EMBRACING AN ETHNOGRAPHIC SENSIBILITY

When scholars adopt an ethnographic sensibility, they observe how people make sense of their world; they seek to “glean the meanings that the people under study attribute to their social and political reality” (Schatz Reference Schatz and Schatz2009, 5). The approach requires that scholars attend to how individuals’ perceptions of the world are embedded in their interactions with others, commit to understanding the work that language and other symbols do, and be open to incoherence and instability as part of explanatory frameworks.

An ethnographic sensibility informs the ways that political scientists study everything from civil-war violence (Wood Reference Wood2003) to the formation of public opinion (Walsh Reference Walsh2004) to compliance under authoritarian regimes (Wedeen Reference Wedeen1999). Scholars often explore these topics through ethnographic research rooted in participant observation. However, despite dominant assumptions in the field, the embrace of an ethnographic sensibility need not be—and is not—limited to the domain of ethnographers. Neither does an ethnographic sensibility require the long-term immersion in field sites and participant-observation methods typical of anthropologists (Pader Reference Pader, Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2006; Schatz Reference Schatz and Schatz2009), although both may be beneficial. Scholars can develop understandings of the social processes through which people make sense of their world by close readings of archival material, examinations of contemporary texts, interviews, and even survey data—to name just a few methods. What matters most is how scholars approach the material gathered from these sources—that is, paying attention to the political meanings embedded in them. Moreover, the fact that various scholars with various sources can successfully approach their research with an ethnographic sensibility is precisely why we think the arguments made here are important for political scientists in general. When political scientists incorporate meaning into their arguments—including all of the ambiguity and contradictions that these processes entail—they can potentially offer new understandings of well-traveled terrain and encourage new lines of inquiry, as suggested by the following examples.

SHIFTING HOW WE THINK ABOUT COMPARISON

Approaching comparison through attention to meaning creates a mode of analysis that is useful for political science but would require rethinking the goals and objects of comparative research designs. Instead of approaching comparison with the goal of exerting control over variables, the comparative approach we propose entails incorporating the meaning-making practices at work in the cases. This attention would entail three core shifts in how we think about and use comparative methods. The shifts are relevant not only to research designs but also to how scholars formulate questions and collect and analyze data.

First, an ethnographic sensibility requires that we recognize the limitations of efforts to control for theoretically relevant variation (Sewell Reference Sewell2005, chap. 3; Yanow Reference Yanow, Engeli and Allison2014). These efforts create unnecessary analytical binds by requiring researchers to make assumptions: first, about what might be theoretically relevant; second, that they can see and measure everything of theoretical relevance; third, that the same empirical phenomena work in the same way in different times and places; and, fourth, that these phenomena are independent of one another. ^{Footnote 1} Furthermore, efforts to control through case selection can push scholars to put very different social and political practices into similar categories, thus creating the illusion of having “controlled” for a potentially relevant phenomenon. An interest in identifying similarities and differences among cases in an effort to enhance comparative analysis need not force scholars to ignore important contextual complexities. Scholars can and should go into the field and enter the archives with what they think might be relevant similarities and differences in mind. However, designing a research project so that potentially relevant factors could be dismissed through “control” would be inappropriate for scholars approaching their research with an ethnographic sensibility. “Control” would be perceived as foreclosing opportunities to understand how context-specific nuance might have important implications for the research question. Instead, they would want to understand and incorporate relevant meanings at work in the cases at hand by seeing a political phenomenon through the eyes of their informants, whether they are living human subjects or historical figures found in the archives.

For example, when we control for variables such as levels of ethnic self- identification to eliminate them as potential explanations, we assume that ethnicity does the same work across time and space or that it means the same thing in one place as in another. We also must assume that the meanings of ethnicity or the processes through which ethnic self-identification take place can be abstracted from the political and social context in which they exist. If we are conducting a controlled comparison, we take these similar abstracted “levels” of ethnic self-identification in two cases where outcomes differ and state with confidence that ethnic self-identification cannot explain the divergence. Yet, adopting an ethnographic sensibility suggests that we can claim no such thing. Ethnic self-identification may do different political work in the two cases because ethnicity might mean something different to actors on the ground—even if the “level” of identification is the same—and thus could still play a role in shaping the political dynamics at work in both cases. ^{Footnote 2}

Because the contexts in which people identify with various ethnic categories may play an important role in the political phenomenon under study, categorizing all instances of self-identification as the same encourages scholars to create general categories that obscure important differences. In her discussion of scholarship on Islamist politics, for instance, Schwedler (Reference Schwedler2015) found that this inclination to create group categories limits our understanding of political practices; the application of an ethnographic sensibility would minimize these tendencies. ^{Footnote 3} Finally, ethnicity should not be conceived as independent from the political systems in which it is produced, which suggests that “ethnic self-identification” and “system of government” cannot be treated as separate independent variables (Laitin Reference Laitin1986; Wedeen Reference Wedeen2008). Bringing an ethnographic sensibility to these types of studies would encourage us to incorporate the complexities of seemingly obvious categories into the comparisons. Of course, much of the most highly regarded work in the qualitative-comparative tradition already demonstrates a commitment to context. ^{Footnote 4} However, comparison with an ethnographic sensibility does more than simply bring context into comparison; it allows us to compare the ambiguous and shifting meanings at work in the political worlds under study. Through explicit attention to meaning-making practices such as the political language people use, the symbols they deploy, and the rituals in which they participate (to name only a few), comparison with an ethnographic sensibility adds unique analytic leverage to even the most context-attentive studies.

This explicit incorporation of meaning into our comparative research designs is the second core shift that we describe. When case-study comparisons require scholars to live and work in particular field sites, they often cannot help but observe what political practices mean in particular contexts. As a result, attention to meaning may be implicitly incorporated into their analysis of even the most positivist accounts of political behavior. However, positivist comparative practices do not require that scholars do so and, in some cases, the assumptions on which these studies are based produce “objects of inquiry that are incommensurable with interpretivist social science” (Wedeen Reference Wedeen2002, 717). The effect is that more often than not, at both the design and analysis stages, scholars categorize political phenomena while ignoring the meanings that words or practices take on and how those meanings shape politics.

By paying attention to how the people we study—whether they are research participants, figures who appear in archival materials, or authors of texts—understand their world, an ethnographic sensibility adds depth to our understanding of politics beyond the incorporation of context. Ethnographers ask questions about what that context means and how it shapes actors’ understandings of their world. Scholars using the comparative method with an ethnographic sensibility would not control for levels of indigenous self-identification because the method itself requires an investigation of what those social “facts” mean to political actors on the ground and the roles those meanings play in shaping social processes. This form of comparison does not take for granted the relevance of a particular variable (how could we possibly meet the requirement of Mills’s method of agreement that we know before we conduct a study what the relevant variables are?) but rather inductively problematizes both its role and meaning in context. By explicitly calling on scholars to compare the work that meanings do in apparently different times and places, bringing an ethnographic sensibility to comparison offers a way out of the analytical binds created through the illusion of “control.”

Applying an ethnographic sensibility to comparative research radically alters the objects and goals of comparison—the third core shift for which we advocate. Where political scientists typically compare similar or dissimilar outcomes, ethnographically oriented comparison highlights political processes—that is, the dynamics and practices that shape political life—as the proverbial outcome of interest. By advocating for attention to meaning making, we encourage scholars to understand political phenomena as constantly evolving. The objects of a social scientist’s inquiry are never fixed, frozen, or static; therefore, they need to be understood through the lens of political processes. This suggests a move away from the language of variables to one that allows scholars to incorporate fluid and potentially contradictory political processes into their analyses.

In sum, by bringing an ethnographic sensibility to comparison, scholars can rethink what comparison means and the types of insights it can produce. They can engage critically with what attempts to control for alternative explanations can actually reveal about political processes, encourage a focus on the political effects of practices as opposed to outcomes, and allow fieldwork and archival research to define the relevant points of comparison. Adopting this approach also would help scholars refine theoretical models and challenge taken-for-granted conceptual categories. The remainder of the article discusses an example of recent research that incorporates meaning into the research design and analysis in ways that demonstrate how an ethnographic sensibility may be applied to comparative research.

THE POLITICAL PROCESSES OF MAKING MEANING

In Ethnic Boundary Making, Wimmer (Reference Wimmer2013) asks how ethnic boundaries are made—a crucial question to answer because ethnic boundaries structure public debate, political loyalty, and the allocation of resources in numerous states across the globe. In a broad theoretical text that draws on interview and case comparisons from Switzerland and the United States, as well as survey data derived from 24 European countries, Wimmer argues that ethnic boundaries are neither infinitely transformable nor an automatic response to institutional categories, as different bodies of scholarly literature suggest. Writing in the tradition of Barth (Reference Barth1969) and Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1977), he provides a process-oriented account of ethnic boundary making to show how ethnic categories are social creations yet have remarkable structuring power for social interaction. The result is an excellent example of how researchers can take the process through which a given outcome is produced as the object of inquiry (in this case, the actual making of ethnic boundaries) rather than explaining a given outcome. In doing so, Wimmer implicitly adopts an ethnographic sensibility because contests over the meaning of ethnicity are at the center of the account.

Ethnic boundaries, it turns out, are created by strategic struggles defining who is inside and outside of a group. The meanings attached to ethnic boundaries (along with the emotions and resources that accompany ethnic belonging) are products of individual actions and subsequently define the actions that individuals take relative to ethnic belonging. This argument has crucial political and theoretical consequences. In particular, outcomes that appear to be products of ethnic differentiation—for example, the clustering of immigrants of a given ethnicity in certain occupations—may actually be products of other political processes, such as strategic action to secure employment in a competitive labor market, rather than preexisting ethnic similarity. Therefore, the political meanings of ethnicity may not have ethnic sources but may be the result of strategic actions by individuals solving practical problems.

We highlight Wimmer’s comparison of ethnic boundary making in three Swiss cities and show how adopting an ethnographic sensibility in conducting comparison—even if implicitly—enhanced his understandings of political processes. Focusing on social ties among residents of neighborhoods with high levels of in-migration in Basel, Bern, and Zurich, Wimmer and his team interviewed recent immigrants and long-term residents using a quota-sampling strategy (Wimmer Reference Wimmer2013, 114–16). What the researchers found about local social networks and the values attached to those networks is striking: the boundary most starkly drawn by interviewees in the neighborhood was not between immigrants and Swiss but rather between those who had lived in the neighborhood longer and those who were newcomers—even among those who shared “similar” cultural backgrounds (ibid., 123). Although “ethnic categories are taken for granted” by residents, they “tend to play the role of secondary classifications only” (ibid., 124).

Given that our theories of ethnic politics predict that ethnic boundaries would be primary, how might this be? Wimmer argues that we can understand the primacy of neighborhood tenure over ethnic filiation through attention to the symbolic fields structuring neighborly behavior—that is, the fields of meaning in which residents are enmeshed. Ethnicity straddles existing symbolic dimensions to which long-term neighborhood residents have comported themselves over time—most important, a set of ideals for “decent” public comportment. Keeping streets clean, maintaining ordered public spaces, and being quiet to avoid disturbing neighbors become values by which established residents identify “insiders,” even if they are of a different cultural background. Indeed, Swiss members of the alternative or punk scene who disregard these “petit bourgeois” values are perceived as outsiders (Wimmer Reference Wimmer2013, 117–18), as are second-generation youth who resist the strictures of elder propriety (ibid., 123). In discovering that public comportment becomes the primary mechanism by which neighborhood residents identify allies, rather than ethnic identity, Wimmer shows the importance of actors’ strategic action to align themselves within the existing symbolic field.

In other words, Wimmer brings an ethnographic sensibility to the question of immigrant incorporation by looking at the meanings of ethnicity and communal belonging that residents bring to their interactions, rather than assuming a priori that the experience of being an immigrant or having ethnic difference is the most important factor determining whether they are incorporated into Swiss society. Prioritizing meanings and the strategic interactions that they produce also leads Wimmer to take seriously the processes by which group belonging is constituted and contested. This attention to local meanings highlights how some immigrants are incorporated whereas others are not, with ethnicity surprisingly playing a secondary role in that process.