Postscript

In: Thinking Ethnographically

By: Paul Atkinson

Pub. Date: 2017
Access Date: August 21, 2018
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: 55 City Road
Print ISBN: 9780857025906
Online ISBN: 9781473982741
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473982741
Print pages: 166-173
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Postscript

It is hard enough to sustain a period of long-term fieldwork, and for many the process of ‘writing
up’ field research is even more demanding. At least the fieldwork itself can be engaging, fun,
sociable. Sitting at a desk, tapping away at a keyboard, is rarely any of those things. It is even
worse if one has little or no idea of how to organise one’s thoughts. In an ideal world, by the
time we have finished our fieldwork, our ideas will have been developing and crystallising. In
reality, there is often a period of hard thinking to be done. That is why we need a repertoire of
ideas. As I have explained already, nobody should regard this collection of ideas as a ready-
made toolbox that can be applied literally and slavishly to all and any field projects. The aim is
to help us organise our thoughts. Equally, ethnographic fieldwork is not intended merely to
illustrate a variety of existing ideas. Those ideas are possible starting points, from which original
perspectives can and should grow.

It is really a bad idea to wait until one is writing a thesis, a report or a paper before embarking
on ‘analysis’. As all texts of methodological advice repeatedly make clear, analysis should take
place hand in hand with the data collection. There should always be a dialogue between ideas
and data, between the concrete and the abstract, the local and the generic. But in the real
world it often turns out that however confident students and researchers are when it comes to
data collection, they can approach analysis and writing in something of a vacuum. Hence my
modest attempt to provide some potentially fruitful ideas. I fully realise that this is not a
comprehensive discussion of all the potentially relevant ideas: clearly such a catalogue would
amount to a complete summary of sociology, cultural geography, anthropology, and indeed all
the social sciences. I also realise that my selection inevitably reflects my own intellectual
background and interests.

It is always easy for authors of books like this to come over as smug: we readily imply that we
know just how it should be done, while less experienced readers just feel frustrated. Well, that
is partly the nature of the beast. A book that droned on and on about how confused and
inadequate I feel most of the time would not be very useful in the long run. But it is important to
emphasise that all research is imperfect. We never attain perfect ‘data’, and ‘analysis’ is always
partial. We often feel that we are not doing full justice to the information we have collected, or
that we have not done justice to the people who have allowed us to share their lives. So we
should not assume that more experienced researchers can use and generate ideas with
assurance and self-confidence. It is the same for everyone. Ideas do not come easily. But they
will definitely not ‘emerge’ just from our repeated inspection of notes and transcripts. The
absence of ideas will just guarantee that no further ideas will appear. We have to bring ideas to

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our fieldwork and to our data, if we are ever to derive ideas from them.

I do not want anyone to regard these ideas as prêt-à-porter, to be adopted off the peg. However
productive some of these might have been in the past, and however suggestive they may be for
current and future work, they do not provide ready-made analyses. The ideas need to be used
as starting points, not as the ends of analysis. All such ideas need to be tested against the
touchstone of data. They need to be modified in the light of experience in the field. That, after
all, is the abiding spirit of all ethnographic inquiry. In the first place, it is a nonsense to imply (as
some vulgar versions do) that ethnographers ever go into the field without ideas and
perspectives. We always need to keep an open mind, being prepared to discover aspects of
culture that we did not know previously (otherwise any research would be redundant). But that
is never the same as an empty mind. Indeed, our ethnographic imagination ought to be
teeming with potentially fruitful ideas, derived from a knowledge of the social sciences, prior
acquaintance with the field or others like it, and a good grounding in comparative literature. All
too often simple-minded appeals to stuff like ‘grounded theory’ turn out to be excuses for
intellectual laziness, in which a glorified content analysis of transcripts or fieldnotes is
presented as if it were analysis, and as if that sort of thematic organisation were the end-point
of the ethnographic undertaking. Some such work may be useful in organising and indexing
our data, but does not substitute for detailed, concrete analysis. Furthermore, the very
designation of ‘data’ as a category separate from analytic reflection and strategic decision-
making is a gross distortion of ethnographic thinking. We do not spend time in ‘the field’ just
accumulating ‘data’, only to embark on thinking at some subsequent stage in the research
process.

There are various habits of mind that need to be cultivated. Let me outline a few. First, one
must always use ideas in a comparative sense. We all become experts on some corner of the
field (the anthropology of medicine, cultural criminology, the sociology of education, or
whatever it may be). Consequently it is easy to remain obsessively focused on just that one
small patch. While it is impossible to be equally well informed about everything, there is no
excuse for not reading more widely. The kinds of analytic ideas that I have been discussing are
not confined to specific local social worlds. They are of broad relevance. They help us to
understand and capture recurrent forms of social action and social organisation. They provide
templates against which substantive issues can be understood. They transcend specific
contexts, in other words. A broad, comparative perspective helps us to defamiliarise our chosen
research sites. In an ideal world we should all be reading monographs derived from fieldwork,
across a wide range of social worlds (as I was encouraged to do as an undergraduate
anthropologist). We should be thinking about making comparisons and links beyond the

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obvious ones.

The imperative of ‘fighting familiarity’ has long been identified by a number of commentators
(Delamont and Atkinson 1995). The general issue is straightforward enough. Sometimes we
are, or have become, so familiar with a given social setting that we really cannot bracket out our
taken-for-granted cultural competence in order to interrogate what we see and hear with
freshness or novelty. Sometimes we have to refresh our ethnographic imagination by
deliberately seeking out settings that are different from our normal stamping ground. It is far too
easy for researchers to become locked into a chosen speciality, rarely looking beyond its
confines and rarely reading outside its standard literature. The criminologist can become almost
totally preoccupied with criminological topics; the sociologist of health and illness rarely looks
beyond the symbolic boundaries of the clinic; the educational ethnographer may remain
focused entirely on schools and schooling. And so on. While we cannot cover the entire range
of possible literature, there is no excuse for failing to look beyond arbitrary disciplinary
boundaries. We only fight familiarity by finding ways of thinking afresh, of working with ideas,
and of looking beyond the obvious. We need to abandon our comfort zone.

What is vital, and it goes beyond the scope of this short text, is to contrive generic narratives
and tropes that can sustain an ethnographic account. After all, the aim of conducting and
writing a major study is not just to tell our readers what people do or even how they do it
(important though these are). We need to fashion our own theses or monographs that go some
way towards a reconstruction of the social world and its social organisation. In other words, we
need to go beyond themes or standard analytic topics, in order to find the narratives and
images that transform our ‘data’ and our basic ideas into something more.

Using a repertoire of analytic ideas allows one to argue from the particular towards the generic.
That, after all, is the underlying logic of ethnographic analysis, as I outlined in the Introduction
to this book. It is the essence of the abductive logic that we employ. We constantly ask
ourselves, of any example of socially-organised activity, ‘What might this be a case of?’. This
involves arguing from ‘cases’. Instances provide the opportunity to transcend their
particularities, and to seek from them their general, formal properties. Those formal properties
are developed through a comparative strategy. Cases are compared with cases, and social
settings with other settings. Hence we can aim to uncover processes and forms that transcend
specific examples and particular social worlds. Such an analytic perspective develops
disciplinary knowledge through ethnographic cases. Ethnography is not primarily an excuse for
experiential writing. The conduct of fieldwork is not simply a matter of the personal experience
of the individual ethnographer. There is, of course, plenty of opportunity to reflect on and
expand upon the personal aspects of fieldwork, and many authors have done so. But if we

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make such writing the main outcome of fieldwork, then we run the risk of distorting the nature
of social research. The kinds of analytic ideas that have been outlined in the body of this book
ought to remind us of the sorts of things that have been identified by sociologists and
anthropologists, drawing out (abducting) general properties from particular cases.

Howard Becker has consistently demonstrated the value of thinking through cases. His is an
approachable, non-dogmatic approach that eschews fancy methodological and epistemological
vocabulary, speaking directly to his readers (see Becker 2014). He consistently makes the point
that we argue from ‘cases’, by exploring as much as we can about the first case, the one we
know intimately, and from further exploration of other cases that extend and develop our
understanding. We explore similarity and contrast. This, once again, is really at the heart of
‘grounded theory’, which is not really about inspecting and mechanistically coding data, but
thinking from the specific to the general and back again, asking oneself what can be learned
from case to case, example to example. One needs always to recall that any ‘case’ (whether
that is an entire institution of local culture, or a specific, concrete event) is always a case of
something. Moreover, events, situations and institutions are always potentially cases of multiple
things.

The most important outcome of ethnography is the constant reminder of the diversity of human
affairs, and the regularities that underpin it. It displays the recurrent dilemmas and difficulties
that social actors face. It provides a constant reminder of the sheer ingenuity of human actors.
It constantly affirms the extent to which human actors are knowledgeable and skilful. It also
brings to consciousness the constant adaptability of individuals and social groups. The diversity
of human arrangements is plastic: it is in principle always available for change. Consequently,
the kinds of ideas that I have outlined in this book are never to be thought of as the last word.

One of Herbert Blumer’s abiding influences is the notion of ‘sensitising concepts’ (Blumer
1954). This is self-referential, being itself a sensitising idea. It is not a call for fuzzy thinking,
and Blumer’s own orientation was towards rigorous conceptual development in sociology. But
sensitising concepts are necessary in getting going and keeping going. They are, in Blumer’s
own phrase, ‘directions along which to look’, and they can therefore start that process of
thinking through cases, developing and extending, refining and sharpening. Consequently, the
ideas outlined in this book should be used heuristically in order to develop one’s own analysis.

In other words, it is not enough to take ideas and then use one’s data simply to illustrate them.
Ideas are there to be used, reshaped, and extended through a close working relationship with
the fields of fieldwork. Note, I do not restrict that to working with ‘data’. It seems to me that far
too many accounts of analysis in the literature on qualitative methods imply that one is working

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with interview transcripts and fieldnotes (and possibly other kinds of data such as photographs,
documents of life and so on). Undoubtedly, analysis depends on close readings of such textual
materials. But it really is not the whole story. The ‘data’ can be too inert. Once we have left the
field, and we confront the shards of evidence that remain, we should already know a great deal
of what we think and what we are writing about. It is, after all, one of the mantras of field
research that analysis is a process that is inextricably linked to the process of fieldwork itself.
So if we take that seriously, then we should always be thinking about our ‘field’ through a
creative engagement with ideas, comparisons, and extensions of our ideas. In other words, the
repeated manipulation of data never exhausts the meaning or the process of analysis. Likewise,
analysis does not stop when one has organised data into themes. Ideas can always go beyond
the data.

Ideas do not ‘emerge’, either from the fieldwork itself, or subsequently from working with data.
At any rate, they do not emerge magically. It is a matter of intellectual work. And ideas certainly
will not be developed productively without disciplines. By that I do not mean just the discipline
of hard work. It is not a matter of the Protestant ethic. I mean the ‘disciplines’ that are also
academic fields and traditions. Fieldwork is not self-justifying. It certainly does not substitute for
thinking sociologically or anthropologically. It is abundantly clear that there is currently far too
much ‘qualitative research’ that is divorced from any disciplinary moorings. That is not to say
that researchers in, say, cultural geography or nursing studies should not be doing it. Of
course they can and should, and they provide their own ideas. But it does mean that one really
cannot embark on field-based social research in a vacuum, with no guiding ideas or conceptual
resources.

In Chapter 1 I introduced the idea of granular ethnography. By that, it will be recalled, I meant
an ethnography that is mindful of the fine-grained organisation of social life, and of the
extraordinarily detailed knowledge and skills that social actors employ. I also mean that
ethnographic research should work with the grain of everyday life. In other words, our research
should be faithful to the many and varied ways in which social events and interpersonal
conduct are organised. It should be attentive to the varied modalities of order and cultural
significance: spatial and temporal, aesthetic and material, linguistic and interpersonal. I do not
want to press the notion of granular ethnography as if it were a novel paradigm. It is intended
as the equivalent of a mnemonic: it should just remind us that there are multiple modes of
organisation that call for our analytic efforts.

Finally, we should not leave these observations without adding that the conduct of fieldwork is
a privilege and offers us a unique experience as scholars. The opportunity to share in the
everyday worlds of fellow men and women, and to follow the extraordinary diversity and

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originality of those worlds, is a rare and precious one. It represents one of the very best
versions of liberal, humanistic scholarship. It is worth preserving and celebrating, even in the
face of colourless, utilitarian interests. Equally, the opportunity to write about that work is
extraordinarily satisfying. Although we do not need to engage in methodological disputation or
paradigm wars, I really cannot think of any way of being a social scientist that is anywhere near
as satisfying. So let us not lose sight of that. The ideas that I have outlined and exemplified in
this book merely represent a small selection of the attempts of many scholars to express the
complexity and variety of social forms and processes. It is all too easy to get bogged down in a
welter of theories, competing epistemologies and conceptual muddles. These examples should
be read and used heuristically. They ought to provide some sort of inspiration. If in the past
people have been able to come up with some of these ideas and to develop them productively,
then surely we can do so too.

So use this book, indeed all methods books, like the proverbial ladder. Use it to get to where
you want to, and then kick it away. I think that too many students and researchers feel
constrained to look over their shoulder, constantly looking elsewhere for validation. Too often
that means that they end up acting like ventriloquists’ dummies, repeating the thoughts of
others, or resorting to the most awful, obscurantist versions of ‘theory’. Anything rather than
create and use ideas that they take ownership of for themselves. So please do not let that
happen to your research. These ideas and others like them are intended to help illuminate
social phenomena. They are ways of transforming the messy, noisy, busy, teeming worlds we
observe and share, and to turn that into a coherent analysis. But, as I have tried to maintain
throughout this and other publications, analysis is the aim of fieldwork, not just the celebration
of the people one encounters, and certainly not a celebration of the author herself or himself.
Recent years have seen too many authors content to study their own experiences, their own
social worlds. This can be justified on the basis of fashionable autoethnography, standpoint
perspectives, or indigenous methods. All confine the researcher to her or his local social sphere
(gender, ethnicity, class). While it is true that we each have a social biography and a starting
point from which we embark on ethnographic exploration, that does not mean that we can
never transcend it. The intellectual and personal challenge is to worry less about ourselves,
about our theoretical purity or our personal identity, and to try (however imperfectly or
incompletely) to make sustained and coherent sense of social worlds. As I have stressed
throughout, that means bringing ideas to the fieldwork, as well as deriving ideas from it.

Some more concluding remarks are, perhaps, in order. The purpose of this short book has not
just been to provide a shopping list of concepts. Fundamentally, I want to encourage readers
(students and others) to take a positive and practical approach to the conduct and analysis of

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fieldwork. That is why the concepts I have offered – obvious though many of them are – do not
include lots of philosophical, epistemological issues. Experience suggests that we can all find
good intellectual reasons that render research impossible. After all, nobody has ever
established perfect consensus over the nature of social science, and generations of social
theorists have occupied themselves with arcane disputes that have involved no practical
research whatsoever. So whatever the particular perspective, I am firmly committed to
methodological literature that serves the interests of practical field research. Ultimately, our
disciplines are not the preserve of armchair speculation. We are, or should be, engaged in
empirical social inquiry. And while we may not have perfectly worked-out epistemologies, that
should not prevent us from getting out into social worlds in order to make of them what we can.
Moreover, good methodology and theory should be among the outcomes of good empirical
research, and not the prerequisites of it. Ideas and data (in the broadest sense) flow into one
another, and without that constant interaction, social theory and methodology are equally
sterile. In the same spirit, I suggest that perfect fidelity to other people’s ideas is not always the
most productive approach. The creative uses of ideas can be far more fruitful than slavish
replication of them, while the constant search for terminological innovation can be confusing –
creating the appearance of novelty where little exists. Again, I am more interested in the
practicalities of research and analysis than in the perfect representation of others’ ideas.
Sometimes a degree of misrepresentation can be creative.

Finally, there is of necessity a degree of arbitrariness in my selection of topics in this book.

There can never be a definitive inventory of concepts that exhaustively map the full range of
analytic possibilities. Equally, we must always keep in mind that there is never just one
definitive analysis of a given social phenomenon. Each social world can yield a number of
different analytic accounts. Our choice of topics or themes, and our deployment of analytic
concepts, always imply a degree of choice. Such choice is not arbitrary, and is always
undertaken in dialogue with the field and the data it yields. The entire exercise of ethnographic
fieldwork is geared towards a creative interaction between ideas and evidence of various sorts.
This is a dialogue we have with ourselves. It is also a dialogue we have with our intellectual
predecessors and our contemporaries. Ideas are the currency that circulates.

The development and use of analytic ideas is, self-evidently, only part of the process. Those
ideas need to be organised into cogent arguments. And they in turn imply the organisation of
analytic texts. The ethnographic monograph is a major work of reconstruction in its own right.
We take our ‘data’ and our ‘ideas’, and through their interaction we develop descriptions,
narratives, explanations and conceptual commentaries that add up to an intellectually satisfying
whole. Ethnography, as I have repeatedly stressed, is more than fieldwork, and it implies a

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characteristic way of approaching and reconstructing a social world. Hence a comprehensive

overview of ethnography’s intellectual thrust should include a review of the textual strategies
that are available to the scholar. That is beyond the scope of this particular book, and my own
contributions need a third book to complete this trilogy that started with For Ethnography.

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