The terroir of bureaucratic practice: Everyday life and scholarly method in the study of policy

“Spaces of darkness and trickery”

When the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life (De Certeau et al., 1998) came out in 1980, no publisher was willing to undertake an English translation. ¹ The volume, sub-titled Living and Cooking, relied too heavily on the concept of terroir, it was felt, for the taste of English-language readers. Terroir is too particular, too ambiguous, and possibly too French (Tomasik, 1998: ix). ² When I discovered the book nearly 40 years later, two decades after puzzling through the first volume, it occurred to me that the study of spatial practice may have a similar translation problem: space and place seem too insubstantial, indeterminate, ungeneralizable. Why is this? Perhaps because spatial practice, like terroir, is fundamentally about unstandardized, subjective, sensory experience. Perhaps because scholarly research is supposed to be rigorously removed from something as inimitable as smell, taste, or the memory of a place. Perhaps the difficulty is at heart about our sanctioned methodological toolbox, one in which the experience of place is analytically too risky.

This article is about approach and method in the geographical research on institutions and policy. My objective is to link that research more closely to everyday life in policy-making institutions. To that end, I stress the importance of concrete context and sensory experience in scholarly practice. I use the term context both in the usual sense of spatio-temporal context as well as the more nebulous sense of a milieu or a feel—facets of fieldwork that scholars register experientially but often omit from their written work. Closer attention to a subjective and seemingly un-rigorous phenomenon like feel is especially important now that institutions are undergoing rapid change and traditional bureaucracies morph into intermeshing circles and networks of influence. Accounting for power and knowledge in a new institutional ecosystem of “fragmented governing space and more liquid, diverse, and decentered power structures” (Wedel, 2017: 154) requires a more textured approach from the analyst.

The argument proceeds in four steps. The next section, titled “Drizzle in a theatre,” highlights the accent on performance in the study of diplomacy. It thereby makes the case for closer attention to the theatricality and feel of bureaucratic practice. Although performance, performativity, and affect are duly noted theoretically, empirical accounts too often downplay or oversimplify the texture of experience. The following section, titled “Feeling silk,” explores the place and context that necessitate my methodological travels: daily diplomatic practice in Brussels, the capital of the European Union (EU). I highlight the theatrical feel of that place and I point to the methodological difficulties that this generates for the analyst. The subsequent section, titled “Indeterminate fables,” engages explicitly with the work of Michel de Certeau. My objective is not to add something cumulatively but to shift our perspective toward daily sensory experience as an essential facet of research. The conclusion, titled “Allowing ambiguity,” summarizes my methodological argument and highlights its implications for political geography.

My empirical examples cite the realm of diplomacy, but my conceptual questions are about how scholars know what they know and how they judge the claims of other scholars. I contribute to a scholarship that is more comfortable with ambiguity and indeterminacy and is thus less inclined toward products that are “methodologically impeccable but often vacuous” (Boltanski, 1987: xvi). Such scholarship is better able to grasp policy-making as “a skill ceaselessly recreating opacities and ambiguities—spaces of darkness and trickery—in the universe of technocratic transparency” (De Certeau, 1984: 18).

Drizzle in a theatre: Assessing place in diplomatic practice

The performative and theatrical character of diplomacy is broadly recognized in geography and related fields, such as history and international relations. As diplomacy re-presents the state, diplomats stage and perform state power. An early modern commentator remarks: “There is not a more illustrious Theatre than a Court; neither is there any Comedy, where the actors seem less what they are in effect, than Embassadors [sic] do in their Negotiation” (de Wicquefort, 1681/1716, quoted in Constantinou, 2018: 1).

Today’s human geography includes multiple accounts of the role of performance, mimicry, liminality, and affect in diplomatic practice (Dittmer, 2017; Jones and Clark, 2015; Kuus, 2014; McConnell, 2017, 2016; see also Shimazu, 2014). The work shows that diplomacy is, in part, a sphere of “creative ambivalence” and liminal shapeshifting subjectivity (McConnell, 2017: 149), as formally accredited (i.e. largely national) diplomats share the stage with quasi-diplomatic and non-state actors. The conceptual import of performance is well established in that literature (Dittmer and McConnell, 2015). ³

That same work also illustrates, though not always explicitly, the integral part of place and space in diplomatic performances. Precisely because diplomacy and many other spheres of bureaucratic practice seem to be unmoored from places, we need to investigate how these spheres operate through specific places (Neumann, 2013). Last but not least, there is a broad recognition of the methodological difficulty of tracing ideas and interactions in bureaucratic structures, especially in opaque and insulated diplomatic settings (e.g. Bachmann, 2016; Jeffrey, 2012; Jones and Clark, 2015; Kuus, 2018a; Müller, 2012). The scholars who attempt such tracing stress the inaccessible and politically sensitive character of the settings. They invest the effort for the insight gained by looking closely at the quotidian detail of policy practice. Without such texture, research becomes stale, “pure theoretical reflection” divorced from empirical engagement and experience (Jeffrey, 2012: 40).

In international relations, too, there is now substantial work on diplomacy as an ambiguous and contingent everyday practice (Adler-Nissen, 2016; Bueger and Gadinger, 2015; Constantinou, 2018; Neumann, 2012, 2013; Pouliot, 2016; Pouliot and Cornut, 2015). That work analyzes the profession in terms of situations, relations, and positions—categories that do not exist before the practices performed in their name (Pouliot, 2016: 3). It shows that power operates in these performances through uneventful and mundane techniques that are underhand, silent, and gestural (Pouliot, 2016: 6, 9). Diplomatic representation is both a professional craft and an everyday practice, “a means of getting one’s way” and “influencing or forcing others to do what they would not otherwise do” (Constantinou, 2015: 24). Diplomacy is an integral part of the global flows of culture rather than an elite sphere of negotiation detached from daily life (Constantinou, 2015: 27). In that discipline, too, many scholars recognize the need for greater methodological pluralism in the study of everyday practice (e.g. Bicchi and Bremberg, 2016).

Diplomatic decision-making is a slow process—a marathon and not a sprint, a practitioner notes. Its course and effects are difficult to observe. A diplomatic performance, The Economist (2013) remarks, is like a drizzle: ubiquitous, but hard to pinpoint. Its impact is observable not at any one point in time but in its cumulative effect over time. ⁴ Analyzing the drizzle-like character of such a performance requires attention to the concrete settings of the performance. Especially in the context of transnational processes, we need to grasp how strategically placed agents “serve as connectors” and “coordinate influence from multiple, moving perches, inside and outside official structures” (Wedel, 2017: 153). Such “moving perches” are contextual and situational, which is to say performative and place-specific. Geographers, with their interest in the know-where of politics (Agnew, 2007), have much to contribute to that effort.

To study the performance of diplomatic (or any other) practice is to study the concrete places and spaces of that practice. A focus on place—an integral part of the context of context—brings out the delicacy of situated relationships in ways that an analysis of policy documents disallows. Place and space are also central mediating forces in a performance. Being in a theatre, especially an old theatre, makes it clear that what you observe and perceive, and how you are observed and perceived, are always mediated by where you are. ⁵ Explicit attention to space and place necessarily brings out the theatricality of political practice, and the other way around: to focus on performance is to necessarily focus on space. Commenting on professional skill, a diplomat says: “That is something that, if you’re doing it, you know it. I cannot quantify exactly how you come to know…. It’s a complex wave” (Pouliot, 2016: 74). The metaphor of a wave is worth contemplating as it captures the fluidity, indeterminacy, and spatiality of daily institutional practice. ⁶

The usual path of pursuing an experience-near account through ethnographic methods is not as helpful as it may seem at first. True, there are insightful ethnographies of bureaucratic settings in geography and related disciplines (see Kuus, 2015 for numerous references). However, the realm of the state and the realm of the everyday too often remain analytically separate. As Jason Dittmer (2017: 6) points out, political geography has tended to perpetuate a binary between the state and the everyday: one can study either state institutions or everyday life, but not both. “Worse,” Dittmer (2017) continues, there is “the subtle implication that studying the state is politically naïve.”

The challenge is not simply about data gathering. It is first and foremost about the difficulty of an open-ended and dialogical approach to fieldwork (Ingold, 2014: 383). Observation can be a starting point, but only that: it must be undergirded by an imaginative and experiential openness to the social context of the site. Ethnographic fieldwork that is conceived as data gathering can hinder rather than help such openness. To enter the field with theories and methods intact, Tim Ingold (2014: 386) says, is “to cast the about-to-happen in unfolding relationship to the temporal past of the already over.” It is “as though, on meeting others face-to-face, one’s back was already turned to them.” What we need, Ingold (2014: 383, 393) continues, is “healing the rupture between imagination and real life” so that theory becomes “imagination nourished by its observational engagement with the world.” As the first step, we must refute “the commonplace fallacy that observation is a practice exclusively dedicated to the objectification of the beings and things that command our attention” (Ingold, 2014: 387). For observation to avoid slipping into objectification, we need to recognize that observation is a fundamentally ambiguous, indeterminate, experiential, and intersubjective enterprise. ⁷

Luc Boltanski’s The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society (1987) illustrates such analytical openness. Boltanski draws on industrial surveys, historical monographs, news media, and “many” interviews, which number or circumstances he does not disclose and most of which he neither quotes nor otherwise uses in any explicit way. The interviews, Boltanski (1987: xvii) notes, were undertaken less for the actual substance of what was said than for the insights, he felt, could be gleaned from “physical interaction” and “face-to-face familiarity” with a person. The book begins and ends with lengthy excepts, which total over 10 pages in print, from two interviews, three years apart, with the same person. The opening interview took place “at a dinner party, in the evening, among friends, ‘in confidence’, with a few bottles of good wine within easy reach” (Boltanski, 1987: 8). That situation, Boltanski explains, was essential for the kind of language game for which he quotes the interview: “one of privacy, of relaxation, occasionally somewhat irresponsible in utterance because speech here is virtually without consequence” (Boltanski, 1987: 8). These two interviews are the only ones used at any length or detail in the nearly 400-page book. In a methodology manual (Bourdieu’s term), this amounts to two interviews with one informant as the backbone of Boltanski’s fieldwork material. Yet every part of book is needed to grasp the two interviews as glimpses into the life-world of a class. Importantly, Boltanski acknowledges that his method was borne of necessity: he did not have the funding to conduct large-scale surveys. “As is often the case,” he writes, “the financial handicap ultimately proved beneficial, for it forced me to reflect upon the fundamental questions […] that I would most likely have evaded had I had the means initially to carry out the ‘rigorous’ large-scale investigation” (Boltanski, 1987: xviii). The Making of a Class is not a de jure ethnography (based on participant observation), but it achieves, de facto, the kind of richly textured and imaginative observational engagement with everyday life that is advocated by Ingold.

The separation between institutions and everyday life has to do, in part, with the tendency to treat place and performance as add-ons rather than necessary parts of scholarly analysis. They are cast in a supporting role, mixed in for color and decoration. The material is added to point out that bureaucratic decision-making involves not only the expected dry stuff but also emotions and senses; that civil servants are not only unthinking bureaucrats but also creative agents. The feel of a place functions analytically as icing on the cake. The feel of a spatial practice thus remains, literally or figuratively, in quotation marks: as something insubstantial, unreal, or merely decorative.

Simply recording such material is not enough therefore: it may indeed alienate rather than entice academic readers. We need to revisit the tacit but deeply ingrained assumption that clearly categorizable data—indicators of the number of interviews rather than the feel on one interview—offer more reliable data. Before we bring in the feel of a place, we must rethink its role in the analysis. We cannot record or analyze place and performance without greater methodological permissiveness about what constitutes scholarly evidence.

Feeling silk: Performances of compromise in Brussels

Brussels is an illuminating spot for observing and absorbing the theatre of diplomacy. This is firstly because of the density and caliber of international functions there. Given that Brussels hosts EU, NATO, and Belgium-based diplomats, the city is often abuzz with intergovernmental meetings. The performers include EU civil servants (some of whom are seconded from national institutions), the national diplomats based in Brussels, the national officials who shuttle between their capitals and the European one, plus journalists, NGO officials, and, last but not least, lobbyists. Brussels hosts as many, if not more, lobbyists than Washington, DC: precise numbers are not available but most estimates suggest parity. ⁸ Near the European Quarter, hotels and restaurants cater mostly to EU-based clientele and this gives the area a nearly unparalleled concentration of multilateral diplomatic functions—understood here as functions that bring together multiple states and are thereby distinct from national policy-making.

For most states in Europe and many around the world, the EU representation is their most important embassy: this is reflected in the caliber of the diplomats sent there. It may be fashionable in some capitals to glorify “big boys” bilateral diplomacy over the “delicate dance” (The Economist, 2014) in Brussels, but the diplomats sent to do the dance are often the most skilled these same capitals can muster. When both France and Germany appointed top-notch diplomats to serve as their Permanent Representatives (effectively ambassadors) to the EU in 2014, The European Voice (2014) remarked: “Neither Paris nor Berlin thinks that this is any time for novices in Brussels.” When Britain’s Permanent Representative resigned unexpectedly in early 2017, reportedly over his capital’s failure to grasp the delicacy of EU diplomacy, many noted that losing someone so well-versed in the “silken culture” of Brussels ought to worry London (D’Ancona, 2017). Among the less skilled, many a highly ranked diplomat has been quietly re-assigned when the capital realizes that they are not sufficiently attuned to the specificities of Brussels. Similar perceptiveness is expected from those seconded to EU institutions. High-ranking officials in the Council (an intergovernmental institution that represents the member states), the Commission (EU civil service), and the European External Action Service (the union’s foreign ministry and diplomatic service) often hold ambassadorial rank in their national systems, though this is not necessarily obvious from their business cards.

Brussels is a particularly fascinating stage secondly because of the fluid and competitive milieu there. Work in Brussels is “more sociological” than in bilateral settings, a senior national diplomat observes. ⁹ “You never know who matters,” another high-ranking official says with a brief laughter: “It’s not the same person as last time. You know it only by testing.” Even top-level newcomers find “the folkways of Brussels” difficult to negotiate (Barigazzi, 2015). Brussels requires practical place-specific knowledge—competence as distinct from authority—even from the highest-placed performers: the authority of rank is never enough. ¹⁰ Visibility is carefully cultivated: image, reputation, and networks are key measures of power. It is no accident that when a Commission official comments on the inexperienced, he speaks of unintended exposure: “They expose things that should not be exposed.” The stress of such constant exposure, throughout the ranks, is discernible even to an occasional visitor: underneath the projection of relaxed confidence, it is not unusual to sense frustrated ambition, insecurity, and anxiety. The “feel” of Brussels is, in part, a peculiar pan-European mix of ambition and disillusionment. The disillusionment is well known to the human resources departments: burnout and anxiety are omnipresent issues in Brussels (see Georgakakis, 2017; Kuus, 2014). ¹¹

Brussels provincializes everyone. Everyone is on stage, exposed more than in the comfort of their own country and thus more aware of the performance aspect of their everyday life. Even highly regarded foreign services advise their officials to work differently than in the national capital. “Nobody” continues in Brussels as they did at home, a long-time observer notes. Competence requires a heightened awareness of the mannerisms and comportment of a diverse set of colleagues and interlocutors. When invited to comment on differences in body language among officials from different backgrounds, a senior diplomat says matter-of-factly that, of course, such things are nationally coded: even the neutral expression in the elevator is conditioned by one’s nationality. He is right, I realize only at that point, half a decade into this research: the elevator mask is indeed nationally coded. There is no neat correspondence between one’s passport and their elevator smile, any observer’s perception of that smile is inevitably tinted by their own background, stereotypes are no more helpful in Brussels than anywhere else, and no chart can be drawn for an academic paper. The elevator performance, nonetheless, exists. I, too, had observed—but analytically downgraded—such codes in the elevators of EU buildings.

The theatre of Brussels-based diplomacy is informal: what the performers need is not visibility as such but the right kind of discreet visibility. “Those people (a seasoned diplomat dismisses the wrong visibility, in formal photographed settings): everyone who does not matter, very well dressed.” His remark underscores that many of the consequential moments in Brussels occur not at formal meetings but at private functions: lunches, dinners, rounds of golf or tennis, interactions in health clubs or European schools (see also Kuus, 2014). ¹² This makes the practice of power more difficult to observe. ¹³

Brussels accentuates the need for curious engagement with place-specific context, but the disposition is necessary in diplomatic practice more broadly. A certain curiosity about the world and a willingness to hear the other side are in the DNA of a good diplomatic service, an interviewee notes. Commenting on the cultivation of such curiosity, another diplomat cites a conversation with a high-ranking colleague: “You as a geographer would have liked it,” he says, “as [the ambassador] stressed the importance of precisely the kind of more oblique ways of learning about the place.” When asked to reflect on the skills most valuable in EU institution, yet another interviewee, one with extensive experience with EU personnel selection, takes a deep breath, leans back, gazes out of the window, and relaxes. “Open-mindedness…”—he lingers on the “s” absent-mindedly. “It will help anybody. […] Really it is intellectual curiosity.”

For the researcher, this context intensifies questions about how to discern, record, analyze, and present the data (Kuus, 2018a). The questions are not limited to fieldwork but pervade virtual encounters with the field, too: excellent journalistic writing on Brussels abounds and references to theatre are commonplace in it. Yet most of that material is edited out of academic scholarship. Academics appear to be uncomfortable with the theatricality of policy: they do not know what to do with the material and they thus cut it.

My fieldwork notes are no exception to such discomfort. On the one hand, the notes contain many allusions to the texture and feel of a theatrical space. “The Brussels skill… [a diplomat appears to be sifting sand through his fingers as he speaks] … you cannot apply what you learned in your ministry.” Several interviewees, in different EU and national institutions, instinctively reach for tactile gestures to characterize the production of EU-level consensuses: gestures of feeling a fabric between their fingers to test its quality, feeling a handful of sand pass through their fingers, or feeling the contours of something amorphous and hard to grasp. As my work progressed, notes about such “cloth gestures” increasingly appeared in my notes as I learned to notice the gestures. On the other hand, the material perches precariously at the edge of the analysis, added occasionally for detail but not retained as the central axis of the work. Although an integral part of everyday life, gestures and allusions are customarily excluded from social science scholarship. They are too particular, ambiguous, context-specific.

Diplomatic knowledge is practical knowledge: “knowing people who can do things,” as one practitioner puts it. It is also a contextual knowledge, “deeply ingrained” in experiential awareness (Constantinou et al., 2016: 13). The core business of the profession, an interviewee remarks is “understanding people: how people see their world—people in their context.” Diplomats contextualize the pursuit of national interest to specific foreign places: their expertise is necessarily place-based and place-attuned. In Brussels too, long-time insiders stress the importance of contextual knowledge: not just what capitals want but also what emerges in the dance in Brussels. Context there extends far beyond meeting rooms into the overall daily atmosphere of interpersonal relations.

Context is especially important for grasping the marathon-like transnationalization of diplomatic work. That process is invisible in official documents and remains largely undercover in expert interviews: diplomats are trained to stress the national interest and they follow their talking points. ¹⁴ When it comes to diplomatic training (the empirical focus of some of the research that undergirds this paper), the question is not only about the stated objectives of training today; it is also about the kinds of spaces that diplomats are being prepared for, through socialization as well as training, in the next 20 years (Kuus, 2018b). When I broaden my analysis beyond formal utterances to gestures, allusions, and shades of voice, the range of evidence widens. Other spaces—less international and more transnational—then come into view. I can then begin to grasp that the long-term futures of diplomatic practice in Europe do not fit into a set of bilateral spaces—at least not in the minds of the more light-footed among the dancers. The next two vignettes illustrate why such a broadening of analysis is difficult. Both vignettes are at first glance about traditional state-based diplomacy, but both also allude to a subtle transnationalization of the diplomatic field. I use the examples to make a methodological point: to foreground the imperceptible shifts that can be brought into view only through interpretative risk-taking and attention to concrete situational and experiential detail.

The first vignette comes from media reports about Pierre Sellal, France’s Permanent Representative in 2014–2017, the “living embodiment” of the French diplomatic tradition in Brussels, and the acknowledged Sun King of the EU scene (De la Baume and Vinocur, 2016). When Brussels began to ponder Sellal’s upcoming retirement, even the admirers of his “light-footed” savoir-faire noted that Sellal may be the last of his kind. His “parlour games” of big player alliances, Salmon Mousseline, and bottles of Grand Crus worked well so far, but the new representative may need to work with a broader range of actors. In the “somewhat regretful” characterization of the parlor game from a diplomat from a Eastern European state: “Pierre never had to approach me for support. He had always his majority arranged and … elegantly presented at the meeting.” Some of those in the parlors take note of the regretful tinge and wonder whether France can afford to be so sanguine about its influence and so “regal” in its manners. “He’s sometimes too French,” a French diplomat says of Sellal: “He’s the Frenchman who knows the Brussels machine best. The question now is whether this version of Brussels corresponds to the reality of today” (De la Baume and Vinocur, 2016). If the French, whose diplomacy is highly regarded in Brussels, are hesitant about the viability of big-player parlor games, what does this tell us about the traditional state-based diplomacy? Little in terms of causal mechanisms, but rather more in terms of the shifting feel of everyday work in Brussels.

The second vignette comes from my interview material. The greatest difficulty in EU decision-making, a national diplomat observes, is coordinating the underlying approaches to issues: the ways of looking at problems, the methods of addressing them administratively. You can develop procedures for communication, but the often unconscious lenses, deeply rooted in national cultures, are hard to alter. The difficulty is often underestimated, the interviewee observes. “There is a nice European sauce that someone has poured over the differences [a gesture of pouring something over a dish carelessly and in copious quantities],” but this often coats rather than harmonizes the differences. At first glance, this diplomat stresses the inter-national character of diplomacy. The sauce is cast as an obstruction on an inter-state scene. But it is noted. There is something in addition to the inter-national shaping that dish.

Both vignettes hint, lightly and ambiguously, at slow subterranean shifts in in European diplomacy. The difficulty lies in making a scholarly argument from such references. In the process of writing, the examples tend to circulate in the downward ladder of “example in the text, example in a footnote, outtake”: they are put back into the text at moments of risk-taking but then re-entered into the cycle of downgrades. The examples seem exceedingly indeterminate and insufficiently causal. They are like daily practice, or terroir. There seems to be not enough material there: only allusions, gestures, and tinges of expression. Waiting for that “enough” to come through explicit claims or formal documents would downplay the emerging transnational patterns I seek to reveal. Waiting for the time when a national diplomat speaks of the transformation of state power is likely a long wait: national civil servants are not paid to tell transnational stories.

Using the kind of material I cite here does not necessarily require that the scholar do hours of interviews with the officials involved: it rather requires that the scholar allow herself to take the material seriously. The difficulty is at heart about acknowledging the role of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and sensory perception in scholarly research. A richer account of diplomatic practice in concrete places requires more than different data. It also requires that we dare to use ephemeral, metaphorical, and opaque remarks and gestures as evidence. If we are to account for the contingency of diplomatic practice without squashing it into a pre-made typology, model, or storyline, we need to record and analyze the practices that exceed and evade formal institutional structures. The question is about how to account for ambiguity and indeterminacy. The next section turns to the scholar whose arguments may be helpful in that effort.

Indeterminate fables: Walks with de Certeau

Michel de Certeau, a French theologian and cultural theorist, sought to offer a “practical account” of a methodology of studying everyday life (Terdiman in de Certeau et al.,1998, emphasis in original). His work is centrally about the contingent and situational character of social practice. De Certeau treats indeterminacy as an essential and necessary characteristic of the life we live (as well as study): not a puzzle that can be solved but an experiential reality that must be, first and foremost, acknowledged. For de Certeau (1984: 203), everyday practice is “an indeterminate fable, better articulated on the metaphorical practice and stratified places than on the empire of the evident in functionalist technocracy.” To study such practice, he says, is to explore: “the ways of frequenting or dwelling in a place […] and the many ways of establishing a kind of reliability within the situation imposed on an individual” (de Certeau, 1984: xxii). ¹⁵ For de Certeau, place is thus a central axis of analysis: place-specific practices necessarily differ from the strategies and blueprints conceived elsewhere. “Every story,” he says, “is a travel story: a spatial practice” (de Certeau, 1984: 115).

Methodologically, de Certeau highlights the processual and relational character of evidence. Data cannot be separated from the context in which it is solicited (and not simply acquired). Written data are not better than spoken one and may be worse: committing a practice into writing often irons out its indeterminacy. To consider the spoken iteration is not to casualize analysis but to consider the entire practice of social intercourse. De Certeau and Giard write:

Social exchange demands a correlation of gestures and bodies, a presence of voices and accents, marks of breathing and passions, an entire hierarchy of complementary information necessary for interpreting a message that goes beyond a simple statement—rituals of address and greeting, chosen registers of expression, nuances added by intonation, facial movements. It must have this vocal grain through which the speaker becomes identified and individualized, and this way of making a visceral, fundamental link between sound, meaning, and body (De Certeau et al., 1998: 252, emphasis added).

It is thus at the level of the empirical that a great deal of the work must take place. To illuminate the indeterminacy of concrete situations, we need not to “scale up” to more cases but to examine these situations with greater intensity, that is, with greater attention and care. De Certeau and Giard articulate the task this way:

We know poorly the types of operations at stake in ordinary practices, their registers and their combinations, because our instruments of analysis, modeling, and formalization were constructed for other objects and with other aims. The essential of analytical work, which remains to be done, will have to revolve around the subtle combinatory set, or types of operations and registers, that stages and activates a making-do [faire-avec], right here and now, which is a singular action linked to one situation, certain circumstances, particular actors (De Certeau, Giard and Mayol, 1998: 256).

Allowing ambiguity: For contextual thickness

This article seeks to advance a methodological approach that is more open to the ambiguity, contingency, and place-specificity of bureaucratic practice. My principal effort is not to explain the role of place in diplomacy or any other sphere of policy-making; my effort is rather to take a step back and create more analytical space for such an explanation. In that space, the sensory perception of place-specific milieu moves up in the hierarchy of analytical value. Although diplomacy, and bureaucratic practice more generally, is a tightly scripted activity, it is also an everyday activity: the script does not fully capture the practice. To better understand the practice, we need to unlearn the customary distinction between policy practice and everyday life. We also need to reconsider the equally habitual focus on generalization, periodization, taxonomy, and writing. These things are important, but they must follow and not precede careful reflection on their costs as well as benefits. This kind of unlearning cannot be built from clearly defined blocks. It begins with acknowledging the indeterminacy of concrete places. That indeterminacy, with its “spaces of darkness and trickery,” is constitutive of the object of study. Only that which is denuded of its human context is easy to define and categorize.

Closer attention to the everyday spatial and theatrical texture of diplomatic practice would help us understand “how diplomacy operates on the human mental screen and indeed in everyday life […], often with unintended consequences” (Constantinou, 2018: 23, emphasis added). Diplomatic work revolves around trust as a sense of shared procedures on how to manage difference on the international arena. That trust is accomplished in part through interpersonal interactions among diplomats. Neglecting everyday interactions irons out the nuances that can illuminate how trust is actually created.

Accentuating indeterminacy brings into view the contingency of policy processes and the agency (capacity to act) of human beings in these processes. The lens in which civil servants are merely cogs in a machine actively obscures the contingent character of policy processes. That lens is exacerbated by the methodological choices that favor clear categories and extensive methods of data collection. ¹⁷ Downplaying the references to silk, dance, drizzle, or the feel of place also perpetuates the lingering stereotype that qualitative research is methodologically lax: quantitative work normally includes information on sample sizes, formulas, and the like, whereas qualitative work tends to be vague about how the research was actually done.

To stress context is to stress place, and the other way around: to study place is to study context. Political practices are rooted in, and unfold in, specific geographical contexts, which are, in part, sensory in character: we study context and we study in context. Context is more than the bare minimum of basic facts about the research topic: context is the medium of knowledge. When a diplomat speaks of everyday competence as “a complex wave,” they are not far from de Certeau’s framing of such competence as an “indeterminate fable,” but they are quite distant from most academic accounts of bureaucratic practice.

Working with de Certeau in bureaucratic settings is needed precisely because the parallels are not obvious. De Certeau seems a good guide for a study of sidewalk cafes, but not for an analysis of inter-state power plays. His open-ended approach to practice is thus especially important to try outside the settings into which we habitually fit it. Accentuating the agency of ordinary persons is no less relevant in a foreign ministry than in a neighborhood park. The opposite may be the case: precisely because civil servants act in highly regimented ways, it is more important to focus on the ways in which the regimen does not fully determine their actions. With greater interest in space and everyday practice in cognate social science disciplines, there is greater need to translate geographical research on place beyond the discipline. De Certeau’s treatment of the experience of place as a necessary part of scholarly analysis may be especially helpful when engaging with audiences outside geography.

The question to ask is not what is the best method but how to solicit and develop context-sensitive knowledge. Boltanski quotes one informant and follows no methodological script, but his book offers a contextually thick investigation that places the complexity of the case above any such script. In the study of policy, an interview, an observation, or a quote pulled from a document is only as good as the contextual knowledge that underpins it: good answers depend on good questions, which cannot be formulated without good understanding of the context. Indeterminacy takes a great deal of effort to bring out. Such contextual knowledge requires being attuned to concrete cases instead of striving for general types as an a priori better goal. It also requires that we notice different things in the data and not purify the messiness of daily life in advance of the analysis (Barry, 2013: 27). The procedural repertoire of methodology manuals—how to set up interviews or how to take field notes—is learned and then let go. It can be let go only if it is learned in the first place. Only through a careful qualitative analysis of the empirical context can one effectively situate practices institutionally and geographically.

Terroir, a metaphor more than a concept for de Certeau, is not about place in the conventional sense of a unit of territory. It is not simply a tool bolstering or spicing up existing analytical frameworks. Terroir is a kind of “moveable mental and physical feast, a selection of geographic and sensory shapes that carries a strong affective charge” (Tomasik, 2001: 520–521). ¹⁸ The metaphor of terroir, and the similarly ambiguous references to silk or dance or drizzle in this paper, are useful not despite their ambiguity but because of it. As analytical devices, they cannot be fully objectified into measurable or easily categorizable data: they remain in the realm of subjective experience. They shift our focus from clear and distinct categories to sensory experiences that cannot be fully captured in words. They thereby help us to shift registers and approach the research question from a more embodied lens.

De Certeau’s work, including the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life, offers no analysis of terroir; it rather offers a way to doing terroir. De Certeau invites us to consider and inhabit the distinction between doing something and thinking about doing it. The focus here is likewise not only on how to do research or how to think about it; it is also on how to approach the distinction of doing research and thinking about it. Terroir is useful in that effort because, like everyday life, it cannot be fully codified. It was a classical singer, and which one I unfortunately do not recall, who said to a junior colleague: “You cannot make voice do anything. You allow.” Precise technique must be acquired as the precondition for the practice, but that technique must then be let go to allow for that practice. Careful and imaginative consideration of place and performance in bureaucratic practice is like that: the task is not as much to produce it as to allow it.