Abstract
In If Truth Be Told: The Politics of Public Ethnography Didier Fassin has collected anthropologists’ accounts of how others, mostly non-academics, have responded to their work. The volume makes clear that the “afterlife” of ethnography deserves further study, in part to help other ethnographers anticipate personal difficulties but also to orient a research program.
Perhaps the most common experience is described by Ghassan Hage. Asked to give a public talk in Ramallah on Palestine’s future, Hage had to imagine the audience before he encountered it. When antagonistic questions revealed how he was heard, he was surprised.
Some of the chapters trace how fieldworkers interact with reporters on diverse topics over many years. After the response of Anonymous to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, journalists called on Gabriella Coleman, whose writings had established her authority on these “countercultural digital activists.” Playing roles as translator, gopher, prolific broker, sometimes trickster, she struggled to correct journalists’ misconceptions of the leaderless network. At the risk of angering some of her sources, over time she had some success in stripping distorting myths from news coverage.
The fates of “public sociology” make us aware of a universal writer’s challenge: correctly anticipating whom authors become for those who read or hear about their texts. These ethnographers often become indignant when they realize they do not own the meaning of their work. Because Jonathan Benthall had studied Palestinian charity organizations, he was called as an expert witness in legal proceedings of the sort (he masks the specifics) that hinge on whether Hamas transforms charity money into terrorism. He discusses distortions of ethnographic truth that enter legal proceedings through sloppy journalism, university presses that shirk fact-checking, judges’ biases, and cross-examinations aimed at “gotcha” moments.
Kelly Gillespie studied vigilante justice in a South African township. When invited to assist a commission of inquiry into policing, she was frustrated. Her effort to draw attention to inequalities was ignored in favor of a narrow focus on policing policies, which she likens to a “racist” focus on black-on-black violence. What did township residents think about her work, the commission, or policing reform as a remedy? We don’t learn. No matter: Gillespie’s concern is that ethnographers lose control of their work when it enters courts and commission proceedings. But wait: Don’t subjects lose control when their experience becomes ethnographic data?
Other contributors were pleased when their work got a second life in emergent social movements. Manuela Ivone Cunha conducted fieldwork in a women’s prison in Portugal. Initially her talks about the research were registered by administrators based on whether they felt criticized. Ten years later her expertise meant something different. Incarceration had doubled. The use of drug laws to sentence women had dramatically increased. Connections between inmate networks and networks in offenders’ neighborhoods had grown strong. When a Commission for Prison Reform was created, her earlier work supported a dramatic reduction in drug sentencing and later, a radical shift to a public health model. Who could have known?
Like “Chicago school” ethnographers who have studied domestic street gangs, anthropological fieldworkers in foreign settings often do post-publication social work. Federico Neiburg was called to service after learning that conflict had broken out among armed groups in the Haitian zone he had studied. When he tried to reduce disputes and connect residents to an array of organizations that might offer aid, like any local politician he became the subject of gossip about his loyalty, discretion, and honesty in the brokering process.
Some of the most useful chapters show that the afterlife of fieldwork is a multi-phased process. Nadia Abu El-Haj went up for tenure at Columbia on the basis of a book that argued that biblical archaeology was shaped to justify Israeli nation claims. She sketches how non-academic Jewish groups mounted a mini social movement that threatened her career.
The public meaning of Vincent Dubois’s fieldwork in welfare offices in France also was built up through conflict and over time, but in another way. He showed that what management saw as useless visits were significant to anxious clients. Academics prized his work, but major media attention came only after clients attacked officials. Then he became newsworthy. Then bureaucrats came to embrace his text.
Unni Wikan makes clear that the study of “public ethnography” will require sensitivity to national differences in the composition of audiences. Wikan was a star in anthropology on the basis of fieldwork in Egypt, Oman, Bhutan, Indonesia, and elsewhere and was famous in Scandinavia as a Norwegian anthropologist. Then she challenged Norway’s myth of being a “colorful plurality” by describing Muslim immigrants as an emerging underclass. Because Norway is so small, literate, and tightly knit, when academics labeled her “racist” it became known by the general public. Wikan also wrote a book on the case of a Kurdish immigrant father in Sweden who murdered his daughter for dishonoring the family. Then she was stung by criticism by well-known public figures, including a celebrated comedian, who saw her as a cultural relativist too sympathetic to the killer. Top agents from Norway’s law enforcement system attended her Oslo seminar, indicating she was still respected at home (they were there to learn about immigrants, not to investigate her); but she wonders whether she could have survived academic colleagues had she been Swedish.
Two chapters describe fieldworkers learning of hypocrisy in medical delivery systems. After AIDS activists used the Brazilian court system to get medical care, government-paid lawyers expanded the strategy massively for poor people who otherwise could not get medicine for chronic conditions. When João Biehl, a Princeton professor studying health litigation in partnership with Brazilian medical and law administrators, documented the phenomenon, he was stunned that his collaborators were not only trying to steal credit for his research but insisting that a manipulative elite was behind the litigation.
The response to her fieldwork on organ transplants, religion, and ethics in Egypt made Sherine Hamdy cynical about ethnography’s potential to “enact radical social change.” When she portrayed disorganization, inequities, and dirty water as undermining poor people’s health, Hamdy was damned by doctors who feared that the truth would shame their professional image and the nation generally. They controlled access to her field site. Meanwhile, from activists and academic colleagues she faced “muzayada”: moral one-upmanship characterizing her work as insufficiently angry.
In his introduction and epilogue, Fassin shows a broad and historically informed reading of ethnographers’ writings on ethnography. The fate of his own fieldwork—in a French prison, with AIDS victims in South Africa, on a police anti-crime squad in a Parisian fringe neighborhood—is especially instructive. What drew media attention to him were not his nuanced texts but terrorist attacks and national elections. Accordingly he recommends tracing the multi-phased interactions through which different actors bring knowledge of fieldwork to non-academic audiences.
Sociology needs to hear the call. Perhaps most famously exemplified by Loïc Wacquant’s critique of prominent urban ethnographers, academic sociology has been taken with moral/political characterizations that, without evidence on who is taking in a work how, confidently read ethnographies as “neoliberal,” “cowboy,” or “jungle book” texts. Most of these chapters show that what a publication means is contingent on what is done later by others, including government officials, book reviewers, awards committees, the news media, collaborators in the sites studied, and people like activists and litigants with cases in process before or arising unexpectedly after a book is published. On the way between scholarly and mass audiences, the meaning of social science research is shaped by professional rivalries, gossip accountable to no one, sensational events occurring outside the fieldwork site that retrospectively make a study relevant, and other often unpredictable processes of diffusion that are not necessarily, probably not mostly, matters of reading original texts.
This set of essays also shows how severely socio-cultural anthropology is crippled by self-segregation. Sociological perspectives are ignored in multiple ways. Chapters are written much as people in any occupation might write about their problems, with colorful and passionate demonstrations that customers/clients often foolishly or venally resist our good judgment about what they should do. These academics generally seem outraged to realize that, when they are not grading readers who are marshaled into classrooms by institutional degree requirements, they don’t have much power over their audiences.
The anthropologists’ essays neglect the elephant in the next university room: in the United States over the last fifteen years or so, sociological ethnographies have reached mass publics to an unprecedented extent. The success of ethnographies by Klinenberg, Duneier, Goffman, Hochschild, and Desmond in reaching millions of newspaper readers, TED talk viewers, and radio listeners is itself part of a twenty-first-century sea change in “public sociology” in the United States. Leading newspapers, prestigious weekly magazines, national public radio shows, trade publishers, and writers’ agents have institutionalized the work of disseminating academic research. Popularizing social science writers have their own investigative networks for reaching into academia. Mass journalism no longer waits for an Op Ed submission or a university PR agent to advocate coverage of a study.
That these anthropologists don’t think comparatively is not just a matter of ignoring sociology’s U.S. ethnographies. Biehl attributes systematic lying by those in power over Brazil’s medical system to “late liberal democratic institutions of government.” He gives no guidance for applying this contextualization/explanation throughout Western Europe nor for reconciling the claim with the next chapter’s description of systematic lying about Egypt’s medical system by Egyptian elites.
Collective professional egocentrism does not sit well with readers who are not members of the club. Some essays are marred with gratuitous, look-at-me neologisms (e.g., “fabulation of power” to refer to government lying). Throughout the volume authors use the sacred trade term “reflexivity” as a substitute for reflection on the most basic methodological questions. These are not biographies of research projects, they are autobiographies. It does not require hours on Freud’s couch to wonder about self-deception, nor legal counseling to bring suspicion to ex parte descriptions of hard-fought battles. If anthropologists’ fieldwork is going to reach mass public audiences, these ethnographers will need to anticipate “give me a break!” reactions of street-smart readers who lack the academic sophistication to ignore glaring conflicts of interest. Perhaps ethnographers of public ethnography should recall the wisdom behind anthropology’s best work and start studying “others.”