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Political Methodology Committee on Concepts and Methods Working Paper Series

12 January 2007

Methods are not Tools Ethnography and the Limits of Multiple-Methods Research

Edward Schatz
University of Toronto (ed.schatz@utoronto.ca)

C&M The Committee on Concepts and Methods www.concepts-methods.org IPSA International Political Science Association www.ipsa.ca CIDE Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences www.cide.edu

Editor Andreas Schedler (CIDE, Mexico City) Editorial Board Jos Antonio Cheibub, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign David Collier, University of California, Berkeley Michael Coppedge, University of Notre Dame John Gerring, Boston University George J. Graham, Vanderbilt University Russell Hardin, New York University Evelyne Huber, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill James Johnson, University of Rochester Gary King, Harvard University Bernhard Kittel, University of Amsterdam James Mahoney, Brown University Cas Mudde, University of Antwerp Gerardo L. Munck, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Guillermo ODonnell, University of Notre Dame Frederic C. Schaffer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ian Shapiro, Yale University Kathleen Thelen, Northwestern University

The C&M working paper series are published by the Committee on Concepts and Methods (C&M), the Research Committee No. 1 of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), hosted at CIDE in Mexico City. C&M working papers are meant to share work in progress in a timely way before formal publication. Authors bear full responsibility for the content of their contributions. All rights reserved. The Committee on Concepts and Methods (C&M) promotes conceptual and methodological discussion in political science. It provides a forum of debate between methodological schools who otherwise tend to conduct their deliberations on separate tables. It publishes two series of working papers: Political Concepts and Political Methodology. Political Concepts contains work of excellence on political concepts and political language. It seeks to include innovative contributions to concept analysis, language usage, concept operationalization, and measurement. Political Methodology contains work of excellence on methods and methodology in the study of politics. It invites innovative work on fundamental questions of research design, the construction and evaluation of empirical evidence, theory building and theory testing. The series welcomes, and hopes to foster, contributions that cut across conventional methodological divides, as between quantitative and qualitative methods, or between interpretative and observational approaches. Submissions. All papers are subject to review by either a member of the Editorial Board or an external reviewer. Only English-language papers can be admitted. Authors interested in including their work in the C&M Series may seek initial endorsement by one editorial board member. Alternatively, they may send their paper to workingpapers@conceptsmethods.org. The C&M webpage offers full access to past working papers. It also permits readers to comment on the papers. www.concepts-methods.org

Ethnography and the Limits to Multiple-Methods Research Academic political science was recently the site of a raucous rebellion in which critics appealed for a more ecumenical political inquiry that would not seek to mimic approaches found in the natural sciences (Monroe 2005). The rebellion appears to have subsided, as some of the critics ideas were absorbed by the disciplines major institutions, and some of the critics themselves came to sit prominently among the disciplines decision-makers.1 In this sense, it may be that APSAs corporate structures began to catch up with rest of the discipline, in which a methodological divide is less pronounced than some assume.2 Alongside some institutional change, we also witnessed normative change in the disciplines intellectual culture. An expressed commitment to problem-driven research reflected the desire to view research methods as being in the service of social inquiry, rather than driving such inquiry. And such a normative change received broad support (at least rhetorically), as even strong proponents of positivist social science began to advocate greater eclecticism in methods.3 The change was not merely rhetorical. In comparative politics (the site of the most vibrant recent debates about methods and methodology), more and more dissertations claimed to involve multiple methods of inquiry. David Laitin (1998) began to use and advocate a triumvirate of methodologiesrational choice, narrative, and manipulation of quantitative dataas the path to theory building. Robert Bates et. al (1998) began an effort to combine rational choice and narrative. Badredine Arfi (2005) called for the combination of insights from literary criticism with computer-aided fuzzy logic. The list goes on. Only in the American politics subfield was intellectual ferment about

The Perestroika listserv, once active with a variety of calls for institutional reform and academic papers justifying or legitimating such change, has become decidedly inactive since 2003 or so. See also Hochschild (2005) on the creation of a new APSA journal, Perspectives on Politicsone example of the mainstreaming of critics ideas for reform. 2 This point is illustrated in Grant (2005). 3 David Laitin, for example, has argued that ethnography and rational choice play complementary roles in the logic of discovery (2006: 27), even as he sounds a note of caution about the chance for success that each method enjoys (2006: fn1, 33).

methods and methodologies minimal (Bennett, Barth, and Rutherford 2003).4 This subfield aside, it had become unpopular to be associated with one method of inquiry. Nothing better captures this normative sea-change than the ascendant view of research methods as tools in a toolbox. The implication was that the capable researcherwho would necessarily be equally trained in Bayesian statistics, participant observation, interview techniques, discourse analysis, and so onwould simply reach for the tool appropriate for her current research problem. And, while some simple household chores could be completed with the aid of a single implement, most complex tasks would require the use of a variety of tools. In this paper, I accept the value of the toolbox metaphor but attempt to define its limits. To be clear at the outset: this is not an attempt to diminish multiple-methods or problem-driven research. The disciplinary developments on these fronts represent distinct improvements in how political science tackles its research; they are symbolic of crucial changes to inquiry about political life. This is, however, an attempt to recognize the practical and intellectual incommensurabilities that necessarily rear their heads. Ultimately, to recognize the limitations of the metaphor is to find ways to build a more eclectic, problem-driven discipline.5 I explore these limitations by considering ethnographys place in academic political science. By ethnography, I mean approaches that rely centrally on person-toperson contact as a way to elicit insider perspectives and meanings. (This definition is at some odds with common uses of the term in both anthropology and political science, as I address below.) I argue, along with proponents of the toolbox metaphor, that ethnographic approaches may be combined usefully with other methods. But, I argue that there are limits, some of which are practical. For example, becoming trained in and employing any research method takes time and involves sunk costs. As a result, it becomes difficult to combine methods that lack core similarities. Other limits are epistemological. The claims to knowledge embedded in ethnography can be reconciled easily with some methods, less easily with other methods.
The methodological critiques of those in subfields of public policy (Yanow 1996; Schram 2004; Soss 2000: 17-25) and political behavior (Cramer-Walsh 2004) did not appear fundamentally to change how most Americanists pursued their research. 5 I discuss the important difference between practices at the level of individual researchers and those at the level of the discipline in the conclusion.
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Recent multiple-methods work by Ashutosh Varshney illustrates the challenges. None of this should suggest insuperable obstacles, but it should counsel realism about the possibilities for multiple-methods research. In the conclusion, I suggest that while some researchers may successfully combine methods in their individual research projects, eclecticism in methods and methodology at the discipline-wide level is a more productive goal. This implies that ethnographys contribution to political research may be more pronounced when ethnographic work stands alone, rather than when it is used in direct combination with other methods in a single, discrete research project.

The Toolbox Metaphor and Legitimacy Scholars who criticized the hegemony of quantitative methods used a variety of strategies to legitimate their work in the face of what they perceived to be a hostile professional environment. Some argued that ascendant approaches (largely rational choice and statistics) privilege the study of quantifiable phenomena, thereby leaving aside important phenomena that do not lend themselves to quantification (Kasza 2002; Schatz and Schatz 2003). Others argued that commonly used quantitative approaches can easily misleadeither because they underemphasize the path-dependency that characterizes the development of human communities (Pierson 2004) or because they make problematic assumptions about the homogeneity of variables (Ragin 2000; Schram 2004). The deploying of the toolbox metaphor was another of these strategies (Bayard de Volo and Schatz 2004; Anderson 2005). If a method was a tool in a toolbox, each was suited to address different questions about political life. A problem-driven researcher (far more desirable than her/his methods-driven counterpart) would reach for the tool/s that were best suited to addressing the topic at hand. The metaphor elegantly suggested that research topic be privileged over research method and nicely tapped into a variety of other calls for disciplinary reform (Shapiro 2005). Much of the professional value of the toolbox metaphor consisted of its ability to legitimate non-ascendant methods as equal to ascendant methods. And it suggested that those laboring in the hegemonic tradition need not fear. The metaphor did not recommend replacing quantitative-methods hegemony with qualitative-methods

hegemony; it was not a call to the barricades. Rather, the toolbox suggested that the disciplines major stakeholders could embrace the eclecticism and methodological pluralism that would result from the critics version of reform. As a legitimating strategy, the toolbox metaphor served a valuable purpose. As an injunction for the shape of research within the discipline, however, the toolbox metaphor had and continues to have crucial shortcomings. These shortcomings boil down to this: a research method is not a tool in the sense that the metaphor suggest. The extended example of ethnography used in political research makes the point. The first section below describes the foundations of ethnography in political analysis. The second examines the trade-offs involved in choosing to become an ethnographer (rather than another type of researcher) or to use ethnographic approaches (rather than other approaches). The third examines the transformation of ethnography when it is used in the context of multiple-methods research. The final section argues that an ethnographic shift in research methodologies may be more appropriate than designing multiple-methods research.

Foundations of Ethnography It is worth pausing to ask, What is ethnography?6 Ethnography is sometimes mistakenly conflated with the whole range of qualitative methods. Even those who treat the subject at length sometimes introduce slippage. For example, at the end of a booklength treatment of the subject, Hammersley (1992) equates ethnography with a casestudy. Woodruff (2006: 13), to take another example, suggests that ethnography is the interpretation of meaningful action.7 To the extent that one likens ethnography to the case study, discourse analysis, metaphor analysis, and archival work, one is at best making a claim about family resemblances. A more common gloss on ethnography links it to participant observation.8 In participant observation, the researcher seeks to develop verstehen (Weber 1949) based on
Harold Orlans, in an insightful posting on the Interpretation and Methods Listserv from 21 April 2006, suggests that the essence of ethnographic research is constantly changing by those claiming to conduct it. I acknowledge this concern but can only flag it here. 7 Woodruffs definition downplays those many aspects of culture and meaning that could have latent, potential, or indirect effects on behavior. 8 Bayard de Volo and Schatz (2004), for example, largely emphasize this link.
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direct observations gleaned from partaking in subjects everyday realities. This use of the term implies that only such observation helps to reconstruct insider viewpoints, overlooking the possibility that strategies other than participant observation may in some cases be useful and appropriate. Schatzberg (2001), to whom I return below, is one example of an author who gleans insider perspectives through documentary sources rather than through participant observation. Even cultural anthropologists, for whom ethnography is the defining feature of scholarly inquiry, face a dizzying array of uses for the term. Broad definitions often result. Fetterman (1989: 11) suggests that ethnography is the art and science of describing a group or culture, a definition that presupposes a priori understandings of group and culture. Over the years, this has proved deeply problematic, as even seemingly pristine and isolated tribes are, upon further examination, revealed to be less than discrete. As Edmund Leach once argued, [T]he ethnographer has often only managed to discern the existence of a tribe because he took it as axiomatic that this kind of cultural entity must exist.9 To describe a group can be no more than to impose a categorical groupness that the researcher takes for granted. The same can be said for how culture is treated in political science; it is usually reified, naturalized, rarely problematized, and leaves little room for individual agency (Wedeen 2002). Indeed, because of a commitment to studying groups and cultures but a simultaneous self-consciousness about doing so, todays cultural anthropologywhile retaining ethnography at its coresimultaneously questions it. Recent discussions of reflexivity that address the researchers role in the production of knowledge (e.g., Davies 1999),10 and multi-sited approaches that seek to link the local to the regional and global (Marcus 1998; Comaroff and Comaroff 2003) underscore the central but ambiguous place of ethnography in contemporary anthropology. I prefer to define ethnography as an approach that relies centrally on person-toperson contact as a way to elicit insider perspectives and meanings. This definition implies that ehnography involves both a process and an end-goal. The process includes a
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Leach, cited with emphasis added, in Tapper (1983: 51) A Russian joke captures the impact of the ethnographer on his research setting: Q: What is the traditional social structure of the Chukchi [a northern Siberian indigenous group]? A: a mother, father, grandparents, eight children, and an anthropologist.

practical reliance on person-to-person interaction (as opposed to work with paper documents, electronic files, computer manipulations, or cultural artifacts). This close contact with other human beings may entail some combination of participant observation, non-participant observation, certain types of interviews (Spradley 1979), and focus groups, among other methods. Ethnography consists of a cluster of methods, rather than a single one.11 The end-goal of this person-to-person contact is to discover emic (i.e., insider) perspectives and meanings. The range of emic perspectives discovered is, of course, merely a fraction of the complexities of any human community. Nonetheless, the variety of motivations, self-understandings, and contextual variables that become apparent through ethnography may frustrate the researcher interested in generating analytic coherence. Thusat various points between the outset of research and reporting the resultsthe researcher necessarily brings analytic categories to bear as s/he makes sense of these emic perspectives. But, in the process of this sense-making, the ethnographer is far likelier to seize upon indigenous categories than to employ categories derived from alien contexts (Schatzberg 2001; Pouliot 2006). Ethnographies are commonly held to champion the disempowered and the dispossessed. Because ethnography pays attention to, and takes seriously, the predicaments of ordinary people, it is often regarded as an agent of social change on their behalf. It is thus no accident that ethnographic methods are often combined with progressive social agendas, such as that offered by Shdaimah, Stahl, and Schram (2006). But this is only one possibility among many. Ethnographers and ethnographic knowledge were part and parcel of the European colonial enterprise (Said 1979).12 To this day, states may employ ethnographers to discover (often construct) traditions that serve to legitimate an elites authority.13 Moreover, large corporations now employ researchers who use ethnographic techniques to learn the behavior of ordinary peopleas a way to improve marketing appeals.14
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This makes ethnography closer to an epistemology or a methodology, rather than a research method, narrowly defined. 12 See also Hirsch (2005) on ethnographic knowledge in the construction of the Soviet state-empire. 13 For one example from post-Soviet Kazakhstan, see Schatz (2004). 14 Thanks to comments by Dorian Warren and Dvora Yanow on the Interpretation and Methods Listserv for revealing this interesting development.

Sunk Costs and Truthful Consciousness Given the above understanding of ethnography, how can we locate its use within political science research? I will argue that to be a political ethnographer (my short-hand for the scholar who uses ethnography to address political questions) means to engage in at least two major trade-offs, which I detail below. What ultimately distinguishes the political ethnographer is the assumption that individual testimony is valuable. In his characteristically wry fashion, Ernest Gellner (1983: 37) once commented that false consciousness is not the universal human condition, it is merely a common one. But how common is it? Under what conditions should the researcher expect an individuals testimony about his/her social or political situation to yield important information, and under what conditions might such testimony mislead? This is ultimately an empirical question, but the political ethnographer begins with the assumption that such testimony is worth mining for its truth-value. This assumption derives from the ethnographers approach to two trade-offs. The first is practical. The typical political ethnographer must learn the complexities of a contextthe language, the cultural assumptions, and the historyeven before beginning first-hand research. While non-ethnographers may also learn languages, cultures, and histories to a degree, the ethnographer often faces particularly significant time commitments that as a practical matter preclude or at least postpone the development of other analytic skills. This trade-off is the normal stuff of professional development, and some mixture of personal inclination, happenstance, and formal training creates a political ethnographer rather than, say, a statistician. This practical trade-off does not end when entering the research context (i.e., the field). The researcher usually invests months if not years developing relationships of trust with research subjects and refining her/his knowledge of the research context. This is justified by a related trade-off: ethnographers are often interested in the particular rather than the general, in internal rather than external validity, and in the agent-

centered rather than the structural.15 Given this practical investment of time and energy, most scholars build entire careers on their graduate school training.16 This leads to the second trade-off. Most generically put: to develop research skills is also to create sunk intellectual costs. In other words, a particular research style can be habit-forming. Few scholars move effortlessly between the rigors of post-modernism and those of positivist social science; the logics, styles of inquiry, requirements, meanings, and rewards vary too widely. Moreover, rarely do benefits accrue to the individual researcher for cross-methodological work; in this sense, habits that develop early in ones professional career tend to have considerable staying power. The ethnographers suspicion that person-to-person research conducted at closerange will generate important information about politics may be quickly challenged by the statistician, who might insist that descriptive information from an informant without a sense of that informants representativeness and the validity of his/her account is not worth the (considerable) effort.17 The political ethnographers response is three-fold. First, s/he is less concerned with representativeness than with identifying processes. Second, claims to representativeness (or accusations of non-representativeness) are predicated upon pre-determined categoriescategories that more often than not are the constructions of a usually-alien researcher. As Fenno (1990: 59) puts in his political ethnography of US Congressional representatives, If I had been certain about what types of representatives and what types of districts to sample, I would already have had answers to a lot of the questions raised in this book. Finally, the ethnographer has a variety of micro-level strategies of triangulation which enable her both to know how an individuals subjective position maps onto larger social and political landscapes and to discover the degree of validity in any individual account. She hardly flies blind.18

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In the conclusion I suggest that ethnography as attention to insider meanings need not be particular, agent-centric, or averse to generalization. 16 David Laitin is among the exceptions, having changed geographic (from Africa to the ex-USSR) and methodological (from ethnography and narrative to greater emphasis on game theory and statistics) focus. See Qualitative Methods (2006). 17 Public-opinion research based on face-to-face interviews is a possible exception here, but the requirements of aggregating numerical data severely limit the type of person-to-person research that can be conducted. 18 On the related questions of validity and generalizability, see Hammersley (1992).

Unlike the ethnographer, the statistician believes strongly in cumulative knowledge, in the homogeneity of categories, and in the possibilities for generalization of epistemic knowledge. S/he lacks faith in the veracity of individual-level accounts of political reality, and is likely to dismiss individual accounts as biased, unrepresentative, simply misinformed, orin the crude language of statisticsnoise. Ultimately, the political ethnographer assumes that (unless proven otherwise) his/her informant offers a truthful picture of his/her own reality, while the non-ethnographer assumes (unless proven otherwise) that such informants are likely to mislead, through some combination of false consciousness and unrepresentativeness.19 When faced with an inconsistency between statistical and ethnographic data, the ethnographer finds fault with the quantitative indicators, with the source of the data, or with the mathematical or categorical assumptions made to manipulate the data. The statistician faced with the same inconsistency, by contrast, criticizes the biased sample and the subjective nature of observational data. Add to the mix institutional considerationshiring choices, tenure decisions, peer reviews, and the likeand even seemingly small decisions create a significant rift between those laboring in the ethnographic tradition and those doing other kinds of work.

Two Types of Political Ethnographer One way to understand ethnographys position is to consider Aristotles distinction between phronesis (grounded knowledge) and episteme (abstract knowledge). Most ethnographers would agree with Flyvbjerg (2001), who argues that while both phronesis and episteme are valuable, social sciences great strength lies in the former rather than the latter. That is, they find much value in producing contextualized, rather than decontextualized knowledge.20
It is theoretically possible to imagine splitting the difference. An individual could be described as being in some ways representative of a particular group. His/her testimony can be described as an accurate reflection of some political or social reality. Here, Ragin (2000) is correct to probe the possibilities for thinking of data as partially in and partially out of a variety of categories. One need not view the world in binarieseither the data is accurate or it is false. All data have some truth-value. But, social scientists make decisions. To describe the partial truth-value of a piece of ethnographic data is to exclude a discussion of other data. At some point, the ethnographer privileges ethnographic data, while the statistician privileges quantitative data. 20 For a debate on the applicability of Flyvbjergs distinction to political science, see Schram (2004) and Laitin (2003).
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While equating the ethnographer with phronetic research is a useful first cut, it may be simplistic. Is the political ethnographer uninterested in abstract theorizing, in developing generalizations, and in speaking across cases? Rarely so. Most political ethnographers are not wedded to an endlessly and irreducibly complex local reality. What distinguishes the political ethnographer is resistance not to generalization per se but to rushing prematurely to generalization. This caution against hasty abstract theorizing represents an unwillingness to dismiss individual voices as rooted in false consciousness and local context as mere noise.21 As noted above, the political ethnographer rather assumes that an individuals consciousness stands to be mined for its truth value. The fact that political ethnography is distinctive should not obscure its variety. This variety turns on how the ethnographer answers a simple question: is ethnography valuable in and of itself, or only to the extent that it serves broader research goals? Is ethnography intrinsically valuable? On one hand of a continuum is the intrinsic-value ethnographer. S/he maintains that the very use of ethnographic methods adds important value to the research endeavor. To conduct ethnographic research on human subjects is to grant legitimacy to their predicaments and concerns; to do so is necessarily to bypass top-down, often state-driven imperatives. To publish ethnographic work is to let the subject speak, giving voice to the powerless, subaltern, and understudied; it is therefore an inversion of the usual relationship between the researcher and the researched. In turn, letting the subject speak may have implications for policy. When welfare recipients, victims of shantytown violence, or women who have lost children in civil wars are allowed to speak for themselves, their predicaments are brought to light, where they otherwise would remain in shadow.22 The value of such research thus inheres in the combination of normative commitments and analytic insights. At the other end of the continuum is the extrinsic-value ethnographer. S/he believes that ethnography is valuable only to the extent that it serves an external purposetypically, that of generating epistemic knowledge about social or political life.
Todays statistician is less likely to declare a persons position false than to declare it an outlier. The normative judgment lying behind both sets of terminology is that attitudes approaching the mean are to be preferred. 22 On welfare recipients, see Soss (2000). On shantytown violence in Brazil, see Arias (2004). On mothers who lost children in Nicaragua, see Bayard de Volo (2001).
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The ethnographer here suggests that a theory without conceptual space for emic perspectives is a partial theory, at best. For examples, theories of why people mobilize, why religious and civic commitments clash or do not, and why ethnic groups do or do not engage in conflict must contend with knowledge about how people understand their own identities, roles, and preferences.23 Whereas the first type of ethnographer does not concern herself with a positivist drive to develop decontextualized laws governing social and political life, the latter type might strive for such generalizations but only if they save conceptual space for the role that emic perspectives play. The core epistemological-ontological commitments of the ethnographer, however, do not disappear, and even the extrinsic-value ethnographer returns to a central choice to privilege abstract knowledge or contextual knowledge.

Abstract Knowledge and Ethnography While the pursuit of abstract knowledge does not categorically preclude the types of things that ethnographers doespecially consider insider meaningssuch pursuits make it very difficult to do so. The extrinsic-value ethnographer is put in a bind that the intrinsic-value ethnographer escapes.24 I will suggest that the ethnographer who tries to pursue epistemic knowledge ends up in one of two places. Either s/he ignores these emic perspectives in pursuit of epistemic knowledge, or s/he ultimately privileges emic perspectives and therefore can offer only a corrective to abstract theorizing. I use topnotch research by Ashutosh Varshney and Jessica Allina-Pisano, respectively, to illustrate.

What Happens to Ethnography in Multiple-Methods Research Ethnographers, by their nature, are multiple-methods researchers. Participant observation is often at the core, but even participant observers are smart to consider relevant statistical, archival, experimental, and other data. But while the value of
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On culture and identity in social mobilization, see Swidler (1986). On civic and religious commitments in Senegal, see Villaln (1995). On ethnic conflict and peace, see Kaufman (2001). 24 The intrinsic-value ethnographer, for his part, must convince those without an inherent interest in the subject that his subject deserves attention. Even if one studies violence or povertyissues with a normative dimension that should speak for itselfit may still not be clear why a study of violence or poverty of one group deserves more attention than a similar study of another group.

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combining methods that share core epistemological-ontological commitments is clear, the utility of combining methods from very different research traditions has yet to be demonstrated. As an example of recent multiple-methods research illustrates, the valueadded from ethnographic work runs the risk of evaporating when combined with methods that lack core similarities. In this section, I examine work by Ashutosh Varshney. I argue that Varshneys use of ethnography is subsumed by his larger epistemologicalontological commitments.25 In other words, the type of targeted ethnography performed projects like Varshneys fundamentally transforms what it means to be an ethnographer. Ethnography is reduced from being both an end-goal (production of insider meanings) and a process (person-to-person contact) to simply the latter. Like David Laitin (1998), Varshney (2002) offers a serious attempt to harness the power of multiple-methods approaches. Varshney begins by asking a question: what produces interethnic peace in some Indian cities, while other Indian cities spiral into interethnic violence?26 Arguing that attention to the micro-level is required to tease out an answer, he uses ground-level techniques (principally interviews, though some oral histories, as well) among his methods to test an explanation for why ethnic violence became endemic in Aligarh, Hyderabad, and Ahmenabad, while it remained uncommon in Calicut, Lucknow, and Surat. Ultimately, he comes to the conclusion that certain types of civic engagement are likely to maintain peace among ethnic rivals, while other types are less likely to do so. This argument could easily travel to contexts far beyond the subcontinentsomething that makes it a first-rate book in comparative politics. His entire research design has rightfully been lauded for its willingness to attend to micro-political factors (King 2004), but it is worth asking what occurs to his groundlevel techniques in the course of research. On one hand, his targeted ethnography helps Varshney to distinguish between superficially similar cases and account for outcomes that otherwise would be paradoxical. It helps him to accomplish a process tracing that links his independent variables (types of civic engagement) and dependent variables (ethnic peace or violence). Without this, there would be an enormous empirical gap. Ground-level techniques here are in the service of the largely deductive logic of the

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For a similar argument about David Laitins work, see Hopf (2006). Ethnic is Varshneys preferred term for the divide between Hindus and Muslims in India.

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research; they are not used to pursue knowledge inductively. And, even if induction plays role in the actual accumulation of knowledge on a topic, presenting ones work as deductive has come to be the preferred rhetoric.27 On the other hand, several things occur to the subjects under study with such a targeted use of ground-level techniques.28 First, the studys focus begins narrow and remains narrow; he is interested what drives the production of inter-ethnic violence or the maintenance of inter-ethnic peace. He proceeds in the following way. First, he constructs an event-history dataset of violence in India that helps him to determine which cases he will use for ground-level study. Then he examines the secondary literature (archival records, newspaper and other periodical accounts) on these cases. Finally, he conducts his field research that involves human subjects (elite interviews, semi-structured interviews with a sample of ordinary people). Though in no way is Varshney insensitive to the tragedy that is ethnic conflict, once he has contact with his research subjects, they are essentially useful as founts of information to test his variables.29 Second, the subjects of the studywhen they appeardo so in a flattened way. Varshney claims that his sampling technique for interviewsusing illiteracy to guide the sampleallows him to hear the voices of the subaltern (20). But, while these voices may have informed Varshneys background thinking, they are scarcely heard in any direct way. Oral histories (as opposed to more structured interviews) are not cited individually (though they are cited as a groupe.g., fn10, 344; fn5, 352), and when evidence from interviews with ordinary people is used, what makes it to print are the responses to quantifiable (i.e., closed-ended) questions (e.g., 126-27). Nothing is wrong with this. Faced with an array of trade-offs, Varshney has made reasonable choices.30 Varshneys goal is clearly to contribute to knowledge about the production of ethnic conflict, as a way to have a say in its prevention. And this goal runs
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In a spirited defense of his own work, Laitin (2006: 31-2) contends that his central insight from his 1998 booknamely, that a new identity of Russian-speakers was emerging in ex-Soviet statescame directly from (inductive) fieldwork. If this is the case, then it is a puzzle why the book is couched in the rhetoric of a priori deductive theorizing. Laitin (personal communication) has pointed out that all social science involves both deduction and induction. This is surely true, but it says nothing about the role, sequencing, or proportions of inductive versus deductive thinking. On these latter issues, see Pouliot (2006). 28 My own work (Schatz 2004) is not at all immune from the shortcomings that I identify here. 29 Varshney might respond that testing such variables helps to tease out explanations that, ultimately, could guide conflict-prevention programs in the future. 30 See Varshney (2006) on basic trade-offs involved in the design and execution of any research project.

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up against the goal of letting individuals speak. Indeed, Varshney contrasts what he does to what an ethnographer does: [H]aving been trained as [a social scientist], I thought my comparative advantage lay in social science, not in constructing ethnographies or writing fiction (xiv).31 In this sort of multiple-methods research, however, insider meanings cannot be given adequate expression. To attend to insider meanings, Varshney would have had to do at least some of the following: a) let his subjects identify what being a Muslim or Hindu means, what violence and peace mean, and what civic engagement meansrather than positing these categories a priori; b) let his subjects identify reasons for ethnic conflict and accept these reasons asat least in some partvalid,32 and c) let his subjects identify the conditions under which ethnic conflict is a salient topic and what related social facts his subjects associate with the topic. Whereas the outsider with a research agenda is understandably determined to elicit responses on a particular subject, ordinary people typically have a complex array of associations and considerations. These associations and considerations are the normal stuff of everyday life, no matter the analytic parsimony the researcher seeks. When I described Varshneys book to my (educated, non-specialist) neighbors in Toronto who are originally from the Calicut region, they responded by insisting that most people actually do not think about ethnic violence or peace; they are more concerned with getting their next meal. The contours of an ethnography need not be dictated by the subjects point of reference, but they ought to carve out space for it. A purer ethnographic account would give pride of place to emic perspectives, but when ethnography is subsumed by a very different logic, such an account is not possible. None of this should be construed as a call for ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967) in political science. While Varshney proposes, however, to steer a middle course between stylized facts and thick description (21), his is a causal story about independent and dependent variables. It is not a narrative about particular people in particular places at particular times. In the end, Varshneys commitment to causal social science determines
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The implication that ethnography is opposed to, rather than a type of, social science is one that might be questioned. 32 See Tilly (2006) for a thought-provoking examination of how and why people give the reasons and explanations that they do.

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how he uses ground-level techniques. If the first ingredient for ethnography (person-toperson contact) enters the stew, the second (attention to emic perspectives) does not. I have defined ethnography as involving a process and an end-goal. When ethnography is combined with other methods, the proportions of process and end-goal change dramatically. In the Varshney case, ethnography is reduced to ground-level datagathering techniques; the goal of explicating insider meanings practically disappears. When well executed, such research adds empirical flesh to theoretical relationships and may offer opportunities to perform process tracing in empirical situations. But the limits are also clear: larger epistemological-ontological commitments subsume ethnography. Typically, such commitments hold little space for attention to insider meanings.33 Varshneys theory of ethnic peace/conflict is an important contribution to the literature, but it holds preciously little room for the human beings who dot his analytic landscape.

Ethnography as Corrective If Varshney is ultimately not a political ethnographer, Jessica Allina-Pisano is. Allina-Pisanos (2004) ethnography is of the extrinsic-value type; she attends to groundlevel realities and insider meanings as a way to engage epistemic knowledge. More specifically, she uses ethnography to call into question a widespread theory about postSoviet economic transitions. Based on ground-level familiarity with agricultural reform in post-Soviet Ukraine, fluency in the regions languages, and carefully cultivated trust of her informants, AllinaPisano demonstrates that local authorities resisted neo-liberal economic reforms for reasons that an ungrounded theoretical literature overlooks. They were not seeking rents or intentionally thwarting market-based reforms for political reasons; rather, they sought to protect Soviet-era rural institutions which served as socioeconomic anchors for their communities, providing employment, social services, inputs for household production, and food for urban populations (557).

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Multiple-methods research conducted in a disciplinary climate where attention to causal theory-building is the overriding priority means that ethnographyunless it stands alone, a point to which I return lateris overwhelmed by positivist commitments.

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This conclusion has enormous implications for how we think about postcommunism. It implies that market-oriented reforms, to be successful, require attention to both local leaders and ordinary people. It suggests a different way of thinking about the value-rationality of post-communist elites. That they are self-serving, even corrupt, individuals is one possibility; Allina-Pisanos work suggests quite different ones. In the end, her willingness to embark on grounded, ethnographic study allows us to turn received theorizing about post-communist economic reform on its head and open a window for developing related research projects. But, like all extrinsic-value ethnographers, Allina-Pisano is in a bind. Her commitment to abstract theorizing rubs up against her commitment to grounded empirical work, and the ethnographer will privilege the latter. Thus, when interviewing local elites, Allina-Pisano accepts the veracity of statements made by former collective farm heads, who claimed to have the best interest of their local communities at heart. The statistician, by contrast, would be far likelier to assume false consciousness or its strategic cousin, outright deceit, on the part of the farm head. These fine choices about how to interpret individual testimony are often made at the margins, but they have a profound impact on the reported results of research andmore to the pointon how research is designed and executed in the first place. The political ethnographer can usefully call into question existing epistemic knowledge, and thisas the Allina-Pisano case illustratesis a valuable service. But to question existing epistemic knowledge is not to develop new epistemic knowledge. Indeed, the logic of extrinsic-value ethnographic work requires that any cross-contextual generalization be based on data derived from ethnographic work conducted on other particular contexts. Unless and until entire armies of political ethnographers conduct well coordinated research across a variety of contexts, the prospects for such decontextualized, ethnographic theorizing would appear distant, at best. The extrinsic-value ethnographer also knows that her research cannot be replicated sensu stricto. She has conducted unique conversations and, while the transcripts of those conversations or the fieldnotes of the ethnographer could be read, the very questions asked (rather than those not asked!) by the ethnographer have an effect on the course of the conversation. What specific effect they have is an empirical question,

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but it certainly complicates efforts at comparison across cases; no two ethnographers conducting face-to-face research are able to institute even the quasi-experimental controls required by scientific orthodoxy.34 Ground-level work like Allina-Pisanos performs a crucial function: it keeps those bend on abstract, decontextualized theorizing in check. It forces them to consider alternative renderings of empirical reality. It asks them to interrogate assumed causal relationships. It raises the possibility that ascendant knowledge can be based on specious conclusions. Such work potentially generates new directions for decontextualized research. It is thus crucialin my viewthat such research remain prominent among the things that social scientists do. But while crucial, ethnography as a corrective is a self-limiting project. How will future decontextualized theorizing on post-communist economic transitions proceed? Even with such an important corrective as Allina-Pisanos, it probably will not attend to emic perspectives. Put most bluntly, subsequent epistemic theorists will likely amend their coding of the Ukrainian case, but they are unlikely to change the factors routinely considered in the course of a typical research day. The difficulty of reconciling large-N and ethnographic work always seems to rear its head.

Conclusion: A Call for Ethnography as an End-Goal The toolbox metaphor has performed a valuable legitimating function for nonascendant methods and their practitioners in political research. The problem with the metaphor, however, is that it wrongly implies that multiple-methods research is necessarily preferable to other kinds of research. The example of ethnography shows that an approach can be fundamentally transformed and its value reduced (rather than added), when combined with other approaches. In such cases, ethnography runs the risk of becoming merely a process of face-to-face research, rather than also being an end-goal of exposing insider meanings. This implies a need to advance what I have called intrinsic-value ethnography. I imagine an academic political science that has space for a variety of ethnographic (not to

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See Heider (1988) on how to think about reconciling divergent ethnographic accounts of the same context.

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mention non-ethnographic) approachesboth intrinsic-value and extrinsic-value. This is a call for an ethnographic shift at the discipline-wide level, as a way to counter what Schram (2004: 417) calls a scientistic drift. This shift would not reduce ethnography to face-to-face data-gathering; rather, it would centrally consider emic perspectiveseven if this means disengaging from the logic of causality-oriented social science. After all, as Dvora Yanow suggests, ethnography is a sensibility35 more than a method. Advancing intrinsic-value ethnography is important not only for those who are already doing this sort of work; it is crucial even for non-ethnographers. We know that emic perspectives are a crucial part of human communities, and social and political processes, but we also know that the central preoccupation with causal theorizing makes it difficult to consider insider meanings. Put most crudely, given the difficulty of plugging emic perspectives into a regression equation, one must either ignore them entirely or create a space for research that attends to them. In this regard, while multiple-methods research may be useful at the level of the individual research project, a discipline-wide eclecticism is preferable (Herrera 2006a). Such eclecticism would preserve a space for stand-alone ethnographic work.36 Ethnography should not be the single goal of political science research, but it should be among the goals of political science research.37 And we have successful examples of ethnographic work that puts person-toperson contact into the background but nonetheless considers insider perspectives. Schatzberg (2001), for example, uses a variety of documentary sourcesespecially a close and systematic reading of local newspapersto offer a general characterization of political culture across a broad swath of sub-Saharan Africa. His is a consummate ethnography, to the extent that it is a book about how and why people view authority as legitimate. But it is ethnography as an end-goal rather than a process, since person-toperson contact is not the central research method.38 Likewise, if we view ethnography simply as a process, James C. Scotts Seeing Like a State (1998) does not qualify. But, if
35 36

Yanow, personal communication By stand-alone, I simply mean ethnography that is published separately from non-ethnography. 37 It is appropriate for some research to put insider meanings into the background. Most research in political economy, for example, would likely eschew insider meanings, even given central insights of work in this area that considers insider meanings (Herrera 2006b; Mwangi 2006). 38 While he relies largely on the close study of texts and symbols, his work is built upon decades-long contact with people from across the region.

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ethnography is the end-goal of locating emic perspectives, Scotts account is pure ethnography, describing the internal logic by which the modern state operates, as well as the excesses to which it can succumb. Both Scott and Schatzberg have an ethnographic sensibility, and both have built their studies on decades-long contact with ordinary people. Like their work, successful work on public rituals and symbolism (e.g., Edelman 1964; Aronoff 1993; Kubik 1994; Jourde 2005) is not derived ex nihilo from the symbolic realm; rather it constructed based on ground-level perspectives. As Aronoff (1993: 6) puts it, to study symbols requires the researchers observing and recording the usage of the symbols in the context of ongoing social relationships. The risk, of course, is that stand-alone, intrinsic-value ethnography could be marginalized by those in the discipline who do not believe that ethnographic work has inherent value. The risk is real, and it implies responsibilities. The ethnographer faces the responsibility to make her/his research both intelligible and relevant to the nonethnographer. S/he need not assume positivist logic or vocabulary, but s/he should be sure to address abiding questions about political and social life whose relevance are widely recognized. At the same time, the non-ethnographer faces the responsibility to read widely and to consider ways of using stand-alone ethnographic research to inform his/her (often positivist) studies of politics. Simultaneously, s/he must resist the temptation to view stand-alone ethnography as merely exploratory research, as simple hypothesisgeneration, and therefore as somehow inferior. Both the ethnographer and the non-ethnographer must find ways to read broadly across an eclectic and broad political science. Substantive and methodological specialization is desirable (Morrow 2003), but only if the discipline simultaneously encourages much boundary crossing (Drezner 2006). I sense that professional political scientists are up to the task.

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