CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH

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© Lee Harvey 1990, 2011, 2014, 2018, 2019, 2023, 2024

Page updated 8 January, 2024

Citation reference: Harvey, L., [1990] 2011, Critical Social Research, available at qualityresearchinternational.com/csr, last updated 8 January, 2024, originally published in London by Unwin Hyman, all rights revert to author.

A novel of twists and surpises

5.8 Critical ethnography
Critical ethnography is a widely used technique in critical social research. The involvement and close attention to detail that characterises ethnography make it useful for rendering visible the invisible and for revealing anomalies and common-sense notions. A critical ethnography transforms the anomalies and taken-for-granted into contradictions and myths by situating them in broader social and historical analyses. Critical ethnography thus focuses on the way in which contradictions are negotiated and myths re-presented.

Critical ethnography differs from conventional or traditional ethnography in its attempt to link the detailed analysis of ethnography to wider social structures and systems of power relationships in order to get beneath the surface of oppressive structural relationships. In essence, critical ethnography attempts, in one way or another, to incorporate detailed ethnographic analysis directly into dialectical critique. For example, critical ethnographic study, in focusing on the way existing practices reproduce ideologies, reveals the way in which the subjects collude in, rather than engage, their own oppression.

Critical ethnography proceeds by raising substantive questions about structural relationships that the ethnographic study elaborates through actual practices. Like the critical case study, the detail of the ethnographic work is a resource in the deconstruction of social structures.[1] Critical ethnography makes use of the same data collection techniques as conventional ethnography (in-depth interviewing, participant observation) and is also reflexive. However, there is far less concern with 'neutrality' both in the interventionist role of the researcher and the presentation of a non-partisan perspective.

The intention is to go beyond the grasping of the subjects' meanings. Critical ethnography asks how these meanings relate to wider cultural and ideological forms. Critical ethnography involves keeping alert to structural factors whilst probing meanings. It involves seeing, for example, how cultural values impinge upon the being studied as Willis did in relating counter-school culture to working-class culture and Westwood did in relating shop-floor celebratory rituals to patriarchal notions of femininity.

Once again, the relationship between wider contexts and actual practices is not self-evident. It emerges as a result of a process of dialectical enquiry. The critical ethnographer works from two directions at once. In examining and sorting the ethnographic material the critical researcher engages the 'explanatory' frames through lateral thinking that call into question taken-for-granted presuppositions by proposing radical alternative analyses. Conventional 'pile building' (Bogdan & Taylor, 1975; Weis, 1985) of horizontally segmented field material (see Section 1.4) is a useful way of doing this if the segmentation process is guided by structural relations. The identification of pertinent structural relations requires a parallel analysis of the prevailing social, political and economic structure in which the detailed study is located.

These alternatives, grounded in empirical data, are guided by broader theoretical and conceptual analyses. In turn the emerging understanding of the nature of actual practices impinges on the guiding theoretical reconceptualisation. Totality and empirical detail constantly mediate one another in the emergence of a more perceptive understanding of the nature and operation of oppressive social structures. Assumptions about patriarchy are, for example, mediated by collusive practices. Engagement for marriage, as Westwood found out, is entered into by women knowing that it will adversely effect their social life, yet seeing it as a means to access an increased share of economic resources. In turn the nature of the practices, their legitimation, and the way they relate to broader mechanism's of oppression are more clearly revealed. Engagement prefigures female and male role stereotypes that consign women in marriage to a nurturing role.

Through ideological analysis, critical ethnography aims to reveal both contradictions and myths. Inconsistencies, for example, between what people do and what they say are transformed from anomalies to contradictions. What, for example, black community college students had to say about time-keeping and what they actually did was anomalous. It became an analytic contradiction, for Weis, once it was explained as the notion of 'white man's clock-time' within the culture of the Black urban ghetto. The students were paying lip-service to the white middle class meritocratic system whilst living in an everyday milieu that operated on a different sense of time.

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Notes

[1] There are similarities and overlap between critical case study and critical ethnography. However, critical ethnography clearly emphasises ethnographic techniques and forms of understanding that may or may not be the intention of the researcher using critical case study. The critical case study is also selected to best assess specific myths or contradictions. Unlike critical ethnography that approaches its subjects as typical of particular groups, as, for example, Willis did with his study of 'the lads', and as Westwood did in her study of women factory workers. return

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