Several years ago, Timothy S. Pachirat, then a graduate student in political science at Yale University, decided to write his dissertation on the “politics of sight.” Modern societies had blinded themselves to certain social practices, he believed, and he wanted to describe how that myopia was generated.
To prepare for his work, Pachirat spent the usual semesters in political-theory seminars, poring over Hobbes and Foucault. And then he spent five and a half months laboring in a slaughterhouse in the Midwest.
For the first two months, he worked in a 34-degree cooler, hanging beef livers on hooks. Then he was shifted to the “dirty” side of the kill floor, where he used electric prods to move cattle into a box where they were shot in the head. Still later—perhaps because he was one of the few workers who spoke fluent English—he was promoted to a quality-control position.
In plunging into the slaughterhouse, Pachirat was acting more like Margaret Mead than Larry Sabato—that is, more like an anthropologist than a typical number-crunching political scientist. But along with several other young scholars, he insists that political science badly needs the insights that ethnography can offer.
The months on the kill floor, says Pachirat in an e-mail message from his native Thailand, allowed him to “illuminate in tangible ways the political and ethical consequences of the delegation of dirty, dangerous, and demeaning work.” Only participant-observation, he says, can give a full picture of how workers, managers, and federal health inspectors experience power relations.
Pachirat is not alone. In Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, a new collection of essays from the University of Chicago Press, he and 16 other scholars argue that political science should drink deeply from the well of anthropology. Their subjects include housing activists in Philadelphia, faith healers in the Congo, middle-aged conservatives at a Michigan diner, and an ax murderer in Ukraine.
“This project started off as a bunch of informal conversations among friends,” says the book’s editor, Edward Schatz, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto. “But as the project developed, I was really encouraged to discover how many people there are out there who are bona fide political scientists, who are happy professionally—or at least say they are—who are doing political ethnography. They’re out there.”
But if they’re out there, they’re not always comfortable. Most political-science departments remain dominated by formal modeling and quantitative analysis, and Schatz warns his graduate students not to expect to build careers on ethnography alone.
Among political ethnographers themselves there are intellectual tensions, which are threaded through Schatz’s book. Some contributors take a relatively old-fashioned approach to evidence-gathering and hypothesis-testing. But others have more-radical instincts, which draw on cultural anthropologists’ models of reflexivity—that is, the notion that ethnographers should scrutinize how their own biases and cultural positions shape their investigations in the field. Pachirat, for one, doubts that scholars should aspire to neutrality or impartiality, at least as those concepts are usually understood.
Crudely speaking, each of those two camps has a presiding elder spirit. For the traditionalists, it is Richard F. Fenno Jr., a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Rochester. In 1978, Mr. Fenno published Home Style: House Members in Their Districts, a book based on immersive fieldwork with members of Congress and their staffs. Home Style paints a rich portrait of legislators’ interactions with interest groups and their techniques for learning what their constituents want. The book has become a minor classic—but it has not had many offspring.
“Everyone cites Fenno, but very few people do that kind of work themselves,” says Myron J. Aronoff, a professor emeritus of political science and anthropology at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, who wrote the foreword to Schatz’s new volume. “There was remarkably little follow-through.”
One scholar who does draw on Fenno is Katherine Cramer Walsh, an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In an essay in Schatz’s book, she argues that scholars of public opinion should look beyond surveys and polls, and spend time on the ground getting a full sense of the complexity and ambivalence of political beliefs. If nothing else, she writes, such observation might give pollsters intelligent ideas about what questions to ask.
For the more radically interpretivist political ethnographers, the presiding spirit is James C. Scott, a professor of political science and anthropology at Yale. In books like Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998), Scott has applied anthropological theory to questions of governmental power.
“I’ve been very deeply inspired by Scott’s work,” says Lorraine Bayard de Volo, an associate professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In Schatz’s collection of essays, she writes about her fieldwork in post-Sandinista Nicaragua and in casinos in Reno, Nev. “I read his books many times before I went into the field,” she says. “They were my textbook in ethnography and theory-building.”
Scott himself did not contribute to Schatz’s book, but he says he is gratified that ethnography is gaining a stronger foothold in political science.
“Most social science, it seems to me, is not permissible without ethnographic inquiry of some kind,” says Scott. “You can’t explain human behavior behind the backs of the people who are being explained. If you want to understand why someone behaves as they do, then you need to understand the way they see the world, what they imagine they’re doing, what their intentions are.”
Schatz says that was exactly what he learned when he did fieldwork in Kazakhstan a decade ago. He was interested in how the national police force functioned, but he says it was only when he did immersive fieldwork in a village that he understood kinship ties and how they shaped families’ interactions with the police. “Once you see those kinship ties and those ritual interactions,” he says, “then you start to look at national politics differently.”
Aronoff tells a similar story about his immersive studies of Israel’s Labor Party in the early 1970s. “I spent years observing what was known as the party’s ‘preparation committee,’” he says. “I tried to explain its behavior as best I could with my political-science arsenal, but eventually I realized that I couldn’t explain what people were doing without using anthropological concepts, especially concepts of ritual.”
Among his most vivid memories of those years is returning to his office at Tel Aviv University past midnight after observing a late night of political wrangling.
“It was 2 or 3 in the morning, and a colleague of mine who was a bachelor was up working late,” Aronoff says. “I told him about the committee meeting, and he said, ‘Mike, I’d like to ask you something. How can you stand to rub shoulders with those disgusting politicians?’ And I was really taken aback. I said, ‘You’re a political scientist, aren’t you? Who’s more involved in politics than politicians?’ And I could see him taking this in. Finally he said, ‘I’ve never met a politician in my life, and I hope I never have to. Just give me my computer printouts and I’m happy.’”
In part because of attitudes like that, Schatz says, huge areas of political life have still seen almost no ethnographic work. Among other things, he wishes that more political scientists had done immersive field work on Wall Street before last year’s collapse.
“In hindsight,” he says, “it would have been interesting to know about the close relationships between, say, banks and mortgage lenders—all of those interpersonal networks.”
He concedes that such work would not be easy. “There are real problems of access here,” he says. “But these are the kinds of things that are actually crucial to study if you want to understand the political and economic system in the United States. But as American politics scholars, too often we put them out of our field of vision, because they’re hard to study.”
Bayard de Volo agrees that fieldwork is difficult and “hugely time-consuming,” but she hopes never to abandon the approach. At the same time, she does not publish papers based on ethnography alone. Instead she marries her immersive work with familiar political-science techniques: quantitative analyses of Colombian social movements, say, or archival case studies of the Nicaraguan military.
Both Schatz and Scott say job prospects for political ethnographers are brightening, at least a bit—especially if they follow Bayard de Volo’s lead and use multiple methods. The so-called perestroika movement that emerged in political science a decade ago, in which scholars protested the field’s emphasis on mathematical approaches, has opened space for qualitative research of all sorts. Three years ago the Midwest Political Science Association, which is known as a bastion of just-the-facts statistical analysis, surprised many scholars by creating a politics-and-anthropology interest section, which Aronoff leads.
“There are lots of departments that have what I now think of as a zoo theory of political science, which is that they want an example of every major species,” says Scott, of Yale. “And just one of them, please. So people who do good qualitative work can often get hired, because mainstream political scientists are so bored with their own discipline that they’re excited when they see something new.”
Still, Scott, who was Pachirat’s adviser, admits having been nervous about the slaughterhouse project. “I was worried this might be a career-ending move even before his career began,” he says. “But he got more job offers than you can shake a stick at.”
Pachirat is now an assistant professor of politics at New School University. Next year Yale will publish his Killing Work: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. “I encourage my doctoral students to pursue questions that excite them in a way that they can be passionate about,” he says. “What’s the point, otherwise?”
