Mats Trondman

Manifesto for Ethnography

This is an open manifesto welcoming readers, writers, and researchers. Do not think of this manifesto as “a law,” a set of rules to be followed, a collection of recipes to be applied, a system to be adopted. In no sense is our aim to construct a grand, systematic, waterproof, “ready-made” theory/methodology counterposed to other scholastic “ready-mades.” Instead, we hope that this manifesto will be read as enabling and “sensitizing,” theoretically and methodologically, approaches to lived culture, worldly experiences, and practical sense making. That is, we hope this manifesto is “put to work” in helping to produce a wide range of ethnographies, thereby being developed, refined, and criticized without ever being locked up as a given system of thought. What is ethnography for us? Most important, it is a family of methods involving direct and sustained social contact with agents and of richly writing up the encounter, respecting, recording, representing at least partly in its own terms the irreducibility of human experience. Ethnography is the disciplined and deliberate witness-cum-recording of human events. As arguably the first ethnographer Herodotus (1987) said in arguably the first ethnography, The History, “so far it is my eyes, my judgement, and my searching that speaks these words to you” (p. 171). “This-ness” and “lived-out-ness” are essential to the ethnographic account: a unique sense of embodied existence and consciousness captured, for instance, in the last line of Gerald Manley Hopkins’s poem “As Kingfishers”: “What I do is me: for that I came.” The social body is the site of this experience engaging “a corporeal knowledge that provides a practical comprehension of the world quite different from the act of conscious decoding that is normally designated by the idea of comprehension” (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 135). The understanding and representation of experience are then quite central, both empirically and theoretically. As William James (1978) said, “Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over [italics added], and making us correct our

For Aïsha: on identity as potentiality

The focal point of this article is identity as potentiality: how a narrated form of self-understanding can be mobilised, enacted and shared with others within unequally distributed multifaceted conditions of existence, with other outcomes than surrender to disowned and self-confirming actions of reproduced exclusion, subordination and enclosure. Concretely, this distribution demonstrates how and why identity as potentiality might come into being within the play of forces in the life of a young Muslim woman trying to incorporate herself into Swedish multicultural society. In addition, the reader will meet reflections on respectability, multicultural incorporation and the possibility of a non-injurious criticism.

Socio-symbolic homologies : Exploring Paul Willis’ theory of cultural forms

Thirty years have passed since Paul Willis formulated a theory of cultural forms in the appendix to his seminal work Profane Culture. In this article we are driven by the conviction that Willis’ theory is a forgotten treasure trove that needs to be recovered, challenged and developed. The argument is guided by three aims. First, we provide a construction of the theory’s main content. Second, we search for possibilities of enlarging the content and scope of his theory. Third, we reconstruct one of the basic underlying arguments of Willis’ theory, that cultural items in themselves carry a given meaning in relation to social groups. In so doing we partly reconstruct Willis’ understanding of ‘objective’ possibilities as something essentially given in time and space. We utilize the example of the car make Cadillac to demonstrate that cultural items also attract because they are already occupied by socioculturally constructed systems of meaning.

Disowning knowledge: To be or not to be ‘the immigrant’ in Sweden

Abstract How do young people make sense of, challenge or inhabit racialized categories in their everyday lives? Through the narratives of five young people in Sweden, this article explores how the social production of ‘the immigrant’ works to structure their perceptions and experiences. An in-depth ethnographic account makes visible both the workings of a ‘racial grammar’ of ‘the immigrant’ and the contradictions of how this grammar is played out in the ‘dilemmas’ faced by ‘Swedish’ and ‘immigrant’ young people. It is argued that the grammar, arising in complex external structural and historical processes, is internalized as an ‘ingrained stigma’ and ‘partial truths’ that are performed and reproduced at the level of experience and interaction.

Taking normative sense seriously: Ethnography in the light of a utopian referent

The paper starts by stating a possible meaning of ethnography within cultural sociology. Then follows an investigation of the ‘normative sense’ in human life that ethnographers not only tend to investigate but also inhabit themselves. The main purpose is to argue that this normative sense needs not necessarily to be shunned, but can be justified as an urgent, conscious, and explicit constituent that enacts theoretically inspired and meaningfully illuminating ethnographic endeavors. This is done by a positive construction and an immanent critique of cultural sociologist Isaac Reed’s work on interpretation and social knowledge, i.e. different forms of epistemic modes, which in this paper is labeled the theoretical, the empirical and the utopian referent, or the pragmatics of grounded re-signification. The paper ends by trying to state the interlaced relationship, or subscription, between these theoretical, empirical and utopian re-significations and the possibility of a thrice-blessed social criticism. Thus, this is what it could mean to take the normative sense seriously.

Between theory and social reality: Ethnography and Interpretation and Social Knowledge: Introduction to the special issue

Difficulties distinguishing the ethnographic object and the ethnographers analysis can pose a challenge to the conduct and dissemination of ethnographic work. The close distance between ethnographic observation and the ethnographers interpretation elides the boundary between considerations of theory and method. In his book, Interpretation and Social Knowledge, Reed describes interpretivism as an epistemological approach aimed at harnessing the potential of social explanations developed in ethnographys interstitial position – the space between theory and social reality. This issue of Ethnographyc provides a forum for ethnographers coming from different theoretical positions and working in different empirical areas to reflect upon on the value and limitations of interpretivism in ethnography.

Light, mind and spirit: Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour revisited on and beyond its 40th anniversary:

This article is an introduction to a Special Issue dedicated to Paul Willis’s classic Learning to Labour at its 40th anniversary, and beyond. His theoretically informed and theorizing ethnographic study is read, explored, and utilized all around the globe. Its use also stretches across the borders of social, cultural and educational sciences and to manifold research areas and settings. Besides laying out its main content, that is, the answers to the question of how working-class kids let themselves get working-class jobs, this article argues that the most significant contribution of Willis’s study is the way it illuminates, both theoretically and empirically, the meaning of cultural production and cultural autonomy in the midst of ongoing social reproduction of class. This introduction ends by presenting the eight contributions to the actual Special Issue, and with an invitation to Paul Willis himself to take issue with cultural production and cultural autonomy.

Educating Mats: Encountering Finnish ‘lads’ and Paul Willis's Learning to Labour in Sweden

In this paper the author himself tells an auto-ethnographical tale about how he came to read and understand Paul Williss Learning to Labour (1977) in the late 1970s as a 22-year-old non-qualified junior high school teacher of Finnish ‘lads’ whose parents had come to Sweden as industrial workers in the late 1960s and early1970s. While most of these ‘lads’ came to reproduce class, the author himself continued to higher education to become a ‘class traveller’. Hence, cultural production and cultural autonomy can work in more than one way, even at the very same time.

Jeffrey C. Alexander The Civil Sphere

The Civil Sphere is one of the most powerful and energizing books on sociology that I have ever read. There is, of course, no way a 1000-word review can justify such a claim or do justice to this nearly 800-page work. Hence, I will not be able to explain how Alexander constructs his theory in relation to well-established social scientific traditions. Neither can I recapitulate how the theory of the civil sphere is put to work and theoretically deepened through his chosen historical cases: gender struggles, the civil rights movement and the Jewish question. Along these historical paths new forms of understanding discourses of liberty and repression, communicative and regulative institutions, social movements, cultural trauma, multiculturalism, integration, performance and transformation emerge. We also learn, at least implicitly, how the normative, the theoretical and the empirical are intertwined – how they continuously inform each other in the ongoing analysis presented in this work. Rather, I focus on what I consider to be the vital centre of The Civil Sphere. ‘We need a new concept of civil society’, Alexander states, focusing ‘a world of values and institutions that generates the capacity for social criticism and democratic integration at the same time’ (p. 4), and to this end suggests that we conceive of civil society as a civil sphere. ‘Such a sphere’, he continues, ‘relies on solidarity, on feelings for others whom we do not know but whom we respect out of principle, not experience, because of our putative commitment to a common secular faith’ (p. 4). Accordingly, this civil sphere is to be understood as a cultural structure that is morally universalistic, analytically independent and empirically differentiated. The moral here concerns reconciling relationships between universalism (collective obligations) and particularism (individual rights). Hence, the civil sphere relies on a wider solidarity and personal autonomy. A democratic society is not just pluralistic in terms of lifestyles, it is also a world of shared values. The good society connects its members through a social consciousness and shared feelings. It makes it possible to transcend particular commitments, narrow loyalties and sectional interests. Multiculturalism – a project of hope, not despair – is a good example from Alexander, as it implies integration as diversity. This means that the primordial qualities of outsiders could be re-interpreted as variations of sacred qualities within the civil sphere. In such a society, issues like poverty, racism and homophobia would create debates with a strong appeal to a broader solidarity built upon, again, shared presuppositions of collective obligations and autonomy. That, according to Alexander, is how an independent civil sphere works. Under such circumstances, the civil sphere has a causal power of its own. Consequently, it needs to be defined, understood and studied vis-à-vis the state and its institutions and other social spheres, such as political, economic, family and religious life. At its best, the civil sphere is a resource for social criticism and democracy. It can demand certain kinds of reforms and monitor their outcomes. Of course, it cannot exist as such, but needs to be constructed, nurtured and sustained. The performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American civil rights movement – the non-violent resistance, the peaceful mass demonstrations, the successful building of relations, not only within African-American communities but also to the broad majorities of white America, to the media, government and the civil force of law – are probably the example par excellence. This is the civil sphere as a growing symbolic structure – a culture with a transforming capacity. Partaking in and constituting a civil sphere means being committed to an ideal, or, if you like, a discourse or normality, concerning who we are and what we want to become. The civil sphere makes it possible for us to reach out beyond where and what we are now. It Acta Sociologica 52(2)

Reviews : Simon Lindgren: Markers of modernity: Images of youth in time and space. Doctoral thesis in sociology, Umeå University, 2002

Simon Lindgren’s thesis, Markers of Modernity, examines the mass medial production of images of youth in two morning newspapers in Northern Sweden the North Bothnia Courier and the Northland Social Democrat-during four decades: the 1930s, 50s, 70s and 80s. The empirical basis of the study thus concerns Northern Sweden, specifically North Bothnia, and the analysis is specified to concern the specific modernisation processes of this region. Lindgren applies a critical discourse analysis with a sociological emphasis. With i~Iichel Foucault, Ian Ang and Norman Fairclough as principle guiding figures, the processes of the production of imagery in the media are understood as ’discursive