> who isn't [a part of an institutional research agenda]?
many people, including me. what institutional research agenda are you part of?
> it's really not possible to do any sort of intellectual work without
> getting in other people's lives.
not so. you could easily do some excellent research on citizenship in the US by a study of the laws, the papers, the legislative debates and history, the handful of books on the topic, the reports of deaths on the US-Mex border, etc.
> 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.
true, there is an illusion of distance; but that illusion has many truths, including the ability of respondents to lie to the census collector in a way that's much harder to do with so-called in-depth interviews and ongoing observation. which is why the pressure to conduct in-depth research exists in the first place. qualitative methods is a direct response to the ability of 'informants' to lie. since adorno has made a re-appearance in the discussions here, a gratuitous citation from _minima moralia_ i think: "only a fool would speak the truth to power".
> >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
i disagree. not all social research begins by asking how social control or cohesion can be achieved, or people motivated to be good little workers...
> 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.
of course, you're right: you can't make something immune from this kind of use. but you can make it as useless as possible. how would the hypothetical research on citizenship above be useful for these kinds of approaches? all of the information is already in the 'public realm'; you would simply have to track its history and provide an (what would probably be a quite damning) account of US practices and policies. the only people it would be useful for are those who aren't the authors of those laws, the authorities.
> 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.
yes. i'm no fan of statistics, nor especially of population surveys in any form. i simply said they were preferable, and the preference comes not from a consideration of their epistemic frame, but from thinking about being subjected to them and how to disrupt their 'usefulness'.
> in the US othering was first pioneered by survey researchers, not
> ethnographers.
perhaps. yet, it was when the survey method was deemed insufficient to explaining or predicting the explosions of insubordination and the growing 'alienation' (here used in that specifically durkheimian sense) that qualitative methods were called upon in an institutionally systematic way and ethnography came to be applied to local contexts.
> 1. ethnos=greek for the people
yes, but within a distinction between 'the people' and civil society, where 'the people' includes in particular the household and family. hence the derivation of the term 'ethnicity'. 'the people' is 'our people'.
a note on recent research happenings here: an army of researchers have just been sent out by a coalition of churches to do in-depth interviews on poor people and 'how they feel'. foucault would have loved it. anyways, i could have saved them the money. they feel (_are_) poor and humiliated on a daily basis. if they wanted to spend money on research, what would have been scandalous would be a study of the times and ways in which the media and government have overtly and implicitly sought to humiliate people for not being employed, the ways in which incomes (and not just welfare incomes) have been getting shittier, the reasons why, including the effects of a bevvy of sociologists now mumbling in the media about a 'culture of poverty' and the (unstated, but implied) disastrous effects of children growing up in households without fathers, parents who work, etc...
but the researchers have discovered something (yawn): over and over again, according to the intrepid researchers, those interviewed talk about how they're not being listened to. nothing surprising there. but what does it tell us?
that, here are the poor and marginalised, flattered that someone with a little more power and money than them is (apparently) listening to them. i guess, after the research is handed over to the government, the govt can send out regular teams of listeners/confessors to assuage any feelings of marginalisation and threats of social disorder. but we know it'll never work. so perhaps the researchers can become, in time, the targets of frustration and violence, which is now thoroughly internalised. maybe if a few researchers get taken hostage, then perhaps the govt will listen. or maybe they'll/we'll just stop being subjected to this facade of sympathy and concern.
(speaking of listening: the govt recently outdid itself by denying a group of deaf people visas to attend a global conference on deafness, on the grounds they were at risk of overstaying their visas... lovely.)
i'm rambling, so later on the history of anthropology, ethnology. it looks interesting.
Angela _________