The Limitations of a “Dirty” World

Abstract

Ethnography is a colonial enterprise. It sprouted its wings from nineteenth century travel diaries in which bold adventurers embarked on a perilous journey, straight into "the heart of darkness," and emerged to tell the tale. 1 Within these ethnographies, the idea of the "savage" helped constitute the notion of "civilization" that these adventurers took for granted (Trouillot 1991). Ultimately, in these fable-esque stories, the adventurer realizes that the exotic inhabitants are more similar to people in the West than different, and therefore argues that their culture should be seen as legitimate. This revelation, in turn, leads the adventurer to reflect upon his or her own society. Such is a prominent strand of ethnographic research in the traditional sense. But while notable nineteenth century ethnographers imagined themselves embarking on a journey to "discover" tribes and medicine men, some twentieth century ethnographers examined the "modern" world, focusing on latter-day "hobos" of the American city (Anderson 1923) instead of "primitive" tribes of the African hinterland. Today, twenty-first century scholars have tinkered further with these tropes in ways that redefine traditional approaches. In the wake of the critiques of ethnography delivered forcefully in the 1980s and 1990s by feminist and postcolonial scholars, urban ethnographers are frequently compelled to position their projects against antiquated tropes of the lone ethnographer, making his or her way amongst the "savages" (c.f.

Against Teleology in the Study of Race: Toward the Abolition of the Progress Paradigm

“…Urban ethnography frequently focuses on black and brown people and spaces as the research “problem.” The field often employs a classificatory typology maintaining distinctions of savagery and civilization. Comparing “decent” versus “street” (Anderson 1999) or “clean” versus “dirty” people (Goffman 2014) maps onto existing racial frameworks of ranked morality (Ralph 2015). The pressure to describe U.S. race relations as “nearly there” can also produce studies like Elijah Anderson’s (2010) recent book on changing patterns of racial interaction, which describes much of Philadelphia’s downtown as a “cosmopolitan canopy” where civility and harmony are now the norm.…”

Reproducing Inequality in Sociology

“…In a pattern all too familiar, the benefits of the knowledge produced by this episteme accrued to whites and shored up whiteness, and the costs were often born by those racialized and studied as racial objects (Washington ). In this context, ethnography arose as a colonial project (Ralph ) and social statistics were developed as part of eugenicist project aimed at proving non‐white intellectual inferiority (Zuberi ; Kendi ). In these ways, the very discipline we practice is rooted in hierarchy and racialism.…”

Relational Distance and Epistemic Generosity: The Power of Detachment in Skeptical Ethnography

“…As with all concepts, we must recognize the fuzzy boundaries of the term stranger, particularly as related to research in one's own society. Strangeness is not a discrete category, but a position on a set of multidimensional continua (Ralph 2015;Small 2015). Are urban ethnographers strangers?…”

“…The questioning, agnostic ("honest broker") approach once accorded primacy-notably by scholars of the Second Chicago School-is now seen as problematic, lacking the right vision for the right community (Ralph 2015). If one can never fully separate one's politics from one's analysis, one should challenge oneself to be seen as a scholar who refuses to put her values into service of a community but watches carefully and precisely from the side.…”