Political Methodology Committee on Concepts and Methods Working Paper Series

18

December 2008

Seeing the Invisible, Hearing Silence, Thinking the Unthinkable The Advantages of Ethnographic Immersion

Michael G. Schatzberg

University of Wisconsin-Madison

(schatzberg@polisci.wisc.edu)

C&M The Committee on Concepts and Methods www.concepts-methods.org

IPSA International Political Science Association www.ipsa.org

CIDE Center for Economic Research and Teaching www.cide.edu

Editor

Andreas Schedler (CIDE, Mexico City)

Editorial Board

José Antonio Cheibub, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

David Collier, University of California, Berkeley

Michael Coppedge, University of Notre Dame

John Gerring, Boston 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 Oldenburg

James Mahoney, Brown University

Cas Mudde, University of Antwerp

Gerardo L. Munck, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Guillermo O’Donnell, University of Notre Dame

Frederic C. Schaffer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Ian Shapiro, Yale University

Kathleen Thelen, Northwestern University

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SEEING THE INVISIBLE, HEARING SILENCE, THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE:THE ADVANTAGES OF ETHNOGRAPHIC IMMERSION

Michael G. SchatzbergDepartment of Political Science

University of Wisconsin-Madison1050 Bascom Mall

Madison, WI 53706, USAschatzberg@polisci.wisc.edu

A previous version of this paper was presented at a workshop on “Political Ethnography:1

What Insider Perspectives Contribute to the Study of Power,” University of Toronto, Toronto,Canada, 27-28 October 2006. For a collection of these papers, see Schatz (forthcoming). I amgrateful to Edward Schatz and the other participants at the workshop, as well as to Jan Vansinaand Richard Merelman, for their critical comments and keen observations.

1

SEEING THE INVISIBLE, HEARING SILENCE, THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE:THE ADVANTAGES OF ETHNOGRAPHIC IMMERSION1

King, Keohane, and Verba (1994:109) posit as one of their rules for constructing

qualitative causal theories that we ought to maximize concreteness. To do this, they write, “We

should choose observable, rather than unobservable, concepts whenever possible.” They are,

however, quite wrong in this assertion. Much closer to the mark is the perspective of George and

Bennett who seem more comfortable with unobserved phenomena. For example, they define

causal mechanisms as “ultimately unobservable physical, social, or psychological processes

through which agents with causal capacities operate, but only in specific contexts or conditions,

to transfer energy, information, or matter to other entities” (George and Bennett 2004: 137).

Ethnographic immersion permits us to grasp certain concepts and causal mechanisms, as well as

perspectives and sentiments, that although invisible, are critical both for our understanding of

politics and the eventual construction of theories that transcend the trivial. It permits the

exploration and excavation of an ideational realm that is often obscured from view, but it

requires the active personal involvement and emotional engagement of researchers as they

attempt to discern it.

The result of successful ethnographic immersion is a sensibility and orientation that is not

discernable using variable logic or statistical reasoning. The emergence of this sensibility often

requires the active personal involvement and emotional engagement of researchers as they

2

interact with the people whom they choose to study and the diverse ancillary materials, written

and oral, that various research methods usually produce. Ethnographic immersion is a conscious

and purposive activity that may take many years, or even a lifetime. It is not a process for the

impatient, the faint of heart, or those shackled to an implacable tenure clock. It is a process that

often begins while doing ethnographic field research, but then continues as one interacts with

data, theory, and method in various other locales: at home, while teaching and writing, in the

library. Such ethnographic immersions are never concluded because there is always something

else one can learn about any particular group of individuals — even if one is working on one’s

own society and is thus not an outsider — at least in terms of nationality. For this reason, and

because ethnographic immersion is never easy and one frequently makes mistakes, humility and

an ability to chuckle at one’s own errors are useful methodological tools.

If we seek to understand the wellsprings of political behavior and activity in any society

we need an appreciation of what makes people tick. We need to understand not only the cultural

categories and rules of a given society which may or may not be made explicit, but also the often

unarticulated and usually inchoate notions, attitudes, ideas, and perceptions, that simply go

unquestioned because they usually pass for part of that body of localized and indigenous

knowledge that “everybody knows.” This is the realm of the subjacent. And because such things

are usually not worth mentioning, no one does. They are sometimes seen as “common sense” or

simply not worthy of comment, explanation, or analysis because these are the things that we all

take for granted. Ethnographic immersion is a means of accessing, to the extent possible, this

subjacent domain of internal knowledge and perspectives so as to understand better what

encourages people to behave politically in the myriad ways that they do.

3

The subjacent realm contains a vibrant store of knowledge, assumptions, ideas, and

presuppositions that have a real impact on politics. Ethnographic immersion is one of the most

effective means of beginning a search for this realm of subjacent politics because it is also one of

the few methodological orientations that even fosters an awareness of this hidden domain that

houses the unstated assumptions that shape politics and political life in so many ways. This is

not a domain in which King, Keohane, and Verba will be of much use as a methodological guide

because they are blind to these hidden dimensions of politics and thus ignore much of what

qualitative research actually offers to political research, analysis, and theory.

Although ethnographic immersion is compatible with several standard methods that are

widely used by political ethnographers and others, let me suggest that such methods (e.g., field

research, interviews, focus groups, participant observation, archival materials, and Foucaultian

excavations of discursive formations) are in and of themselves are insufficient to explore the

subjacent dimension of political life. Instead, in various combinations, they need to be deployed

consciously to accomplish three interrelated tasks that should constitute the three core tasks of

ethnographic immersion. Simply put, we must see the invisible, hear silence, and think the

unthinkable. The remainder of this paper will examine each in turn, although not at equal length.

SEEING THE INVISIBLE

“Seeing the invisible” is a phrase of a distinguished anthropologist of village China, Fei

Xiaotong, that I encountered in Friedman’s (2006:371) engaging account of the difficulties of

doing field research in a Leninist authoritarian state. Fei (and initially Friedman) intended the

phrase to mean the adoption of an historical perspective that would permit one to visualize things

4

For the published account of this fieldwork, see Schatzberg (1980). For the sake of2

consistency, however, I shall use the current name of the country throughout.

Field Log, Lisala, 11 February 1975, 39.3

Field Log, Lisala, 9 April 1975, 66.4

like roads that were never built, land that was never developed, or a cellular telephone tower that

was never constructed. In my own initial field research experience (1974-1975) in the up-

country town and sub-regional administrative center of Lisala in what was then Zaïre and is now

the Democratic Republic of the Congo, seeing the invisible with this sort of a material focus was

also quite useful. In my case, though, the emphasis was more synchronic than diachronic and2

involved traveling occasionally to other locations during my field work. At one point I journeyed

to a neighboring town, Bumba, because the only bank in the sub-region was there and I needed to

retrieve some funds. “One can sense here that there is something called development occurring.

The market is well stocked and lively. There are about twice as many stores as Lisala and their

range of articles — while not great — is still better than Lisala.” In other words, only by seeing3

what Bumba had in terms of material development was I able to see what was not present in

Lisala. This obviously led me to begin questioning why commercial and agricultural

development seemed to be further along in one location than the other. Although I never actually

focused any of my research on this particular question, it did force me to begin trying to see what

was not there. Seeing what is there can thus trigger a vision of what is not there.

To provide another example, after I had been in the field about six months, I wrote that

“Lisala is now a week into its third beer shortage since I have been here. Things are really

getting desperate. This morning I even saw the local representative of the CND [political police]

drinking water.” In this instance I was simultaneously seeing both the visible and the invisible. 4

5

Field Log, Lisala, 8 November 1974, 9. The copies were done on carbon paper.5

Was the local head of the political police really drinking water rather than beer? I was stunned.

Since Congo was then a single-party dictatorship in which the political police wielded great

power (Schatzberg 1988: 30-51), my assumption was that even in a severe beer drought the

merchants would always be able to find a case or two to keep this gentleman happy. I knew then

that this particular beer shortage was serious. Parenthetically, I had not been planning to write

about beer when I set off into the field. The theorists then occupying Mount Olympus had

decreed that what was really important to the task of nation-building was the resolution of the

various crises of political development. One of those was what the Committee on Comparative

Politics of the SSRC called the “penetration crisis.” In Lisala, however, the beer crisis seemed

far more important (Schatzberg 1980:1-2) and my immersion in this community (no pun

intended) and the obvious importance that people attached to beer, was one of the factors that led

me to change my focus and abandon the then-reigning gods of political science theory.

Ethnographic immersion compels us to look at the banalities of daily life as they are lived

by the people from whom we are trying to learn. Since my research project was focused on the

bureaucracy, those were the sites where my immersion in the field and daily exposure to the lives

of mid-ranking bureaucrats led me to begin trying to understand the world that they inhabited.

“Bureaucrats in this country, at least on the first impression, seem to be carrying on a passionate

love affair with paper. The Commissaire Assistant de Zone furnished me with a simple list of the

number of collectivités and localités in the zone. . . . This one sheet of paper was produced, and

signed, in sextuplicate.” This is perhaps another way of saying that before an ethnographic5

immersion will produce “dramatic” changes in the researcher’s understanding, it is quite

6

Parenthetically, during my most recent stint of “fieldwork” among academic bureaucrats6

at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I was Director of the African Studies Programfrom 2004-2007, I noticed the same phenomenon in patterns of bureaucratic communication viaemail.

necessary to produce what we might call small insights in to the ordinary and routine workings of

the social or political machinery. Phrased differently, the banal is often a critical point of entry.

In this instance, this was my first indication that the precise number of copies was important, but

for reasons I did not yet understand. What were the possible explanations? First, safety. In an

era before computers and word processing, and in a local context where there were no reliable

sources of electricity, let alone any xerox machines, having a spare copy or two as a back up was

obviously necessary. But six copies went far beyond this. A second possible explanation was

that this love of copies was simply a bureaucratic pathology. While the Congolese bureaucracy

was certainly fraught with pathologies, I soon came to understand that this was not one of them.

After reading enough documents, in many different offices, and finding copies of the same

document distributed far and wide, I eventually realized that the dispersal patterns were

important. The distribution of these spare copies was how bureaucrats engaged in informal

contact and communication with those a layer or two above them in the hierarchy. It was also a

way of protecting themselves from accusations that they were divulging secret information to a

foreign researcher. The trivial and quite public information that the official gave to me (with

copies sent to all of his immediate superiors) was simply his way of saying: “Look at the

information I just gave to this foreign researcher. Nothing out of the ordinary here.”6

Seeing the invisible, or having the invisible shown to one, can often be humbling. As a

graduate student I had spent time studying public administration and familiarizing myself with

7

the then dominant theories in the sub-field. Since I was heading off to Congo to study

bureaucracy, I had read about budgeting. The works of Charles Lindblom (1959) and Aaron

Wildavsky (1964) had persuaded me that budgets were incremental documents that rarely

introduced anything new or radical, and that the best predictor of budgetary expenditures and

projections in the current year were, in fact, those of the preceding year. While working in Lisala

my base of operations was the documents room of the sub-regional government where, because

of the principle of dispatching multiple copies of all bureaucratic documents to anyone who

might be even remotely in the administrative chain of command, I had access to most of the

documents from the administrative layers both above and below the sub-region. So I began

trying to get a handle on the local variants of what I fully expected to be a pattern of incremental

budgeting.

At one point I came across an entry for one collectivity (a unit of local administration)

that had previewed an expenditure of roughly $3,000 for magazine subscriptions for the local

youth center. This was to be a brand new expenditure under the general budgetary rubric of

“Public Charity” [bienfaisance publique]. “Ah-ha,” I thought. This was clearly not the sort of

incremental expenditure that a close reading of budgetary theory had led me to expect so I was

puzzled. I was also perplexed because at that time in Congo one would have been hard pressed

to spend even $300, or one-tenth of the total, on subscriptions. There was just not that much

being published in the country at that moment. By that time I was pretty sure that there was a

pattern of systematic corruption and exploitation in place at the level of the collectivity that was

linked to taxation of the peasant farmers and a misappropriation of funds at the collectivity level,

but the precise outlines of the system were still unclear. Although I was reasonably persuaded

8

that there was a misappropriation of funds going on, there was only so much I could deduce from

the documentation.

Because I was persuaded that I had stumbled on to something quite illegal, I gingerly

approached the two Congolese clerks with whom I was sharing the office. We had been together

for a while and I had already established a pleasant joking relationship with each of them that I

frequently irrigated with beer. I showed them the figures and told them what my concerns were.

Did not an expenditure of $3,000 for magazine subscriptions for the youth center of a small

collectivity in the middle of nowhere seem a bit excessive? Would they help me to understand

this particular budgetary line? By this point in our conversation they were trying very hard to

keep their composure. They failed, however, and were soon laughing themselves silly at my

expense. They even went to a neighboring office to share this huge joke with more of their

colleagues. Finally, after they had calmed down, they patiently explained to me that there was no

youth center in that particular collectivity (Schatzberg 1980: 71). I had seen the visible budget

entry but had failed to see the invisible system of corruption and exploitation behind it. It was

also clear to me that this was another instance where the then dominant theoretical literature I

had been versed in had led me astray and had provided me with no tools to understand what was

actually going on around me. Because Lindblom and Wildavsky wrote in the context of a

democratic system with a viable concept of the public good, they had not — to the best of my

recollection — ever really questioned the basic veracity of budgetary categories. I had made the

mistake of assuming that there was a youth center simply because the budgetary documentation

said there was one. Needless to say I returned to my examination of the budgets with renewed

interest and a more skeptical frame of mind.

9

Sometimes, however, my previous training did not lead me astray. In trying to explore

the daily lives of the Congolese bureaucrats I soon realized that leisure activities were important.

In a town like Lisala, leisure time revolved around the bars. As a way of thanking my informants

after a formal interview, I found it useful to offer them a beer or two in a bar of their choice.

These very informal sessions often went on for hours, and I often found that they were every bit

as valuable as the interviews themselves. After a few beers some folks often chose to elaborate,

elucidate, or even correct what they had told me during the formal interview. I also found it

useful to become a fixture in several of the local watering holes most evenings. Once there I

began observing patterns of interaction. Who was drinking with whom? Who was sending beers

to whom, and why? Was this a gesture of ethnic solidarity, friendship, courtesy, or thanks?

What were the unwritten and usually unspoken “rules” that governed this distribution of

resources? In this way I was also able to see the invisible, and what eventually emerged was an

analysis of the ethnic and social class networks that played an important role in peoples’ lives

(Schatzberg 1981).

Seeing the invisible thus became important for me while I was in Lisala. But the realm of

the invisible went well beyond counterfactual thought exercises concerning patterns of local

development, beer shortages, ethnic and class networks, or phantom budgetary categories. Early

in my stay in Lisala I developed relationships with several individuals who eventually started

speaking to me about the world of the spirits, the power of the ancestors, and the realm of magic

and sorcery. More controversially, seeing the invisible also meant, and still means, being able to

see the supernatural and the spiritual.

10

Field Log, Lisala, 28 April 1975, 72.7

I had lived and worked in Cameroon for two years prior to my initial stint of fieldwork in

graduate school, so I had already gained some familiarity with this side of life — at least to the

extent that I was dimly aware that it existed. Some reading in anthropology while a graduate

student had also sensitized me to the fact that this was important to many Congolese. But there

was virtually no literature in political science on the subject and I was not prepared for what I

encountered. My introduction to this world was slow and depended on the willingness of a

handful of individuals to speak to me in a relatively open manner.

One bureaucrat, an inspector for one of the economic affairs ministries, shared the

following story with me. One evening he had arrived at one of the bars in town, Chez Yembu,

and ordered a beer.

Yembu himself gave him a glass. When the inspector poured his beer into the glass and

picked it up, the glass shattered in his hand. Apparently Yembu was quite embarrassed.

The inspector is convinced that Yembu was trying to poison him because of a fine he had

received. This is a fairly common sort of suspicion here. One wonders how much effect

the world of sorcery and magic has on the functioning of the administrative apparatus

here. I suspect quite a bit but people are most reluctant to talk to a foreigner about these

things.7

In relating this story to me, the Congolese bureaucrat was both embarrassed and troubled.

Embarrassed because most Congolese did not like to speak of these things to an outsider whom

11

they feared might not understand their world and who would think them to be “primitive” or

“uncivilized” in some way. Troubled because for him this was a potentially life threatening

situation. At the time, I filed away the tale but did not dismiss it.

In another conversation with a different person we discussed the same spiritual and

invisible phenomena at some length.

Last evening I was invited to the home of one of the gentlemen I interviewed last

week. We had a few beers and he began to talk about magic and sorcery in this society.

He told me that he himself had seen Mammy Wata. This is a creature who lives in the

water. He is half man, half fish, with a small part serpent mixed in for good measure.

This informant is also convinced that Muhammed Ali is a sorcerer because he predicted

the round in which Foreman would fall. He then went on to tell me of another incident

which happened to him. He was ill and went to a féticheur [sorcerer]. The chap asked

him for 15Zs [U.S. $30] to cure him and, as a bonus, said he would produce his long dead

father. At the appointed hour the image of a man appeared and spoke to the respondent.

His first words were ‘Who authorized you to marry a woman from another group?’ In

fact, the respondent had married a foreigner. To cure him all the féticheur did was to

touch him in a certain way. The gentleman also told me that President Mobutu is

extremely strong and knowledgeable in such affairs. This may be true, of course, but it

12

Field Log, Lisala, 20 November 1974, 13-14. The individual was referring to the 19748

heavyweight boxing title bout in Kinshasa between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Foran account, see Mailer (1975).

Field Log, Lisala, 8 January 1975, 23.9

might also be that the President has recognized his interest in having people believe that it

is true.8

There were other such tales and observations as well. According to yet another

informant, many Congolese “. . . obey Mobutu because they are afraid of his magical powers —

his ability as a sorcerer. This may be a means of political control which Western political

scientists have overlooked in their efforts at ‘science.’ My informant maintains that the president

is extremely gifted in such fine arts.” Obviously, I was beginning to wonder why this9

information that seemed so important to Congolese made little or no analytic sense to me. Was

this data? What was I to make of it? Why would an intelligent and reasonably well-educated

individual think that Muhammed Ali was a sorcerer because he successfully predicted the round

in which his opponent would fall. Many years later I would become aware that there were

different modes of political causation at work and that this was merely one of them (Schatzberg

2001), but at the time I was clueless. All I had was a hunch that this information pertaining to

the realm of the spiritual and supernatural was important, but I did not know how, or why.

Political science was not much help.

In honesty, here I must recognize that some political scientists did write about sorcery. In

general, however, such treatments were usually confined to the realm of revolt, rebellion, or

warfare. There was, for example, a large literature on the rebellions of the mid-1960s in the

13

Congo. These accounts described how the rebels would fight only after having been treated with

a magical potion that would turn the bullets of the opposing forces into water, thus making them

invulnerable (Young 1970; Verhaegen 1966 and 1969). But the proffered explanations, quite

persuasive at the time, tended to leave the impression that such quasi-religious beliefs would

inevitably disappear once “development” or “modernization” had occurred. Analyses also linked

these phenomena to the schools of thought that studied either religions of the oppressed or

millenarian movements (Cohn 1961; Lanternari 1963). To the best of my knowledge, however,

there was no attempt to relate these supernatural phenomena and beliefs to either the world of

“normal” high politics (politics within the state or the single party) or the daily politics of

ordinary life. And yet, while I was in Lisala and as I gradually became better integrated into the

local community, it progressively dawned on me that there was something here that needed to be

explored and studied. It just took me another twenty-five years to discover how it might be done

(Schatzberg 2001).

HEARING SILENCE

The second core task of ethnographic immersion is to hear silence. In one sense, this

simply means that we should follow the lead of Sherlock Holmes, who famously solved the case

of Silver Blaze, a race horse that had disappeared shortly before a major competition. Holmes

was able to shed light on the mystery because he was attentive to, and was able to “hear,” a dog

that did not bark in the night when it might well have been expected to begin growling loudly

because of the presence of an unknown individual (Conan Doyle 1967;

http://sherlock-holmes.classic-literature.co.uk/silver-blaze/). More prosaically, we always need

14

Field Log, Lisala, 29 December 1974, 21.10

Field Log, Lisala, 20 May 1975, 77.11

to be aware that people will only reveal a certain degree of the truth (as they understand it) to any

researcher, and that the extent to which they are willing to share what is in their hearts and minds

is likely to be governed by a host of contextual factors. At the risk of stating the obvious, one of

the most prominent of these is regime type. As far as Lisala in the mid-1970s was concerned,

one individual told me that he was afraid to say what he really felt about the situation for fear that

someone would throw him in jail. At the time I noted both laconically and naively that: “The

more time I spend here the more get the feeling that there are many who are really afraid to say

what they think. This, of course, does not exactly constitute the world’s greatest research

climate.”10

Sometimes hearing silence was relatively easy. One could listen to what officials of the

regime were saying and then simply fill in the glaring gaps from one’s own knowledge of the

regime’s history and practices. For example, “The day before I left for Kisangani I attended a

lecture given by the Commandant of the Military Prison at Angenga. He spoke of the history and

role of the FAZ [Forces Armées Zaïroises]. The talk was more interesting for what was omitted

than for what was said. There was no mention of the Force Publique’s repressive role under

colonialism. Instead, he stressed its role in two world wars. As far as post-independence history

is concerned, all he said was that following the country’s politics, the name had been changed

from the ANC [Armée Nationale Congolaise] to the FAZ; the latter name being more

authentic.”11

15

Field Log, Lisala, 22 December 1974, 19.12

At other times hearing silence was much more difficult. There were many things going

on that people were afraid to speak of, or even write about, in the course of their normal

bureaucratic dispatches, reports, and memoranda. Hearing silence often means being able to hear

the pauses, the hesitancy, and the reluctance to continue elaborating on a subject for fear that

continued conversation might create problems for them. At one point during my stay in Lisala I

had to leave town for a brief period. When I returned I asked folks what had happened during my

absence. “There were also a number of deaths here while I was away. One student died of

hepatitis. Another young man was apparently caught stealing something in someone’s field. He

was killed and mutilated. Parts of his skin were cut away in nice, even sections. My sources

(both excellent reliability) seem to feel that these pieces of flesh were subsequently eaten.” 12

People were obviously embarrassed and, to the best of my recollection, were never able to bring

themselves to say the word “cannibalism.” There were also political reasons for this silence, the

judicial officials and magistrates who were charged with investigating this matter knew that if

this incident ever became public their careers would be broken and that they would probably be

imprisoned or worse. This was simply not the sort of image of itself that the Mobutu regime was

trying to project. I never was able to engage people on this particular subject; nor did I even try

because of its extreme sensitivity. But it was a significant silence that I had to force myself to

hear.

There are other ways of hearing silence as the following account indicates:

16

Field Log, Lisala, 29 January 1975, 31-32.13

Yesterday I went to a Rassemblement Populaire [popular rally] at the football

stadium. . . . When I arrived at about 4:30 . . . the Chef de la Cité was leading the chants.

“Avant tout – DISCIPLINE,” etc. The crowd, except for a few hard core revolutionaries

was generally pretty apathetic. Policemen even had to be dispatched to make sure that

people moved in as close as possible to the microphone. . . . . Throughout the discourse

[of the Commissaire sous-régional] the population remained extremely apathetic — old

women sitting and looking bored; adolescents wandering around preening themselves;

little babies howling.13

How could one hear silence amid the din of babies howling and the chants into the

microphone? What one did not hear were people responding to the chants and participating in

them. Given that armed police and uniformed members of the party youth wing were present and

prominently visible, and that most of the people there had been rounded up and the market closed

by force to “encourage” attendance, the silent response of the population in the face of repeated

calls of the authorities to respond in the approved manner to the party chants was both telling and

deafening. I later understood that the apathy I had witnessed was not passive, but an act of

resistance to power. I had been privileged to hear a courageous silence.

Other silences are less courageous but quite understandable in an authoritarian single-

party regime. In Nairobi, Kenya, during an unsuccessful field research trip that Kenyan

authorities terminated prematurely (Schatzberg 1986), I had a conversation with several people

17

These are development gatherings to raise funds for schools or other projects from14

voluntary contributions.

Field Log, Nairobi, 8 November 1984, 7.15

who were commenting on President Moi’s donations to Harambee functions. We were14

discussing how much of a contribution the president was good for if he was invited to the

function and if he decided to attend. We also touched on the question of where, exactly, these

presidential contributions came from. “... One man said that when you are president the money is

yours in that it has your picture on it. So when the president calls up the Central Bank and says

he needs Kshs. 100,000 /- before 10:00 a.m. and it is already 9:00, if you were the governor of

the bank would you say no?” The silence that followed this rhetorical question was deafening15

because all were afraid to say what they knew to be the case: namely, that President Moi could

order up as much money as he wanted from the Central Bank, for whatever purpose, without ever

being held accountable for it.

THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE

Thinking the unthinkable is the hardest of the three core tasks associated with

ethnographic immersion. Simply put, it requires that we take nothing for granted and question all

our assumptions. It also requires that we ask our informants to do the same thing. The process

may be phrased in terms of an ordinary metaphor of daily life. Thinking the unthinkable requires

that when we enter a restaurant we wonder not only about what is on the menu, and why, but also

about what is not on the menu, and why. In other words, when we sit down in a Chinese

restaurant, we must consider not only the choice between spare ribs and governors chicken, but

we must also ask ourselves why we never even think of ordering a beef burrito, tandoori chicken,

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or veal scallopine. Those thoughts, in that context, are literally quite unthinkable. Similarly, but

in a different context and without conducting an opinion poll on the subject, my suspicion is that

this morning while getting dressed none of the men present thought that it might be a good idea

to apply facial makeup. Such a thought never entered our minds and was thus, quite literally,

unthinkable.

Or, to take a more overtly political example. My very strong suspicion is that none of the

people who have either heard this paper presented or read it in preliminary form have ever

thought that it would be desirable to re-institute slavery in the United States. Such a thought is

not on the political menu and is, therefore, unthinkable. In other words, in doing our best job of

trying to figure out what is on the political menu in any given society, itself a task that is not

always easy, we rarely ever stop to think about those things which are not on the menu, and why

they are not there, and why it almost never occurs to us to look for them. Thinking the

unthinkable requires humility and the ability to admit to oneself and one’s informants that one

knows nothing. It requires being able to ask questions that are “obvious” and “dumb” even

though we are supposed to be “experts.”

Two clarifications are needed here. First, please note that I mean thinkability and

unthinkability to be understood literally. Can we do, we think these thoughts? Lakoff (1996: 4)

reminds us that: “one of the most fundamental results of cognitive science, one that comes from

the study of commonsense reasoning, is that most of our thought is unconscious — not

unconscious in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but unconscious simply in that we are not

aware of it.” Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 32-33) reinforce the point:

19

Nearly all important thinking takes place outside of consciousness and is not available on

introspection; the mental feats we think of as the most impressive are trivial compared to

everyday capacities; the imagination is always at work in ways that consciousness does

not apprehend; consciousness can glimpse only a few vestiges of what the mind is doing;

the scientist, the engineer, the mathematician, and the economist, impressive as their

knowledge and techniques may be, are also unaware of how they are thinking and, even

though they are experts, will not find out just by asking themselves.

Second, these notions should not be confused with normative concerns. In all societies there are

some ideas and actions that are quite thinkable even though they are certainly reprehensible. For

example, it is unfortunately quite thinkable for Hutu and Tutsi to slaughter each other in Rwanda,

Burundi, and Eastern Congo. On the other hand, there are also actions and ideas that are surely

normatively desirable but which are, nonetheless, quite unthinkable politically. The idea of the

abolition of slavery during the early days of the U.S. republic would be a case in point (see

Schatzberg 2001).

Let me provide an illustration. From 1976-1978 the Mobutu regime instituted a ban on

the importation of foreign beers into the Congo. By that time I had already left the Congo, so I

was not in the field to examine the new policy at first hand. In its broad outlines, however, and

based on what I had learned during my investigations of the local political economy of beer in the

country, nothing in the measure surprised me. I was able to explain the policy, at least to my

own satisfaction, as an attempt on the part of the regime to save scarce economic resources

because local breweries were required to import hops and malt. An equally compelling reason to

20

my way of thinking was the need to protect local industry from foreign competition. In 1992,

some two years after the political opening in Congo, a former baron of the Mobutu regime,

Sakombi Inongo, confessed publicly that several tons of “mystical products” were dumped into

the Congo River to pacify the population and bind them politically to President Mobutu. In this

way people would remain loyal to the Mobutu regime because they would be bewitched when

drinking the local beers. This is why, according to Sakombi, foreign beers were banned from

1976-1978. The real reason was not to promote local breweries, not to conserve scarce foreign

exchange revenues, as numerous studies of political economy including some of my own would

lead us, not unrealistically, to believe, but to make sure that those who could afford foreign beers

were also placed under this spell (Schatzberg 2001: 132-134). In my earlier work (Schatzberg

1980) I had recognized that there was a rational political-economic link between low beer prices

and political quiescence, but Sakombi’s explanation was something quite different.

I has stumbled across Sakombi’s testimony in 1993 while I was working on Congolese

politics in Brussels because I could no longer get back into the country. The Mobutu regime had

denounced my published work as “anti-revolutionary,” or anti-Mobutu, and requests for visas

went unanswered. Periodically, therefore, I would appear in Brussels both to work in the

excellent collections on Congolese politics that Belgian scholars had maintained, and also to do

some interviewing among Congolese exiles. I was visiting one of these research collections and

reading in its main reading room with other scholars when I found a newspaper account of

Sakombi’s public testimony concerning the ban on imported beers and his understanding of why

it had happened. At the time, I suddenly realized that people were staring at me and it is quite

possible that a word or two of invective might have inadvertently crossed my lips. Here was a

21

completely different alternative explanation to the political-economic ones I had once advanced.

It assumed, moreover, a rather different series of assumptions about the universe and about

political causation. The fact of the matter is that most political scientists do not give much

credence to broadly spiritual forces, or to sorcery, or to an extremely wide variety of possible

explanations for political behavior.

This is a mistake, for these are also alternative means of understanding political causation

that people, depending on the context of the moment, do act upon. Furthermore, if we fail to

understand the well-springs of political action, how political actors themselves think of their

actions and understand the causal forces of their own universe, then we are destined to provide,

at best, only partially accurate explanations and understandings of political phenomena.

As mentioned, I found Sakombi’s testimony on this matter while reading a Congolese

newspaper. Eventually, I was able to base a study of the cultural logic of eight African states on

an intensive analytical reading of over one hundred years of newspapers (Schatzberg 2001). The

purpose was, for one large question (political legitimacy) to attempt to make bare and, in so

doing, understand the portions of the subjacent realm that pertained to political legitimacy. I

doubt that this particular methodology, which is more indebted to Foucault than to Malinowski,

actually has anything to do with political ethnography. But I can say that I would not have been

able to ask the questions I was asking without having previously immersed myself in the ordinary

daily existence of these particular societies.

My current research on the politics, economics, and culture of football (soccer) in Africa

again seeks to lay bare the subjacent realm of politics with a combination of close reading and

fieldwork whenever possible. My main concern in this research is the elaboration of what I now

22

Interview, Kampala, Uganda, K-2, 3 July 2001, 4.16

think of as the moral structure of sport and how this moral structure either does or does not

translate into the subjacent realm of politics. For example, in societies where there is not much

sense of political fair play, what does it mean to have a referee in a sporting event and does it

matter whether these referees are “neutral”? Does it matter whether journalists who are paid to

observe and report on soccer matches are themselves neutral? An early stint of fieldwork in

Kampala, Uganda, for example, provided me with an occasion to begin getting a handle on these

and other questions that were of interest to me. More specifically, at least initially, I was

interested both in further exploring alternative understandings of causation and in trying to

comprehend how people implicitly come to define their understanding of the realm of politics

(Schatzberg 2006).

Once again, even on the most basic empirical level, I have found that thinking the

unthinkable is still a most useful, if occasionally humbling, way to proceed. At one point in my

stay I was interviewing a former Ugandan sports journalist who, after telling me much about the

Ugandan football scene during a lengthy interview, made it clear through his body language that

he wished to leave. Taking this as a cue, I asked him if there was anything important we had not

discussed. “Yes,” he said, “I was surprised that you didn’t ask me about corruption among sports

journalists.” Whereupon we began chatting about that. Needless to say, I had not the slightest

notion that this might be a problem or that the articles I had begun reading in the daily press

might well have been affected by such considerations.16

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CONCLUSION

How does one do ethnographic immersion? This seemingly simple question will call

forth a variety of responses — many of them reasonable and useful. There is, in other words, no

single prescribed way of doing this. All I have been able to do here is to relate some of the

methods I have found to be effective in the construction of a series of partial ethnographic

perspectives. I emphasize the word partial because I do not think that an ethnographic immersion

is ever complete. The best we may hope to accomplish is an incomplete approximation of a very

small portion of the subjacent realm in any society. That said, once we decide that such a venture

is worthwhile, what should we do?

I have no “one-size-fits-all” answer. But the goal would seem to require that we operate,

at least part of the time, as political ethnographers. More concretely this means fieldwork and

training in the relevant foreign languages or domestic jargons are necessities. In the words of one

ethnographer (Bradburd 1998), one has to “be there” because things will suggest themselves in

the course of fieldwork that might not otherwise occur. Or, if subjacent notions are discovered

on the printed page, then field work is one way of triangulating data so that one can see and

understand printed words as lived experiences. A second stage of the process, well after field

work though, is to use the subjacent concepts, tacit understandings, and daily practices as a

means of “reading” and excavating (in a Foucaultian sense) seemingly dissimilar and perhaps

unrelated bodies of literature. In a second stage, therefore, one no longer needs to be physically

“in the field,” but one does continually need to question and reinterpret the information that one

had learned and the perspectives on the subjacent realm that one had developed.

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What ethnographic immersion — which begins with political ethnography — can do for

us is to make visible the invisible, convert silence to sound, and to begin the arduous process of

thinking the unthinkable that may provide us with some keys to uncovering the politically

subjacent and often hidden domains of politics that all societies possess. Furthermore, when

taken together, all three core tasks of ethnographic immersion may permit us to imagine political

worlds and realities that were unimaginable to us and, in so doing, aid us in exploring the realm

of the politically subjacent. Ethnographic immersion and the procedures that are part of it,

therefore, are not likely to produce results or findings that are clear, simple, or equationally

precise. This does not trouble me. Alfred North Whitehead once said “Seek simplicity and

distrust it.” Those who would engage in this type of research are perhaps better advised to “seek

ambiguity and embrace it.” The advantage of ethnographic immersion is precisely this: it permits

one to embrace ambiguity both as a conclusion and as a strategy of research. We need to think of

human ambiguity not as a barrier to theory and theory building, but rather as its basis. Parsimony

may well be a necessary way station along the path to a certain type of political theory. But if the

price of parsimony is the sacrifice of culture and context, then that price is too high. Over fifty

years ago, and thus well before the current theoretical infatuations wrought by rational choice

approaches, Marc Bloch (1953: 151), a founder of the Annales school, wrote the following:

As for homo religiosus, homo oeconomicus, homo politicus, and all that rigamarole of

Latinized men, the list of which we could string out indefinitely, there is grave danger of

mistaking them for something else than they really are: phantoms which are convenient

25

providing they do not become nuisances. The man of flesh and bone, reuniting them all

simultaneously, is the only real being.

26

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