Ethnography

How does the work of ethnographers contribute to policies they did not anticipate, policies they may even abhor? This article explores the ways 19th-century Europeans who would never have considered themselves as policymakers or even policy wonks – writers, artists, missionaries, and ethnographers – influenced colonial ‘native policy’. The article focuses on the case of precolonial European representations of Polynesia (Samoa in particular), tracing the effects of these discourses on the foundational process of colonial state formation in German Samoa after 1900. German colonialism in China and Southwest Africa is also discussed. Both the form and the content of ethnographic discourse influenced colonial interventions, even if these effects were dependent on a contingent array of other determinants. The conclusion discusses various ways in which ethnographers can try to see that their writings are not enrolled into political projects to which they might object.

As Beijing is being transformed into a global city, new kinds of spatial and social hierarchies are produced. Based on ethnographic research conducted among students at a school for the children of migrant workers in China’s capital, this article examines how new hierarchies are continuously produced through embodied spatial practices within city space, and examines how school texts, state ideology, and children’s appearances produce new kinds of marginalities.

Building explanations from data is an important but usually invisible process behind all published research. Here I reconstruct my theorizing for an historical ethnography of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and the NASA (National Aeronautical and Space Administration) decisions that produced that accident. I show how analogical theorizing, a method that compares similar events or activities across different social settings, leads to more refined and generalizable theoretical explanations. Revealing the utility of mistakes in theorizing, I show how my mistakes uncovered mistakes in the documentary record, converting my analysis to a revisionist account that contradicted the conventional explanation accepted at the time. Retracing how I developed the concepts and theory that explained the case demonstrates the connection between historic political and economic forces, organization structure and processes, and cultural understandings and actions at NASA. Finally, these analytic reflections show how analysis, writing, and theorizing are integrated throughout the research process.

This article explores local transformations of power, and accompanying expressions of communal powerlessness, in Chelnochovskna-Dniestre, a town on the southwestern border of Ukraine where the collapse of the Soviet system has triggered the disintegration of the political, economic and physical infrastructure, as well as the concomitant departure of almost all those able to obtain visas to emigrate. It seeks to understand and articulate the distinctive and complex sense of place that has taken hold of the town, whose collective consciousness is now at once extensively transnational and intensively local, and where place is made palpable as much through what is absent as through what is present. In so doing, it seeks a more profound appreciation of the power of place itself on the lives of ethnography’s subjects.