Andreas Glaeser                                          

Theory by Way of Ethnography

 

Social life is best understood as a complex thicket of interacting social processes which are in principle effect flows through webs of action-reaction chains. If this is the case, then ethnography should be the method of choice to study social life, for not other method gets as close to the critical juncture of what constitutes social life, that is the concatenation of actions and reactions. If theory is predominantly concerned with the analysis of these flows, especially with the ways in which they stabilize to form durable institutions as well as the ways in which regularity becomes disrupted leading to changes or even the disintegration of institutions, then ethnography should also be the best vehicle to develop theory.

 

However ethnographic practice as it has emerged historically in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology also has considerable limitations in its ability to observe and analyze processes. The greatest problem is that traditional ethnography is on the one had an ethnography of the present, on the other it is an ethnography of constricted space favoring the observation of face-to-face interactions. Action-reaction effect flows, however, can span extensive temporal and spatial horizons thanks to transportation, communication and storage techniques which allow the projective articulation of actions. I have systematically developed these ideas in an essay entitled An Ontology for the Ethnographic Study of Social Processes (click HERE for reference and access to the text).

 

Narrative in Ethnography and Literature

 

Literature is often more successful in supplying an acute sense of social life at a particular time and place than ethnography. Not surprisingly, many ethnographers experience desires to fictionalize precisely in order to capture this life. This is for me reason enough to explore the possibilities and limits of ethnography and literature to symbolize the social. I am currently writing an article precisely on this issue. One of the key differences, I will argue, is that literature has to (as already Aristotle noted) make systematic reference to the common place in emplotting its narratives. Ethnography, however, can not afford to do this. Its task is precisely to reflect on these common places in an effort to theorize social dynamics.

 

Theory and ethnography