Download Prison ethnography 2012

RESEARCH “INSIDE”,
VIEWED FROM “OUTSIDE”:
REFLECTIONS ON PRISON
ETHNOGRAPHY
Martyn Hammersley
The Open University
Resisting the Eclipse: International Symposium on
Prison Ethnography,
The Open University, September 2012
Outside/Inside
• Doing research ‘inside’: I’m an outsider
to this.
• Ethnography as finding out what goes
on inside settings, behind the facades,
and/or as accessing insider
perspectives.
• Reflexivity as stepping outside in order
to reflect back upon an activity or action,
and upon oneself as agent.
Problems surrounding
inside/outside
• Epistemological problems: the ethnographic
imperative
Insider knowledge
Contextual understanding
• Ethical and political problems
Speaking on behalf of?
Voyeurism
Espionage
The Ethnographic Imperative
‘Go and sit in the lounges of the luxury hotels
and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on
the Gold Coast settees and on the slum
shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the
Star and Garter Burlesk. In short, […] go get the
seats of your pants dirty in real research’
(Robert Park, quoted in McKinney 1966: 71).
While Park encouraged the use of diverse forms
of data, this quote is frequently cited in support
of the idea that only participant observation can
provide true knowledge of the social world.
A more recent echo in the
context of prison research
‘This may sound obvious. But it has to
be said. It simply is not possible to do
research that will tell you much about
prisons without getting out into the field.
No amount of theorizing or reading in an
office can substitute for the hands-on
experience of spending your time in
prison’ (King 2000:297-8).
A claim to epistemic privilege
• What I have called the ethnographic imperative
involves the assumption that closeness or
involvement produce superior understanding.
For example, Crewe (2009:477) refers to it as ‘a
form of learning that is direct and experiential’.
• There is much to be said in favour of this idea.
But it needs to be qualified and
reconceptualised. Indeed, taken literally, it does
not provide a coherent rationale for
ethnography.
Who has epistemic privilege?
If closeness or involvement provide for the
best understanding, then surely it is
participants in the settings that
ethnographers study – in the case of
prisons, not just inmates but also warders
and others – who are the ones who have
epistemic advantage? They are more
closely and persistently involved in the life
of the setting than an ethnographer can
ever be.
One response
An influential response to this problem in
some quarters is to reformulate the goal
of ethnography as to amplify the voices
of ‘insiders’, especially those on the
margins, those whose voices have
hitherto been excluded, dismissed, or
ignored.
I don’t think this is a good idea.
A counter-argument
• The notion of epistemic privilege as deriving
from closeness and involvement is empiricist.
• It neglects the fact that understanding is not a
matter of the world impressing its nature upon
us but rather of our having the resources and
ability to engage with it in order to understand
it, and being aware of how what we bring to
the task may lead to distortions (Phillips and
Earle 2010).
• Closeness and involvement are not enough;
and might not always be necessary.
The expressivist over-reaction
There can be a tendency to push this counterargument too far. Here, research comes to
be seen as a process of construction, or
even invention: its products are viewed as
expressions or reflections of the positionings,
characteristics, etc of the researcher. From
this point of view, accounts cannot be judged
in terms of accuracy but only for
genuineness of political commitment, degree
of reflexivity, and/or aesthetic sensibility or
creativity.
A common folly
‘Let us remember how common the folly
is, of going from one faulty extreme into
the opposite’.
(Thomas Reid, Essays on the
Intellectual Powers of Man,1785, quoted
in Haack 1993:v)
A second problem with
ethnographic privilege
Most ethnographers would argue that the settings
they study cannot be understood simply in their
own terms: that they need to be located within a
wider social context.
But in order to gain understanding of this context
ethnographers cannot rely upon participantobservation, they must use other kinds of data.
And if this contextual knowledge is more than
just an add-on, if it actively shapes our
understanding of the setting, then the claim of
ethnographic privilege is undermined.
One response to the problem
of context
Some argue that we must adopt the right
theory, so as to provide the context, and must
then use this as a framework for constructing
a picture of the setting. It seems to me that
Wacquant comes close to this position (see,
for example, Wacquant 2002b).
This is clearly at odds with the original
‘empiricist’ rationale for ethnography. Given
that he retains this rationale (in 2002a),
perhaps there is a contradiction within
Wacquant’s position?
A rather different response
Once again there is a problem here of going
from one extreme to another. It is true that we
cannot do any research, including
ethnography, without making prior
assumptions about the phenomena being
investigated. But these assumptions must be
adopted tentatively, where contentious, and
revised where necessary, not treated as a
straightjacket.
Moreover, ethnography is neither superior nor
sufficient as a source of knowledge, even
though it is of great value.
Ethical and political issues
These also relate to ethnographers’ claims to
gain ‘inside knowledge’.
• The first centres on the charge that
ethnographers claim to speak on behalf of
those they study, and that this is illegitimate,
amounting to an infringement of autonomy.
Yet, claiming to provide a sound account of
people’s perspectives and actions is not the
same as claiming to speak on their behalf.
This criticism itself derives from the empiricist
idea of the ethnographer as insider.
The ethnographer as voyeur
‘Whyte and Boelen entered this urban
space and, like voyeurs, attempted to lay
bare its underlying structures. Each found
different structures because their angles of
vision were different. But each of their texts
endorses the validity of the cultural voyeur’s
project. They refused to challenge and
doubt their own right to look, write, and ask
questions about the private and public lives
that go on in Cornerville’ (Denzin 1992:131).
The ethnographer as spy
‘Sociologists stand guard in the garrison and
report to their masters on the movements of
the occupied populace. The more
adventurous […] don the disguise of the
people and go out to mix with the peasants
in the "field", returning with books and
articles that break the protective secrecy in
which a subjugated population wraps itself,
and make it more accessible to manipulation
and control./ The sociologist […] is precisely
a kind of spy’ (Nicolaus 1968).
Two influential responses
• Partisanship: following what is taken to be
the lead of Becker in his article ‘Whose side
are we on?’ (but see Hammersley 2000 and
Liebling 2001). Who should be sided with,
and why? What is the effect on research?
• Participatory inquiry, for example trying to
facilitate prisoners doing research
themselves, so as to speak on their own
behalf. But, again, which prisoners, and
why? Who is responsible for the quality of
the research, and how is this to be judged?
My response
• In Save the World on Your Own Time Stanley
Fish (2008) insists that academic researchers
‘do not try to do anyone else’s job’ and ‘do not
let anyone else do their job’.
• This echoes a similar sentiment expressed
many years earlier by Ned Polsky (1967:140),
who suggested that if someone wants to
engage in social work, or for that matter police
work, [or, we might add, politics] that is their
‘privilege’, but they should not do this in the
name of social science.
Both partisanship and facilitating other voices
getting heard are reasonable activities, in
themselves. But carried out in the name of
research they betray it.
Furthermore, these activities are also by no
means unproblematic. They share as many
ethical and political agonies, or at least
discomforts and dissatisfactions, as are
endemic in ethnographic work. There is
nothing uniquely ‘inauthentic’ about
ethnography.
Conclusion
• There is no inside or outside per se. All
perspectives and locations are situated; and,
similarly, all reflexivity is from a particular
perspective. There is no view from nowhere,
either from ‘outside’ or ‘inside’. However, we
are not lost in a hall of mirrors, nor are we
forced to resort to some dogmatic solution.
• Similarly, there is no moral high ground, inside
or outside, we are all in the swamp.
• Our anchor must be a commitment to research
as an activity that is of value for itself, pursued
with due modesty and moderation.
References
Crewe, B. (2009) The Prisoner Society: Power, adaptation and social life in an
English prison, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Denzin, N. (1992) ‘Whose Cornerville is it anyway?, Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography, 21, pp120-32.
Fish, S. (1995) Professional Correctness, New York, Oxford University Press.
Fish, S. (2008) Save the World on Your Own Time, New York, Oxford
University Press.
Haack, S. (1993), Evidence and Inquiry: Towards a Reconstruction in
Epistemology, Oxford, Blackwell.
Hammersley, M. (1995) The Politics of Social Research, London, Sage.
Hammersley, M. (2000) Taking Sides In Research, London, Routledge.
Hammersley, M. and Traianou, A. (2012) Ethics in Qualitative Research:
Controversies and Contexts, London, Sage.
Liebling, A. (2001) ‘Whose side are we on?’, British Journal of Criminology, 41,
pp472-84.
Lynch, M. (2000) ‘Against reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of
privileged knowledge’, Theory, Culture and Society, 17(3), pp26-54.
References
McKinney, J. C. (1966) Constructive Typology and Social Theory, New York,
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Nicolaus, M. (1968) Fat-Cat Sociology: Remarks at The American Sociological
Association Convention, Boston. Available at:
http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/fatcat.html
Phillips, C. and Earle, R. (2010) ‘Reading difference differently: identity,
epistemology and prison ethnography’, British Journal of Criminology, 50,
360-78.
Polsky, N. (1967) Hustlers, Beats and Others, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Sparks, R. (2002) ‘Out of the “Digger”: The warrior’s honour and the guilty
observer’, Ethnography, 3, 4, pp556–581.
Wacquant. L. (2002a) ‘The curious eclipse of prison ethnography in the age of
mass incarceration’, Ethnography, 3, 4, pp371-397.
Wacquant, L., (2002b) ‘Scrutinizing the street: poverty, morality, and the pitfalls
of urban ethnography’, American Journal of Sociology, 107, 6, pp. 14681532.
Whyte, W. F. (1981) Street Corner Society, Third edition, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press.