Manifesto for Ethnography

Abstract

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