RESEARCH “INSIDE”, VIEWED FROM “OUTSIDE”: REFLECTIONS ON PRISON

ETHNOGRAPHY

Martyn HammersleyThe 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-reactionThere can be a tendency to push this counter-

argument 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 participant-observation, 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 responseOnce 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 issuesThese 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.

ReferencesMcKinney, 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. 1468-1532.

Whyte, W. F. (1981) Street Corner Society, Third edition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.