The Uncontrollable Afterlives of Ethnography

Abstract

How does the work of ethnographers contribute to policies they did not anticipate, policies they may even abhor? This article explores the ways 19th-century Europeans who would never have considered themselves as policymakers or even policy wonks – writers, artists, missionaries, and ethnographers – influenced colonial ‘native policy’. The article focuses on the case of precolonial European representations of Polynesia (Samoa in particular), tracing the effects of these discourses on the foundational process of colonial state formation in German Samoa after 1900. German colonialism in China and Southwest Africa is also discussed. Both the form and the content of ethnographic discourse influenced colonial interventions, even if these effects were dependent on a contingent array of other determinants. The conclusion discusses various ways in which ethnographers can try to see that their writings are not enrolled into political projects to which they might object.

NASA Revisited: Theory, Analogy, and Public Sociology

“…Other individual cases of professional sociology that traveled into the policy domain, also not representative because they had high media visibility, attest to the obstacles involved (Coleman 1966(Coleman , 1975Wilson 1996;Becker et al 2004;Stacey 2004). Whether doing traditional or organic public sociology, we cannot assure that policy formation and implementation based upon our work is in keeping with the social analysis behind it (Steinmetz 2004;Wiles 2004;Beck 2005). Tittle (2004) warns that publics have interests they want affirmed, inhibiting the sociologist from pursuing evidence fully or contradicting the contentions of the group.…”

The Afterlife of “Teachers’ Beliefs”

“…Appadurai, 1986, p. 5 Discussions of writing in qualitative research usually treat a published text as a fixed object of analysis, an end point of the research that can be analyzed in terms of genre, voice, style, and strategy. The only aspects of its postpublication fate to receive much attention are the responses of the people described in it, and in the rare case media or governmental appropriations of it (e.g., Brettell, 1993;Foley et al, 1977;MacDonald, Adelman, Kushner, & Walker, 1982;Steinmetz, 2004;Vaughan, 2006;cf. Abbott, 2010;Willinsky, 2006).…”

Disentangling disciplines

“…30 Elsewhere in the same article Steinmetz misstates the point and nature of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, and then writes, 'Mead's effort to describe the core categories of a monolithic, stable Samoan culture bears an uncanny resemblance to the orientation of modern colonial regimes in their pursuit of cultural stabilization.' 31 Here we have a just-so story, magical thinking (uncanny), of the sort we have become used to in postmodern and postcolonial discourse: a study of adolescent girls and their sex lives is likened to a colonial plan for cultural stabilization. Critics have found much wrong with Mead's book, but hardly this.…”