Baiocchi.2008 Political Ethnography

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The Ethnos in the Polis: Political Ethnography

as a Mode of Inquiry
Gianpaolo Baiocchi*1 and Brian T. Connor2
1
Brown University
2
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Abstract
In the social sciences, there is renewed attention to political ethnography, a research
method that is based on close-up and real-time observation of actors involved in
political processes, at times even extending the definition of these processes to move
beyond categories of state, civil society, and social movements. This article examines
the emergence of political ethnography from a number of disciplinary locations,
such as political science, the cultural turn in sociology, and anthropology, and shows
the value of this new approach for understanding how politics work in everyday life.
Introduction
Political ethnographies are a relative novelty for the social sciences. They
are new in that there is today a resurgence of ethnographic studies that
deal with the formal province of political sociology or political science:
states, nations, social movements, political culture, and revolutions. In the
last 15 years, these have included studies like Lancaster’s (1988) ethnography
of Managua neighborhoods during the revolution; Brown’s (1997) study
of AIDS activism in Vancouver; Auyero’s (2001) study of Peronist networks
in Argentina; Lichterman’s (1996) ethnography of forms of activist com-
mitment; Eliasoph’s (1998) study of political apathy; Wood’s study of
faith-based community networks (2002); and Glaeser’s (2000) study of
police officials in postreunification Germany, among many others. It has
also included special issues of journals like the Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography special issue on the ‘Far Right’, and two issues of Qualitative
Sociology dedicated to political ethnography. As an indicator of the novelty
of these studies, the introduction to the special issue of Qualitative
Sociology1 by Auyero (2006, 257) states that ‘politics and its main protagonists
(state official, politicians, and activists) remain un(der)studied by ethnography’s
mainstream’. A set of reflections in States and Societies, the political sociology
newsletter, has practitioners of political ethnography reflecting on the
challenges of ‘risking inconvenience’ by undertaking ethnography and
justifying and publishing such work in a subfield whose mandate is to
© 2008 The Authors
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
140 The Ethnos in the Polis
‘study the “big” world of power and institutions, not the “small world”
of everyday interaction between ordinary people’ (Lichterman 2005a, 1–2).
Yet such ethnographies have been around for a long time, even if not
always prominently recognized as central to sociology and allied disciplines.
In anthropology, concerns with forms of authority and power date to the
founding of the discipline, and are the analytical focus of many studies in
the post–World War II period. In addition to the Manchester school
ethnographies, like Epstein’s Politics in an Urban African Community (1958),
postwar investigations of clientelism and ‘pathological’ social formations,
like Banfield’s Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958) or Lewis’s Five
Families (1959), are essentially political ethnographies. In sociology, under
the guise of community studies, since the 1930s scholars have engaged in
direct observation of neighborhood activists, political networks, and the
day-to-day life of politics. Many of the most famous such studies, such as
Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown studies (1929, 1937), Hunter’s study
of Atlanta (1953), or Vidich and Bensman’s study of Candor, New York
(1956), had strong, if not explicit ethnographic components. The Lynds,
for example, emulated the ‘approach of the cultural anthropologist’ (1929,
3) in describing the modes of behavior that prevailed in Muncie, Indiana.
It is clear that ethnography, ‘close-up, on-the-ground observation of
people and institutions in real time’ where the investigator detects ‘how
and why agents act think and feel’ (Wacquant 2003, 5, cited in Auyero
2006) can offer special insights for the study of politics. If we think of the
study of politics broadly as the study of societal power (its distribution,
reproduction, and transformation) and the structures, institutions, move-
ments, and collective identities that both maintain and challenge it, the
ethnographic gaze can mean any one of the following:
1 Studying politics, defined as the events, institutions, or actors that are
normally considered ‘political’ (e.g., social movements, or states), but in
an ethnographic way: at a smaller scale and as they happen. We call this
version ethnographies of political actors and institutions.
2 Studying routine encounters between people and those institutions and
actors, encounters normally invisible in nonethnographic ways (e.g., the
encounter between organized social movements and nonparticipants; or
the encounters with state bureaucracies or welfare agencies). We refer
to this version below as encounters with formal politics.
3 Studying other kinds of events, institutions, or actors altogether, that
while invisible from nonethnographic vantage points, are of consequence
to politics in some way (e.g., apathy, or nonparticipation in social
movements). Below, we call this the lived experience of the political.
Many political ethnographies do not exclusively fall into one or the
other category; instead, we use these categories as a heuristic device. The
first category might more readily come to mind as constituting political
ethnography, but we make the argument that the second and third
© 2008 The Authors Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 139–155, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00053.x
The Ethnos in the Polis 141
versions are also important. The first version includes studies of social
movements, revolutions, civil society organizations, although ‘under the
microscope’, detailing the experiences and processes taking place in those
institutions or among the actors in question (Auyero 2006). For example,
Lichterman’s (2005b) account of various protestant volunteering and advocacy
projects shows that group customs that invite reflective and critical discussion
contributed to the formation of successful external ‘bridges’ or ties.
The second and third versions might be less readily considered political
ethnography, but are just as important in the insights they provide about
politics. The second version, encounters with formal politics, moves away from
the inner workings of recognizable actors and institutions in politics, like states
and social movements, and toward their boundaries. These ethnographies
principally include studies of encounters with states or state bureaucracies
as well as the study of the blurry boundaries between those formal institutions
and informal politics, such as the ‘grey zones’ of clandestine political
activity (Auyero 2007) or participants at the edge of social movements
(Wolford 2005). The third version, the lived experience of the political, takes
the broadest definition of what constitutes the political. Objects of study
include studies of apathy, instead of engagement, or of conversations at sites
ordinarily thought to be nonpolitical. But in these cases, the ethnographer
then makes the analytical link to political culture, or nation, or another
relevant political process. In this latter definition, it is not that political actors
as understood by the discipline may have fuzzy boundaries examined up
close, but that the everyday in itself becomes a politically relevant site,
whether or not recognizable ‘political actors’ are present. Navaro-Yashin
(2002), provides a an example of this style of political ethnography, where
fashion shows and sporting events, among other mundane places, become
sites where the political can emerge through discourse, actions, or both.
Political ethnographers often make the claim that the ethnographic gaze
calls into question many of the assumptions of traditional political studies,
and that this can call for a significant retheorization. The advantages of
political ethnography, as alluded to in this introduction, are multiple. The first
advantage is that ethnographic studies of politics can provide an understanding
of how state, national, or global actions play themselves out on local stages
(Burawoy 2000; Scott 1986). Another advantage is that practices in the
political realm can be examined. Questions such as how do people (not)
get involved in politics can be answered by studying how individuals
negotiate their actions in regards to political issues in their everyday lives
(Auyero 2003; Eliasoph 1998). Finally, both of these advantages get back
to the idea of the lived experiences of the political. Where previous studies
of politics used broad strokes to paint a picture of political life, political
ethnography allows the researcher to bring up the mundane details that
can affect politics, providing a ‘thick description’ where one was missing.
In this sense, ‘political ethnography provides privileged access to its processes,
causes, and effects’ of broader political processes (Tilly 2006, 410).
In this essay, we review the state of political ethnography, briefly

considering its origins before considering contributions along the three
lines above. Our discussion is interdisciplinary, but in the final section of
the essay, we also consider some disciplinary conventions in sociology,
political science, and anthropology, and how these shape how authors have
justified the status of their works within these disciplines. We will be thus
closely attentive to whether, and how, political ethnographers speak back
to central questions in the discipline, scrutinizing strategies of justification,
the rhetorical moves by which authors assert the value of their findings
as relevant to the discipline (Law 2004). The goal of this abbreviated
essay is to convey some of the excitement of this interdisciplinary mode of
inquiry and discussion, and to introduce some exemplars to an audience
of ethnographers and others. What we do not do is to provide a thorough
picture of all, or even most, political ethnographies. The limited size of
this review prevents us from discussing many more interesting works, or
discussing the ones we address in more detail. We also limited our discussion
to the English-language literature, full aware of exciting studies in other
languages.2
The origins of political ethnography

Like in sociology, anthropology counts with an earlier tradition of political
ethnographies, many of them in the manner of the Manchester school,
and many under the rubric of political anthropology (Vincent 1990;
Werbner 1984). Manchester school scholars, under the influence of Max
Gluckman, developed a distinctive structuralist style of anthropology with
their investigations of British Central Africa. They concerned themselves
with forms of authority in traditional societies as well as with changing
practices and conflicts that result from colonial pressures, and were often
structural functionalist in theoretical orientation. For example, Epstein’s
(1958) study of a mine township in the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia
traces emergent forms of urban organization among Africans, like unions
or welfare organizations, that transcend but do not fully displace tribal
allegiances as a means of integration. Another classic political ethnography
is Banfield’s (1958) postwar study of Italian peasants, finding the moral
order that guided a social formation mired in patronage and clientelism.
As mentioned, the so-called community studies in sociology often
deployed ethnographic methods and often addressed local politics and
local political culture, albeit sometimes in an oblique manner. So while
Suttles (1968) is mostly concerned with the ‘social order of the slum’ in
South Chicago, the moral universe that residents create for themselves, he
does describe institutional arrangements and communication patterns that
reproduce this order, concerns that are shared by contemporary Foucauldian
scholars. Later community studies, like Kornblum’s (1974) and Bailey’s
(1974), more explicitly address political questions. Kornblum is concerned
with explaining the absence of ‘a powerful working class movement which

could be called socialist in the United States’ (1974, vii), while Bailey wants
to shed light on the ‘practical and theoretical significance of Alinsky-type
groups’. To answer these questions, these researchers engaged in detailed
participant observation, although in combination with other methods,
and aimed at making more generalizeable claims, and counting on the
representativeness or typicalilty of the fieldsite, as was the hallmark of
community studies. Community studies declined in importance in sociology
in subsequent years, which helps account for their relative absence in
discussions of political ethnography, as does the fact that they sometimes
tended to address political issues obliquely and usually did so through the
lens of the category of community, which many contemporary researchers
would find excessively homogenizing.
Another precursor to contemporary political ethnographies is to be
found in the number of studies dealing with politics that in the 1980s and
1990s, that while interview based, increasingly emphasized individual
experiences and meaning. Cultural sociologists, in particular, were
beginning to pay increasing attention to the importance of the meaning
of social action to the actors involved. Civic life and the basis for solidarity
was the overarching concern for Bellah and his collaborators (1985).
Bellah et al.’s investigation of the nature of the relationship between public
and private life in the contemporary USA is concerned with understanding
action in the public sphere, and ‘the resources Americans have for making
sense of their lives, how they think about themselves and their society,
and how their ideas relate to action’ (Bellah 1985, ix). The research for
the book relies on participant observation in civic and political organizations
as well as interviews, and some of the chapters present ethnographic
evidence, the specificity of the cases is less important as the book is
very much aimed at exploring ‘representative issues in representative
communities’ (p. ix).
Social movement scholars were also increasingly attentive to individual
actors as well as meaning-making, especially under the guise of ‘frames
analysis’ (Gamson et al. 1982; Snow and Benford 1988). McAdam’s study
of ‘Freedom Summer’ (1988), for example, explored the biographical roots
of activism in depth, and relies in large part on the understanding of
participants to make sense of events. It is based on a sample of interviewees,
divided between those who attended and those who signed up for, but
did not take part of Freedom Summer. Gamson’s study (1992) of how
‘average working people’ ‘talk politics’ relies on the observation of ‘peer
groups’ – a variant of the focus group, in which a small group of peers
talks in a nonbureaucratic setting and the facilitator plays a minor role in
keeping the conversation going. Concerned with distorted views of the
mass public that portrays the average person as a passive consumer of media
information, as well as with understanding the sort of political consciousness
that can lead to collective action, Gamson presented his participants with
topics and observed how talk naturally occurred, coding it for frames.
While neither study was ethnographic, they were both very much concerned
with individual acts of meaning-making, which will become important
for subsequent ethnographies.
Political ethnography (1): Political actors

A first strand of political ethnographies is made up by studies of collective
actors like social movements, neighborhood associations, and other
expressions of civil society. Political ethnographers have asked questions
about the meaning of such association – at times dialoguing with Gramsci
and other theories of culture and power, and at times dialoguing with
theories of civic association. These scholars have argued that ethnography
allows us to answer a number of questions simply not accessible by other
means (Lichterman 1996). As all of these ethnographies attest, projects
about ‘ways of doing politics’, practices, and performances require a certain
amount of observation of these as they happen, and where they happen.
Studies of language and culture have to pay attention to the internal
coherence of cultural codes but also to the unspoken, performative, and
structuring elements of these codes, the ‘extralinguistic’ factors, as the
implicit rules of who can and cannot speak, who determines the rules of
‘proper’ speech, and access to proper ways of speaking, and strategies of
presentation of the (political) self (Eliasoph 1998). In recent years, US-based
studies have joined a resurgence in interest in ethnographies of politics
and social movements in the Global South, especially among the Latin
American urban poor, also largely inspired by concepts of civil society
(Arias 2006; Auyero 2001; Baiocchi 2005; Gay 1994; Mische 2006).
One strand of questions has been about everyday meanings and common
sense in the crafting of political identities. Why, ethnographers have asked,
do certain political group identities make more sense than others? In
pointed contrast to approaches that focus on ‘objective’ opportunity structures
or the assumed rationality of collective actors as a way to explain collective
action, political ethnographers often focus on everyday meanings instead.
For example, Rubin’s (1997) study of the emergence of Coalition of Workers,
Peasants, and Students of the Isthmus (COCEI) as a major political party
in Juchitán, Mexico, gives a rich historical account of how the leftist party
was able to make a stronghold in the poor region. In using grassroots tactics
centered around Zapotec ethnicity, COCEI was able to organize support
against the traditional, corporatist governing practices of the Institutionalized
Revolutionary Party (PRI). Rubin uses interviews and archival research
to show what issues COCEI focused on to gain support, and also why
residents supported or did not support the party’s actions. Hansen (1999)
studies the emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India through archival
records and fieldwork, to show how Hindu nationalist parties like the
Bharatiya Jonata Party (BJP) were able to gain power in the Indian
government in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The nationalist parties, Hansen
claims, used narratives based in the moral superiority of (middle-class)
Hinduism, separating their moral high ground from the lower classes and
other religions, in particular Islam. For example, the Hindu parties used
the construction of a temple in Ayodhya as a means to foster a national,
moral community. A brick drive was started where towns collected bricks
and performed a ceremony around them before being sent to the temple
site. The drives were most successful in areas with high Muslim populations.
Religious antagonism was used here as a means to foster a nationalism
based most strongly on Hinduism, relegating non-Hindu Indians as second-
class citizens. Here, national parties use everyday experiences with others
such as Muslims or lower-class people as a means of mobilizing support for
Hindu nationalism. Glaeser (2000) examines the creation of East and West
German identities among the police forces in postunification Germany.
Basing his study on a Potsdam and Köpenick police station, Glaeser uses
interviews and observation to see how Germans use space, language, and
actions to identify and deal with the change to a unified German state. As
opposed to studies that look at how citizens manage this divide, Glaeser
instead looks at police officers, showing how people who represent the state
come to terms with their employment position in regards to national identity.
Eliasoph (1998) uses political ethnography to understand why individuals
try to remove themselves from voicing political beliefs in public venues.
Eliasoph examines this problem from a number of sites – PTA meetings,
a local bar, and even an environmental activist group – to see how
individuals created communities, but without overtly politicizing those
communities. Perhaps the most odd example of this came from the
environmental movement studied. This group used tactics of individualizing
the problems of environmental damage as a way to create change. Instead
of utilizing political discourses on the environment, individuals learned to
‘speak for themselves’, focusing on the self and one’s own reasonings, all
the while trying not to speak for others in the community (Eliasoph 1998,
207–8). The result was a difficulty in debating with public officials, who
used science and technical information to oppose the activists’ goals and
interest-based demands. Politics, Eliasoph argues, has now taken a turn in the
public sphere where it is increasingly difficult to actively engage in direct
politics using a language of moral right. Now public political discussions
tend to focus on individualized, interest-based reasonings of political beliefs.
Auyero’s investigation of ‘political clientelism’ among the urban poor
in Villa Paraíso, a shantytown on the outskirts of Buenos Aires is also
exemplary. Based on extensive fieldwork among the poor and local
brokers, Auyero investigates the meaning of these networks and exchanges.
Clientelism has long been a theme for political scientists who observed
that, as an asymmetrical relationship, perpetuates the social standing of
both patron and client, and is sometimes seen as something akin to ‘false
consciousness’. But by observing it closely and unpacking its meanings for
poor participants, something other than simple social reproduction emerges.

Clientelist exchanges, or as Auyero prefers, instances of ‘problem solving
through personalized political mediation’ (2001, 210) reflect agency and
improvisation of the poor, and are crisscrossed by ‘enduring and long-
lasting relationships, narratives, and identities’ (2001, 213) and the idea
that problems can be solved through personal mediation with successful
outcomes is becoming an ‘uncontested part of life in shantytowns’.
In a similar vein, Gutmann (2002) explores the ‘popular politics’ of
Mexico’s urban poor, avoiding the both pitfalls of presenting them as
‘marginal’ (as had been the case in the 1960s and 1970s) or of romanticizing
the resistance inherent in their daily practices (as is the case in what the
author calls ‘resistance theory’) by taking the reader on a journey through
the political lives of the residents of colonia Santo Domingo, a working-class
neighborhood in Mexico City. This bottom-up study of the myriad
meanings of democracy in this neighborhood considers when, how, and
why residents do and do not participate in ‘politics’. In a pointed break
from social movements approaches, Guttman poses the important and seldom
addressed question of why people do not participate in protest or other
forms of political activity, reminding us that when social movements are
presented as the main actors in books about urban Latin America they
constitute even in the best scenarios but a fraction of the urban population.
Political ethnography (2): Encountering formal politics

In contrast to ethnographies that focus on civil society actors and networks
(and in which the state often plays a prominent role as a target), other
political ethnographies have focused on everyday encounters with formal
political institutions, often focusing on encounters with the state. These
interactions can center around issues such as labor, work, and other places
where individuals must interact with the state and state officials (Gupta 1995;
Kerkvliet 2005; Taussig 1980). In many of these ethnographies, politics is
not considered solely as a top-down repressive force where subjects either
consent or resist; instead politics is a process where subjects interact with
various political institutions, sites, and actors, from which the subject can
desire, and be disciplined, to be a productive citizen, docile body, or even
activist. Foucault’s writings on issues such as biopower, surveillance, and
governmentality play a guiding role in many of these works. The management
and governance of subjects and populations is the common Foucauldian
element in these writings. These various political studies use Foucault in
myriad ways; some concentrate on how politics is part of everyday life
(Mahmood 2005; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Taussig 1997), others use Foucault
in issues surrounding politics and globalization (Inda 2005; Ong 1999, 2003),
and others attempt to build their own theories of politics, eschewing most
of their empirical work in order to focus on the creation of their theories
(Chatterjee 2004; Hansen 1999; Inda 2005; Ong 1999; Taussig 1997).
A good example is Ong’s (2003) study. Ong’s theoretical choice to

examine how Foucault’s technologies of governance work in Cambodian
immigrants’ experience of citizenship in the USA is less a test of theory
and more of a plotting of the ‘concrete assemblages produced by converging
rationalities ...’ (p. 10). The first portion of the book deals with the
historical situation in which thousands of Cambodians fled their country
and ended up in the USA. Combining historical documents with refugee
narratives, Ong shows the direct processes and causes of Pol Pot’s regime
that lead to people fleeing Cambodia. The rest of the book examines the
practices Cambodian refugees did and were exposed to and the technologies
of government that helped them negotiate the changes resulting from
moving to a postindustrial state. One particular practice centered around
the efforts to become self-reliant. The idea of self-reliance was stressed by
most of the institutions the refugees dealt with. Social services like welfare
helped with refugees transitioning from peasants to ‘low-wage workers’
(p. 277). Health services taught refugees about regulating the body, especially
through birth control, These and other institutions all preached self-reliance
as a necessary tool for survival in America. Ong discusses the difficulty
and strategies many refugees used in their transition from top-down,
repressive society in Cambodia to the self-regulatory, disciplinary lifestyle
that various institutions kept insisting was how one should live in the
USA. The self-constitution of these refugees in America was governed
through their encounters with state bureaucracies, religion, and work, all
aiming to create productive members of society. Ong’s work ethnographically
details how Cambodian refugees became citizens; not just in the legal
sense of citizenship, but also in the moral and ethical sense of how
Cambodians could become ‘worthy’ citizens.
Another exemplar is the study by Corbridge et al. (2005). Resulting
from 3 years of research in Eastern India, the book combines results of
household surveys, extensive taped interviews, but relies heavily on field
observations in five sites in three states. Like some of the contemporary
anthropological interventions discussed here, the book is engaged with
Foucault, Scott, and a range of postcolonial theories. Reversing Scott’s (and
Foucault’s) gaze on how states see populations, the study is concerned with
how the view from below, or ‘the myriad ways that the state comes into view’
(2005, 7). The central arguments of the book are developed in its sections
on its fieldwork, carried out in sites where ‘pro-poor governance’ schemes
were carried out. The story is told in each community from three vantage
points: from the point of view of encounters with development and
‘empowerment’ schemes; from the point of view of career paths of civil
servants; and finally, from the point of view of poor-state encounters that are
mediated by local political societies. Participation in pro-poor participatory
schemes is slight, and largely understood as an ineffective vehicle. Some of
the most interesting insights from the research have to do with the way that
state-poor encounters are embedded in local political contexts. In one field
site in West Bengal, for example, an area dominated by the Communist Party
(CPI-M), and where the poor are dependent on party elites, participation in
local village councils did not directly impact major decisions, but the polit-
ically charged atmosphere meant that acts of impropriety or embezzlement
came to light and occasioned political responses by the dominant party.
Political ethnography (3): The lived experience of the

political
A third strand of political ethnography focuses on the everyday and its
relationship to politics. Everyday life in relation to politics has no singular
meaning for these authors, but ethnographies have often highlighted how
some of the most seemingly mundane aspects of life become rooted in
politics of the state or nation (in particular the nation). Here, state
bureaucracies, social movements, or nongovernmental organizations are not
necessarily found. Sporting events (Navaro-Yashin 2002), ritual (Taussig
1997), religious groups for women (Mahmood 2005), and even life in a
factory and its housing (Pun 2005) all provide sites away from the state
and traditional social movements/civil society to show how deeply the
politics of a nation imbues its subjects with certain discourses and practices.
Donham (1999) uses history and ethnography to study how the people
of Maale dealt with the transitions of rule in Ethiopia, from anti-modern
religious missions to communist attempts at reform and modernization.
Transitioning between Maale and Addis Ababa, Donham provides a rich
understanding of how state politics and policies emanating from the capitol
affect the everyday lives of people in a remote area of Ethiopia. In Turkey,
Navaro-Yashin argued that secular and Islamic cultural and political forces
were found in some of the most mundane aspects of life in Turkey.
Department stores, fashion shows, and markets all became venues where
secularist and Islamic values could be marketed and made part of the
‘normal’ politics and values of Turkey. Other spaces or more sacred national
symbols also became places for Turks to claim a secularist or Islamic
identity. For example, after the 1994 elections, when the secularist regime
was replaced by an Islamic one, there was an increase in the number of
statues being built for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern
(secular) Turkey. The increase, as Navaro-Yashin claims, comes from the
fact that many secularists were worried about what would happen to
Turkey with a religious political party in power, and wanted to ‘reproduce
Turkey’s secularist history into the future’ (2002, 89). By claiming Ataturk
as a symbol of secular Turkey, secularists attempted to portray the history
of the nation as a secular one, and cast the new Islamic regime as a
possible threat to the history of the nation.
Wedeen’s (1999) study in Syria practiced a politics ‘as if ’ under Asad’s
regime. Combining both archival research and ethnography, Wedeen
examines discourses, spectacles, and individuals’ interpretations of them to
understand how a repressive, totalitarian regime is able to remain in power

with relatively little threats to power. Her theory rejects hegemony-based
and discipline-based theories on action, claiming that people in Syria
neither fully believe in what they do or say at political rallies or in front
of government officials, nor do they whole heartedly provide a counter-
hegemonic politics. This ‘as if ’ can be seen in the spectators at public
events meant to show the greatness of Asad and Syria. Even though Wedeen
learned that many of the participants secretly criticized the regime, they
still participated in the events as if they were staunch supporters of Asad.
In this case, subjects are neither coerced nor disciplined to a real positive
belief in the regime. At the same time, no strong counterhegemonic
movement was present threatening to topple the regime. Instead, individuals
negotiated a space of relative domination and freedom by practicing a
politics of ‘as if ’ without fully accepting nor rejecting Asad’s regime.
Contexts of justification
Political ethnographies are a largely interdisciplinary affair. Even a cursory
look at citations in the ethnographies in this review will attest to a lively
debate across and against disciplinary and area-study boundaries. But political
ethnographers often write from within disciplines that vary in their
evaluations of what constitutes an acceptable contribution to knowledge or
science. According to the standards of positive science, which exert influence
in political science and sociology, ethnographies are at a disadvantage:
they can be lacking in terms of representativeness, reliability, and replicability
(Burawoy 1998, 26). Here we briefly review disciplinary trends in how
political ethnographers justify their theoretical contributions.
In political science, where ethnographic methods are relatively rare,
ethnography is often deployed as a means of providing a contextualized
‘value added’ to studies on politics (Bayard de Volo and Schatz 2004; Fenno
1986). There appear to be two main ways in which this ‘value added’ is
given: through historicizing and contextualizing the ethnographic case
(Laitin 1986; Pereira 1997; Rubin 1997; Schatz 2004), and by using
ethnography in a mixed methods approach, where the multiple methods
are generally used to test some middle-range theory relevant to the case
(Bayard de Volo 2001; Laitin 1986, 1998; Pereira 1997; Stokes 1995).
Political scientists that use a mixed methods approach often combine
ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with survey data (Laitin 1998;
Pereira 1997; Stokes 1995). This is generally done as a way to improve
the validity of a study (Bayard de Volo and Schatz 2004, 270). Tying
ethnographic case data with either large national surveys or of surveys of
the population being studied helps create results that speak not only to the
particularities of the site, but also to a broader spectrum. In some cases,
the ethnographic data become less important to the whole narrative, and
the distinctiveness of ethnographic insights less central to the theoretical
claims. While at times mixed methods can produce a more thorough

knowledge of a population being studied, the reliance on nonethno-
graphic methods can also push the insights of ethnography aside.
In sociology, ethnographies have a long-standing position within the
discipline, and while by no means a central method, ethnographies constitute
an established approach. By and large, political ethnographers within
sociology do not claim their sites are representative, but do make broader
theoretical claims. A usual overture to disciplinary standards by political
ethnographers within sociology is to express appreciation for the limits of
their case while emphasizing the additional insights gained by this case
study. A master methodological trope for sociological–political ethnographies
is Burawoy’s proposal of the ‘extended case method’ (Burawoy 1991, 1998,
2000), in which contradictions or empirical anomalies in the case take
center stage and force our attention to the case at hand with a view to
reconstructing theory. Explanations founded on historically specific cases
are thus significant for the theory by virtue of their uniqueness (Burawoy
1991, 280). Theoretical reconstructions in these ethnographies might be
thought of as middle-range interventions, which are neither too broad in
theoretical scope, nor too narrow in situating the circumstances.3
Political ethnographers within anthropology are least concerned with
justification or the standards of positive science because ethnography itself
is in a position of dominance within the discipline. Some of the ethno-
graphies we review in this essay place a great deal of importance on sites,
relegating theoretical claims to a lower priority. But contemporary ethno-
graphers often make big theoretical claims. In contrast to authors within
sociology, contemporary political ethnographers within anthropology make
bolder theoretical claims, dialoguing with ‘grand’ theories, as opposed to
engaging with middle-range approaches. ‘This challenge,’ as Tsing (1993,
31) notes, ‘requires turning one’s back on the analytic distinction between
theory and ethnography, in which the former looks out confidently from
the particularized and unself-conscious world of the latter.’ Anthropologists
are using their fieldwork to not only ‘test’ theories like an extended case
method, but also to have a dialogue directly with entire theories, not just
testable fragments of larger theories (like theories on globalization, modern-
ization, etc.). For example, Navaro-Yashin (2002) engages with Foucault
and Zizek to show how symbols of both the secular and Islamist regimes
in have become a part of everyday life for people living in Turkey, and
offers reflections on the nature of modernity in that context. In these
cases, theory is used in a conversant sense – not tested, but used to explain
the situation and provide further insights into the theories used.
Conclusions
We concur with the evaluations of others who have examined the field,
and agree that political ethnography can bring unique insights and that
political ethnographers are producing exciting studies that challenge received

wisdom. Whether examining constituted political actors or simply events
and moments that constitute the political, political ethnographers have at
once given us better understanding of actors and institutions as well as
challenged the presumed unity and coherence of these actors. Whether
investigating the fuzzy boundaries of categorical actors like states or social
movements, the importance of meaning to political action, or the political
nature of the everyday, political ethnographers continue to push our
understanding of politics forward. We have reviewed ethnographies of
recognized political actors like social movements, ethnographies of
encounters with the state, and ethnographies of the every day that are
political.
We have also sketched out some disciplinary trends in the deployment
of political ethnography, and these might be thought of as disciplinary
styles. In reviewing and discussing these styles, it has not been our intention
to assert the superiority of one over another or even less, to reproduce
the distinctions between them. Attention to what ethnographers do
when they study politics and how they dialogue back to theory shows a
range of styles and approaches. One need not subscribe to radical
philosophy of science to recognize that these methodological stances to
some extent shape substantive findings. Political ethnographies within
political science occupy the least privileged position within the three
disciplines. Nonetheless, these ethnographies stress the historical con-
textualization needed to understand current political situations being
studied. As a disciplinary style, we also find ethnographies being used in
conjunction with other methods, with the intention of providing
fuller, more complex, and possibly more valid or generalizable studies.
Sociology gives us a nuanced method of testing theory with the
extended case method, and political ethnographies in this style are
attentive to extant theory but also call into question received wisdom.
In anthropology, we find authors who are attentive to the everyday and
who bring a number of insights about its relationship to politics, often
outside of traditional settings like social movements or bureaucracies.
In terms of relationship to theory, anthropology has authors who provide
insights based on careful interpretation of practices in sites and some
authors who engage in grander theorization; from this vantage point, the
kind of theory testing of sociologists or political scientists might appear
formalistic.
Short Biographies
Gianpaolo Baiocchi (PhD 2001: University of Wisconsin) writes on
politics, culture, and theory. His most recent book, Militants and Citizens:
The Politics of Participation in Porto Alegre, was published by Stanford
University Press.
Brian T. Connor is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University

of Massachusetts, Amherst. His primary research areas are culture, theory,
and politics.
Notes
* Correspondence address: 240 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
Email: gp_baiocchi@mac.com.
1
To be published as an edited volume.
2
A small sampling of non-English works follows. In Portuguese, see Zaluar (1994) and Goldman
(2003); in French, see Abeles (1989) and Briquet (1997); in Italian, see Gribualdi and Musella
(1998) and Bassi (1996); in Spanish, see Isla and Taylor (1995) and Marcos (2006); in German,
see Heidemann (2002) and Amborn (1993).
3
General theory is used here as a foil of middle-range theory. Middle-range theorizing, made
popular by Merton ( [1949] 1967), follows the belief that older, grand theories were too
encompassing for empirically based social scientists to test. Less explanatory and grandiose
theories, based on particular contexts and settings, are offered as a better epistemological base
for social scientific research. General theory (or grand theory) does not specify the exact places
where the theory can or should be applied. It crosses contexts, settings, individuals, and
institutions.
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Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 139–155, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00053.

The Ethnos in the Polis: Political Ethnography

In this essay, we review the state of political ethnography, briefly

The origins of political ethnography

with explaining the absence of ‘a powerful working class movement which

Political ethnography (1): Political actors

poor participants, something other than simple social reproduction emerges.

Political ethnography (2): Encountering formal politics

A good example is Ong’s (2003) study. Ong’s theoretical choice to

Political ethnography (3): The lived experience of the

understand how a repressive, totalitarian regime is able to remain in power

claims. While at times mixed methods can produce a more thorough

political ethnographers are producing exciting studies that challenge received

Brian T. Connor is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University

© 2008 The Authors Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 139–155, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00053.x

© 2008 The Authors Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 139–155, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00053.x

© 2008 The Authors Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 139–155, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00053.x

© 2008 The Authors Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 139–155, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00053.x

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