Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1999 18:27:10 -0400 From: kelley <kcwalker at syr.edu>
hey ange, thanks for the discussion of marx and althusser.
ange writes:
>no, I'm saying in a roundabout and hesitant way I guess that if you're a
>part of an institutional research agenda
who isn't?
>then you should either get the
>hell out of other people's lives
it's really not possible to do any sort of intellectual work without getting in other people's lives. statistical survey research only gives you the illusion that you aren't in other people's lives. in the states, it is very much *in* people's lives every loving minute.
>or you should only do research which is
>_entirely_ useless from the perspective of social control, motivation,
>and social cohesion.
no such thing. all social theory/research began as that and none of it escapes this critique or possible future. and none of it is immune from being used for these purposes despite sincere, well-thought out attempts to avoid this.
experimental and statistical procedures are based on the hypothetical-deductive model which seeks explanation, prediction and control. social control is fundamental to {*conceptually related to*] and an inevitable result of the h-d model. the very idea of collecting data on people through surveys was about controlling people in order to tax them, punish them, monitor their movements, births, deaths, etc. counting people was just as important as subjecting labor to the time clock.
in the US othering was first pioneered by survey researchers, not ethnographers.
just a few technical points and a longer substantive point re the history of ethnographic methods which were characterized as emanating from the impulse to see people as Others and to understand them:
1. ethnos=greek for the people
2. the study of kinship systems is really about the study of property systems and the complex rules regulating the distribution and use of property. it was also about the study of the supposedly universal incest taboo; the research only revealed that the taboo was universally broken.
3 interpretive methodologies didn't emerge in an effort to understand others; a bit more complicated than that:
anthropological fieldwork [conceived of as "ethnography"] was largely disparaged until the 1920s. it didn't really precede the use of ethnographic methods in sociology. the two emerged around the same time. the first pioneers of qualitative interviews and observations were:
WEB DuBois's _The Philadelphia Negro_ 1899 Veblen's studies of academic life under the onslaught of bureaucratization The Lynd's 1924 account of Middletown.
the ethnographic eye, in the states, was initially turned toward white middle and upper middle class americans for the most part. they were considered a social problem, yes, but not for the racist reasons you suggest. DuBois's work is more complex, obviously.
anthropologists relied on the accounts of explorers, traders, missionaries and colonial officials. when anthropologists did do fieldwork it was to collect artefacts and information about a group's history so it could be fit into an evolutionary schema much like morgan had done. they weren't interested in language, customs, habits. ** they tended to call this ethnology.
franz boas, for ex, never met a n.w. coast indian until 1885 when bella coola indians were being exhibited in a museum of ethnology. boas did fieldwork the next year, focusing mainly on texts and artefacts. he didn't give a fig about understanding people. malinowski didn't do his fieldwork til WWI. he too was interested in history and texts, not in their present living conditions or understanding them. he commented on his interest in talking w/ ppl b/c he was bored and he found it enlightening. but he didn't champion it as some special form of knowledge.
sociological fieldwork was not "ethnography" as we use the term today. rather, it utilized the community-as-case study social survey: census data, document analysis, official records, diaries, shopping lists, letters, school essays, etc. the model of 'scientific' research at the time was the experimental methods pioneered in psychology. interviews and hanging out were seen as too subjective and not rigorous.
imagining Otherness was pioneered by quantitative researchers in the US, not ethnographers. social surveys were part of progressive reform efforts, funded by a wealthy elite alarmed by immigration and urbanization.
sponsored first by churches, then by corps, then gov't in an attempt to count, quantify and categorize Otherness to determine how many from different denominations, religions, nationalities and to chart each group's supposed problems adjusting. people were transformed into a statistical aggregates to be reported in census of exotic lifestyles. the 1911 Immigration Commission survey was the culmination of this research which b/g in 1880s. obviously numbers were important here and no one gave a fig about how they felt or attempted to understand them as romanticized others.
the idea of interviewing and hanging out with ppl was a last resort and not seen as esp objective. 'hanging out' was about getting a feeling for urban geography and space more often than not. robert park @ chicago school encouraged ppl to hangout and get a feel for a community but he always insisted on the use of objective, impersonal techniques detailed above.
an exception was DuBois's _The Philadelphia Negro_ which was sponsored by Susan Wharton who was an advocate in the settlement house movement assoc. w/ jane addams. Du Bois conducted 5000 interviews which sought to describe the conditions of black life--poor housing and infrastructure, menial and poorly paid jobs, etc. --and aimed at a kind of social uplift. Dubois accepted the paternalistic benevolence which inspired the settlement house movement.
park's chicago school sociology can be accused of many things but it wasn't necessarily about trying to reform various others so they'd assimilate and magically rid the city of social problems. if anything, park can be accused of naturalizing 'natural areas' of the city assuming that the ethnic enclaves, bohemias, hobohemias, havens for drug addicts, etc were natural to the city and something to be celebrated because of its diversity and freedom. the strain of sociology that posed the city to the community was found in louis wirth's work and those who followed him. iow, there were competing approaches to urban research.
he can also be accused of conceiving of sociology as the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, not esp. concerned w/ moral uplift or reform but with the professionalization of the discipline.
the lynds_ Middletown_ study in the early 20s was first major attempt to employ ethnographic methods used by ethnologists of native americans. their work was sponsored by the Council of Churches concerned about christian communities, modernization and moral values. the first forays into othering on the part of interpretive sociologies, then, was initially the othering of 'middle america'.
the lynd's did this b/c they were so worried that they wouldn't be able to study people like themselves: they were afraid of being too subjective and missing the obvious. so they consulted clark wissler, an ethnologist of native americans who argued that culture was the result of environmental factors.
their second study in 1937 was inspired by the lynd's shift toward socialism and was conceived as a critique of capitalism via an examination of the power relations which determined social life.
their work influenced community studies of class and power such as warner's _yankee city_ which, again, studied whites. his was an effort to understand the power rel.in the states and subjective classification of status and class.
chicago school ethnographic methods also emerged b.c many of the ppl who b/c sociologists had been social reformers, social workers, and some had been poor, transients, and gang members themselves. these folks pushed for ethnographic methods because they argued that survey data and documents were not especially reliable--particularly official documents from police depts and settlement houses. this was based on their own experience as part of the system or subject to the system. iow, they saw other methods as flawed and inaccurately portraying the poor or certain ethinc groups, for ex, as criminally prone when they knew this to be the result of police records and bigotry.
their motivations were, like booth in london, to undermine the dominant assumption that crime was the result of cultural, biological or racial deficiencies. they were interested in showing how crime was influenced by the environment: poor housing and infrastructure, poorly paid jobs, etc. i guess you could say they othered in the name of undermining what they thought was a more pernicious and damaging othering.
this is not to suggest, of course, that middle class moralism wasn't involved. it was. obviously, many also felt that social reform meant encouraging immigrants to adapt middle class norms, etc.
a second major influence was w.f. whyte's _street corner society_ whyte was trained as an economist and was interested in documenting housing conditions. whyte pioneered participant observation, though that wasn't his intent initially. he didn't even call it that. he wasn't interested, at first, in getting to know people or understand them. he was concerned about poverty and eradicating poor material conditions and elicited the help of someone once affiliated w/ a settlement house in order to get access to housing and talk to people about their living conditions. this isn't much of a surprise given the popularity of muck raking journalism at the time.
another indirect influence was the frankfurt school's authoritarian personality studies. paul lazarsfeld, who pioneered statististical survey methods in the 40s as the most objective, scientific approach to social research, was originally part of community studies of unemployment. [cf., jahoda et al (1933)] _marienthal_ was notable as the forerunner of community studies research on unemployment, prompted by the closing of a mill which employed nearly everyone in an austrian community. they were interested in the german trad of psychologistic research but were hoping to study the connection between psychology and social structure revealed by massive unemployment.
lazarsfeld was unhappy with that approach. in his intro to mirra komoravsky's _the unemployed man and his family_, which was a continuation of the authoritarian personality studies only in depression era US, he notes its weaknesses insofar as she interviewed people about the effects of unemployment on family life and her work was biased and subjective. she was trying to show how the patriarchal model of the family was premised on male breadwinning.
later, lazarsfeld campaigned for statistical procedures which and referred to these as survey methods. so, the term participant observation came about to distinguish it from lazarsfeld's work. in the mid to late 40s, then, the method of p-o b/c assoc. w/ ethnography and took on it's meaning in direct relation [and opposition] to quant. modeling of quasi-causal correlations between aggregate data.
** a notable exception here is the work of frank cushing who lived w. zuni's and b/c a zuni shaman and war chief while working as an ethnologist for the Smithsonian. they booted him for his involvement in uprisings since it was more customary for ethnologists to view living native americans as artifacts suitable for display at the world's fair.