The Political in Political Ethnography.
Politics with a small p Political ethnography has an interdisciplinary origin and has experienced a boom since
2000. As discussed elsewhere (Baiocchi and Connor 2008 ; Schatz 2009 ; Luhtakallio and Eliasoph 2014 ; Auyero 2006 ), we can trace it back to the Manchester school of political anthropology; the tradition of community studies in sociology (what is usually called the Third Chicago School); the cultural sociology of civic and associative life (Bellah et al. 2007 ); as well as to the work of scholars of social movements interested in practices and biographies (McAdam 1990 ) or in frame analysis (Gamson 1992 ; Snow and Benford 1988 ). We do not offer a comprehensive review of works that define themselves under this banner, as other authors have carried out such a review, but discuss some of its insights and the origins of its predicament.
Often framing their studies in contrast to Bcapital-P^ politics of political science and political sociology, with its focus on formal actors and delimited institutional domains,
political ethnographers have claimed many advantages to their work. Ethnographic
2 This last point has been central to the analysis of political philosopher Claude Lefort ( 1981 ) for whom the political is the name of the symbolic reconstitution of the social, after the body of the king-ruler became
separated from the social body. As such, the political is conceptualized always as an empty place, without a privileged location and always vulnerable to contestation. To a certain extent the main political issue for Lefort is the dispute for the jurisdiction of the political. To be blunt here, what most ethnographies usually take for granted is what we—taking a page from philosophers like Lefort and Schmitt—would like to find ways to research from the ground up. The political (le politique) became the popular term to describe the notion of a symbolic form that institutes society yet is not equivalent with society itself. Furthermore, the pre-modern theologico-political could not function without a representation of unity. Lefort, relying significantly on Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, argues that through the image of the king’s doubled body European societies represented themselves to themselves. Through the doubled nature of the king’s body, society is represented and therefore social identity is secured. As such, the body of the king is not simply an empirical concept but is the means by which society institutes itself. To destroy this symbol is to dis-incorporate or disembody society’s unity; it leads to the appearance of individuals and to disconnecting power from a specific body that represents the social whole. This leads to Lefort’s famous assessment of modernity: BPower [now] appears as an empty place and those who exercise it as mere mortals who occupy it only temporarily or who could install themselves in it only by force or cunning. There is no law that can be fixed, whose articles cannot
be contested, whose foundations are not susceptible of being called into question. Lastly there is not representation of a center and of the contours of society; unity cannot now efface social division.^ be contested, whose foundations are not susceptible of being called into question. Lastly there is not representation of a center and of the contours of society; unity cannot now efface social division.^
And taken as a whole, the literature has developed a number of insights. First, much of the work has advanced a relational definition of politics. That is, for most of the scholarship under this banner politics are relational, they are not necessarily society- centered, but can actually arise from other parts of the social, be it the state, markets, or some in-between space, without something like the Habermasian Blife world^ having a preeminence over the milieu in which the activities deemed political happen. To a certain extent a lot of research is currently taking place at what Auyero ( 2007 ) has called the Bgray zone,^ the intersection of routine, everyday, and formal politics as a hybrid area where polity, policy, and politics dissolve.
Second, the work has shown that there are no pre-conditions for when and how politics exist or arise. Unlike previous models of sociological inquiry implicitly or explicitly normative, 3 and thanks also to the work of comparative historical sociologists like Ikegami ( 2005 ), Casanova ( 1994 ), and Forment ( 2003 ), we know that activities usually considered as politics by scholars and laypeople have existed despite the lack of
a strict separation between state and civil society. This literature has contributed to the stream of ethnographic studies of the polity by showing when activities usually considered as political have flourished in contexts that previous theories have deemed as impossible for it to happen. It has also helped combat teleological versions of the development of the political arena as a distinctive milieu of exchange and interaction, a state only possible when the influence of economic and political power is neutralized. And it has also expelled transcendental dimension implicit in the public sphere narrative, in which there is always a tension between the ideal result (the general will or the common good) versus the will of the many.
As a result of these insights, ethnographers have over time given up on dichotomies like citizen/client, in which one part of the pair was meant to be the normative guide to how to understand the other (Auyero 2003 ). And more generally speaking, political ethnographers have moved away from the notion of the idealized individual citizen making claims before the state. Scholars have shown instead, and in many different ways, that political subjects are multiple and contradictory—client, activist, politico, voter, campaign manager, entrepreneur, protester, patron, bureaucrat, hustler, etc. Political ethnographers have opened exciting vistas to messy, real-world, Bsmall-p^ politics.
3 And here this applies to whether we think of the teleological modernization model of Lipset ( 1959 ), Almond and Verba ( 1965 ), or Habermas’s ( 1989 ) model of the public sphere.
On the impossible normalization of an emergent field Yet the growth and consolidation in the early 2000s of the sub-discipline has also
presented it with a particular paradox. On one hand, because it has often been a literature defining itself against, and deriving analytic leverage from its difference from, Bcapital-P politics,^ it has not preoccupied itself with definitions de novo as much as differences from extant definitions. At the same time it has attempted to normalize itself and claim its jurisdiction in sociology (be it via edited issues, conferences, or the coinage of specific and particular concepts), while keeping itself open to new litera- tures, such as the pragmatic turn in cultural sociology, or Actor Network literatures in social studies of science. This, to a certain extent, has meant that all scholars have been able to be in a common conversation, while keeping the referent of that conversation sufficiently vague. While providing common terrain, the disadvantage of that ambigu- ity has been that authors often actually talk past each other because the Bit^ of political is something completely different. And the attempt at normalization has also had other consequences: it has, to a certain extent, pushed out of the conversation fellow travelers who have either worked on domains not explicitly labeled as political but from which similar theoretical and methodological lessons could have been taken, such as contem- porary Burban ethnographies^ (Kasinitz 1992 ), from non-ethnographic approaches that clearly share important concerns as in comparative-historical sociology (Brubaker 2006 ; Ikegami 2005 ); or from non-sociological ethnography less concerned with defining itself as working on Bpolitical^ topics. (Wedeen 2008 ; Gutmann 2005 ; or Li 2007 ).
It is for this reason, then, that we believe the exercise of more clearly defining and operationalizing the political in political ethnography is in order. The task at hand is a descriptive one; we are not making normative claims about the proper usage of the word or an ontological claim about what the political actually is. Our purpose in using a lexicographical approach (cf. Abend 2008 ; Brubaker 2002 , 2005 ), is not to settle on one Bit^ but rather create some clarity as to what version of politics is being presented, advanced, and discussed by different political ethnographies. The aim is to contribute to
A first step in developing such a trading zone is to clarify what scholars have actually meant.
a sociological Btrading zone^ more than settling on one definition. 4
The multiple meanings of the political What exactly, constitutes, Bthe political^ and what distinguishes it from Bthe social^ is,
of course, a complicated question with a long history in political theory that we cannot hope to cover here. Suffice it to say that political theorists variously focus on the state, conflict, power, and community in their definitions. Ethnographers, on the other hand,
4 According to Galison, BTwo groups can agree on rules of exchange even if they ascribe utterly different significance to the objects being exchanged; they may even disagree on the meaning of the exchange process
itself. Nonetheless, the trading partners can hammer out a local coordination, despite vast global differences. In an even more sophisticated way, cultures in interaction frequently establish contact languages, systems of discourse that can vary from the most function-specific jargons, through semi specific pidgins, to full-fledged creoles rich enough to support activities as complex as poetry and metalinguistic reflection^ (Galison 1997, p. 783).
have focused on a few main questions revolving around the nature of the political bond, such as how it is organized, and whether people invest their sense of sovereignty in other citizens and organizations, or in state institutions. They have also asked what struggles labeled as political are about, such as access to the state or accumulation of symbolic and material resources. If we examine carefully what ethnographers mean when they examine politics, we can distinguish three distinct ways, which we refer to as polis, demos, and elector. Each of these refers to a specific domain of activity and tends to privilege particular social locations as well as strategies for how best to study them.
The first, which we call polis, revolves around the question of who is counted or included in the political community. The second, demos, is concerned with the rhetor- ical make up of a political community, as in the contours of its imagined communities. The third, elector, in which the political is understood as the production of subjectiv-
ities, is most often associated with questions of governmentality. See Table 1 , which lists these types.
The question of the make-up of the polis, who is and is not counted, has been a central preoccupation for political theorists and political ethnographers have taken heed. The political lays in the encounter with formal politics, either in its routine form or in resistance or negotiation with it. The emphasis is often on showing how domination results from the struggle to uphold and reproduce the monopoly of legitimate symbolic and physical violence by the dominant groups in society. The accent is on the connections between micro settings and macro forces.
This includes ethnographies in the extended case method tradition (Lazar 2008 ; Thayer 2001 , 2010 ) as well as works that have taken on modern versions of machine politics (Marwell 2007 ; McQuarrie 2011 , 2013 ; Pacewicz 2015 , 2016 ). In both cases there is attention to how macro structural forces shape particular locales and in the role ideology/misrecognition play in hiding or naturalizing the links and forces, and how they produce practices at the meso and the micro levels. Lazar’s ( 2008 ) ethnography in El Alto, Bolivia is exemplary. Rather than paint a Manichean picture of how Western ideas of citizenship are imposed on non-Western subjects, the author aims to demon- strate that the interactions among individuals, local civic organizations, and the state create a hybrid citizenship that mirrors the hybrid cholo identity of the majority of El Alto’s inhabitants. Similarly, the work of Michael McQuarrie on the separation of community development and community organizing in Cleveland has similar concerns. The focus in this case is on the Bprivatization^ of community-based organizations and
Table 1 Definitions of the political Main Concern
Sites
Theoretical References
Polis Who gets counted/ encounter Community-based non-profit Gramsci, Bourdieu with formal politics
organizations
Demos Rhetorical make up of a
Tocqueville, Rousseau, political community
Civil society/ NGOs
Dewey Elector
Governmentality; State as
Foucault, Latour, assemblage
State policies; experts’
interventions
Schmitt, Weber Schmitt, Weber
The site for this kind of research tends to be organizations with linkages to both the world of formal policy making and urban development and to a past history of political activism. What characterizes this work is that the civic/political bond appears as non- autonomous, as always linked or intertwined with larger entities (in among State, civil society and market), and its aim is less to provide a thick description of the world within a particular community and more to point to linkages within larger fields (and to conceptualize how actions are meaningful both in the economic and the civic sphere). 5
In Demos, in contrast, the locus of politics is civic life. Less directly concerned with domination, as with the examples above, the emphasis here is on the available civic spaces, and on identifying how interactions and organizations allow for certain patterns of communication or discursive styles. These allow for solidarity to arise and for those communicational styles to flourish. Also, it is far more interested in inquiring about how autonomous these spaces are from state or market intervention and what the conditions are under which—in an increasingly fragmented society—groups that cross social boundaries can actually exist and participate in producing ties within the wider community. Ethnographies of voluntary associations by scholars like Lichterman ( 1996 , 2005 ) and Eliasoph ( 1998 , 2011 ) are exemplars. Lichterman observes how groups produce bonds, boundaries, and speech patterns that allow or preclude for civic life to extend outside the immediate borders of the group itself, bringing a great deal of complexity to the social capital metaphor. The ethnography argues that it is not the amount of voluntary participation that matters, but rather that it is the style, which allows us to understand how long term trust can actually be developed. Mische’s relational work ( 2007 ) also belongs in here as it shows how activist-networks navigate
5 Recent classics within urban ethnography have focused not on this directly but rather on its absence: the accent is on exclusion and the retirement of formal organizations from the sphere of action of the State and
civil society. Though often not labeled explicitly as political ethnography, these works deal with the political as a particular effect/consequence of the exclusion of the polis and retrenchment/retirement of the sphere of policy from the lives of the poor. Key examples of this use of political are seminal books like Philip Bourgois’s In Search of Respect, Sudhir Venkatesh’s American Project, and Loic Wacquant’s Body and Soul, as is Pine’s ( 2012 ) ethnography of Bmaking do^ in Naples. Ethnographies that deal with welfare recipients; entrepreneurs of the informal economy; or the internal fight for honor, status, and recognition within racialized impoverished and disintegrating communities are all examples of this type of use of the political. In most cases there is an allusion to the transformation of structures at the macro level (e.g., the hollowing out and roll back of the State, neoliberal policies) that produce effects at the level of the observed interaction. Again, the emphasis is less on the mechanisms and the meso level when compared to Polis and more on how the alluded changes result in the framing ecology (the hyper-ghetto), certain observable practices, modes of individuation (the hustler, the gang leader) and strategies for action. The retrenchment of formal institutions in these cases has resulted in an absence of a shared definition of what constitutes politics, whom to link to, how to solve, and how to organize (all dimensions present at work in Polis). It is in this vacuum then that some activities usually presented at the level of the economy—or as status games—gain political salience. If the political theorist to invoke here is Thomas Hobbes, it is less because the war of the poor against the poor resembles the homo homini lupus he so brilliantly discussed but rather because the retrenchment resulted in an absence of shared definitions about politics as defined in this paragraph.
among NGOs, parties, and the State, and allow for the public to exist in-between the civic and partisan intersection of networks. In her ethnography of youth political participation in Brazil, Mische shows the strategic importance of styles of communi- cation that result from positioning at the juncture of multiple groups. These works generally emphasize the meso level, and have a distinctive theoretical lineage; de Toqueville, Dewey, Rousseau, Arendt, and Habermas are the key theoretical coordi- nates in which these ethnographies can be located. In Demos, the political resides in the crossing among social boundaries in order to produce a collective process of deliber- ation, judgment, and action.
In Elector, the political is used as a stand in for the power/knowledge syndrome, and for an analysis of the agents who decide what are the defining contours of the legitimate political community. Much of the empirical work is organized by the question of how does the state extend itself into everyday life. Most of the ethnographies conducted under this framing use the political as a way to describe how power and knowledge get articulated in productive ways that result in types of institutions, mechanisms, and subjectivities. The impetus behind this use of the political often rests on readings of Foucault and his concepts of governmentality, technologies, biopolitics, and disposi- tive. This Brealist^ definition of the political—which includes background references to Weber and Schmitt—spans distinctive bodies of work, though, and includes work on revealing the politics of sight, under which bureaucratic power hides away that which is too repugnant to contemplate (Pachirat 2011 ); the work of Verdery ( 2002 ), which shows the relative autonomy of Romanian local officers in undermining private property claims; as well as more explicit ethnographies of governmentality, which scrutinize closely how state policies produce particular citizens/subjects and the inclusion/exclusion processes they generate (Decoteau 2013 ; Biehl 2005 ; Kligman 1998 ; Petryna 2002 ).
Most of the authors within this kind of scholarship are political ethnographers who navigate between anthropology and sociology. Among sociologists, we deem exem- plary Auyero’s continuing line of investigation about the urban poor in Argentina (Auyero and Swistun 2009 ; Auyero 2012 ), in which he shows how poor populations are produced as Bpatients of the State^ and how they are Bmade^ confused about the toxic waste they inhabit by diverse state and non-state agents, as well as the recent work of one of his disciples, Pablo Lapegna ( 2016 ), who shows the concerted work of provincial political leaders, state bureaucrats, and local social movement leaders in actively producing the de-mobilization of peasants against the toxic consequences of the soybean boom in northeast Argentina.
Another related strand of scholarship makes the State not the beginning of the inquiry into how power operates in micro-capillary ways. This literature shows how the State and the political are constituted by multiple practices as a purely separate area of social life. The bridge here is the work of Latour ( 1993 , 2005 ) and of political theorists like Timothy Mitchell ( 1991 , 2002 ), who have shown how the State is the effect of particular practices; how the economy is an area of expert intervention set apart by processes of relational assemblage; how the scientific is what gets Bseparated^ and divided as pure science. This line of inquiry has made its way into our field of interest by showing how politics are made and unmade and the role of experts in it. For instance, the work of Rodriguez ( 2017 ) scrutinizes how nonstate leaders—i.e., civil leaders and community advocates—have contributed to what James Scott ( 1998 ) has Another related strand of scholarship makes the State not the beginning of the inquiry into how power operates in micro-capillary ways. This literature shows how the State and the political are constituted by multiple practices as a purely separate area of social life. The bridge here is the work of Latour ( 1993 , 2005 ) and of political theorists like Timothy Mitchell ( 1991 , 2002 ), who have shown how the State is the effect of particular practices; how the economy is an area of expert intervention set apart by processes of relational assemblage; how the scientific is what gets Bseparated^ and divided as pure science. This line of inquiry has made its way into our field of interest by showing how politics are made and unmade and the role of experts in it. For instance, the work of Rodriguez ( 2017 ) scrutinizes how nonstate leaders—i.e., civil leaders and community advocates—have contributed to what James Scott ( 1998 ) has
Varieties of world-making: Towards a lower common definition of how to study the political?
Given this diversity of definitions, how can we use these words in conversation? We would like to suggest there is lower common definition that belies these various approaches. The question of what activities count as political would be much more profitably addressed if our words and concepts were clearer, and comparisons could be more profitably leveraged. We asked ourselves, after having catalogued the most salient research from the last two decades: can we aim for a lowest common denominator definition? What would it look like? What would be its analytical usage and potential contribution? In other words, what would happen if scholars went into the field armed with a set of theoretical sensibilities that would allow us to interrogate the world, imagining what concept of the political—among the myriad of existing ones—would best fit the case? This is in contrast to both the tabula rasa that grounded theory imagines as well as with the impulse towards quod erat demonstrandum more common to critical approaches, which tend to privilege one pre-established theoretical perspective, and consequently where we find only what we already know. We build up here on Timmermans and Tavory’s ( 2012 ) call for abduction in qualitative work. For them, qualitative work begins from extensive and broad knowledge of the pre-existing theories that allow for anomalies to be identified and for theory to be constructed. We are less interested here in the question of innovation but want to highlight the role that multiple theorizations play in allowing the researcher to engage in a recursive process of double fitting data and theories. Where we differ from Timmermans and Tavory, however, is that rather than calling for a more generalized theoretical multiplicity as an avenue only for theoretical innovation, we see in the Bfalse^ starts of the construction of the study object, not an avenue for the search of anomalies, but rather a great opportunity for
the challenge of our earlier theoretical and normative pre-conceptions. 6 In looking at the different theories that have been mobilized to name and explain political phenomena, we pair down the frameworks related to the political as a way to generate a trading zone for political ethnography.
Our specific proposal is actor-centered. We propose beginning with the world that informants construct for themselves—by what they do, what they say, or what they say they do—and follow that through to broader dimensions, attentive to three issues central to political life: trajectories of individuation, mediation, and categorical divi- sion. In looking at these three, we explicitly show the research choices of some of the best exemplars of the literatures we discussed in the previous section, underscoring
6 Despite their claims to having an open theoretical menu, their work still reproduces to a certain extent the opposition between the grounded and the extended case method, by thinking that ECM theories cannot be
abducted. Most of the article’s examples are from Bsurface/narrative^ theories: phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology. They do not delve in depth about what would happen if you try to take that
approach with theories at the level of the actor, the actor’s motivations and cultural repertories; with normative takes on political life; or with dispositions, symbolic misrecognition, hegemony.
how theory and methods usually constitute a package (Clarke and Star 2008 ), in which theory relates strongly to how ethnographers conduct research. Each dimension follow-
ed by scholars also highlights one particular road for data production. In the first case, it is the collection of long term trajectories of individuals as they enter the polis via participant observation; in the second one, it is the work of reconstructing the integra- tion of individuals into organizations, and the history of said organizations within a larger ecology of competitors, via archival and interviews; in the third one, we see the focus mostly on meanings and interviews through which the subjects imagine them- selves and others.
The first question we ask concerns trajectories of individuation. What are the trajectories by which individuals construct selves that are political? Instead of thinking of the individual as a finalized and punctuated self, clearly delimited, we want to observe in which relational ways individuals inscribe themselves in groups and activities they qualify as political. Sometimes this takes place within larger holistic and hierarchical ideas of selfhood that
scholars have identified. 7 But principally, we need to be attuned—through their activities— to how they individuate and affiliate. In terms of the literature, for example, scholars have turned up many different kinds of political selves: volunteers, campaign managers, activists, citizens, militants, clients, hustlers, hockey moms? What are the rights and obligations implied in inhabiting each role? This way of producing data has privileged one version of qualitative work: that based on the long-term ethnographic observation of trajectories, careers, and turning points in how people learn to be part of a political self. These observations have usually occurred in fieldwork that happens over the course of many years, with several revisits, as to make sure to capture the larger context that goes beyond just the observation of interactions or situations and provides a fuller picture of the possibilities and constraints afforded by the process of individuation.
While individuation refers to the formation of political selves, mediation refers to the main avenue through which participants establish bonds they understand as political. In some cases this question has meant looking at the question of access to problem solvers and networks that broker symbolic and material resources. In some cases the research has focused on state offices and officers as the vehicle of this bond; and in others the focus has been on organizations: NGOs, civil society, political parties, or activist networks. What all these have in common is that the organizing question is the search for the linkages among individuals, groups, and organizations in order for individuals to gain access to assets or recognition. Here the privileged data producing techniques have been three: archival work on the history of the organization being studied in relationship with other actors in society; interviews with both the brokers and those who are being mediated; and observations of pointed selected situations in which the organization (re)produces itself, mostly meetings and interactions with other actors perceived as political.
Division implies the question of how informants imagine the political bond. 8 When they do so, whether they do it, what background symbols they deploy. By which
7 On this, see anthropologists like Dumont ( 1983 ) or Dias Duarte ( 1986 ) who make the punctuated idea of the individual one of the possible historical varieties of how subjectivity operates. 8
This last point is particularly important if we are going to understand the agent’s own attributions of meanings to particular situations. It has been interesting to notice that while some of the work reported upon here is based on a cultural sociology of democracy (Poletta 2012 ), scholarship has nevertheless made of meaning not a structuring force but rather an environment, a result of past structural arrangements, or an instrument for action.
categorical divisions? Relatedly, how do these divisions come into play and become inscribed in institutions or routines? What is privileged here are the particular categories through which participants self-define their experiences and how they imagine what counts as political and what does not, as well as how these categories may be generative of forms of institutionalized inclusion and exclusion. Many of the studies mentioned here have shown how these divisions organize the political world, focusing on binaries such as: apolitical vs. apartisan; activist vs. politician; clientelism vs. citizenship; the moral vs. the political; the political vs. the partisan; community organizer vs. service provider. While these studies tend to privilege either semi-structured or ethnographic interviews in order to elicit the role of cultural structures in the imagined meaning of the participants’ activities, often they are complemented by in situ observation.
Our minimal formula is both an epistemological and a methodological recipe, based on the study of trajectories, mediations, and categorical divisions, and the multiplicity of qualitative methodological options that need to be brought into scrutiny when we decide to focus not just on one avenue for inquiry, but rather on its combination. It proposes to combine the study of long-term trajectories, the study of linkages, the focus on the role of cultural structures, and to highlight accounts as the principal avenue for the production of data. And this is not a capricious choice, but rather the result of taking seriously post-positivist approaches to the context of discovery (Reed 2011 ; Swedberg 2012 ). If the appropriate way to think about how to do research following this paradigm closely would be to think of it as the encounter between two sets of meanings: those of the ethnographer with those of the subjects whose lives are being studied (Reed 2010 ), our proposal is that the early collection of data revolves around these three questions, with attention to what might be salient political instantiations, and helps us in deciding and adjudicating what kind of case this is and what role Bpolitics^ plays in it. This means following actors and taking their activities and understandings seriously as a first step, but it also means a great deal of agnosticism about what might be the privileged social location of political activity. If we are able to recognize the contested, reflexive, and complex character of how people think about themselves, we should be able to imagine ourselves in the same terms and be reflexive about our theoretical frameworks as the meanings we mobilize while building the study object.
To illustrate the power of this approach we draw on four examples below: a classic work on the historiography of popular protest, one contemporary ethnography, and, more presumptuously, two projects we have been involved in. 9 In each of the cases, following actors’ own definitions of the political, while the scholars were sensitized to the three dimensions above, provided unexpected insights.
Unexpected insights and actor’s definitions of the political
E. P. Thompson’s ( 1971 ) analysis of paternalism not as something imposed from the top down, but rather as the preferred political repertoire of the poor, which lagging in
9 Returning to past fieldwork as a source of inspiration is less common in sociology than in anthropology (e.g., Hannerz 1980 ; Sansone 2003 ; Gutmann 2005 ), despite some notable exceptions (Burawoy on the Extended
Case Method or the Brevisit,^ for example; recent cases include Auyero’s Patient of the State, and his article with Benzecry—Auyero and Benzecry 2017 —on how dispositional sociology helps us to understand the continuity on time of patronage politics).
time, had re-activated a political bond based in a previous form of political and labor control exercised by those in power, is a classic exemplar of the approach and sensibility we are aiming to highlight. His article BThe Moral Economy of the English Crowd^ questions the usual portrayal of eighteenth-century food riots as Bspasmodic episodes^ bereft of deeper, sustained political consciousness and activity. Against an account of popular history composed of occasional social disturbances spurred by some sort of economic stimuli that caused Brebellions of the belly^—a bad harvest, unfavorable weather, trade disruptions—Thompson offers his own views based on the Bmoral economy of the poor.^ Thompson traces the contours of the bread- nexus during a period in history in which Bprofit^ was still negatively seen by standard communal relations. Millers and bakers were seen as servants of the community and middlemen were immediately suspect characters. Underwritten by ideas of customs and rights, the paternalist model tightly controlled economic practices and relations around food. People subject to dwindling access to food began mobilizing literally to set the price of wheat or bread. As evidence of the political undercurrent of the crowds, Thompson notes that violent actions against millers rarely looted supplies: sometimes they reset the price of purchase, other times the actions were wholly punitive against profiteering, so there was a disciplining effect at work more lasting than the fleeting action itself. Occupying positions that allowed them a near-bird’s-eye view of the economy—porters, dock workers, mill workers—the poor could easily monitor move- ments and production of grain. Thompson also notes the key role of women as instigators of the revolts.
While not a political ethnography per se, Thompson’s analysis of Bfood riots^ has been an inspiration for political ethnographies interested in mobilization and protest by
subordinated groups and agents. 10 But more importantly, it involves many of the elements we have highlighted here: the account of the actors’ own self understandings
goes beyond automatic explanations; the focus both on the meanings that organize actions and on key actors and activities through which the meanings are carried into particular actions; the partition of the world into moral categories and how particular actors fit in those views; and the research concludes in a way that is absolutely counterintuitive to what is expected.
Auyero’s ( 2001 , 2003 ) investigations of political Bclientelism^ among the urban poor on the outskirts of Buenos Aires is another exemplar. Clientelism has long been a theme for political scientists who observed that, as an asymmetrical relationship, it perpetuates the social standing of both patron and client and is sometimes seen as something akin to Bfalse consciousness.^ According to Gay ( 1998 ), clientelism has been held responsible for many of the ills in the region’s democracies; Bit is clientelism that forges relations of dependency between masses and elites. It is clientelism that stifles popular organization and protest. And it is clientelism that reduces elections to localized disputes over the distribution of spoils^ (p. 7). Similarly, Auyero ( 2001 , p. 20) describes Bpolitical clientelism as one of those simplifying images that obscure more than clarify^ because so much is simplistically explained by it, from oligarchical domination to lack of organization and participation. But by observing it closely and unpacking its meanings for poor participants, something other than simple social
10 A short list of notable scholarship that has sought inspiration in it includes Somers ( 1994 ), Calhoun ( 2012 ), Lapegna ( 2016 ), and early work by Auyero ( 2001 , 2003 ).
reproduction emerges. Rather, clientelism appears not as an instrumental and coercive exchange of votes and favors, but rather as an unequal exchange bond articulated relationally as a meaningful caring relationship.
The ethnography thus describes these relationships as sites for problem-solving and for the formation of political identities. The idea that Bpressing problems can be solved
through personalized political mediation and that there are good [brokers] to be had^ then becomes part of the common sense of shantytown dwellers (p. 211). Active participation in this system of problem solving creates and recreates political identities
Bas much as it provides food and medicine.^ These identities are constantly reinforced through ritual and material practices. Rather than presenting clientelism as the opposite
of political engagement, Auyero shows how participation in these networks is deeply political. Allegiance to these ways of problem-solving creates a distinct political culture and approach to politics. But by observing it closely and unpacking its meanings for poor participants, something else emerges—Bagency and improvisation of the poor,^ strategies of survival, and problem solving.
A third ethnography we want to present as an exemplar is one of our projects: a study on how politics was experienced by actors who mediated between neighborhood organizations and formal political institutions in the northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil (Baiocchi and Corrado 2010 ). It emerged from the idea of understanding actually existing Bpopular^ civil society – that is, voluntary life among popular sectors, in Salvador da Bahia. It was based on a series of ethnographic interviews with activists about how civil society, political parties, and the State are lived and experienced in the popular neighborhoods of the city. While there is by now a burgeoning literature on Brazil that details all the existing participatory institutions that exist in cities throughout the country, state institutions that have opened up spaces for participation and overlap with civil society networks, here we begin from the Bbottom^—the neighborhood, the terreiro, or the neighborhood school and try to trace our way Bup^ to the state.
To our surprise, we seldom got there—not because civil society was absent or unable to do it, but because there is a profound disconnection between the life-world of neighborhoods and the logic of state institutions. This provided an unexpected insight into ethnic mobilization there. Salvador is Brazil’s Black capital and it has the country’s most visible symbols of Black culture. Yet, the city’s Black Movement has largely been unable to achieve local gains or even play a prominent role in electoral politics, which some scholars have dismissed as result of Black Brazilian’s acceptance of the myth of Racial Democracy. Yet, our research clearly showed both an awareness of racism and strong ethnic mobilization. So it was not Bfalse consciousness^ or lack of ethnic mobilization.
The paradox of Salvador is not that there is not ethnic associationalism, but rather that it is not connected with propositional politics and its claims seldom make its way to the local public sphere. The key we discovered had to do with differential understand- ings of individuation and mediation. While all of our informants identified themselves as Black and identified racial structures as shaping their lives, their understandings and evaluations of formal politics were quite divided. Those who only mediated between the neighborhood and formal institutions were critical of the world of politics and its polluting influence. Those who were also involved in mediating publics tended to experience formal politics as unjust but ultimately accessible through legitimate Black political action. This distinction helps account for the difficulty in mobilizing around a The paradox of Salvador is not that there is not ethnic associationalism, but rather that it is not connected with propositional politics and its claims seldom make its way to the local public sphere. The key we discovered had to do with differential understand- ings of individuation and mediation. While all of our informants identified themselves as Black and identified racial structures as shaping their lives, their understandings and evaluations of formal politics were quite divided. Those who only mediated between the neighborhood and formal institutions were critical of the world of politics and its polluting influence. Those who were also involved in mediating publics tended to experience formal politics as unjust but ultimately accessible through legitimate Black political action. This distinction helps account for the difficulty in mobilizing around a
Finally, a fourth project was on the apparent cynicism of American life (Baiocchi et al. 2014 ). A group project on the state of civic life in the United States, it followed civil society organizations in Providence, Rhode Island over the course of a year. A central debate in the contemporary civic engagement and democracy literature concerns the apparently skeptical American citizen (Putnam 2000 ; Eliasoph 2011 ; Lee 2015 ; Walker 2014 ). We found that in Providence, as in America as a whole, skepticism and engagement were ubiquitous. Our fieldwork showed that individuals and groups were simultaneously skeptical of and engaged in politics. The disavowal of politics was a cultural idiom of engagement. We saw this concept in motion at both the individual level (BI am not political^) and group level (BThis is not a political organization^). The disavowal of politics was used to distinguish one’s civic activities as autonomous from the influence of the state, politicians, and political institutions. Disavowing politics involves identity work that created new boundaries between the activities in which people actively engage, and the unsavory, ambiguous, and contaminating sphere of politics. That is to say, by asserting that she Bis not political,^ an individual may distinguish her actions and self from the polluted qualities popularly associated with politics. The research showed that the disavowal of politics was productive for civic engagement—by generating taboos against politics, disavowal actually created new notions of what it means to be a good citizen that provide avenues for legitimated engagement. We concluded that distrust and cynicism about politics is not in itself a threat to democracy or an automatic prelude to disengagement. Rather, attention to the day-to-day practices and meanings of participants in civil society shows that disavowal of the political allows people to constitute creatively what they imagine to be appro- priate and desirable forms of citizenship and civic engagement.
All these accounts upend authors’ initial views of what might be considered political. The projects did not find a paternalistic labor regime for the British author, nor an unequal instrumental and depoliticizing exchange for the Argentinean scholar. In the case of Brazil, the research did not show the powerful ideology of racial democracy shaping neighborhood non-engagement, while in New England, disavowal was not a synonym of cycnism and disengagement, bur rather only one way of doing politics. In each case, attention to actors’ own activities and definitions of the political within the context of labor regimes, patronage schemes, civil society organizations, or racial politics, and how these manifested in terms of individuation, mediation, and divisions powerfully shifted theoretical expectations, producing surprising accounts of political life, thanks to avoiding a formulaic pre-definition in the context of discovery.
Conclusions and implications One of the central issues of ethnography is how and when conceptualization occurs.
While different schools of qualitative sociology have imagined different approaches to the relationship between theory and data (e.g., the extended case method by concep- tualizing and re- conceptualizing at the end of the case, looking for anomaly and theory reconstruction; grounded theory and analytic induction looking for ways to define the phenomena as emerging from the field, discarding negative hypotheses about the While different schools of qualitative sociology have imagined different approaches to the relationship between theory and data (e.g., the extended case method by concep- tualizing and re- conceptualizing at the end of the case, looking for anomaly and theory reconstruction; grounded theory and analytic induction looking for ways to define the phenomena as emerging from the field, discarding negative hypotheses about the
Recent work by Richard Swedberg ( 2012 ) advanced how to theorize as an activity. In his article, Swedberg sees knowing many competing theories as the key to devel- oping an instinct for how to adjudicate early on among contending claims about what the data might be about. While our article deals with the conceptualization of the political in ethnographic work, we would like to inscribe it within the epistemological conversation inaugurated by Swedberg. We imagine the resulting sensibility as one in which ethnographers go to the field using the theories as sensitizing concepts, con- ceiving of them as potential interchangeable lenses, which would allow us to interro- gate the world as we go along, imagining what theoretical concepts—among the myriad of existing ones—would best fit the case. We see this as a dialectical activity, in which certain occurrences in the field point us to their potential conceptualization or classification as a particular kind of phenomena, even if not in the realm of our Bfavorite theory^ (Burawoy 1998 ; Eliasoph and Lichterman 1999 ) still within alterna- tive options our colleagues in the sub-discipline have mobilized. This approach has proved fruitful for the generation of theoretical novelties (Timmermans and Tavory 2012 ); we are advocating for it here as a way to understand the use of theory in the early phases of qualitative studies at large.
This is of course particularly hard when discussing what counts as politics; while there are many competing definitions, in all of them we are still political beings, and as such bring baggage with us in terms of how we ethnocentrically predefine what counts as politics in a particular site (be it conflict, civic cooperation, debate, or resistance to regulation, etc.). We are not trying then to produce a definite version of the phenomena but rather to be explicit and reflexive about what we deem to be political and how other phenomena that other schools of thought define as political—but we may not—appear in our sites. What we want to highlight here is a central component to the grounded approach to the context of discovery—though not its relationship to theory at large: patiently to 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 omni- science, and to the service of better knowing.
In doing this we are extending and systematizing the pioneer work of colleagues like Eliasoph, Mische, Lichterman, or Auyero. Scholars before us—of course—have been able to produce data as political while going beyond their initial theoretical frames well before we started doing fieldwork; we would never claim for it to be a distinctively novel contribution. What we have done instead is to produce a more systematic and comparative account of what ethnographers have called Bpolitical^ in given sites and what are the possibilities that they open up for us in terms of theoretical conceptual- ization in the context of discovery, if we think of phenomena not as a given, but as emergent possibilities made out of the encounter with multiple and parallel theoretical ways of casing them.
To these two implications—the conceptualization of data in the context of discovery and the definition of the political without resorting to a pre-existing ontology—we add To these two implications—the conceptualization of data in the context of discovery and the definition of the political without resorting to a pre-existing ontology—we add