescent baseball players, I was proudly (and necessarily) an outsider, never again to be a preadolescent, but sufficiently trusted to be an honorary one. My responsibility was to the discipline, sharing hidden truths and transforming actions into concepts—teamwork, sportsmanship—that could illuminate worlds in which people had to collaborate within a moral order.
An exemplar of the moral outsider, Goffman (1989:125-26) pungently describes his belief in the distance of the stranger, standing apart from the morality of the scene. He refers to the ethnographer as a “fink,” writing that ethnography entails subjecting yourself, your own body and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation…. With the ecological right to be close to them (which you’ve obtained by one sneaky means or another), you are in a position to note their gestural, visual, bodily response to what’s going on around them and you’re empathic enough—because you’ve been taking the same crap they’ve been taking—to sense what it is that they’re responding to.
With the support of St. Elizabeth Hospital, Goffman’s (1961) role as assistant to the athletic director bestowed a right to be present. Through his role and through his own self, Goffman stood apart from those observed. He knew it, as did they. He viewed a world in which he lacked experiential knowledge, needing to uncover the “crap” that natives treat as taken-for-granted, and unpacking norms and operating practices that seem obscure. One observes through a “socially cultivated position” (Tavory and Timmermans 2014: p. 41). With one foot in the field and one foot in the discipline, the ethnographic stranger sees what neither group can.
The ethnographer is not just any stranger. She is a stranger trained in observation, analysis, and theory construction. The field-worker’s distance from the group permits ethnographic authority. What emerges is an empirical story, but a special kind of story. It is a narrative shaped by contingencies and by connections (Katz 2001:482, 2002:448).
The Dual Stranger
The ethnographic stranger enters a scene without a strong commitment to members and should leave with dispassion intact. She must be strange coming and going: a dual stranger (Fine and Hallett 2014). This model is integral to generalization and as a means to avoid becoming a partisan. The ethnographer as dual stranger stands apart from a now common tradition in which the ethnographer arrives as an outsider but desires to become incorporated. It requires effort not to be seduced by a community, given the benefits of belonging, easing the collection of data, providing friendship, and perhaps gaining the endorsement of the final product. Even if not read by those in the field, ethnographic texts are read and critiqued by those who serve as allies and advocates. These interested readings, filtered through politics, make urban ethnography so contentious as claims allege that ethnographers, whether deliberately or not, mislead wider publics and harm those they are ostensibly aiding (Rios 2015; Wacquant 2002).
Any competent researcher embraces local rules of engagement as part of the ethnographic mission. Accepting local norms eases the collection of data and encourages social relations. The question is whether this embrace is genuine or strategic. Even if we reveal that we are not native, a stance I take as crucial, we should be seen as fair-minded strangers. In my own ethnographies, I always jot notes in a small pad, providing a visual marker that I am an outsider.
This display of outsider status stands in contrast to the technique of many ethnographers, who attempt to recall events after they transpired, taking bathroom breaks, texting on phones, and ultimately holding to the hope that their community will forget their outsider status. However, for an ethnographic stranger, the notepad reveals her distinct role within the setting, a material marker of separation. Such a simple display is a practical means through which the ethnographer’s position is specified, linking the “how to” of ethnography with its relational stance.
The distance inherent in the ethnographer’s position as stranger facilitates a complex and layered understanding of a social scene. With the exception of ethnographers who begin as full members, the ethnographic mission entails the seduction of a group to welcome the stranger. This explains Goffman’s (1989:125) reference to the ethnographer as fink and sneak. The ethnographic stranger is, like the private eye (Shulman 1994), a self-interested visitor pretending to be a true believer. Even though the goal is dispassion, her behavior suggests caring. The ethnographer hopes to penetrate hidden spaces and private talk. The targeted group must be persuaded that the ethnographer is harmless—or ideally beneficial—to the position, resources, and culture of the group. Strangers depend upon the kindness of communities, and the researcher hopes to be both “stranger and friend” (Powdermaker 1966). The image of the agreeable and attentive stranger is central to the ethnographic method, performing ignorance as a blind to gain access.
Beyond being naive, the ethnographer is often treated as a figure of curiosity. In several field sites, I have been labeled “the professor,” a comment that is simultaneously deferential, ironic, and differentiating. Being defined as an outsider becomes useful when the researcher presents conclusions of which informants had been unawares or find objectionable. In my study of meteorological offices, I found many instances of forecasters’ joking fascination with high-status science. When I argued that this seemed to be a tool for them to justify what might otherwise be seen as low-status bureaucratic work (Fine 2007), a form of self-enhancing rhetoric found in other sites in which identity was threatened, this was taken as the claim of someone who lacked an intuitive understanding of meteorological shopwork and could not appreciate their technical sophistication. The claim demonstrated that I did not belong to their world, even as I knew that they did not belong to mine. Throughout I was a stranger, coming and going.
The Seductive Site
To argue that ethnographers should take a detached stance ignores profound pressures toward involvement and the benefits—interpersonal and professional—that come with allegiance. A push exists toward involvement and commitment—the seduction by the site. This push should be monitored, reflexively engaged, and, at times, resisted. Once a group has admitted an ethnographer, participants wish to incorporate her, inoculating themselves from the criticism of an outsider. Perhaps she won’t be treated as a full member, but rather as a loyalist.
This was certainly true with my first ethnography on youth sports. Little League Baseball in the 1970s was under sharp condemnation because of what many perceived as its competitiveness, gender bias, and the antics of overengaged parents. In the site, coaches tested whether I was “on their side” and players quickly enlisted me as a friend and as someone who would do favors. My challenge was to balance these seductions, essential for gaining trust and access, and the recognition that some of my findings (detailing racism, sexism, coaching incompetence, or parental invective) would produce a sense of betrayal. The Little League organization was not pleased with the result, even though it was not an attack on the organization or the activity. I strove to minimize my politics by recognizing a fondness for the players and the coaches, even while watching troubling behavior. How might bad behavior be justified; how might good behavior be criticized; and, perhaps most important, what were the unintended consequences of actions good and bad? I hold tightly to the belief that on the scale of divine justice, each group and each person are fairly balanced. Such a perspective is skeptical of demons and saints, but it served me well as a means of viewing a scene and as a means by which I could integrate myself into a group without being their defender.
This belief—part of my ethnographic self—characterizes all of my ethnographies, and it is a stance that I advocate to students, while recognizing that overlooking heroes and sinners is not right—or possible—for all. There are costs in seeing all as worthy of friendship and none as worthy of hatred. But in skeptical depictions, one finds material for critics to use and none of my projects have received the warm embrace of controlling institutions, who wish for a clean bill of health. They get none.
To examine the specific processes that push the researcher toward embrace, I address three issues that encourage the researcher’s commitment to the scene: topic selection, interpersonal rewards, and exchange relations.
Topic Selection
Understandably many ethnographers select a site or a group based on admiration or compassion. These are groups for which one feels that “one can do some good” and, with the growth of urban ethnography, these studies often involve a desire to confront forces that produce inequality. Seeing the malign effects of eviction, probation, or surveillance (Desmond 2016; Goffman 2014; Rios 2011), one hopes to use one’s authority to support those who are oppressed and to change policy. One selects these scenes because of a prior set of commitments. There is virtue in putting one’s beliefs into action. It is understandable that one selects a community for which one feels concern, hoping that one’s project will persuade publics and provoke action. The ethnographer—the heroic self (Cobb and Hoang 2015)—serves as a voice for those lacking influence or power. Few ethnographers—not none, but few (Mitchell 2002; Simi and Futrell 2010)—select focal groups with which they lack empathy, but here too the ethnographic outcome is determined as a result of the selection: a sociology of justice. Few enter a scene without moral evaluations.
One frequent strategy is to study one’s own community, however defined, demarcated by class, race, age, or gender. In contrast, I have always felt that one should not select a group that one wishes to help, but a group that one wishes to understand. There is a danger in being too much a part of an ethnographic world. Or as Erving Goffman once told me, “Only a schmuck would study his own life.”
This strategy is snidely labeled “me-search.” Through personal or familial background, one is already halfway through the door. Indeed, it was inaccurately reported that my research on high school debate (Fine 2001) was chosen because my son was a championship debater (Lofland et al. 2005). He was, but he chose that activity because of my research, not the reverse. I select my ethnographic research projects based on an inchoate theoretical question. Frequently the originating idea is not the final emphasis, but this is how it begins. While I select research sites if I believe that I could fit in (I did not select gangs, cheerleaders, or radical activists), my goal is to build knowledge through a dense account of a social world.
In the case of Little League Baseball, my first ethnography, I was a student of small group dynamics, conducting research in the laboratory, although with an ethnographic eye acquired as Erving Goffman’s undergraduate research assistant, and an interest in cultural traditions, from my training in folklore. I selected Little League Baseball teams because they combined a task-oriented group (focused on winning) and an expressive culture (having fun). I had not played youth baseball and I had little awareness of the affronts to children. My goal was to draw parallels between microcultures in the field and in the laboratory (Fine 1979).
Later, I selected role-play gamers because I was interested in how fantasies reflect the social order, restaurant cooks to examine the boundaries of art worlds and laboring communities, mushroomers because of an interest in how nature was made cultural, and meteorologists because I wished to learn how predictions of the future could routinely and bureaucratically be produced from evidence of the past. I knew none of these groups when I entered the field. That I selected communities for reasons of theory—not from reasons of experience—helped me to avoid the pitfalls of partisan allegiance. However, even in ostensibly apolitical sites, politics intrudes, including sexism, climate change, or age discrimination. My data permit me to describe how groups discuss and act on these issues—that is part of a competent recounting of the site—but always with a focus on what interactional, organizational, or cultural processes can be discovered.
Interpersonal Rewards
A communal embrace often generates interpersonal rewards. The sympathetic ethnographer may benefit from the incentives of friendship, but such incentives can be dangerous. A sincere embrace makes critique seem like backstabbing. One is unlikely to attack one’s friends, sometimes ignoring or downplaying discrediting details. When the ethnographer masquerades as a friend, any nonsympathetic analysis is betrayal. In this sense, being recognized as an outsider preserves the legitimacy of the outsider’s analysis. Having informants is essential, but when these relations become those of confidants, the ethnographer has taken a side.
Good ethnographers work on establishing positive relationships. Some of these may be true friendships, a few even more intimate (Fine 1993). It can seem a betrayal to present a negative account of those who have done kindnesses. They have helped us; we should return the favor. Aside from a desire for emotional support, the ethnographer depends on friendships to better research and, as a result, will embrace all who are willing to be embraced, whether they would be hugged in other circumstances. However, too much affection can elide the particular role of the academic ethnographer. While we rarely disabuse informants of their desire to love us, we need to draw boundaries in subtle ways: through critical questions, by not adopting the same form of talk, or by disappearing when it is time to compile field notes.
We can see the strategic aspect of ethnography when we partner with the unlikable. But what about good people who perform bad actions? Support for these helpmates is understandable. Some of my closest Little League informants—my key informants—made racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks about niggers, rape, and faggots. I was tempted to protect them, wiping the slate clean: even if anonymous, they could be known. I didn’t. But my goal was not to promote tolerance; it was to understand how boundaries, status, and common values shape group culture. The players trusted me by sharing their world in a way from which sociologists could generalize. These discrediting moments were not unique; informants do not only speak truth to power, they sometimes speak lies. It happened among chess players (deceiving opponents), high school debaters (presenting false information), and folk art collectors (underpaying artists). Urban ethnographers have their own gothic stories that deserve to be shared. These were people who I genuinely liked, doing things that I genuinely loathed, but my love of the discipline came first. I remain skeptical of good intentions and am willing to maintain detachment from bad ones despite the siren call of friendship to emphasize or erase.
Exchange Relations
What constitutes a fair exchange between researcher and informants? The ethnographer may believe that because she has been provided access and information, an exchange of help for help is justified. In this, we come to believe that our informants should be satisfied that the ethnographer has not misused the community’s openness as a wedge for criticism.
Whereas friendships operate on a personal level, exchange relations involve the community. One is aided not merely by individual informants, but through a community that permitted observation. In such situations, quid pro quo is manifest. We help you; you serve our interests or at least don’t harm us in the public eye. Perhaps our informants have enough trouble without the ethnographer piling on. To describe the various sins—or crimes—of an impoverished community might be seen as aiding oppression. While this is understandable, the embrace is too tight. Detachment is required. When I reveal crude and sexist remarks in restaurant kitchens toward servers or female customers, this was taken by some as a betrayal of an underpaid and overworked occupation. Likewise senior citizen activists do not need to have the world reminded that sexism and racism are found among seniors as well as juniors. Were they betrayed by my accounts: perhaps, given what they shared, but if my goal is to present the world as it was given me, I defend my betrayal. It is our task to describe the world as it occurs, not out of malice, but as our responsibility, and in this, we have the advantage that it is only once we publish that our informants can discover what they might consider a betrayal. Our informants may believe that we will protect them, but we only depict them. We are the mouthpiece for none but sociology. I never make promises I cannot keep, and as a result, I make few promises. I pledge an account that I find true, but not one that they do.
Stranger to Skeptic
That ethnographers can operate as strangers in the field is a methodological and empirical reality. But how does this position help ethnographers become skeptics as they inscribe their data in text. 7 How, through writing, does a social stranger become a skeptical authority? Vargas (2016: p. 186) speaks of “ethnographic uncoupling, a process of distancing and disconnecting from both the relationships with informants and physical spaces in an ethnographer’s field site.” 8
Returning from the field at the conclusion of research, we must represent the scenes with fidelity. This approach separates our depiction of action from those of community members. The theoretical stranger is not tied to a set of local understandings. Sociological concepts such as conventions, emotion work, idiocultures, authenticity, and framing are not only to be found in single scenes, even though they may first be noticed there. What gives them power is that a similar dynamic is evident elsewhere.
Even if a researcher develops close ties during the research, she can recapture some of that distance in the analysis. Through the writing—and the reading that accompanies writing—disciplinary loyalty is displayed. For the ethnographic stranger, returning home is not only an option but a desideratum. The overly devoted field-worker may suffer in missing the insights of the discipline to which she belongs.
The challenge of representation is not only that of bias but of blinded cognition. When I observed Little League Baseball players—middle-class, suburban preadolescent boys (Fine 1987)—I wished to understand their world as they understood it, but I depicted their world as a microsociologist. Describing how group hierarchies were created, how they evolved, and how embedded cultural elements supported hierarchies were crucial. Interpersonal jockeying—and even aggression—is found on Little League teams but also in restaurant kitchens, meteorological offices, and chess tournaments. In a similar way, understanding performed sexuality as transactional labor, creating both power and control, can be found in the excellent analyses of Asian bar hostesses by Parrenas (2011) and Hoang (2015). These scholars distinguish among how these women saw themselves, how they were understood by their clients, how their work fits into global capitalism, and how a clear-eyed sociologist viewed their opportunities and constraints. We must recognize the views of our informants, but filter them through sociological concerns without a mandate to change the world.
While Erving Goffman’s account of St. Elizabeth Hospital is uniquely unsettling, the analytic style of Asylums is characteristic of the work of the Second Chicago School, a moment of time during the conformist 1950s in which skepticism was urgently needed. Goffman channels the approach of Everett Hughes on dirty workers, also found in Howard Becker’s writing on marijuana users and jazz musicians, Julius Roth on tuberculosis hospitals as sites of mystification, Donald Roy on the creation of comic routines in factory work, Anselm Strauss on the consequences of psychiatric ideologies, and Fred Davis on the coping mechanisms of taxi drivers. These writers, sympathetic but questioning strangers, have their descendants in the recent ethnographies of Grazian (2015) on the zoo as a site for the creation of categories of human and “nature,” Mitchell’s (1983) discussion of how mountain climbers think about the tamed wild and narrative their experiences, and Jerolmack’s (2013) account of pigeons providing a site and discourse of nature in the city. Each depends on analytic distance to link their site and other places of nature work. These projects are not only about the zoo, the wilderness, or the park, they are about how the boundary between nature and culture is set, despite the blurriness of that line.
My ethnography of Little League Baseball teams (Fine 1987) was not to recount the vivid excess of preadolescent culture or the competitive stresses of youth baseball. I hoped to explain how small group cultures are created through the norms, values, and status systems of interaction orders (Fine 2012). In the development of an idioculture, a preadolescent baseball team has parallels with an adolescent gang, sorority, work team, or Alcoholics Anonymous support group. Likewise, a meteorological office (Fine 2007) with its goal of forecasting, shaped by social and technological processes, is similar to other sites of prediction of the future, whether they be political polling firms, hospitals, or sports betting parlors. Restaurant kitchens, while specialized spaces of food production, are like all worksites that have a “culture of production” in which an aesthetic discourse arises from the demands of service (Fine 1992b). The restaurant shares characteristics with the foundry, the law firm, and the bordello.
As with all writing, skeptical writing builds on strategies of representation. Specifically, I address prismatic vision, social comedy, and epistemic generosity, each revealing tropes of analytic detachment. Just as when gathering data, so too when writing: the further one is, the closer the view.
Prismatic Vision
One of the crucial skills of the skeptical analyst is to see the world from multiple perspectives without being committed to any as true, an approach memorably labeled “cubist ethnography” (cited in, Auyero and Swiston 2009: p. 12). In this, the skeptical ethnographer differs from those devoted ethnographers who search for a singular truth. The readiness to integrate contrasting perspectives is crucial to conceptual development.
Central to analysis through a prismatic lens is the ability to perceive unintended consequences. Positive outcomes inevitably create dilemmas. Harmful circumstances are beneficially linked to these same practices. Morality reverberates in ways that are startling and revealing. Consider Venkatesh’s (2008) analysis of gang activity, challenging commonplace images of the dysfunctional lives of urban criminals. While vividly recounting the violence and destruction that gangs can cause, Venkatesh argues that gangs, akin to social clubs, cultural fellowships, and criminal schemes, are also like corporations in revealing a rational economic order. He transcends the tired claim that ghettos are not disorganized to show the similarities among economic organizations in marketing, outreach, and accounting. Venkatesh presents multiple visions of a world that reveals the intersection of dysfunctional and rational action. This freaky, startling metaphor characterizes the prismatic perspective.
Social Comedy
Beyond developing theory through multiple perspectives, writing constitutes emotion work and an attempt to capture an audience. Here skeptical ethnography treats the world as a comic domain when viewed from the outside, while still calling for empathy. One can write about actors while fully embedded in a scene or, alternatively, one can write as if one had just observed a peculiar world from the outside. This latter perspective constitutes Davis’s Martian ethnography, but equally it has been seen as an ethological approach, a stance that treats human behavior as deliciously peculiar. Just primates can be seen through their near-human antics (Nippert-Eng 2015:15), any set of actors can be conceptualized as a neighboring species, a little strange, and a little not us. The skeptical ethnographer presents the routine as absurd when viewed with distant eyes to clarify how we think about the normal and the taken-for-granted. In this way, ethnographic discourse involves embracing life’s incongruity by bracketing what we all know, a central methodological dictum of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967; Pollner 1987).
Ethnographic writing can be swaddled in irony if we maintain our distance. This is what Goffman achieved in his examination of mental hospitals and what Van Maanen (2010) and Moskos (2007) achieved for urban policing. The patients become the wise and ethical actors and the medical staff come to be seen, in Goffman’s telling, as quite mad. The police can be as chaotic as those that they chase. The ethnography of zoos by Grazian (2015) exemplifies this stance. By virtue of the shared space of human animals and other species (once wild, now performing as wild), Grazian reveals how human action is caged as well. Parents attempt to control their brood, and we realize that the thoughtless and easy divide between wild and tame is dissolved. Those encaged, whether patients or beasts, are revealed through the skeptical ethnographer’s pen to be defined through social control. The joke not only is on us, it is us.
Epistemic Generosity
By speaking of our informants as beasts or as comic foils, this technique might suffer from the sin of cynicism. True, it is a risk. By smirking at those things that our informants hold dear and doubting the possibility of altering the world for the better, we may appear to demean our informants. Here a third element of skeptical discourse may come to our rescue. Epistemic generosity is the flip side of social comedy. Just as every act can be made amusing, every act can be justified. A skeptical ethnography must not disregard the felt morality of informants. An analysis that encompasses epistemic generosity recognizes that informants are as wise as we are.
Consider Eliasoph’s (1998) accounting of the social construction of apathy. The sociable groups in her estimable ethnography, Avoiding Politics, do not do politics as we think they ought, but they do politics—or avoid politics—in ways that provide them with a feeling of having met their communal obligations. Play can produce communal feeling. She challenges us to accept these men and women in their lifeworlds. This constitutes our epistemic generosity to those who do not measure up to the demands of our lifeworlds. This charity is essential to the writing of ethnography. While we recognize the strange, the strange can be normalized.
The Skeptic in an Ethnographic World
Skeptics stand apart from a community while depicting it. So does the ethnographic stranger whose lasting contribution rests upon epistemic authority of her observations. Field-workers are tourists whose expertise lies in other worlds. In justifying a skeptical ethnography, I rely on the metaphors of the observant stranger, embracing dispassion as a central feature of ethnography in the world, and then as a skeptic, equally dispassionate at the desk. Ethnography begins by understanding local scenes but must extend beyond to examine generic processes and to treat the scene as representative of a class of scenes. As field researchers have emphasized (Adler and Adler 1987), researchers can engage a community in several ways from peripheral membership to complete membership. I argue for the former, despite the benefits of member’s knowledge. The skeptical stranger can challenge the tacit to expose patterns that insiders might miss, blanketed by the comfort of tradition.
Let us revere Mills’s (1959) sly and seductive framing of the sociological imagination. Groups interpret the world in light of their interests. They are not wrong to do so, even if they see the world narrowly. By skepticism of every worldview, the skeptical ethnographer presents communal meanings as both local and general. This provides an entry point to knowledge by an observer who lacks a partisan investment. As is evident from our sociological predecessors, the stranger and the skeptic prevent us from being swamped by a surge of local orthodoxy. The skeptical ethnographer is neither convert nor Martian, neither devoted nor hostile, but an amalgam: traversing worlds with notepad in hand.
As ethnographers, we should not forget the time in which informants were a source of wonder. There is virtue in wonder. Distance can be discernment; strangeness a strategy. We must credit the visions of those we study, while not giving so much credit that their visions become ours. Our task as scholars of modest mien is to recognize that our informants do not know it all, but neither do we.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2015 Meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society and at the University of New Brunswick. I appreciate the comments of Colin Jerolmack and Iddo Tavory on a previous draft of this article.
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.