What did we say they’ve said? Four encounters between theory,method and the production of data

Introduction

In ‘The Circular Ruins’, Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of how an experienced wizard retreats from the world to a location that possesses strong mystical powers: the circular ruins. There, the wizard has but one goal: to make another human being from his own dreams. Sleeping and dreaming longer and longer each day, the magician dreams of his young man becoming educated, and becoming wiser. Years pass and the wizard creates the boy piece by piece, in agonizing detail. The wizard calls upon the god Fire to bring his creation to life. Fire agrees, as long as the wizard accustoms his creation to the real world, and that only Fire and the wizard will be able to tell the creation from a real human. Before deciding to bring the young man into the world, the magician resolves to abandon his hopes, and to sacrifice his life. As he ultimately walks into the flaming house of Fire, the wizard notices that his skin does not burn. ‘With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.’

Sociologists have realized that they are ‘made’, that the foundation of our discourse cannot be justified by something ‘out there’ or by the retreat from the world; rather we’ve come to understand sociology is something dreamt by a particular set of wizards: sociologists themselves. The post-positivist (Alexander, 1987), ‘strong programme’ (Bloor, 1991 [1976]; Latour, 1988) and reflexive (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Calhoun, 1995) moment of sociology has made the discussion on the conventions of theorizing a central trope in the task of producing sociological theory. This reflexivity about ourselves has thrown sociological ethnographers into a panic. Unable to escape the hall of mirrors we have encountered, one answer has been to view the challenge of understanding as a purely technical one, simply retreating into naive empiricism. A second answer has denounced the struggle for understanding as a struggle for power, by announcing the impossibility of knowing ‘the other’ – given the asymmetry in the relationship.

Reed’s book invites us to dialogue in creating an option distinctive from those two, which is a kind of reflexive, good-enough approach that emphasizes the role of meaning in organizing subjectivity, and how consequently causality is a ‘forming force’ in producing practices and interpretations (p. 11). It also advances (p. 35) the conceptualization of explanation as a particular kind of understanding, which always takes the form of an encounter. Taking seriously post-positivist approaches on the context of discovery (Swedberg, 2011), the appropriate way would be to think of it as the encounter between two sets of meanings: those of the ethnographer on those of the subjects whose lives are being studied (Reed, 2010). If we are able to recognize the contested, unfinished, reflexive and complex character of how people think about themselves, we should be able to imagine ourselves in the same terms and go into the field armed not with the tabula rasa that sometimes grounded theory imagines (or with a quod erat demonstrandum impulse, to find only what we already know and want to find), but rather with a theoretical helmet with interchangeable lenses, which would allow us to interrogate the world as we go along, imagining what theoretical concepts – among the myriad of existing ones – would best fit the case. ¹

In the following pages, I develop how this approach finds a fruitful analogue in psychoanalysis as a practical endeavor that produces a particular kind of truth; what we can learn from that equivalency; how this epistemological approach works in parallel to Reed’s plea for theoretical pluralism; and what are then the consequences of this book for practitioners of cultural ethnography.

Ethnography as encounter and miscommunication

What would happen if we thought of ethnography as a particular kind of encounter, that between self and other, between a teller of tales and a listener of stories (Tsing, 2005), and we double down on this take, and think of it then as a folie á quatre? In it, two selves represent themselves and each other in an asymmetrical exchange. We would then need to seriously think about the role played in the production of knowledge by how we represent both others and ourselves. In our role as ethnographers symbolization participates in how we are seen, in what ideas we bring with ourselves, in the performative dimension of how we are able to present ourselves (friendly, secretive, ethical) and on how we imagine the others (given the logical impossibility to know another person’s experience, pace Weber we can only reconstruct the public meaning of actions, accounts and gestures). Representational practices are present also at the level of the ethnographee: in the larger narrative forms and cultural tropes subjects use to present themselves in front of the researcher (see Portelli, 1997); in how they imagine us (Venkatesh, 2001); how they imagine we imagine them; but – more importantly – how they imagine we would like them to be (what Pugh (2013) recently has called ‘the honorable interviewee’).

All of this is not new, but I want to emphasize that thinking like this means to understand that ethnography, like other kinds of asymmetrical encounters, ² is always an exercise in miscommunication, in which: a) total control about what is being communicated is impossible; and b) understanding ‘what is really going on there’ is more a horizon of intelligibility than a potential to be fulfilled.

Understanding that translation is – to a certain extent – always treason should help us not to find how we can actually avoid committing it, but rather liberate us to understand how limited our understanding of that encounter is always going to be. It will always depend on our theoretical choices in the context of investigation, our entrance to and approach on the field, the kind of questions we would like to answer, and the kind of encounter generated by our co-presence in the scene. The shadow of an impossible hermeneutic bar is a constraint that has barred ethnographers from understanding ourselves partially, and understanding our subjects of study partially. The responsibility bestowed on us by this second encounter described by Isaac Reed, that between sociologists’ meanings and the signification structures of the locals, then is to attempt to communicate what kind of choices we’ve made to be able to produce data, not in order to discount them or bracket them, but to understand them as the pulleys and wedges that actually allow for knowledge to be produced.

Let me bring a classic example in here; Max Weber, in his criticism of economic historicism, wrote about how to think about a wall that has been destroyed. Can we isolate each and every element of what actually happened there? Or is the reconstruction of the process always oriented by how our theoretical preferences and our research questions frame a reality that is multiple, contradictory and in flux? What allows for the reconstruction to exist, i.e. our value relation to the process and our analytical frames, is at the same time that which cancels the fantasy that there is one omniscient way, outside of language, to organize what we have put under observation. It is the question itself what organizes the fragment of reality as intelligible. What practitioners of ethnography have added to this is a two-step process in which in doing ethnography we refine, contrast, compare our pulleys and wedges with previous theories and cases, in order to find out what is going to be the best question the data at hand – as something that needs to be enrolled by and made to speak for our theories – can answer.

Recognizing this should not stop us and force us to think of knowledge as a total impossibility but rather to push us into three directions: a) to understand that we are aiming to objectify the words of the others, to borrow what they say and do, and systematize it; b) a reflection on the validity of how we construct these encounters as data; c) an opening up of the menu of theoretical options available when doing ethnography. All this results in a reflexive account not of who we are – as in the diverse versions of positional reflexivity – but rather on how limited our knowledge is and how our practices can be validated, objectified and studied.

Shamanism, psychoanalysis … ethnography?

In Structural Anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss highlights the similarities between shamanism and psychoanalysis. Sorcerers and therapists both intervene by providing a plus of symbolization to the experience of a suffering other. Shamanism does so by means of an abreaction, when the sorcerer relives and provides closure for a past event that disturbed the patient. Unlike the sorcerer who speaks for the silent patient, the analyst is there so the patient can talk and abreact against her listening presence, and to provide a plus of symbolization by reorganizing the patient’s universe in terms of psychoanalytic interpretation. They both provide the other with a language to make sense of experiences hard to represent and elaborate, but while one speaks for the patient, the psychoanalyst objectifies the talk of the patient, while providing a reorganization of what was actually said which solidifies free associations – what they said – into an interpretation. In both cases a prerequisite role – in one situation listener, in another one orator – establishes a direct relationship with the conscious part of the patient and an indirect one with the unconscious.

What would happen if we extend this analogy to sociological ethnography and made it into our third encounter? What kind of interventions do we perform? Notice here that I’m less interested in the ontological-realist claims of psychoanalysis and more interested in what analysts do as they produce knowledge; the kinds of deep interpretations they mobilize. Instead of having the ethnographer be a blank canvas for the projection and transference of the locals, we intervene not by giving back an objectification of the other’s own words but rather by inscribing this symbolization in terms of sociological notes, memos and – finally – a paper or book. Much like the co-presence provided by shamans and analysts, we know there is little replacement for being there; though we are an in-between figure, even if we listen more than we talk, we do the latter at particular moments in which we force the subject’s interpretations of what s/he is doing to become self-evident.

Even more, we also partake in effective symbolization by inducting, using homologies that jump between different levels of analysis, from particular actions and utterances to what is being said; we reconstruct both the context under which certain actions become meaningful and the cultural structures that organize the experience – this is what Isaac Reed calls a successful resignification, key to maximal interpretation (2011: 29). Aiming to find homologies between disparate situations (like Bourdieu does, for instance) is a pragmatic exercise, which aims to weave disparate materials into larger signification structures as well as its role in practice and interaction. In that exercise we also aim to find when is it that competing symbols organize the subjects’ experiences in discordant ways they need to find reconciliation for, and the practices this engenders. Much like psychoanalysis we push to find when and how meaning and actions go together – and in finding that out, we retrospectively attribute causality.

Psychoanalysis also has training-in-the-making, makes exemplary use of casing (both in texts where cases operate as templates, and in seminars where new cases get discussed, and as a result both techniques and diagnostics get solidified), and provides the analyst with a set of tools to intervene depending on the encounter (face-to-face conversation vs couch; punctuating words to attribute meaning; repeating them; sometimes laughing at an utterance the patient has made but can’t take). Ethnographic sociologists intervene in a variety of ways (observation; formal training to become a member of a particular group; photo elicitation; formal and open-ended interviewing; go-along conversations). We also end our sessions when we feel data has saturated – though the objective here is our research, not the subject’s knowledge of its own responsibility – and inscribe the traces of what we think constitutes truth in notes. We make exemplary use of cases too, either as theoretical guides for comparison, or trying to understand how our work fits within a given conversation: Is what we study the most extreme version of a phenomenon? Is it the most common? Under which conditions does what we observe emerge?

But despite all these coincidences there are two key differences. First, unlike analysts who make of going systematically through analysis part of their training and their work routine (as supervisions), we don’t have many instances to reflexively objectify our work. We seldom have opportunity to be reflective about how we inscribe our words, and because of this we can’t really pretend that we can control what constitutes misrecognition. Analysts work through with transference and counter-transference as a central part of what constitutes understanding. ³ Psychoanalytical knowledge is ‘good enough’, as a very specific kind of mode of communication that’s made to elicit a specific kind of truth, because – and not despite – of the specific kind of reflexivity vis-à-vis the other it strives for. Our own demands for a kind of scientific knowledge beyond the here and now, however, make it hard for us to escape Mannheim’s paradox (Reed, 2010): we are always bound to be subjects of our own context and – to a certain extent – blind to it. ⁴ This is part of the second divergence between the two disciplines too; the side advantage of psychoanalysis is that it is freer, and much less worried about its scientificity or its facticity, despite still having a strong conception of truth and causality. So what would happen if we were to do the same thing we did with psychoanalysis here, showing how the deep interpretive character of analytical practice is produced in action, and applied it to sociology? What would then be the relationship between theory, ethnography and how we case and produce our data?

Ethnography and epistemology

Given the challenging character of this encounter, how do we still manage to produce valid knowledge? ⁵ Reed’s emphasis on the reflexive, unfinished, and meaning-mediated character of sociological explanations, convokes a dialogue between cultural and comparative scholars, and grounded theory. If grounded theorists and analytic inductors (Katz, 2001; Becker, 1998; Blumer, 1986; Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Tavory and Timmermans, 2009) have brought an open-ended approach to the relationship between theory and data, developing sensitizing concepts, pushing us to ask what is the best question the data can actually answer, most of the questions their data can indeed answer have been based on some version of symbolic interactionism, or of small group theory in which the processes are relatively similar and stable. Analytical induction has developed itself around the idea of false starts, since it’s built on the idea of negative cases. Perhaps because it has made the observation of interactions in real time and space its main data source, large parts of this literature have developed at the level of the micro, or looking at organizations, and in opposition to ‘unobservable’ entities (such as habitus, hegemony or field). Regardless of how different the milieux or the groups are, there is always a social ontology made of boundaries, ceremonies, idiolects, etc. However – and following the analogy with analytical practice – what I want to highlight here is the second component of grounded theory: to patiently take the false starts, the struggles in establishing the study object during the context of discovery, as part of the knowledge enterprise, almost as a mandatory step against theoretical omniscience, and in the service of better knowing.

I’m not rejecting here the idea that we can produce theory prior to data. Rather, I’m emphasizing that abandoning our a priori ontological underpinning of what the world is made out of (networks, interactions, structures, actions, etc.) should lead us into something like epistemological agnosticism and in consequence, into theoretical pluralism (Abend, 2008). A pluralism that would include theories beyond those at the surface level I’ve described before. Can we think, for instance, of what we observe as being part of a social topology? Can we bring in the idea of field à la Bourdieu, and with it other theoretical perspectives than those already predicated at the micro and processual level of analysis? Can we adjudicate in situ whether we are seeing ‘culture in action’ or the work of dispositions?

To these questions our answers through fieldwork should be, to put it bluntly (if albeit shortly): 1) if data shows continuity in time and the inability to act in different contexts than those for which the practices have been originated, we might be able to profit from Bourdieu’s idea of dispositions; 2) if the data shows discontinuity in time, agents acting in different contexts in different yet patterned ways, and high levels of individuation (since we don’t take the biological individual and the self as equivalents), we are closer to the theoretical terrain of culture in action; 3) if, on the other hand, the data shows a highly localized and contextualized pattern of actions and accounts, varying according to the interlocutor and the activities involved, we are probably in front of a field better organized theoretically around symbolic interactionism; 4) if data shows how actors act in ways they perceive as meaningful, organized around categorical binaries, interpreting new contexts under pre-existing interpretive frames, and usually against what we immediately perceive as instrumentally-oriented action, then we are in the terrain of cultural sociology. Notice, though, how in every example I’ve lightened the ontological claims each school states, making of them not attempts to map the nature of being, but rather competing ways of casing, nominating and finally producing stuff as data. To show how this would look in actual research, I present next a reflection on the means that have proved useful to my own sociological practice.

In my research on musical consumption (Benzecry, 2009, 2011), for instance, I went to the opera house prepared to find a Bourdieu-like case of embodied and extra locale status exchange, and I ended up listening to love. Instead of the displaced satisfaction of status conversion (and the misrecognition that it involves) I took the metaphor of love at face value and explored what kind of relationships people established with an object they were heavily invested in. The resulting picture was both an exercise in theory development and an account of the organization of selfhood and the paths to transcendence in a particular place.

In my work on orchestras (Benzecry, 2006a), I set out to explore interactional styles between conductors and musicians during rehearsal, only to realize that the ideal of charismatic and authoritarian genius must battle for supremacy at a different level of analysis: in a complex cultural and organizational field. The realities of funding and bureaucracy which can see innovative and egotistical programs cut; the norms of orchestral musicians and their demand to be treated with respect; the continual competition in a marketplace flooded with a surplus of self-styled ‘conductors’ – all these work to make charismatic authority risky and difficult to maintain beyond the interactional dynamics.

My work on literary circles in Buenos Aires (Benzecry, 2006b), on the other hand, shows that the resolution of disputes among authors in literary circles discussed there did not come about due to ‘bad faith’ intellectual moves. Rather it is the product of focused gatherings and small-scale civilities in book launches and book talks where there is an overseeing public. Here the institutional setting works alongside emergent informal solidarities founded on everyday life interactions and performative gestures (e.g. a rival shows up and applauds) to give rise to a new form of writers’ culture. The peace that broke out between warring literary factions was the product not just of new meanings, nor new cultural institutions, but rather their interplay over time in real times and spaces. Unlike in the preceding piece, I went looking for a Bourdiesian field, and instead found an art world!

In all of these dialectical accounts of the encounter between subject and object, meaning played a central role, sometimes as a motivating force; in others as a powerful way to organize experience; in the conductor’s case, as an interplay of forces at multiple levels that resulted in the production of culture; and in some more as the result of long-time exchanges by people in real time and spaces, which cemented and resulted in ways of acting. In all of the cases my original frames on art and culture were challenged by my first encounter with the other as data at the context of discovery. That led me to competing theories, the refinement of middle-range hypotheses and a new study object, though still based on the same parcel of the world I had initiated my observations upon.

In these examples, there is no ontological claim about how culture actually operates; what I aimed to do was to adjudicate in situ, and during an extended initial period, which were the theories available to make sense of, name and organize what I was finding. This epistemological approach to method would be a natural complement to the advantages described by Reed’s ‘landscapes of meaning’, as the coherence that he espouses for a case does not come from the mobilized theories, but rather from the meaningful context(s) he aims to reconstruct interpretively. Nevertheless, unlike Reed’s cultural realist perspective – most of the examples in the book are about cultural structures – there is nothing in his approach that does not authorize us to think of how would it work within a spectrum of contexts; from the less to the more structured; from the more immediate ones to the farthest removed.

Coda: Ethnography as a pulley and wedge

The advantage of ethnography might be precisely its incomplete and limited character (Candea, 2010), an admission of the impossible closure in the business of producing description about otherness. And this happens by design; we don’t record the totality of social life in a particular place. We organize a reality that is multiform, complex and contradictory, according to (and as such limited by) the questions we want to answer. It is this limitation – the fact that we are limited by theory, language and selfhood – that actually allows us to produce this kind of knowledge. This might be the time for ethnographical sociological work to adopt what Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (2012 [1983]) has called a ‘weak’ version of ‘factness’, in which hermeneutical procedural validity is the only possible claim we can actually make about our second degree interpretation of the world we’ve been engaged with during our fieldwork. Learning to live with a ‘good enough ethnography’, then, becomes a phrase that refers not just to the ethical standards of qualitative research (Schepper Hughes, 1992), but about the possibilities of knowledge and communication in general.

This ‘weak’ way out strives to interpret the world in a way that will be convincing or plausible to other members of our ethnographic community, but which recognizes itself as an interpretation. This does not mean that anything goes; there are also identifiable misinterpretations. In other words, there are constraints on interpretation; paraphrasing Latour, we can write that the moon is made out of green cheese, but the moon has to collaborate with us. What is going on – regardless of our questions and theoretical perspectives – is not docile but resists our attempts to make sense of it, harden it into data, and make it into a fact. And once again – in this movement that implies finding allies to enroll and share our interpretations – we are back in the inescapable terrain of language and communication, asking others to help us stabilize the meanings we are attributing to the practices and the accounts we’ve observed, and pushing ourselves to reflect on how the validity of our own discourses has been produced. Even after these four thousand words, we are still made of fire.