Abstract
This edited volume explores the public afterlife of ethnography. It does so by describing some of the issues at play in the publicization – the process through which encounters with the public take place – of ethnography. Public ethnography refers to both an ethnography made public and the ethnography of the process of research being made public. Two research questions structure the book’s contents: (1) What difference does ethnography make when the findings, style, and the world of the ethnographer are transported into the public domain? (2) What happens in the encounter between the ethnographies and their publics? The book answers these questions in three parts.
The first part describes the strategies deployed by the chapters’ authors in their interactions with various publics. Gabriella Coleman discusses the different roles ethnographers must adopt in the course of doing research and the importance of researchers being adept at speaking with different public audiences, especially journalists. Ghassan Hage reflects on how one’s audience can shape the form and content of public presentations and Kelly Gillespie talks about how to present ethnographic research to a group with a settled political and informational mandate, arguing that it is the responsibility of ethnographers to challenge the ways in which information is constructed and understood. The section concludes with a chapter by Manuela Ivone Cunha, who raises important questions in her chapter such as the following: How does anticipated interaction with the public shape the research questions asked? How do you approach respondents when you are working on behalf of an agency with a specific agenda? How does this affect research methods?
The second part of the book discusses the various forms of engagement sought from ethnographers by their publics. In this section, scholars such as Frederico Neiburg, Lucas Bessire, Jonathan Benthall, and Vincent Dubois discuss the pragmatics of concealing information and making it public. They do so to demonstrate how these concepts are entangled with one another while also being subject to negotiations and manipulations, leaving the efforts of ethnographers subject to cooptation by the very politics they aspire to speak against through their work. This section collectively suggests that engaging with the public and the challenges that arise in doing so may be inevitable.
The volume’s third section argues for public ethnography to be seen as a serious mode of inquiry and for ethnographers to continue to engage the public with their work. This section analyzes cases in which tensions – more or less provoked – occurred in the course of the publicization of ethnography, often threatening the researcher. Scholars such as Unni Wikan contend that public ethnography brings to the forefront important debates about reality and the quest for truth. Meanwhile, João Biehl suggests that second-order ethnographic reflexivity vis-à-vis public ethnography expands the ethnographic record and provides new openings for conceptual work, while also making it possible to consider the explicit logics of the political rationalities at play when ethnographic research encounters its various publics. Chapters from Nadia Abu El-Haj and Sherine Hamdy further galvanize the importance of public ethnography by discussing how the public shapes the importance of scholarly work more so than authors’ intent. As such, the third section of this volume has this overarching theme: ethnographers should avoid being aloof or cynical of the role their work and their ideas may play in shaping – and, it is to be hoped, bettering – the world.
This volume encourages ethnographers to continue to engage the world. It does so by calling for greater recognition and discussion of how publics come in with their own ideas, ideological commitments, and affective stakes that shape ethnographers’ ability to engage them. In other words, this book provides a discussion of the various ways in which ethnographic work may become public and the issues that arise in its publicization. Although the discussion centers upon ethnography, the relevance of the discussion relates to any form of scholarly work that has the potential to reach public audiences. As such, researchers who engage in a variety of research methods and have an interest in further exploring the public afterlife of their published work would benefit from reading the discussions that take place in this volume. This book would also be relevant to include in research methods courses at the undergraduate and graduate level to introduce students to the issues that may arise when research becomes public.
With that said, this book does not serve as a how-to manual for conducting public ethnography and fails to discuss many of the more mundane, everyday issues that may arise when undergoing this form of research. Although this may not be the volume’s intention, the lack of this discussion makes it unclear as to how to conduct public ethnography. For example, it would be challenging for scholars to design a study of the publicization of their own work based on the material presented in this book; however, this book’s overall discussion of the public life of ethnography, how that public life is jointly shaped by ethnographers and the public, as well as its overall encouragement of ethnographers – and other researchers – to continue to engage the public with their research does open up a path for creating a standardized methodology for doing so.