Jack Katz

Ethnography's Warrants:

“Assuming your argument is empirically sound, so what?” Ethnographers are especially vulnerable to this question because their warrants are commonly diffused throughout their texts, because they aim to describe what is obvious to their subjects, and because such rude questions usually are raised only silently. Perhaps the most common warrant for ethnography is a claim that social forces have created a moralized ignorance that separates research subjects and the research audience. The author discusses several dilemmas that plague ethnographers when they attempt to bridge the gap, and then he describes the strategy of naturalistic ethnography. Last, he briefly addresses a broader range of warrants, identifying five additional, frequently used, complementary justifications for ethnographic studies.

Phenomenological Ethnography in Sociology and Anthropology

In this issue we present a variety of examples of recent and ongoing ethnographic research in which investigators are working self-consciously in dialogue with one or more traditions within the phenomenological movement in philosophy. Each article makes a contribution to a given substantive field. As a set they pose a range of issues: the variety and distinctiveness of phenomenologically influenced ethnography, the relationship between philosophy and empirical inquiry, the evolution of phenomenological influences in social research, and issues about convergence and segregation in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology. We comment briefly on the last. One historically emergent difference is the contrasting moral postures that author and reader take toward the subjects of study. Anthropological writings characteristically have illuminated native groundings for subjects’ perspectives, enhancing respect for local cultures by uncovering reasons that outsiders had not appreciated. Sociological ethnography began in a similar posture, but for over 40 years now, and especially in phenomenologically influenced works, ethnographies produced out of academic sociology departments have frequently been critical or at least agnostic about claims made by their subjects, and the suspension of belief has ranged from the political to the ontological. The anthropological articles in this issue restore credibility to native graphy

On the Rhetoric and Politics of Ethnographic Methodology

In a variety of ways, all ethnographies are politically cast and policy relevant. Each of three recurrent political rhetorics is related to a unique set of fieldwork practices. Ethnographies that report holistically on journeys to “the other side” build policy/political significance by contesting popular stereotypes. Theoretical ethnographies draw on political imagination to fill in for a lack of variation in participant observation data and to model an area of social life without attempting to rule out alternative explanations. Comparative analytic studies build political relevance by revealing social forces that are hidden by local cultures. Each of these three genres of ethnographic methodology faces unique challenges in relating fieldwork data to politically significant explanations. By shaping the ethnographer’s relations to subjects and readers, each methodology also structures a distinctive class identity for the researchers—as worker, as aristocrat, or as bourgeois professional.

Essences as Moral Identities: Verifiability and Responsibility in Imputations of Deviance and Charisma

Persons conceive of abilities and disabilities, talents and character defects, competencies and incompetencies, as essences-unobservable, present and inherent states of being. We can test for imputations of essences by noting whether an actor changes his menaing when he defines others by referring only to observable phenomena-their past, manifested activities. The concepts of deviance and charisma, defined as inferior and superior capacity to respond in interaction, summarize the two forms of essences. In these moral transactions, people establish ambivalent identities for themselves, limitating their own actions and risking reversals of identity with those labeled.

Cover-Up and Collective Integrity: On the Natural Antagonisms of Authority Internal and External to Organizations

This paper traces the roots of organizational cover-up to the sources of collective integrity. It develops a perspective on tensions between the vitality of authority within organizations and the penetration of moral authority respresenting the external society. In the white-collar ranks of formal organizations, persons construct authority to govern internal relations by shielding members from external scrutiny and by declining to force members to accept their responsibilities according to externally defined norms. Accepting these practices as proper, external authorities recognize the legitimacy of a collectivitys moral autonomy. I examine several forms of shielding and non-enforcement practices, noting each for each: how it builds authority to integrate the collectivity by weakening the penetration of external authority; uses of the method routinely accepted as legitimate by external authority; and how members may drift from legitimate uses to illegitimate “cover-ups.” I also discuss some implications for the study of white-collar deviance and the experience of complicity in occupational life.

Start here Social ontology and research strategy

Theory is about starting points. Research usually relies on theory to justify starting with pre-commitments to independent variables, background factors, or structural conditions that will explain historically and geographically varying phenomena, which are treated as dependent, fungible, superficial upshots, or otherwise secondary and essentially inferior. I propose that we start by trying to describe the phenomena to be explained as they exist for the people living them. For this, we need theory of another sort, a theory of social ontology that indicates the lines of inquiry required to produce a complete description. If we start research by describing the nature of social phenomena as they are experienced, it will make a difference in structuring data gathering; in developing a research craft capable of seeing practice, interaction maneuvers, and tacit embodiment; in shaping a research agenda; and, ultimately, in where we end substantively.

Deviance, Charisma, and Rule-Defined Behavior

Problems in present perspectives on deviance are discussed, a remedy is offered, and some of its implications are elaborated. The major problem is the failure to distinguish between action and state of being, between recognition of rule-breaking act, and imputation of deviant ontological status. A complementary distinction, between extraordinarily superior performance in terms of rule-standards and charismatic ontological status, is required for the sociology of charisma. Action oriented to behavior as defined by rules is distinguished from action oriented to deviant and charismatic ontological statuses: the meaning of negative and positive essence is elaborated, and negative and positive sanctioning of behavior is separated from the structural placements of the deviant in isolation and the charismatic individual in transcendent position. These analytic distinctions separate different kinds of experience: being deviant and being charismatic are identities distinguished from role-identities; and the tensions unique to those seen as ontologically deviant and charismatic are described.

Concerted Ignorance: The Social Construction of Cover-Up

That people can and do keep a silence about things whose open discussion would threaten the group’s conception of itself; and hence its solidarity, is common knowledge. It is a mechanism that operates in every family and in every group which has a sense of group reputation. To break such a silence is considered an attack against the group; a sort of treason, if it be a member of the group who breaks the silence. This common silence allows group fictions to grow up; such as, that grandpa was less a scoundrel and more romantic than he really was. And I think it demonstrable that it operates especially against any expression, except in ritual, of collective guilt [Hughes, 1964: 28].

Families and Funny Mirrors: A Study of the Social Construction and Personal Embodiment of Humor

Based on participant observation and videotapes, this article examines laughter in a Parisian funhouse. Three central contingencies of an initial metamorphosis, from sober dispositions to doing laughter, are specified. The would-be laugher must collaboratively construct the presumption that another person shares his or her perspective on the mirrors reflections, develop mutually untenable definitions of a person and that persons reflections, and display a corporeal appreciation of the sensed juxtaposition. Each of these dimensions is altered when participants undergo a second metamorphosis, a shift to being done by the spirit raised. A final section analyzes the trascendent powers of family relations as they play on glaces bizarres.

Time for new urban ethnographies

■ Advances in urban sociology now depend on developing the temporal dimensions of ethnographic data. For public place behavior, the need is to follow people before, through, and after the sites where fly-on-the-wall researchers traditionally have observed them. To understand how people economically exploit a city’s public life, researchers must follow market responses that discount and redistribute initial advantages. For explaining the formation of neighborhoods, a multiphase social theory is required. Drawing examples from Los Angeles, nine historical processes are shown to have shaped a substantively wide range of cases, including officially preserved, Orthodox Jewish, affluent totemic, low-income ethnic immigrant, and homeless service areas. A historical approach shows that the social character stamped onto a neighborhood early in its history is often effaced or reversed by later processes, identifies new formative processes, and locates the major turning point in a different period, the 1960s, than do theories stressing globalization and deindustrialization.