Abstract
A lone one-eyed wolfdog with the capacity to converse in English turns up in a barn in Upstate New York’s Finger Lake claiming to have run all the way from Siberia. In the barn, the wolfdog starts a conversation with an incredulous Timothy Pachirat (author of this play). Thus, starts Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power, a playful and non-traditional academic scholarship, presented as a play, on ethnography—the method used by anthropologists to study human cultures.
The book is presented as a seven-act play with 17 characters, 10 living ethnographers, and seven fictional characters including the one-eyed wolfdog. While the book is a fiction and Pachirat wrote the dialogues, some of the materials in the dialogues come from the characters’ published works and are cited academically. Further, the author shared the play with the ethnographers and received feedback from a few of them.
The play revolves around a trial of Alice Goffman concerned specifically with her ethnographic book–On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City published in 2014. In the play, the roles of officers of the court, witnesses, and jury are enacted by the various ethnographers who have been summoned to the trial by The Prosecutor, one of the fictional characters. Goffman’s book—based on her doctoral dissertation looked at surveillance, policing, and incarceration in a low-income African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia—has attracted sustained criticism and impassioned defense from inside and outside academia. Pachirat uses the discussions around Goffman’s work as an exemplar to make sense of ethnography. In the play, the readers are guided across various and sometimes contradictory understandings of ethnography, role and ethnographer ethics, methodological/theoretical issues in ethnography, and ethnography’s troubling history of colonialism and racism.
The first three acts are “useful introduction to the embodied quality of ethnographic research” (p. xv). Both Acts I and II are brief: in Act I, the wolfdog—after introducing itself—narrates its journey from Siberia to New York and its dreams during the journey which dealt with the research of 10 ethnographers in this play. In Act II, the subjective nature of ethnography is briefly captured, and the issue of objective ethnography is discussed. In Act III, criticism of ethnography from scholars situated in positivism who sometimes see qualitative researchers engaging in “navel gazing” (p. 17) is presented. This act also discusses the debate between whether research is conducted for understanding or predicting; aims of interpretive research; how all research, in one way or the other, are results of some opinions; including a brief introduction to deception in research, reducing harm to research subjects and the IRB process.
In Act IV, ethnography’s relationship to power is explored, a topic normally glossed over or ignored in textbooks. In insightful conversations between the characters, various accusations levied upon ethnographers are discussed. Accusations of ethnographers being “handmaiden to – colonial projects of power” (p. 43) who facilitate(d) the “making the unknown legible so that it could be conquered and ruled” (p. 43); ethnographies always being imbricated in power “projects of control and domination” (p. 45); the troubling association of anthropologists with segments of government for aiding political aims (pp. 50–53), and how majority of ethnographic work seemingly is based on “voyeurism of the poor, or the perverted, or the deviant” (p. 61) leading to “exoticization of the other” (p. 57) are discussed. This act also sees conversations about what can be thought of as the “primary task of ethnography” (p. 29); nexus between theory and ethnography (pp. 30–31); types of ethnography; historical beginnings of ethnography; issues of insider/outsider (emic/etic) and whether a research where the researcher does not share identity markers with the community being researched is ethical and desirable.
Act V sees discussion on the how-to-do aspect of ethnography and elaborates steps normally engaged in ethnography. The discussions are not laid out as linear prescriptive steps, but rather as thoughtful meditations with multiple arguments for and against various approaches. The act also points to the ethnographer’s own positionality making some research questions possible at the expense of other questions similar to other research traditions.
Act VI contains the trial of Alice Goffman. Using Goffman’s book as a case study, Pachirat brings forward “the tensions of ethnography’s relationship to power and the practical conduct of ethnography” (p. xv). During the trial, issues relating to lack of evidence, bias, data fabrication/destruction, and convenience sampling in ethnography are discussed. “Act Seven offers a brief, if intentionally ambiguous, conclusion to the play’s dramatic arc” (p. xv). This ending, while it might be disappointing to a few readers, is brilliant since it seemingly invites the readers to make up their own minds and to open up conversations on various facets of ethnography.
While this is an academic book that can also double as a reference book, it is a breath of fresh air in academic publishing. A welcome addition to the normally dry nature of academic scholarship. The book is an exemplar academic writing using alternate genres of representation and challenging the notion of what academic scholarship needs to look like. Not only is the play a proper academic book, it is also a good play in its own right. While published playwrights and drama critiques might not concur with this conclusion, playwrights also do not write plays about dense research methodologies and theories. Like all published plays, different elements of plays are present; all the characters are well developed, background information is provided in each act, and the conversations between the characters are believable. One criticism that could be thrown is the abstractness of some sections in Acts IV and V for those not having some understanding of qualitative research, but this criticism can be levied against any book that engages with theory and methodology.
Although the author nowhere claims the book to be a representation of arts-based research (ABR), an interesting question can be posed: is this book a piece of ABR? However, there is no straightforward answer, given multiple interpretations of ABR exist with different views on whether the art or research should be the focus of ABR. Nonetheless, the book is a brilliant example of what can be done to academic texts and is reflective of other academic works (e.g. Unflattening by Nick Sousanis (2015)) presenting complex academic concepts in non-academic prose. Works like Pachirat’s and Sousanis’s are making academic scholarship accessible to a wider audience who otherwise would not be concerned with it. This I think is the major contribution of this play. The book is also an important addition to the fiction sub-genre in qualitative research and thus can be used as an exemplar while teaching/practicing fictional strategies by qualitative researchers.
