REVISITS 645 Revisits:AnOutlineofaTheory ...burawoy.berkeley.edu/Methodology/Revisits.ASR.pdf ·...

REVISITSREVISITSREVISITSREVISITSREVISITS 645645645645645

RevisitsAnOutlineofaTheory

ofReflexiveEthnography

MichaelBurawoy

University of California Berkeley

This paper explores the ethnographic technique of the focused revisitmdashrare in soci-ology but common in anthropologymdash when an ethnographer returns to the site of aprevious study Discrepancies between earlier and later accounts can be attributed

to differences in (1) the relation of observer to participant (2) theory brought to thefield by the ethnographer (3) internal processes within the field site itself or (4)forces external to the field site Focused revisits tend to settle on one or another ofthese four explanations giving rise to four types of focused revisits Using examplesthe limits of each type of focused revisit are explored with a view to developing areflexive ethnography that combines all four approaches The principles of the fo-

cused revisit are then extended to rolling punctuated heuristic archeological andvaledictory revisits In centering attention on ethnography-as-revisit sociologistsdirectly confront the dilemmas of participating in the world they studymdasha world thatundergoes (real) historical change that can only be grasped using a (constructed)theoretical lens

cipline of anthropology After four decadesof expansion starting in the 1950s there arenow many more anthropologists swarmingover the globe They come not only fromWestern centers but also from ex-coloniesThey are ever more skeptical of positive sci-ence and embrace the interpretive turn it-self pioneered by Geertz that gives pride ofplace to culture as narrative and text ldquoWheneverything changes from the small and im-mediate to the vast and abstractmdashthe objectof study the world immediately around it thestudent the world immediately around himand the wider world around them bothmdashthere seems to be no place to stand so as to

ackingbackwardand forwardthrough 40 years of field work Clifford

Geertz (1995) describes how changes in thetwo towns he studied Pare in Indonesia andSefrou in Morocco cannot be separated fromtheir nation statesmdashthe one beleaguered by asuccession of political contestations and theother the product of dissolving structuresThese two states in turn cannot be separatedfrom competing and transmogrifying worldhegemonies that entangle anthropologists aswell as their subjects Just as Geertzrsquos fieldsites have been reconfigured so has the dis-

Direct all correspondence to MichaelBurawoy Department of Sociology Universityof California Berkeley CA 94720 (burawoysocratesberkeleyedu) This paper was launchedin a dissertation seminar where it received spir-ited criticism from Bill Hayes Linus HuangRachel Sherman and Michelle Williams Sincethen I have taken it on the road and picked upcomments and suggestions from many includingJulia Adams Philip Bock Patricia CloughMitchell Duneier Steve Epstein Jim FergusonMariacutea Patricia Fernaacutendez-Kelly MarionFourcade-Gourinchas Herb Gans Tom GierynTeresa Gowan Richard Grinker Lynne HaneyGillian Hart Mike Hout Jennifer Johnson-

AmericanSociologicalReview2003Vol68(October645ETH679) 645

Hanks Gail Kligman Louise Lamphere SteveLopez Ruth Milkman Sabina Neem SherryOrtner Mary Pattillo Melvin Pollner LeslieSalzinger Ida Susser Joan Vincent LoiumlcWacquant Ron Weitzer and Erik Wright I alsothank the four ASR reviewers in particular DianeVaughan whose inspired commentary led to ma-jor revisions and Reviewer D whose persistentcritical interventions kept my argument on aneven keel This venture was made possible by ayear at Academyrsquos Arcadia the Russell SageFoundation to which revisits are rightly butsadly barred

646646646646646 AMERICANSOCIOLOGICALREVIEWAMERICANSOCIOLOGICALREVIEWAMERICANSOCIOLOGICALREVIEWAMERICANSOCIOLOGICALREVIEWAMERICANSOCIOLOGICALREVIEW

locate just what has altered and howrdquo (Geertz19952) This is the challenge of the ethno-graphic revisit to disentangle movements ofthe external world from the researcherrsquos ownshifting involvement with that same worldall the while recognizing that the two are notindependent

With their detailed ethnographic revisits toclassic sites the earlier anthropologiststended toward realism focusing on the dy-namic properties of the world they studiedwhereas more recently they have increas-ingly veered in a constructivist direction inwhich the ethnographer becomes the centralfigure They have found it hard to steer abalanced course On the other hand sociolo-gist-ethnographers grounded theorists inparticular have simply ducked the challengealtogether Too often they remain trapped inthe contemporary riveted to and containedin their sites from where they bracket ques-tions of historical change social processwider contexts theoretical traditions as wellas their own relation to the people theystudy While sociology in general has takena historical turnmdashwhether as a deprovincial-izing aid to social theory or as an analyticalcomparative history with its own missionwhether as historical demography or longi-tudinal survey researchmdashethnography hasbeen slow to emancipate itself from the eter-nal present My purpose here is to encour-age and consolidate what historical interestthere exists within sociology-as-ethnogra-phy transporting it from its unconscious pastinto a historicized world by elaborating thenotion of ethnography-as-revisit This inturn lays the foundations for a reflexive eth-nography1

Let me define my terms An ethnographicrevisit occurs when an ethnographer under-takes participant observation that is study-ing others in their space and time with aview to comparing his or her site with thesame one studied at an earlier point in timewhether by him or herself or by someoneelse This is to be distinguished from an eth-nographic reanalysis which involves the in-

terrogation of an already existing ethnogra-phy without any further field workColignonrsquos (1996) critical reexamination andreinterpretation of Selznickrsquos (1949) TVAand the Grassroots or Franke and Kaulrsquos(1978) reexamination of the Hawthornestudies are both examples of reanalyses Arevisit must also be distinguished from anethnographic update which brings an earlierstudy up to the present but does not reengageit Hollingsheadrsquos (1975) empirical accountof changes in Elmstown is an update becauseit does not seriously engage with the origi-nal study Gans (1982) updates The UrbanVillagers not so much by adding new fielddata as by addressing new literatures onclass and poverty These are not hard andfast distinctions but they nonetheless guidemy choice of the ethnographic revisits I ex-amine in this paper

There is one final but fundamental distinc-tionmdashthat between revisit and replicationEthnographers perennially face the criticismthat their research is not trans-personally rep-licablemdashthat one ethnographer will view thefield differently from another2 To strive forreplicability in this constructivist sense is tostrip ourselves of our prejudices biasestheories and so on before entering the fieldand to minimize the impact of our presenceonce we are in the field Rather than dive intothe pool fully clothed we stand naked on theside With the revisit we believe the contraryThere is no way of seeing clearly without atheoretical lens just as there is no passive

1 A reflexive ethnography can also be devel-oped through synchronic comparisonsmdashcompar-ing two factories communities schools and soonmdashin different spatial contexts as well asthrough the diachronic comparisons of the tem-poral revisit that form the basis of this paper

2 Or even worse the same ethnographer willhave divergent interpretations of the ldquosamerdquoevents Thus Van Maanen (1988) describes hisfield work among police on patrol successivelyas a ldquorealistrdquo tale that strives for the ldquonative pointof viewrdquo as a ldquoconfessionalrdquo tale that is preoc-cupied with the field workerrsquos own experiencesand as an ldquoimpressionisticrdquo (from the paintinggenre of Impressionism) tale that brings the fieldworker and subject into a dynamic relationshipWolf (1992) similarly presents her field work onshamans in Taiwan in three different ways asfield notes as fictional account and as profes-sional article While recognizing the importanceof experimental writing and the contributions ofthe postmodern criticism of ethnography Wolfends up defending the professional article withits rules of evidence and interpretation Such po-lyphony calls for a vocabulary and frameworkbeyond ldquoreplicationrdquo


neutral position The revisit demands that webe self-conscious and deliberate about thetheories we employ and that we capitalize onthe effects of our interventions There is alsohowever a second meaning of replicationthat concerns not controlling conditions ofresearch but testing the robustness of find-ings We replicate a study in order to showthat the findings hold across the widest vari-ety of cases that mdashto use one of Hughesrsquos(1958) examplesmdashthe need to deal with dirtywork applies as much to physicians as jani-tors Replication means searching for simi-larity across difference When we revisithowever our purpose is not to seek con-stancy across two encounters but to under-stand and explain variation in particular tocomprehend difference over time

In short the ethnographic revisit champi-ons what replication strives in vain to re-press Where replication is concerned withminimizing intervention to control researchconditions and with maximizing the diver-sity of cases to secure the constancy of find-ings the purpose of the revisit is the exactopposite to focus on the inescapable dilem-mas of participating in the world we studyon the necessity of bringing theory to thefield all with a view to developing explana-tions of historical change As we shall seeto place the revisit rather than replication atthe center of ethnography is to re-envisionethnographyrsquos connection to social scienceand to the world it seeks to comprehend

WHATSOCIOLOGYCANLEARN

FROMANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropologists routinely revisit their ownsites and those of others or reanalyze canoni-cal works while sociologist-ethnographersseldom revisit their own sites let alone thoseof their forbears Even reanalyses are rareWhy should the two disciplines differ so dra-matically It is worth considering a numberof mundane hypotheses if only to dispel dis-ciplinary stereotypes The first hypothesis asto why anthropologists are so fond of revis-its is that field work has long been a tradi-tion in their discipline and they have accu-mulated therefore a vast stock of classicstudies to revisit Ethnography is so new tosociology that there are few worthy classicstudies to revisit This hypothesis doesnrsquot

stand up to scrutiny though as sociologistshave been doing systematic field work al-most as long as anthropologists Franz Boasbegan his first field work among theKwakiutl in 1886 only a little more than adecade before Du Bois ([1899] 1996) workedon The Philadelphia Negro BronislawMalinowski first set out for the Trobriand Is-lands in 1915 and at the same time Thomasand Znaniecki (1918ndash1920) were collectingdata for their The Polish Peasant in Europeand America

A second hypothesis might turn the ana-lytic eye to the present Anthropologists hav-ing conquered the world can now only re-visit old sites (or study themselves) As inthe case of archeologists there are only somany sites to excavate Sociologists on theother hand have so many unexplored sites tocultivate even in their own backyards thatthey have no need to retread the old Thissecond hypothesis doesnrsquot work either espe-cially now that anthropologists have spreadinto advanced capitalism where they competewith sociologists (Susser and Patterson2001) Moreover sociologists are always re-turning to the same places to do their ethnog-raphies but rarely it would seem to revisitThat is generations of sociologists havestudied Chicago but never or almost neverhave they systematically compared their fieldwork with that of a predecessor

This brings me to a third rather bleak hy-pothesis that the early ethnographies in so-ciology were so poorly done so ad hoc thatthey are not worth revisiting I hope to dis-abuse the reader of this idea by the time Ihave finished Sociologists have been quitecapable of superbly detailed ethnographyjust as anthropologists can be guilty ofsloppy field work Moreover flawed fieldwork does not discourage revisits but as weshall see it often stimulates them

A fourth hypothesis is that the worldsstudied by early sociologist-ethnographershave changed so dramatically that the sitesare unrecognizable whereas anthropologicalsites are more enduring This too does notmake sense Hutchinsonrsquos (1996) Nuerlandhas been invaded colonized and beset bycivil war since Evans-Pritchard was there inthe 1930s but that did not stop her usingEvans-Pritchard as a baseline to understandthe impact of decolonization war Christian-


ity and transnational capital SimilarlyColson (1971) followed the Gwembe Tongaafter they had been displaced by floodingfrom the Kariba Dam Sociological sites onthe other hand are not all demolished To besure urban renewal overtook Herbert GansrsquosWest End (Gans 1982) but Whytersquos NorthEnd (Whyte 1943) is still recognizable de-spite the changes it has sustained The dramaof change and the dissolution of old sites dobecome factors in revisits but this does notdistinguish the anthropologist from the eth-nographer-sociologist

If it is not the nature of the site being stud-ied then perhaps the distinction lies with theobservermdashthe anthropologistrsquos romancewith the past or the sociologistrsquos attachmentto the present One does not have to resort tosuch an essentialist and unlikely psychologyOne might simply argue that anthropologistsinvest so much in their research sitemdashlearn-ing the language the practices rituals andso onmdashthat they are drawn back to their ownsites rather than driven to excavate newones But this fifth hypothesis doesnrsquot ex-plain the anthropologistrsquos relish for studyingother peoplersquos sites revisiting other peoplersquosstudies

Perhaps the answer lies with the disciplin-ary projects of anthropology and sociologySo my sixth hypothesis is that anthropolo-gists have been trained to study the ldquootherrdquoas exotic (or they came to anthropology withthis in mind) and they are therefore more re-flexivemdashmore likely to ask who they are andwhere they came from Sociologists becausethey study the familiar (ie their own soci-ety) are less reflexive less likely to thinkabout themselves and their traditions Buthere too the difference is not clearmdashsociolo-gists have a trained capacity to exoticizethose they study as though they come froma different world even if they are next-doorneighbors Indeed some would say that wastheir craftmdashmaking the normal abnormaland then making it normal again

Still in turning to the discipline for an ex-planation I think one may be getting nearerthe mark Ethnography in American sociol-ogy has followed a twisted road It began asthe dominant approach in the field when theChicago School prevailed but with thespread of sociology and the expansion of theuniversity it succumbed to the twin forces

of survey research and structural functional-ismmdashwhat Mills (1959) called abstractedempiricism and grand theory His point ofcourse was that sociology had lost touchwith social reality Even before he wrote hispolemic the Chicago School had taken upthis challenge reconstituting itself under theinfluence of Everett Hughes but also AnselmStrauss into what Fine (1995) has called theSecond Chicago School creating an alterna-tive to theoreticism and empiricism To de-ductive grand theory these sociologistscounterposed grounded theory discovered inthe empirical data To survey research theycounterposed field research based on in situobservation of the micro-social Here wefind the great studies of Goffman BeckerGusfield Gans Davis Freidson and othersThey reclaimed ethnography for science aninductive science of close observation codi-fied in Glaser and Straussrsquos (1967) The Dis-covery of Grounded Theory and reaching itsapotheosis in Beckerrsquos (1998) craft manualTricks of the Trade

Forced to carve out its own ldquoscientificrdquoniche participant observation turned inwardTo put their best positivist foot forward par-ticipant observers (1) pretended to be neutralinsiders and thus silencing the ways fieldworkers are irrevocably implicated in theworld they study (2) repressed preexistingtheory as a dangerous contamination (3)sometimes even eclipsed processual changein the search for singular descriptions of mi-cro-situations and (4) suspended as unknow-able the historical and macro-context of themicro-analysis3 In studying ethnographicrevisits I will provide correctives along allfour dimensionsmdashthematizing (1) the ob-server as participant (2) the reconstructionof theory (3) internal processes and (4) ex-ternal forcesmdashthereby establishing the fourprinciples of reflexive ethnography4

3 Abbott (1999 chap 7) argues that the Chi-cago School ethnographies were ldquohistoricalrdquo inthat they were concerned with process In myview Chicago ethnographies were largely bereftof process let alone history If process or historyentered the Chicago School it was in the form ofthe general cyclical theories of social change as-sociated with Robert Park

4 These four principles are also the defining mo-ments of the extended case method (Burawoy1998 Burawoy Burton et al 1991 Burawoy


My criticism of sociologist-ethnographersshould not be misunderstood There is muchbe studied and gleaned from the present Thelong tradition of community studies domi-nated by the Chicago School has made enor-mous contributions to our understanding ofurban life The symbolic interactionists andthe ethnomethodologists have deployed par-ticipant observation to great advantage sus-taining this marginal technique in face of theascendancy of quantitative research As anembattled minority participant observers in-sulated themselves both from changes in thediscipline and from changes in the worldToday when historical sociology is main-stream when grand theory is no longer soimperial when survey research is itself in-creasingly concerned with longitudinalanalysis when globalization is the topic ofthe day participant observation should comeout from its protected corner to embrace his-tory context and theory5 In this project so-ciologists have much to learn from anthro-pologists from both their insights and theiroversights Anthropologists offer an inspira-tion but also a warning

Within anthropology the trajectory of eth-nography has been very different Its ca-nonical texts were ethnographic Just as so-

ciology returns again and again to MarxWeber and Durkheim so anthropology hasreturned to Boas Mead MalinowskiEvans-Pritchard Radcliffe-Brown and therestmdashand will continue to do so as long asthey define the anthropological traditionWhen the very possibility of ethnographywas threatened by anticolonial revolts an-thropology reverberated in shock Acknowl-edging how dependent they were on forcesthey no longer controlled anthropologistswilly-nilly became exceedingly consciousof the world beyond their field site Theyrevisited (and reanalyzed) the innocentstudies that were their canon and that sooften had been conducted under the protec-tive guardianship of colonialismmdashcondi-tions that remained silent in the originalstudies The isolation of the village of thetribe was a conjuring act that depended onthe coercive presence of a colonial adminis-tration (Asad 1973) Simultaneous with thisheightened historical consciousness came aquestioning of the anthropological theoriesthat emerged from these hitherto unstatedconditions and of the way their texts al-ready contained within them particular rela-tions of colonial domination (Clifford andMarcus 1986) Thus history theory andcontext came to be deeply impressed uponthe anthropologistrsquos sensibility (Comaroffand Comaroff 1991 1992 Mintz 1985Vincent 1990 Wolf 1982)

While the anthropologist was thrown intoa turbulent world order the sociologist-eth-nographer retreated into secure enclaves inboth the discipline and the community Thesociologists threw up false boundariesaround their sites to ward off accusationsthat they did not practice ldquosciencerdquo whilethe anthropologists forsook science as theyopened the floodgates of world history Oncethe ex-colonial subject was released fromanthropological confinement and allowed totraverse the world the trope of revisit be-came as natural to the practice of the anthro-pology as it was to the movements of its sub-jects Taken-for-granted by the anthropolo-gist it takes a sociologist to exhume the sig-nificance and variety of revisits

In the remainder of this essay I design aframework to critically appropriate the clas-sic revisits of anthropology and to bring so-ciology-as-ethnography out of its dark ages

Blum et al 2000) Reflexive ethnography and theextended case method however differ in theiremphases The extended case method stresses theaugmentation of social processes studied throughparticipant observation with external forces andthe reconstruction of theory reflexive ethnogra-phy stresses the dialogue between constructivism(observer as participant and reconstructingtheory) and realism (internal processes and exter-nal forces) In other words the extended casemethod and reflexive ethnography share the samefour constitutive elements but these elements arebrought into a different relation with each other

5 At least in one area ethnography has em-braced history theory and context The ethnog-raphy of science began as a reaction to grandMertonian claims about the normative founda-tions of scientific knowledge It then turned tothe daily practice of laboratory life (Latour andWoolgar 1979)mdasha resolutely micro-analysisdrawing on strains of ethnomethodology Theselaboratory studies then relocated themselves inthe wider context that shaped science and its his-tory but without losing their ethnographic foun-dations (Epstein 1996 Fujimura 1996 Latour1988)


DISSECTINGTHEFOCUSED

REVISITNtildeMANUFACTURING

CONSENT

Revisits come in different types Howeverthe most comprehensive is the focused re-visit which entails an intensive comparisonof onersquos own field work with a prior ethnog-raphy of the same site usually conducted bysomeone else Like the focused interviewbefore it (Merton Fiske and Kendall 1956)the focused revisit takes as its point of depar-ture an already investigated situation but onethat takes on very different meanings becauseof changes in historical context and the inter-ests and perspectives of the revisitor

The scheme of focused revisits I develophere derives from my own serendipitous re-visit (Burawoy 1979) to a factory studied byDonald Roy one of the great ethnographersof the Chicago School Roy (1952a 1952b1953 1954) studied Geer Company in 1944ndash1945 and I studied that same factory 30years later in 1974ndash1975 after it had be-come the engine division of Allied Corpora-tion Like Roy I was employed as a machineoperator For both of us it was a source ofincome as well as our dissertation fieldwork As I grew accustomed to the work-place I was reminded of other pieceworkmachine shops not the least Royrsquos classicaccounts of output restriction (Roy 1952a1953 1954)6 There were the machine op-erators on piece rates working at their ra-dial drills speed drills mills and latheswhile the auxiliary workers (inspectors set-up men crib attendants dispatchers truckdrivers) were on hourly rates I observed thesame piece work game of ldquomaking outrdquo(making the piece rate) and the same pat-terns of output restriction namely ldquogold-brickingrdquo (slowing down when piece rateswere too difficult) or ldquoquota restrictionrdquo (notbusting rates when they were easy) In turn-ing to Royrsquos (1952b) dissertation I discov-ered a series of remarkable coincidences thatleft me in no doubt that I had miraculouslylanded in his factory 30 years later Whatmade it even more exceptional was the rarequality of Royrsquos 546-page dissertation If I

had planned to do a revisit I could not havechosen a better predecessor than Roymdashtheexhaustive detail the brilliant use of eventshis familiarity with industrial work his richportraits of shop floor games7

In fact Royrsquos findings were so compellingthat I was at a loss to know what more Icould contribute For all the talk of scienceI knew that to replicate Royrsquos study wouldnot earn me a dissertation let alone a jobAs Merton (1957) confirmed long ago inacademia the real reward comes not fromreplication but from originality8 My firstinstinct was reactivemdashto denounce Roy as amyopic Chicago participant observer inter-ested in promoting human relations on theshop floor who did not understand the work-ings of capitalism or the way state and mar-ket impressed themselves on shop floor re-lations But if external context was so im-portant in shaping the shop floor then onewould expect changes in the state and themarket to produce different experiences in1974 compared with 1944 But everythingseemed to be the same Or was it

I painstakingly examined Royrsquos (1952b)dissertation and discovered indeed a seriesof small but significant changes in the fac-tory First the old authoritarian relation be-tween management and worker had dissi-pated This change was marked by the dis-appearance of the ldquotime and study menrdquowho would clock operatorsrsquo jobs when theirbacks were turned in pursuit of piece rates

6 I was familiar with a number of other studiesof piece rates that showed similar patterns ofldquooutput restrictionrdquo (see esp Lupton 1963)

7 According to Chapoulie (199617) EverettHughes considered Royrsquos dissertation ldquoone of thebest he had supervisedrdquo

8 When a finding is controversial replicationmight pay off A case in point was the heated andseemingly everlasting debate between pluralistand elite perspectives on community powerHunter (1953) whose reputational study (an eth-nography of sorts) of Atlanta in 1950 led thecharge for the elite perspective revisited Atlantain the early 1970s to confirm his original finding(Hunter 1980) The very different conditions hefound in Atlanta (emergence of a black elite ex-pansion of the downtown importance of infor-mation technology etc) made the replication allthe more persuasive The more diverse the con-ditions under which a finding holds the more ro-bust it becomes Because the conditions of Royrsquosand my ethnographies were so similar replica-tion was less interesting than was the explana-tion of small changes


that could be tightened Second if verticaltension had relaxed horizontal conflicts hadintensified Instead of the collusion betweenoperators and auxiliary workers that Roy de-scribed I observed hostility and antagonismTruck drivers inspectors crib attendantswere the bane of my life As we reportedthem Royrsquos and my experiences were dif-ferent but what to make of those differ-ences I now consider four hypothetical ex-planations for our different experiences al-though at the time of my study I consideredonly the fourth one

ObserverasParticipant

My first hypothesis is that Royrsquos and my ex-periences at Geer and Allied respectivelydiffered because we had a different relationto the people we studied After all Roy wasnot new to blue-collar work like I was hewas a veteran of many industries He wasaccepted by his fellow workers as Imdashan En-glishman and a student to bootmdashcould neverbe Perhaps his blue-collar pride flared upmore easily at managerial edicts perhaps hecould more effectively obtain the respectand thus the cooperation of auxiliary work-ers Our divergent biographies and resultinghabiti therefore might explain our differentexperiences but so might our location in theworkplace I was a miscellaneous machineoperator who could roam the shop floor withease while Roy was stuck to his radial drillNo wonder one might conclude he morethan I experienced management as authori-tarian Finally a third set of factors mighthave intervenedmdashour embodiment as racial-ized or gendered subjects Although manyhave criticized Manufacturing Consent(Burawoy 1979) for not giving weight torace and gender it is not obvious that eitherwere important for explaining the discrepan-cies between Royrsquos experiences and mine aswe were both white and male Still in mytime whiteness might have signified some-thing very different because unlike Roy Iwas working alongside African AmericansThis racial moment may have disrupted lat-eral relations with other workers and boundme closer to white management

I argue that none of these factorsmdashneitherhabitus location nor embodimentmdashcouldexplain the difference in our experience of

work because both of us observed everyother operator on the shop floor goingthrough the same shared and common expe-rience regardless of their habitus their lo-cation or their race Work was organized asa collective game and each worker evalu-ated others as well as themselves in terms ofldquomaking outrdquo We all played the same gameand experienced its victories and defeats inthe same waymdashat least that was what bothRoy and myself gleaned from all the emo-tional talk around us

ReconstructingTheory

If it was not the different relations we had tothose we studied that shaped our differentexperiences of work perhaps it was thetheory we each brought to the factory Un-doubtedly we came to the shop floor withdifferent theories Roy was a dissident withinthe human relations school He arguedagainst the findings of the Western ElectricStudies that restriction of output was theproduct of workers failing to understand therules of economic rationality To the contraryRoy argued workers understood economicrationality much better than managementwhich was always putting obstacles in theway of their ldquomaking outrdquomdashobstacles opera-tors cleverly circumvented in order to meetmanagerial expectations without compromis-ing their own economic interests If rateswere impossible to make workers would sig-nal this by slowing down If piece rates wereeasy workers would be sure not to draw at-tention to the fact by rate busting for fear itwould lead to rate cutting Not workers butmanagement it turned out was being irratio-nal by introducing counterproductive rulesthat impeded the free flow of work

Like Roy I was a dissident but within theMarxist tradition I tried to demonstrate thatthe workplace rather than the locus for thecrystallization of class consciousness hostileto capitalism was an arena for manufactur-ing consent I showed how the political andideological apparatuses of the state so fondlytheorized by Gramsci Poulantzas MilibandHabermas Althusser and others found theircounterpart within production It was here onthe shop floor that I found the organizationof class compromise and the constitution ofthe individual as an industrial citizen Bor-


rowing from Gramsci I called this the ldquohe-gemonic organization of productionrdquo or theldquohegemonic regime of productionrdquo

If our theories were so different couldthey explain ourmdashRoyrsquos and minemdashdiffer-ent experiences of the workplace Certainlydifferent theories have different empiricalfoci select different data But at least in thiscase theoretical differences cannot explainwhy I experienced more lateral conflict andRoy more vertical conflict why he battledwith time and study men whereas in my timethey were nowhere to be found If theoryalone were the explanation for our differentaccounts then Allied Corporation wouldlook the same as Geer Company if examinedthrough the same theoretical lens When Ifocus my theory of hegemony onto GeerCompany however I discover a more des-potic workplace than Allied one that favorscoercion over consent with fewer institu-tions constituting workers as individuals orbinding their interests to the companyEqually were Roy to have trained his humanrelations lens on Allied he would have per-ceived a more participatory managementculture Whereas at Geer workers weretreated as ldquoyardbirdsrdquo Alliedrsquos managementexpanded worker rights and extended morehuman respect and in exchange obtainedmore worker cooperation Differences re-mained therefore even as we each take ourown theory to the workplace of the other

I am not saying that theories can never ex-plain discrepancies in observations made bytwo researchers but in this case work wasso tightly structured and collectively orga-nized that our lived experiences were largelyimpervious to the influence of consciousnessbrought to the shop floor from without in-cluding our own sociological theories

InternalProcesses

So far I have considered only constructivistexplanations for the difference in our expe-riencesmdashthat is explanations that focus onthe relations that Roy and I had to our fel-low workers (whether due to habitus loca-tion or embodiment) or explanations thatfocus on the theories we used to make senseof what we saw I now turn to the realist ex-planations for the differences we ob-servedmdashthat is explanations that consider

our accounts to reflect attributes of the worldbeing studied (rather than products of ourtheoretical or practical engagement with thesite) Like constructivist explanations real-ist explanations are also of two types Thefirst attributes divergence to ldquointernal pro-cessesrdquo and the second to ldquoexternal forcesrdquo

Is it possible to explain the shift from des-potic to hegemonic regimes of production byreference to processes within the factoryRoy (1952b) did observe internal processesof a cyclical character Rules would be im-posed from above to restrict informal bar-gaining and collusion but over time workerswould stretch and circumvent the rules untilanother avalanche of managerial decrees de-scended from on high Could such cyclicalchange explain a secular change over 30years It is conceivable that the shift fromdespotism to hegemony was an artifact of ourdifferent placement in the cycle between bu-reaucratic imposition and indulgency patternBut this explanation does not work becauseI too observed a similar oscillation betweenintensified rules and their relaxation duringmy year on the shop floor So this rules outthe possibility that Roy and I were simply atdifferent points in the cycle Besides theshift over 30 years cannot be reduced to theapplication or nonapplication of rules butalso involved the introduction of completelynew sets of rules regarding the bidding onjobs grievance machinery collective bar-gaining and so on Annual cyclical changecould not explain the overall shift in the 30years We must turn therefore to externalfactors to explain the secular shift to a hege-monic regime

ExternalForces

The shift from despotism at Geer Companyto hegemony at Allied Corporation is com-patible with a shift reported in the industrialrelations literature The system of internallabor markets (both in terms of bidding onjobs and the system of layoffs through bump-ing) as well as the elaboration of grievancemachinery and collective bargaining becamecommon features in the organized sectors ofAmerican industry after World War II Thesechanges were consolidated by the patternbargaining between trade unions and leadingcorporations within the major industrial sec-


tors I drew on the literature that documentedthe more corporatist industrial relations toexplain what had happened on the shop floorsince Royrsquos field work While the overalltransformation of the system of state-regu-lated industrial relations was one factor gov-erning the move from despotism to hege-mony the absorption of the independent GeerCompany into the multinational Allied Cor-poration was the second factor Alliedrsquos en-gine division had a guaranteed market andwas thereby protected from competitionmdashthe very pressure that stimulated despotismHere then were my twin explanations for theshift from despotism to hegemony (1) GeerCompanyrsquos move from the competitive sec-tor to the monopoly sector and (2) the trans-formation of industrial relations at the na-tional level Both of these forces originatedfrom beyond the plant itself

What do I mean by ldquoexternal forcesrdquo Iuse the term ldquoexternal forcesrdquo rather thansay ldquoexternal contextrdquo to underline the waythe environment is experienced as powersemanating from beyond the field site shap-ing the site yet existing largely outside thecontrol of the site These forces are not fixedbut are in flux They appear and disappearin ways that are often incomprehensible andunpredictable to the participants Externalcontext by contrast is a more passivestatic and inertial concept that misses thedynamism of the social order

This brings up another question Fromamong the myriad potential external forcesat work how does one identify those thatare most important They cannot be deter-

mined from the perspective of participantobservation alone but in addition requirethe adoption of a theoretical framework fortheir delimitation and conceptualizationBut theory is necessary not just to grasp theforces operative beyond the site it is alsonecessary to conceptualize the very distinc-tion between internal and external localand extra-local For example Marxisttheory directs one first to the firm and itslabor process (the local or internal) andthen to an environment (the extra-local orexternal) composed of markets and statesThe ldquointernalrdquo and the ldquoexternalrdquo are com-bined within a more general theory of thedevelopment of capitalism In sum theoryis a sine qua non of both types of realist ex-planation for change between successiveethnographies of the same site

Table 1 assembles the four hypotheticalexplanations for the discrepancy betweenRoyrsquos (1952b) and my own account of theGeerAllied shop floor Along one dimen-sion I distinguish between constructivistand realist explanationsmdashthe former focus-ing on changes in knowledge of the object(whether due to different relations to thefield or alternative theory) and the latterfocusing on changes in the object of knowl-edge (whether these changes are due to in-ternal processes or external forces) Thesecond dimension refers to the distinctionbetween ldquointernalrdquo and ldquoexternalrdquo explana-tions of changemdashbetween relations consti-tuted in the field and theories importedfrom outside or between internal processesand external forces

Table 1 Possible Explanations for the Divergence between Royrsquos Original Ethnography andBurawoyrsquos Revisit

Explanations Internal External

Observer as Participant Reconstructing Theory

Constructivist (a) Habitus (work experience) Human relations

(b) Location (in production) vs

(c) Embodiment (language race age)Marxism

Internal Processes External Forces

Cyclical imposition (a) Absorption of factoryRealist and relaxation into monopoly sector

of rules (b) Secular national shiftin industrial relations

Sources Burawoy (1979) Roy (1952b)


CritiqueandAuto-Critique

In claiming ldquoexternal forcesrdquo as the expla-nation for the discrepancy between my ownaccount and Royrsquos (1952b) I am not sayingthat the other three dimensions are unimpor-tant Far from it The impact of those exter-nal forcesmdashchanging state and market con-text of the companymdashcould only have beenobserved through participant observationcould only have been detected with the aidof some theoretical framework and couldonly have had their actual effects via themediation of social processes within theworkplace My approach here however isvery different from the Chicago Schoolrsquosexemplified by Royrsquos (1980) review ofManufacturing Consent (Burawoy 1979)Roy was curiously uninterested in explain-ing changes and continuities in the organi-zation of work or in placing our labor pro-cesses in their respective economic and po-litical contexts or in evaluating how our re-spective theoretical frameworks shed differ-ent light on what had happened over those30 years For Roy our two studies merelyshowed that there are different ways to ldquoskina workerrdquo He evinced no interest in the fac-tors that might explain why ldquoskinningrdquo tookone form earlier and another form later9

If there are limitations to Royrsquos Chicagomethod there are also limitations to my useof the Manchester method10 Even though Istill believe that ldquoexternal forcesrdquo offer themost accurate explanation for the discrepan-cies between our accounts in hindsight theway I conceptualized markets and states wasdeeply problematic11 I was guilty ofreifying ldquoexternal forcesrdquo as natural andeternal overlooking that they are themselvesthe product of unfolding social processesHere I was indeed shortsighted Markets andstates do change Indeed soon after I leftAllied in 1974 the hegemonic regime cameunder assault from (1) the globalization ofmarkets (which in fact led to the disintegra-tion of Allied) and (2) the Reagan statersquos of-fensive against trade unions In forging classcompromise and individualizing workersthe hegemonic regime made those very sameworkers vulnerable to such offensives fromwithout If I had been more attentive toMarxist theory I would have recognized thatstates and markets change More than that Iwould have noticed that the hegemonic re-gime sowed the seeds of its own destructionby disempowering the workers whose con-sent it organized The hegemonic regime thatI saw as the culmination of industrial rela-tions in advanced capitalism was actually onthe verge of disappearing

The problem was not with the choice ofldquoexternal forcesrdquo as the explanation ofchange from Geer to Allied but my failure totake sufficiently seriously the other three el-ements in Table 1 I should have deployedldquotheoretical reconstructionrdquo to recognizepossible ldquointernal processesrdquo (elsewherewithin the economy or state) that might haveproduced those ldquoexternal forcesrdquo Further-more had I problematized my own embod-ied participation at Allied I might have ap-preciated the peculiarities of manufacturingthat were being replaced by ascendant vari-eties of newly gendered and racialized labor

9 Similarly Becker (199889) reduces my re-visit to studying the ldquosame problemrdquo under ldquonewconditionsrdquo In so doing he misses the distinc-tiveness of my extended case method First Ididnrsquot study the same problem but the oppositeproblem That is he ignores my inversion ofRoyrsquos theoretical framework (from the human re-lations questionmdashwhy people donrsquot workhardermdashto the Marxist questionmdashwhy peoplework so hard) Second he misses the historicalfocus of the study namely my attempt to explainchanges on the shop floor between 1944 and1974 Therefore third he overlooks my exami-nation of external forces as the source of suchchange The problem with both Roy and Beckeris not their critique of Manufacturing Consentbut their anodyne assimilation of the study to amethodology it opposes the methodology ofHughes (1971) thematized by Becker (1998)that searches inductively for what is common tothe most disparate of cases rather than explain-ing divergences To be sure there are insights tobe gleaned from showing the similarity betweenjanitors and physicians but there is also much tobe gained by examining why medical and janito-rial services have each changed over time or why

each varies from place to place10 I am here referring to the Manchester School

of Social Anthropology and its extended casemethod (Van Velsen 1967)

11 There have been numerous criticisms ofManufacturing Consent most recently in a sym-posium edited by Gottfried (2001) These andother criticisms include excellent reanalyses butfew bear directly on my revisit to Geer


processes The lesson here is that revisits de-mand that ethnographers consider all fourelements of Table 1

FromElementstoTypesof

FocusedRevisits

The four elements in Table 1 define reflex-ive ethnography that is an approach to par-ticipant observation that recognizes that weare part of the world we study Reflexiveethnography presumes an ldquoexternalrdquo realworld but it is one that we can only knowthrough our constructed relation to it Thereis no transcendence of this dilemmamdashrealistand constructivist approaches provide eachotherrsquos corrective12 Following Bourdieu(1990) I believe that interrogating onersquos re-lation to the world one studies is not an ob-stacle but a necessary condition for under-standing and explanation13 In particular as

ethnographers we are only part of the worldwe study That is we face human limitationson what we can study through participantobservation which makes the distinction be-tween internal and external inescapableOnce again cross-classifying these two di-mensions we get four possible ways of ex-plaining the discrepancy between an origi-nal study and its revisit It so happens thatactual focused revisits tend to emphasize oneor another of these four explanations givingrise to four types as shown in Table 2

Not only do focused revisits tend to fallinto one of four types but each type assumesa quite distinctive modal character

Type I revisits focus on the relations be-tween observer and participant and they tendto be ldquorefutationalrdquo That is to say the suc-cessor tends to use the revisit to refute theclaims of the predecessor Such is Freemanrsquos(1983) denunciation of Meadrsquos (1928) Com-ing of Age in Samoa and Boelenrsquos (1992)vilification of Whytersquos (1943) Street CornerSociety

Type II revisits focus on theoretical differ-ences and they tend to be ldquoreconstructiverdquoThat is to say the successor uses the revisitto reconstruct the theory of the predecessorSuch is Weinerrsquos (1976) feminist reconstruc-tion of Malinowskirsquos (1922) Argonauts ofthe Western Pacific and Lewisrsquos (1951) his-toricist reconstruction of the Redfieldrsquos(1930) Tepoztlaacuten A Mexican Village

Type III revisits focus on internal pro-cesses and they tend to be ldquoempiricistrdquo Thatis the successor tends to describe rather thanexplain changes over time Such is Lynd andLyndrsquos (1937) revisit to their own first study

Table 2 Typology and Examples of Classic (Focused) Revisits


Type I Refutation Type II Reconstruction

Constructivist (a) Freeman (1983) reg (a) Weiner (1976) regMead (1928) Malinowski (1922)

(b) Boelen (1992) reg (b) Lewis (1951) regWhyte (1943) Redfield (1930)

Type III Empiricism Type IV Structuralism

(a) Lynd and Lynd (1937) reg (a) Hutchinson (1996) regRealist Lynd and Lynd (1929) Evans-Pritchard (1940)

(b) Caplow (1984) reg (b) Moore and Vaughan (1994) regLynd and Lynd (1929) Richards (1939)

12 Abbott (2001 chap 3) has written a delight-ful account of how constructionism and realismreproduce each other Each is incomplete with-out the other each corrects the other

13 It should be clear that like Bourdieu andWacquant (1992) or Morawska (1997) I do notreduce reflexive ethnography to the relationshipbetween observer and informant (as Rabinow[1977] and Behar [1993] do in their accounts)First a reflexive ethnography is reflexive notonly in the sense of recognizing the relation wehave to those we study but also the relation wehave to a body of theory we share with otherscholars Second a reflexive ethnography is eth-nographic in the sense that it seeks to compre-hend an external world both in terms of the so-cial processes we observe and the external forceswe discern


Middletown A Study in Modern AmericanCulture (Lynd and Lynd 1929) and the sub-sequent revisit to Middletown by Caplow andhis colleagues (Bahr Caplow and Chadwick1983 Caplow and Bahr 1979 Caplow andChadwick 1979 Caplow et al 1982)

Type IV revisits focus on external forcesand they tend to be ldquostructuralistrdquo That isthey rely on a configuration of externalforces to explain the discrepancy betweenthe two studies Here my two main examplesare Hutchinsonrsquos (1996) revisit to Evans-Pritchardrsquosrsquo (1940) The Nuer and Moore andVaughanrsquos (1994) revisit to Richardsrsquos(1939) Land Labour and Diet in NorthernRhodesia

FOCUSEDREVISITSOFA

CONSTRUCTIVISTKIND

The distinguishing assumption of the con-structivist revisit is that the site being stud-ied at two points in time does not itselfchange but rather it is the different relationof the ethnographer to the site (Type I) orthe different theory that the ethnographerbrings to the site (Type II) that accounts forthe discrepancy in observations It is ourknowledge of the site but not the site itselfthat changes in the first instance throughrefutation and in the second instance throughreconstruction We call these revisits con-structivist because they depend upon the in-volvement or perspective of the ethnogra-pher that is upon his or her agency

TypeIRefutation

Perhaps the most famous case of ldquorefuta-tionrdquo is Freemanrsquos (1983) revisit to Meadrsquos(1928) study of Samoan female adolescentsIn her iconic Coming of Age in SamoaMead claimed that Samoans had an easefulplacid transition to adulthood marked by arelaxed and free sexuality so different fromthe anxious tension-filled guilt-ridden andrebellious adolescence found in the UnitedStates Based on multiple sourcesmdashaccountsof missionaries and explorers archives andhis own field work in 1940 1965 1968 and1981mdashFreeman claimed Samoans were aproud vindictive punitive and competitivepeople Far from easygoing they were defi-ant individuals far from placid they were

often more bellicose far from their cel-ebrated sexual liberation Samoans prizedvirginity among them adultery excited rageand rape was common Samoan adolescentsFreeman claimed were as delinquent asthose in the West

How could Mead (1928) have been sowrong Freeman (1983) had a long list ofindictments Mead knew little about Samoabefore she arrived she never mastered thelanguage she focused narrowly on adoles-cents without studying the wider society herfield work was short lasting only threemonths out of the nine months she spent onSamoa she lived with expatriates rather thanwith her informants she relied on self-re-porting of the teenage girls who later de-clared that they were just teasing her Meadwas naive inexperienced unprepared andfinally hoaxed14 Worse still and here we seehow theory enters the picture Freeman ac-cused Mead of dogmatic defense of the cul-tural research program of her supervisorFranz Boas Showing that the trauma of ado-lescence was not universal Mead was lend-ing support to the importance of culture asopposed to biology But the evidence saidFreeman did not sustain her claims

This attack on a foundational classic ofcultural anthropology reverberated through

14 This strategy of indicting onersquos adversariesby stressing their extra-scientific motivation ortheir nonscientific practices is not confined to thesocial sciences In Opening Pandorarsquos Box Gil-bert and Mulkay (1984) show how biochemistsentangled in disputes about ldquothe truthrdquo deploytwo types of discourse an ldquoempiricistrdquo discoursethat deals in ldquothe factsrdquo and a ldquocontingentrdquo dis-course that attributes ldquoerrorsrdquo to noncognitive(social political and personal) interests Scien-tists apply the empiricist discourse to themselvesand the contingent discourse to their opponentsWe find the same double standards in Type I re-visits The revisitorrsquos research is beyond re-proach while the predecessorrsquos research ismarred by flawed field work by biases due tohabitus location or embodiment In these casesof refutation as for the scientists studied by Gil-bert and Mulkay (1984) revisitors exempt them-selves from such biases or inadequacies in theirown field workmdashbut the grounds for such ex-emption are more presumed than demonstratedCritics easily turn the tables on the revisitor byplaying the same game and revealing his or herbiases


the discipline15 Social and cultural anthro-pologists regrouped largely in defense ofMead While recognizing possible flaws inher field work and tendentious interpreta-tions of her own field notes they turned thespotlight back on Freeman Refutation in-spired refutation Critics found his citationsof sources opportunistic they wondered howhe (a middle-aged white man) and his wifemight have been more successful in discov-ering the sex lives of female adolescentsthan the 23-year-old Mead They accusedhim of relying on informants who had theirown axe to grind making him appear eithermore gullible than Mead or simply cynicalThey complained that he said little about hisown relations to the people he studied ex-cept that he knew the language better thanMead did They were skeptical of his claimthat being made an honorary chief meantthat Samoans trusted him more than they didMead His critics considered him to havebeen gripped by a pathological refutationalfrenzy that lasted from first field work untilhe died in 2001

Freeman brought further vituperationupon himself by refusing to offer an alterna-tive theory of adolescence biological orother that would explain the data that he hadmobilized against Mead He followed Pop-per to whom he dedicated his 1983 bookbut only half way Popper (1962) insistedthat refutations be accompanied by bold con-jectures For Freeman to have done thatwould have entailed moving to a Type II re-visitmdashtheory reconstruction Other anthro-pologists have come up with such recon-structions partial resolutions of the contro-versy Thus Shore (1983) argued that Sa-moan character was ambiguous displayingMead-type features in some situations andFreeman-like features in others He pro-

posed a richer theory of Samoan ethos thandid either Mead or Freeman

Others have tried to resolve the contradic-tion in a realist manner proposing that Meadand Freeman were studying different ldquoSamo-ansrdquo In refuting Mead Freeman was forcedto homogenize all Samoa He did not distin-guish the Samoa colonized by the Dutch fromthe Samoa colonized by the Americans Datacollected from anywhere in Samoa between1830 and 1987 were grist for his refutationalmill Yet even Mead herself recognized ma-jor changes that overtook Samoa during thisperiod and suggested that the period of herfield work was especially harmoniousWeiner (1983) argued that Samoan charactervaried with the influence of missions In thearea studied by Freeman competition amongseveral denominations led Samoans to bemore defiant than in Meadrsquos Manursquoa wherethere was only a single mission Such realdifferences between the communitiesWeiner claimed went a long way to recon-ciling the divergent accounts We are heremoving in the direction of realist revisits

In short Freemanrsquos obsessive focus onrefutation based on the distorting relationsof ethnographer to the field occluded boththe reconstruction of theory and historicalchange as strategies to reconcile predeces-sor and successor studies The same narrowldquorefutationalrdquo focus can be found inBoelenrsquos (1992) revisit to Whytersquos (1943)Street Corner Society Based on a series ofshort visits to Cornerville in the 1970s and1980s Boelen accused Whyte of all mannerof sinsmdashfrom not knowing Italian ignoringfamily not understanding Italian village lifeand poor ethics to defending flawed Chi-cago School theories of gangs Unlike Meadwho died 5 years before Freemanrsquos book waspublished Whyte was still alive to rebutBoelenrsquos accusations (Orlandella 1992Whyte 1992) In Whytersquos account he knewItalian better than did the gang members hedid not consider the family or the Italian vil-lage as immediately relevant to street cornersociety his ethical stances were clear andbeyond reproach and finally his theory ofthe slum far from embracing Chicagorsquos dis-organization theories was its refutationLike Freeman Boelen was fixated on refu-tation without proffering her own theory orconsidering the possibility of historical

15 Journals devoted special sections (AmericanAnthropologist 1983 pp 908ndash47 Current An-thropology 2000 pp 609ndash22) or even whole is-sues (Canberra Anthropology 1983 vol 6 nos1 2 Journal of Youth and Adolescence 2000vol 29 no 5) to the controversy A number ofbooks have appeared (Caton 1990 Freeman1999 Holmes 1987 Orans 1996) a documentaryfilm was made (Heimans 1988) and a fictional-ized play was produced of this high drama in theacademy (Williamson 1996)


change between the time of Whytersquos studyand her own observations

Boelenrsquos (1992) critique of sociologyrsquosiconic ethnography barely rippled the disci-plinary waters in part because ethnographyis more marginal in sociology than in anthro-pology and in part because the critique waspoorly executed Even if Boelen had ap-proached her revisit with Freemanrsquos serious-ness she would have had to confront a so-ciological establishment mobilized to defendits archetypal ethnography As a graduatestudent and female to boot she would havebeen at a severe disadvantage As Freemandiscovered it is always an uphill task to re-fute an entrenched study that has become apillar of the discipline and in Meadrsquos casea monument to Americarsquos cultural self-un-derstanding One might say that Freemanhad to develop a pathological commitmentto refutation if he was to make any headwayIn the business of refutation the balance ofpower usually favors the predecessor espe-cially if he or she is alive to undermine ordiscredit the refuting successor16 The evi-dence brought to bare in the refutation mustbe either especially compelling or resonantwith alternative or emergent disciplinarypowers Rather than cutting them down tosize or trampling them into the ground it isoften easier to stand ldquoon the shoulders of gi-antsrdquo which is the strategy of the next set ofrevisitsmdashthe reconstruction of theory

TypeIIReconstruction

We have seen how some refutational re-visitors not content to highlight the distort-ing effects of poorly conducted field workalso claimed that their predecessors im-ported arbitrary theory at the behest of aninfluential teacher or as a devotee of a fa-vored school of thought In the examplesabove the revisitors failed however to putup their own alternative theory They pur-sued the destruction of theory but not its re-construction It is reconstruction that distin-guishes Type II revisits

One cannot be surprised that feministtheory is at the forefront of theoretical re-construction of the classic ethnographiesThere have been feminist reanalyses of ca-nonical works such as Goughrsquos (1971) fa-mous reconstruction of Evans-Pritchardrsquoswork on the Nuer The classic feminist re-visit however is Weinerrsquos (1976) revisit toMalinowskirsquos (1922) study of the TrobriandIslands Malinowski did his field work be-tween 1915 and 1918 and Weiner did hersin a neighboring village in 1971 and 1972Although by no means the first to revisit thissacred site Weinerrsquos is a dramatic recon-struction from the perspective of Trobriandwomen Where Malinowski focused on therituals and ceremonies around the exchangeof yams Weiner dwelt on ldquomortuary cer-emoniesrdquo conducted by women after thedeath of a kinsman at which bundles of spe-cially prepared banana leaves and skirts(also made out of banana leaves) are ex-changed among the female kin of the de-ceased While men worked in the yam gar-dens women labored over their bundlesThese two objects of exchange representeddifferent spheres of power control of theintergenerational transfer of property in thecase of men and control over ancestral iden-tity in the case of women Thus the ritualsof death similarly divided into two typesthose concerned with reestablishing inter-generational linkages through the distribu-tion of property and those concerned withrepairing onersquos ldquodalardquo identity or ancestryby distributing bundles of banana leavesWomen monopolized a power domain oftheir own immortality in cosmic time whilethey shared control of the material worldwith men in historical time

Weiner (1976) committed herself to repo-sitioning women in Trobriand society andby extension to all societies Hitherto anthro-pologists had reduced gender to kinship orseen women as powerless objects ex-changed by men (Leacutevi-Strauss 1969) In tak-ing the perspective of these supposed objects(ie in subjectifying their experiences)Weiner showed them to wield significantpower institutionalized in material practicesand elaborate rituals Her revisit thereforeserved to reconstruct a classic study by of-fering a more complete deeper understand-ing of the power relations between men and

16 In her comments as a reviewer DianeVaughan made this point So too did RichardGrinker in private remarks to the author Grinker(1994 2000) revisited the Central African sitesof the famous and controversial anthropologistColin Turnbull


women While Weiner may have been in-spired to develop her reinterpretation by vir-tue of being a woman and living withwomen these were not sufficient conditionsfor her gender analysis we know this fromthe women anthropologists who precededher The turn to her particular understandingof gender was shaped by feminism Ratherthan impugn Malinowskirsquos (1922) field workas limited by his focus on men and a myriadof other foibles that could be gleaned fromhis diaries she attended to its theoreticallimitations

At the same time Weinerrsquos (1976) studyis curiously ahistorical in that she made noattempt to consider what changes might havetaken place in the 55 years that had elapsedbetween her own study and MalinowskirsquosDetermining change might have been diffi-cult for Weiner as Malinowski had paid solittle attention to mortuary rituals It wouldhave required her therefore to first recon-struct Malinowskirsquos account of the TrobriandIslanders as they were in 1915mdasha dauntingtask but one that as we shall see some TypeIV revisits have attempted

Still there are Type II revisits in which thesuccessor reconstructs the theory of historyused by the predecessor in particularLewisrsquos (1951) classic revisit to RedfieldrsquosTepoztlaacuten (Redfield 1930) Redfield studiedTepoztlaacuten in 1926 and Lewis studied thevillage 17 years later in 1943 ostensibly todiscover what had changed But he becamemuch less interested in studying the changein Tepoztlaacuten than in taking Redfield to taskfor his portrait of an integrated homoge-neous isolated and smoothly-functioningvillage glossing over ldquoviolence disruptioncruelty disease suffering and maladjust-mentrdquo (Lewis 1951428ndash29) Lewis stressedthe individualism of the villagers their po-litical schisms their lack of cooperation thestruggles between the landed and landlessand conflicts among villages in the area In-stead of upholding Redfieldrsquos isolation ofTepoztlaacuten Lewis situated the village in aweb of wider political and economic forcesand traced features of Tepoztlaacuten back to theMexican Revolution

How did Lewis (1951) explain the differ-ences between his account and Redfieldrsquos(1930) First he ruled out historical changeover the 17 years as sufficient to explain

their discrepant portraits of TepoztlaacutenRather Lewis criticized Redfieldrsquos folkndashur-ban continuummdashthe theory that historicalchange can be measured as movement fromfolk to urban forms While Lewis did grantsome validity to Redfieldrsquos theorymdashcommu-nities do become more secular and individu-alized over timemdashhe held the folkndashurbancontinuum responsible for Redfieldrsquos senti-mental portrait of Tepoztlaacuten His criticismswere multiple The idea of a folkndashurban con-tinuum creates a false separation of town andcountry and an illusory isolation of the vil-lage it overlooks the internal dynamics anddiversity of villages and most important ig-nores the impact of broader historicalchanges and Redfield substitutes positionon a continuum from rural to urban for thestudy of real historical change Thus in thefinal analysis Lewis attributed Redfieldrsquosromanticization of Tepoztlaacuten to his myopictheory of history17

For Lewis (1951) to stop here would leavehis revisit as Type I but he advances to TypeII by providing his own broadly Marxisttheory of social change He situated Tepozt-laacuten within an array of historically specificexternal influences such as new roads andimproved transportation commerce land re-form new technology and the expansion ofschooling Like Weiner (1976) Lewis didnot use Redfieldrsquos (1930) study as a base-line to assess social change For himRedfieldrsquos ethnography was based on a mis-guided theory of history which he Lewisreplaced with his own context-dependent un-derstanding of history

The story does not end here In The LittleCommunity Redfield (1960132ndash48) subse-quently offered a reanalysis of Lewisrsquos(1951) focused revisit He agreed with

17 Vincent (1990 chap 4) situates Lewisrsquos cri-tique of Redfield in much broader moves towardhistorical analysis that preoccupied postwar an-thropology in both England and the UnitedStates I also note parenthetically that Redfieldwas deeply influenced by the Chicago School ofurban ethnography at that time dominated byRobert Park and Ernest Burgess IndeedRedfield married Parkrsquos daughter and started outstudying Mexicans in Chicago under the direc-tion of Burgess So one cannot be surprised byhis ahistorical acontextual approach to histori-cal change


Lewis Historical change cannot explain thediscrepancy between their two portraits ofTepoztlaacuten But he denied the relevance ofthe folkndashurban continuum because he hadnrsquoteven developed the theory at the time hewrote Tepoztlaacuten Instead he attributed theirdifferences to the question each posed ldquoThehidden question behind my book is lsquoWhatdo these people enjoyrsquo The hidden questionbehind Dr Lewisrsquo book is lsquoWhat do thesepeople suffer fromrsquordquo (Redfield 1960136)And Redfield continued this is how itshould bemdashwe need multiple and comple-mentary perspectives on the same site Eachhas its own truth18 We are back to a Type IIreanalysis But this misses Lewisrsquos pointmdashthat questions derive from theories andsome theories are superior to others Even ifthe folkndashurban continuum did not springfully formed from Tepoztlaacuten its embryo wasalready there in the early study casting itsspell as an inadequate synchronic theory ofsocial change19

When Lewis (1951) claimed some theorieshave a better grasp on social change thanothers he was undoubtedly heading in a re-alist direction Today we find anthropolo-gists taking a constructivist turn lockingthemselves into Type II revisits that rule outexplanatory history altogether as either im-possible or dangerous In the late 1980sFerguson (1999) revisited the ZambianCopperbelt some 30 years after the famousstudies of the Manchester School In his ac-count of deindustrialization retrenchmentand return migration to the rural areasmdashtheresult of plummeting copper prices Interna-tional Monetary Fundndashsponsored structuraladjustment and a raging AIDS epidemicmdashFerguson discredited the Mancuniansrsquo tele-ology of urbanization and industrialization

(Gluckman 1961) that would be adopted asa mythology of development Rather thansubscribing to a theory of underdevelopmentand decline however Ferguson refused anytheory of history for fear of generating a newmythology Although there are realist mo-ments to his ethnography and the data heoffers could be reinterpreted through a real-ist lens Ferguson replaced ManchesterSchool teleology with an anti-theory thatdisengaged from any causal account of so-cial change In other words his revisit wentbeyond pure refutation (Type I) to theory re-construction (Type II) but the new theory isthe apotheosis of constructivism explicitlyrepudiating the realist endeavor Construc-tivism brought to a head now topples over

FOCUSEDREVISITSOF

AREALISTKIND

To the simpleminded realist focused revis-its are designed specifically to study histori-cal change We have seen however that re-visits may never mention history or mentionit only too discount it Constructivist revis-its pretend there is no change and the dif-ferences between predecessor and successoraccounts are due to the ethnographersrsquo par-ticipation in the field site or to the theorythey bring to the site The revisits I now con-sider start out from the opposite presump-tionmdashthat discrepant accounts are due tochanges in the world but as we shall seethey are often modified by considering theeffects of the ethnographerrsquos participationand theory The constructivist perspectivebrings a needed note of realism to the realistrevisit by insisting that we cannot know theexternal world without having a relationshipwith it In what follows constructivism dis-turbs rather than dismisses corrects ratherthan discounts deepens rather than dis-lodges the realist revisit

I divide realist revisits into two typesType III revisits which give primary atten-tion to internal processes and Type IV re-visits which give more weight to externalforces This is a hard distinction to sustainespecially when the time span between stud-ies is long Only if the revisit is an empiricaldescription cataloging changes in a com-munityrsquos economy social structure cultureand so on can a purely internal focus be sus-

18 In a further revisit to Tepoztlaacuten in 1970Bock (1980) focuses on the continuing potencyof the symbolic life generating yet another TypeII revisit reconstructing the interpretations ofboth Redfield and Lewis

19 In 1948 Redfield (1950) actually conductedhis own revisit to a village he studied 17 yearsearlier A Village That Chose Progress reads likea Durkheimian fairy story of a community mov-ing along the folk-urban continuum or asRedfield puts it taking ldquothe road to the lightrdquochap 7 p 153) the light being Chicago This isan unreal realist revisit of Type III


tained I therefore call these revisits ldquoem-piricistrdquo As soon as the focus shifts to ex-plaining social change the ethnographer isalmost inevitably driven to consider forcesbeyond the field site20 Even the most bril-liant ethnographers have failed in their en-deavors to reduce historical change to an in-ternal dynamics Thus Leachrsquos (1954) ac-count of the oscillation between egalitariangumlao and hierarchical gumsa organizationin Highland Burma and Barthrsquos (1959) ac-count of the cyclical movement of concen-tration and dispersal of land ownershipamong the Swat Pathans have both come un-der trenchant criticism for ignoring widerforces21 Revisits that thematize the configu-ration of ldquoexternal forcesrdquo whether eco-nomic political or cultural I call structur-alist revisits But the emphasis on ldquoexternalforcesrdquo should not come at the expense ofthe examination of internal processes Themark of the best structuralist revisits is theirattention to the way internal processes me-diate the effect of external forces

Sustaining the distinction between ldquointer-nalrdquo and ldquoexternalrdquo compels us to problem-atize it but without relinquishing it Just asType I refutational revisits by themselves are

unsatisfactory and require incorporation intoType II revisits of reconstruction so Type IIIrevisits that dwell on internal processes areequally unsatisfactory by themselves requir-ing incorporation within Type IV revisitsthat thematize ldquoexternal forcesrdquo

TypeIIIEmpiricism

A compelling empiricist revisit is hard tofind but Lynd and Lyndrsquos (1937) revisit totheir own study of Middletown is at least apartial case Insofar as they describedMiddletownrsquos change between 1925 and1935 they confined their attention to thecommunity but as soon as they venturedinto explanation they were driven to exploreforces beyond the community Without somuch as recognizing it they reconstructedthe theory they had used in the first studymdasha reconstruction that can be traced to theirown biographies and their changed relationto Middletown In other words their revisitostensibly an investigation of internal pro-cesses bleeds in all directions into Type Iand II constructivist explanations as well asType IV structuralist explanations

The first Middletown study (Lynd andLynd 1929) which I call Middletown I wasmost unusual for its time in focusing on so-cial change Taking their base-line year as1890 the Lynds reconstructed the interven-ing 35 years from diaries newspapers andoral histories22 To capture a total picture ofMiddletown they adopted a scheme used byanthropologist W H R Rivers that dividedcommunity life into six domains getting aliving making a home training the youngorganizing leisure religious practices andcommunity activities They argued that thelong arm of the job increasingly shaped allother domains The expansion of industryentailed deskilling monotonous work un-employment and declining chances of up-ward mobility Employment lost its intrinsicrewards and money became the arbiter ofconsumption The exigencies of industrialproduction led to new patterns of leisure (or-ganized around the automobile in particu-lar) of homemaking (with new gadgets andfewer servants) the rise of advertising (in

20 Even apparently robust internal explanationsof social change such as Michelsrsquos ([1910]1962) ldquoiron law of oligarchyrdquo have been subjectto punishing criticism for bracketing historicalcontext Schorske (1955) for example showedhow the bureaucratic tendencies of the GermanSocial Democratic Party the empirical basis ofthe iron law of oligarchy were a function of arange of forces emanating from the wider politi-cal field Coming closer to ethnography I(Burawoy 1982) inveighed against Gouldnerrsquos(1954) classic case study of the dynamics indus-trial bureaucracy for bracketing the external eco-nomic context of his gypsum plant

21 Nugentrsquos (1982) reanalysis of The PoliticalSystems of Highland Burma showed that changesin the region were a product of political instabil-ity in neighboring China changing patterns oflong distance opium trade and contestation be-tween British and Burmese armies as much asthey were a product of internal processes BeforeNugent Asad (1972) had shown the limitationsof Barthrsquos Hobbesian model of equilibrium poli-tics by refocusing on class dynamics in particu-lar the secular concentration of landownershipand how this was shaped by colonial forces be-yond the immediate region

22 Below I call this type of historical diggingan ldquoarcheological revisitrdquo


newspapers that had expanded their circula-tion) The pace of change was greatest in theeconomy which set the rhythm for the otherdomainsmdashleisure education and home un-derwent major changes while religion andgovernment changed more slowly

In all realms Lynd and Lynd (1929) dis-cerned the profound effects of class Theprevious 35 years had witnessed so theyclaimed a growing division between a work-ing class that manipulated physical objectsand a business class that manipulated humanbeings (stretching all the way from the low-est clerical workers to the highest corporateexecutive) They discovered a growing classdivide in access to housing schooling wel-fare medical services in patterns of the do-mestic division of labor leisure reading re-ligious practices and in influence over gov-ernment media and public opinion Thebusiness class controlled ideology promot-ing progress laissez faire civic loyalty andpatriotism while the working class becameever more atomized bereft of an alternativesymbolic universe

If we should congratulate the Lynds onadopting a historical perspective we shouldalso be cautious in endorsing their studyrsquoscontent especially after historian Thern-strom (1964) demolished a similar retro-spective history found in Warner and Lowrsquos(1947) study of Yankee City This is all themore reason to focus on the Lyndsrsquo revisitto Middletown in 1935 Middletown inTransition which I call Middletown II

Robert Lynd returned to Middletown witha team of five graduate students but withoutHelen Lynd The team set about examiningthe same six arenas of life that structured thefirst book With the depression the domi-nance of the economy had become evenstronger but Lynd was struck by continuityrather than discontinuity in particular byMiddletownersrsquo reassertion of old valuescustoms and practices in opposition tochange emanating from outside Lynd docu-mented the emergence and consolidation ofbig business as a controlling force in thecity the expansion and then contraction ofunions as big business fought to maintain theopen shop in Middletown the strangleholdof big business on government and the pressthe growth and centralization of relief for theunemployed adaptation of the family as

women gained employment and men lostprestige the expansion of education thestratification of leisure patterns the continu-ity of religious practices that provided con-solation and security

So much for the Lyndsrsquo empiricist ac-count But there is a second register an ex-planation of the changes interwoven withthe description Capitalist competition andcrises of overproduction produced (1) thedisappearance of small businesses makingthe power of big business all the more vis-ible (2) uncertain employment for the work-ing class which was living from hand tomouth (3) diminished opportunities for up-ward mobility as rungs on the economic lad-der disappeared resulting in (4) a moretransparent class system The two-classmodel had to be replaced by six classes Al-ready one can discern a change in the Lyndsrsquotheoretical system In Middletown I changecame about ldquointernallyrdquo through increases inthe division of labor in Middletown IIchange was produced by the dynamics ofcapitalism bound by an ineluctable logic ofcompetition overproduction and polariza-tion The influence of Marxism is clear butunremarked Market forces were absorbingMiddletown into greater America the fed-eral government was delivering relief sup-porting trade unions and funding publicworks while from distant places came radiotransmissions syndicated newspaper col-umns and standardized education Middle-town was being swept up in a maelstrom be-yond its control and comprehension

The Lynds (1937) could not confine them-selves to internal processes but how self-conscious were they of the shift in theirtheoretical perspective Two long and strik-ingly anomalous chapters in Middletown IIhave no parallels in Middletown I The firstanomalous chapter is devoted to Family Xwhich dominated the local economy govern-ment the press charity trade unions andeducation Yet Family X was barely men-tioned in Middletown I although its powereven then must have been transparent to allThe second anomalous chapter deals withthe ldquoMiddletown Spiritrdquo examining the rul-ing-class ideology and the possibilities of acounter-ideology based on working-classconsciousness If Middletown I was a studyof culture as social relations Middletown II


became a study of culture as masking andreproducing relations of power Differenttheoretical perspectives select different em-pirical foci Instead of the inordinately longchapter on religion we find one on the hege-mony of Family X23 Itrsquos not just thatMiddletown had changedmdashthe Lynds or atleast Robert Lynd had modified their theo-retical framework

But why Did the refocused theory simplymirror changes in the world In other wordsdoes the world simply stamp itself onto thesociologist who faithfully reports changeThat was the Lyndsrsquo position in 1925 whenthey described themselves as simply record-ing ldquoobserved phenomenardquo with no attemptto ldquoprove any thesisrdquo (Lynd and Lynd 19294 6) The intellectual ambience of Middle-town II was entirely different Robert Lyndstarted out by declaring research without aviewpoint as impossible and that his view-point was at odds with the people he studiedIn those 10 intervening years Lynd had be-come persuaded that laissez faire capitalismwas unworkable that planning was neces-sary and that trade unions should be sup-ported He had begun to participate in theNew Deal as a member of the National Re-covery Administrationrsquos Consumers Advi-sory Board and he had been influenced bywhat he regarded as the successes of Sovietplanning (Smith 1994) As we know from hisKnowledge for What (1939) Robert Lyndtook up an ever more hostile posture towardcapitalism In 10 years he had come a longway from the declared empiricism in Middle-town I and his revisit was shaped by his owntransformation as much as by Middletownrsquosby his adoption of a theory of capitalism thatthematized the power of forces beyondMiddletown and patterns of dominationwithin Middletown In short therersquos more

than a whiff of Type I II and IV revisits inthis ostensibly Type III revisit to Middletown

If the Lynds were never the empiriciststhey originally claimed to be the second re-visit (Middletown III) conducted between1976 and 1978 by Caplow and his collabo-rators did attempt a purely empirical de-scription of changes within MiddletownWhile the researchers did spend timemdashseri-allymdashin Middletown their results werelargely based on the ldquoreplicationrdquo of two sur-veys the Lynds administered in 1924mdashoneof housewives and the other of adolescentsLeaving aside possible changes in the mean-ing of questions or the differential bias in thesamples themselves Caplow and his col-laborators concluded that values had notchanged much over 50 years and that the lifestyles of the working class and the businessclass had converged (Bahr Caplow andChadwick 1983 Caplow and Bahr 1979Caplow and Chadwick 1979) In their bestknown volume Middletown FamiliesCaplow et al (1982) noted that despitechanges in the economy state and mass me-dia the family maintained its integrity

Caplow et al (1982) debunked the ideathat the American family was in declinebut they were not interested in explainingits persistencemdashhow and why it persistedalongside changes in other domains Norwere they interested in explaining the sig-nificant changes in the family that they didobserve namely increased solidaritysmaller generation gaps and closer maritalcommunication Such a task might have ledthem to examine the relations between fam-ily and other spheres or to investigate theimpact of forces beyond the community Inchoosing to focus on replicating the Lyndsrsquo(1929) Middletown I surveys Caplow et alnecessarily overlooked questions of classdomination at the center of Middletown IIand in particular the power of Family X24

Indeed lurking behind their empiricismwas a set of choicesmdashchoices made by de-fault but choices nonetheless techniques ofinvestigation that define the researcherrsquos re-lation to the community values that deter-

23 Another explanation for Lynd and Lyndrsquos(1937) focus on Family X is that Robert Lynd wascriticized by residents for omitting it fromMiddletown I Bahr (1982) goes so far as to im-ply that Lynd drew his ideas about the importanceof Family X from a term paper written by a resi-dent of Middletown Lynn Perrigo that was criti-cal of the first Middletown study Merton (1980)wrote a letter to Bahr questioning his insinua-tions of plagiarism and suggesting alternative rea-sons for Lyndrsquos change of focus in Middletown II(also see Caccamo 2000 chap 4)

24 The original surveys in Middletown I werenot replicated by Robert Lynd in Middletown IIin part I suspect because of the absence ofHelen Lynd


mine what not to study theories to be re-futed and reconstructed25

Caplow and his collaborators shed furtherlight on the distinction between replicationand revisit for their return to Middletownwas indeed a replication that attempted tocontrol the relation of observer to partici-pant That is they asked the ldquosamerdquo ques-tions under the ldquosimulatedrdquo conditions of aldquoparallelrdquo sample of the populationmdashall forthe purpose of isolating and measuringchanges in beliefs life style and so on26

The trouble is of course as in the naturalsciences (Collins 1985 Collins and Pinch1993) one never knows to what extent re-sponses to a survey reflect something ldquorealrdquothat can be used to test a hypothesis or towhat extent they are a ldquoconstructionrdquo of thesurvey instrument Making no pretense tocontrol all conditions the focused revisitconfronts these questions of realism andconstructivism head-on There is a secondsense however in which the replicationstudies of Middletown III are limited andthat is in their failure to explain what has orhas not changed That would mean recon-structing rather than refuting theories and ofcourse it would entail going beyondMiddletown itself This brings us conve-niently and finally to Type IV revisits

TypeIVStructuralism

Parallel to the Lyndsrsquo return to Middletownis Firthrsquos (1959) classic revisit to Tikopia an

isolated and small Polynesian island that hefirst studied in 1928ndash1929 (Firth 1936) andto which he returned in 1952 Like theLyndsrsquo in their revisit to Middletown Firthwas not about to deconstruct or reconstructhis own original study Rather he took it as abaseline from which to assess social changeover the 24 years that had elapsed betweenthe two studies Having constructed Tikopiaas an isolated and self-sustaining entity theimpulse to social change came primarilyfrom without Indeed Firth arrived just aftera rare hurricanemdashan external force if everthere was onemdashhad devastated the islandcausing widespread famine As a counterpartto the depressions that hit Middletown thehurricane became Firthrsquos test of the resil-ience of the social order a test which for themost part was met But Firth was more con-cerned to discern long-term tendencies in-dependent of the hurricane and the famine itprovoked He emphasized Tikopian societyrsquosselective incorporation of changes emanat-ing from withoutmdashlabor migration to otherislands the expansion of commerce and amoney economy the influx of Western com-modities the expansion of Christian mis-sions the intrusion of colonial rule In theface of these irreversible forces of ldquomodern-izationrdquo the Tikopian social order still re-tained its integrity Its lineage system attenu-ated but didnrsquot disappear gift exchange andbarter held money at bay residence and kin-ship patterns were less ritualized but theprinciples remained in spite of pressure onland chiefly power was less ceremonial butalso strengthened as the basis of colonialrule In short an array of unexplicated un-explored external forces had their effects butwere mediated by the social processes of ahomogeneous Tikopian society

More recent structuralist revisits problem-atize Firthrsquos assumptions They examine thecontingency of external forces as well as thedeep schisms these forces induce within so-cieties They think more deeply about theimplication of the original ethnographers liv-ing in the world they study and even theirimpact on the world that is revisited27

25 As Robert Lynd (1939) himself wrote ldquoThecurrent emphasis in social science upon tech-niques and precise empirical data is a healthyone but as already noted skilful collection or-ganization and manipulation of data are worthno more than the problem to the solution ofwhich they are addressed If the problem iswizened the data are but footnotes to the insig-nificantrdquo (p 202) Smith (1984) reviewed theMiddletown III studies as betraying RobertLyndrsquos project of critical sociology Caplow(1984) responded that he and his colleagues werejust good social scientists examining hypothesesput forward by the Lynds and describing thecomplex social changes since 1924

26 In the extensive literature on ldquoreplicationrdquoof particular interest is Bahr Caplow andChadwickrsquos (1983) discussion of the problems ofreplication with respect to their own MiddletownIII studies

27 Macdonald (2000) writes about the effectsof Firth himself on her own revisit to TikopiaThe Tikopians would cite Firth back to her as theauthentic interpretation of their society and they


Hutchinson (1996) and Moore and Vaughan(1994) replace Firthrsquos homogeneous societyundergoing modernization with societies be-set by domination contestation and indeter-minacy These revisits reflect the profoundlydifferent theoretical lenses that the ethnogra-phers bring to their field work

Hutchinsonrsquos (1996) revisit is the mostcomprehensive attempt to study what hashappened to the Nuer of South Sudanmdashthoseisolated independent cattle-minded warriorsimmortalized by Evans-Pritchard in his clas-sic studies of the 1930s (Evans-Pritchard1940 1951 1956) Hutchinson did her firstfield work in 1980ndash1983 just before the out-break of the second civil war between theldquoAfricanrdquo South and the ldquoArabrdquo North Shereturned to Nuerland in 1990 while it wasstill in the midst of the devastating warHutchinson took Evans-Pritchardrsquos accountsof the Nuer as her base-line point of refer-ence and asked what had changed over 60years of colonialism with the succession ofa national government in Khartoum (North-ern Sudan) and then two civil wars Herquestions were entirely different from thoseof Evans-Pritchard Where he was interestedin the functional unity of the Nuer commu-nity viewing it as an isolated order insulatedfrom colonialism wars droughts and dis-eases Hutchinson focused on the latterWhere he looked for the peace in the feudthe integrative effects of human animositiesand ritual slayings she focused on discordand antagonism in order to understand thetransformation of the Nuer community

Instead of reconstructing Evans-Pritchardrsquos original studies relocating themin their world-historical context Hutchinsondeployed the clever methodological deviceof comparing two Nuer communitiesmdashonein the western Nuer territory that moreclosely approximated Evans-Pritchardrsquos en-closed world and another in the eastern Nuerterritory that had been more firmly inte-grated into wider economic political andcultural fields Administered by theSudanese Peoplersquos Liberation Army (SPLA)

the West became a bastion of resistance toIslamicization from the North Still eventhere despite being swept into war marketsand states the Nuer managed to maintaintheir cattle-based society Exchanging cattleespecially as bridewealth continued to ce-ment the Nuer but this was only possible byregulating and marginalizing the role ofmoney As the Nuer say ldquoMoney does nothave bloodrdquo It cannot recreate complex kinrelations precisely because it is a universalmedium of exchange Rather than cattle be-ing commodified money was ldquocattle-ifiedrdquoAs in the case of bridewealth so in the caseof bloodwealth cattle continued to be meansof payment In Nuer feuds cattle were for-feited as compensation for slaying onersquos en-emy When guns replaced spears or when theNuer began killing those they did not knowbloodwealth was still retained but onlywhere it concerned the integrity of the localcommunity

Change may have taken place within theterms of the old order but nonetheless it wasintensely contested As war accelerated Nuerintegration into wider economic politicaland social structures Nuer youth exploitednew opportunities for mobility through edu-cation An emergent class of educated Nuermen bull-boys as they were called threat-ened the existing order by refusing scarringmarks of initiation (scarification) Initiationlies at the heart of Nuer society tying men tocattle wealth and women to human procre-ation Thus the newly educated classes wereat the center of controversy Equally cattlesacrifice was contested as communities be-came poorer as Western medicines becamemore effective in the face of illness and dis-ease and as the spreading Christianity soughtto desacrilize cattle The SPLA promotedChristianity both to unite the different South-ern factions in waging war against the Northand as a world religion to contest Islam in aninternational theatre Finally the discoveryof oil and the building of the Jonglei Canal(that could environmentally ruin southernSudan) increased the stakes and thus the in-tensity of war Indeed southern Sudan be-came a maelstrom of global and local forces

Rather than reifying and freezing ldquoexter-nal forcesrdquo Hutchinson endowed them withtheir own historicity following their unex-pected twists and turns but also recognizing

treated her as his daughter The chiefs in particu-lar embraced the portrait Firth had painted of aproud and independent people captured in thetitle to his first book We the Tikopia (Firth1936)


the appearance of new forces as old ones re-ceded Uncertainty came not only from with-out but also from within Nuerland where so-cial processes had a profound opennessmdashacacophony of disputing voices opened thefuture to multiple possibilities Unstablecompromises were struck between moneyand cattle Nuer religion and Christianityprophets and evangelists guns and spearsall with different and unstable outcomes indifferent areas The radical indeterminacy ofboth external forces and internal processeshad a realism of terrifying proportions

For all its indeterminacy Hutchinsonrsquos(1996) revisit is realist to the core She doesnot try to deconstruct or reconstruct Evans-Pritchardrsquos account Our next revisit how-ever does precisely thatmdashit problematizesthe original study much as Freeman did toMead and Weiner did to Malinowski InLand Labour and Diet in Northern Rhode-sia another of anthropologyrsquos African clas-sics Richards (1939) postulated the ldquobreak-downrdquo of Bemba society as its men migratedto the mines of southern Africa in the 1930sShe attributed her postulated ldquobreakdownrdquoto the slash and burn agriculture (citimenesystem) that could not survive the absenceof able-bodied men to cut down the treesMoore and Vaughan (1994) returned to theNorthern Province of Zambia (NorthernRhodesia) in the 1980s only to discover thatthe citimene system was still alive if notwell Why was Richards so wrong and yetso widely believed

Moore and Vaughanrsquos (1994) first task wasto reexamine Land Labour and Diet in thelight of the data Richards (1939) herselfcompiled and then in the light of data gath-ered by subsequent anthropologists includ-ing themselves Moore and Vaughan discov-ered that Bemba women were more re-sourceful than Richards had given themcredit for beingmdashthey cultivated relish ontheir own land and found all sorts of ways tocajole men-folk into cutting down trees Thiswas Richardsrsquo sin of omissionmdashshe over-looked the significance of female labor andits power of adaptation Her second sin wasone of commission namely she endorsedthe obsession of both Bemba chiefs and co-lonial administrators with the citimene sys-tem an obsession that stemmed from theway the Bemba used shifting cultivation to

elude the control of their overlords whetherthat control be to extract taxes or tribal obli-gations So it was said by Bemba chiefs andcolonial administrators alikemdashcitimene wasresponsible for the decay of societyRichards not only reproduced the reigninginterpretation but gave ammunition to suc-cessive administrations which wished tostamp out citimene Land Labour and Dietwas forged in a particular configuration ofsocial forces and extant knowledge and thencontributed to their reproduction As a par-ticular account of Bemba history it also be-came part of that history

The conventional wisdom Richards (1939)propagatedmdashthat Bemba society was in astate of ldquobreakdownrdquomdashwas deployed by co-lonial and postcolonial administrations tojustify their attempts to transform Bembaagriculture Even as late as the 1980s theZambian governmentrsquos agrarian reforms as-sumed that citimene was moribund It re-sponded to the Zambian copper industryrsquossteep decline by encouraging miners to re-turn ldquohomerdquo (ie to rural areas) where theywere offered incentives to begin farming hy-brid maize Moore and Vaughan (1994)show how it was this return of men (not theirabsence) that led to impoverishment as thefarmers now demanded enormous inputs offemale labor delivered at the expense ofsubsistence agriculture and domestic tasksIn particular this compulsory labor causedwomen to wean their children prematurelyleading to higher infant mortality It was notthe cash economy citimene or male absen-teeism that threatened Bemba livelihood asRichards and conventional wisdom had itbut the regulation of female labor by maleworkers returning from the Copperbelt

This is a most complex revisit On onehand Moore and Vaughan (1994) did toRichards (1939) precisely what the Lyndsdid not do to themselves and Hutchinson didnot do to Evans-Pritchardmdashnamely to locatethe original study in the social context of itsproduction recognizing its contribution tothe history the successor study uncoversdrawing out the link between power andknowledge On the other hand unlike Free-man (1983) who also proposed ways inwhich Mead shaped the world she describedMoore and Vaughan did not sacrifice historyThey were still able to offer an account of


the transformation of Bemba agriculturefrom the 1930s taking their reconstructionof Richardsrsquos classic study as point of depar-ture But here is the final paradox Mooreand Vaughan did not consider the ways theirown analysis might have been one-sidedgoverned by specific feminist andFoucauldian assumptions and thereby con-tributed to discourses that would shape theBemba world of future revisits While theylocated Richards in the world she producedthey did not locate themselves in their ownrelation to the Bemba Indeed they write alltoo little about their own field work theirown interaction with the Bemba In restor-ing Richards to history ironically Moore andVaughan placed themselves outside history

Moore and Vaughan (1994) did not takethe final step toward grounding themselvesbecause they did not engage in any self-con-scious theorizing They had no theory tohelp them step outside themselves As in theindeterminacy of outcomes in Nuerland theopenness of the future stems from a refusalof theorization beyond orienting proposi-tions about gender power and knowledgeBoth these revisits contrast vividly with myown structuralist study in which I viewed thehegemonic organization of work as the ldquoendof historyrdquo and had no conception of rever-sal or alternative paths Where I froze exter-nal forces to produce a structural over-determination Hutchinson (1996) andMoore and Vaughan (1994) left externalforces in the hands of the gods to produce astructural underdetermination My error wasthe opposite of theirs but the source was thesamemdashan ignorance of the processes behindthe external forces I did not examine theprocesses behind state transformation ormarket globalization Hutchinson did notstudy the strategies of war in the Sudan orthe World Bankrsquos development schemesMoore and Vaughan did not attempt ananalysis of the declining copper industry orthe Zambian statersquos strategies of rural devel-opment The revisits to the Nuer and theBemba reversed the determinism of theirpredecessors whether it be the static func-tionalism of the one or imminent breakdownof the other These anthropologistsrsquo aversionto explanatory theory led to an empiricismwithout limits just as my failure to takeMarxist theory sufficiently seriously led me

to reification without possibilities In allcases the problem was the undertheorizationof external forces We need to deploy ourtheories to grasp the limits of the possibleand the possibilities within limits

EXTENDINGTHEREVISITTO

ALLETHNOGRAPHY

We are now in a position to extend the analy-sis of the focused revisit to other dimensionsof ethnography But first to recap The fo-cused revisit entails a focused dialogue be-tween the studies of the successor and pre-decessor From this dialogue I have eluci-dated four explanations for the divergence ofaccounts of the ldquosamerdquo site at two points intime I distinguished revisits based onwhether they were constructivist (ie fo-cused on the advancemdashrefutation or recon-structionmdashof ldquoknowledge of the objectrdquo) orwhether they were realist (ie focused onhistorical change in the ldquoobject of knowl-edgerdquo)

In the constructivist class I distinguishedType I from Type II revisits Type I revisitsfocus on a claimed distortion in the originalstudy brought about by the relation of eth-nographer to the people being studied Theserevisits aim to show how misguided the firststudy was thereby discrediting it withoutsubstituting an alternative interpretationThe peculiarity here is refutation without re-construction The Type II revisit focuses onthe theory brought to bear by the originalethnographer and replaces it with an alterna-tive theory In neither case is the revisit it-self exploited for its insight into historicalchange which is the focus of Types III andIV Type III revisits concentrate on internalprocesses of change Such a confinementproves possible only in so far as there is noattempt to explain change that is only if welimit ourselves to describing it Finally TypeIV revisits admit external forces into theframework of explanation Here ignoranceof those external forcesmdashtheir appearanceand disappearance and their dynamicsmdashleads either to structural determinacy ormore usually to historical indeterminacy towhich even the effects of the original studymay contribute

I have argued that the nine revisits dis-cussed here tend to fall into rather than


across the four types This suggests that thedimensions I used to define the four typeshave a certain robustness with respect to theactual practice of focused revisiting Still thedistinctions are far from watertight Take themore imposing distinction between con-structivism and realism While our con-structivist revisits seem to be able to suspendhistorical change that precisely is theirshortcoming On the other hand I haveshown how realist revisits continually faceconstructivist challenges underlining the di-lemmas of participating in a world while ex-ternalizing and objectifying it If there isbleeding across the constructivist-realist di-mension the boundary between internal andexternal is a veritable river of blood Refuta-tion easily leads to reconstruction and em-piricism to structuralism However fluid andpermeable the line between internal and ex-ternal may be the distinction itself is none-theless unavoidable First theorizing cannotbe reduced to the ethnographerrsquos relation tothe field Theorizing cannot begin tabularasa with every new field workmdashitrsquos not fea-sible for ethnographers to strip themselvesof their prejudices Even if it were feasibleresearchers wouldnrsquot get far as a scientificcollectivity if they insisted always on return-ing to ground zeromdashthey necessarily cometo the field bearing theory Simply put themutually enhancing dialogue between par-ticipant observation and theory reconstruc-tion depends on the relatively autonomouslogics of each Second everything cannot bea topic of study An ethnographer must dis-tinguish the arena of participant observationfrom what lies beyond that arena The neces-sity of the demarcation between internal andexternal is therefore practicalmdashethnogra-phers are part of the world they study butonly part of itmdashbut it is represented and jus-tified in terms of the theories they deploy

In short reflexive ethnography recognizestwo dilemmas (1) There is a world outsideourselves (realist moment) but ethnogra-phers can only know it through their relationto it (constructivist moment) and (2) ethnog-raphers are part of that world (internal mo-ment) but only part of it (external moment)There is no way to transcend these dilemmasand so reflexive ethnography must considerall four moments even if in the final analysisit concentrates on only one or two The prac-

titioners of other sociological methods haveno reason to gloatmdashthe same dilemmas alsoapply to them they are just less glaring andless invasive Reflexive ethnography clari-fies and anticipates the methodological chal-lenges facing all social science Ethnogra-phers can say to their scientific detractorsldquoDe te fabula narraturrdquo

Having demonstrated the principles of re-flexive ethnography at work in the focusedrevisit which is still rather esoteric for soci-ologists can these principles be applied toother aspects of field work Can ethnogra-phy be conceptualized more broadly throughthe lens of the ldquorevisitrdquo In addition to thefocused revisit I delineate five other typesof revisitmdashrolling punctuated heuristic ar-cheological and valedictory Here my intentis to show how sociologists have begun todeploy these in their ethnographies therebygesturing to and even embracing historycontext and theory

FieldWorkNtildeTheRollingRevisit

I begin with the mundane routines of fieldwork the elementary form of ethnographyConventionally field work is regarded as asuccession of discrete periods of ldquoobserva-tionrdquo that accumulate in field notes later tobe coded sorted and analyzed when all theldquodatardquo are in Every ldquovisitrdquo to the field is un-connected to previous and subsequent onesso in the final analysis visits are aggregatedas though they were independent events Inthe reflexive view of field work on the otherhand ldquovisitsrdquo to the field are viewed as asuccession of experimental trials each inter-vention separated from the next one to besure but each in conversation with the pre-vious ones In this conception field work isa rolling revisit Every entry into the field isfollowed not just by writing about what hap-pened but also by an analysis in which ques-tions are posed hypotheses are formulatedand theory is elaboratedmdashall to be checkedout in successive visits In this renditionfield notes are a continuous dialogue be-tween observation and theory

In his appendix to Street Corner SocietyWhyte (1955) describes the detached pro-cess of accumulating data writing down ev-erything and sorting it into folders but healso writes of the conversation between


theory and data Thus he writes of the influ-ence that the anthropologist ConradArensberg had in encouraging his focus onsocial interaction among particular individu-als and how that interaction reflected the so-cial structures in which they were embed-ded Arensberg provided the theoreticalframe that Whyte was to so famously elabo-rate Accordingly Whytersquos field notes be-came filled with detailed events and conver-sations between particular individuals Hisepiphany came when he discovered the linkbetween performance at bowling and posi-tion within the gang and later when he re-lated mental illness (eg Docrsquos dizzy spells)to the disruption of customary roles He car-ried out experiments in the field to test histheories Thus he cured Long John of hisnightmares by restoring him to his formerplace in the gang Once Whyte realized whathis project was aboutmdashafter 18 months inthe field he was forced to write a report torenew his grantmdashhis field notes did indeedbecome more like a dialogue of theory anddata It would have happened much earlierif he had subscribed to rather than stumbledupon the idea of the rolling revisit

At the same time that field notes are a run-ning dialogue between observation andtheory field work is a running interactionbetween ethnographer and participant It in-volves a self-conscious recognition of theway embodiment location and habitus af-fect the ethnographerrsquos relations to thepeople studied and thus how those relationsinfluence what is observed and the data thatare collected Whyte (1955) was only tooaware of the significance of his ethnicity hislarge physical size and his relative youth aswell as his upper-middle-class backgroundand his connection to Harvard for makingand sustaining contact with the variousgroups in Cornerville His relation to thecommunity changed with his status whenfor example his new wife came to live withhim But it also altered as his interestsshifted from gangs to racketeering and poli-tics Throughout he was strategic in how hepositioned himself within the communityacting as secretary of the Italian CommunityClub becoming part of local election cam-paigns (one of which led him into illegal re-peat voting) and even organizing a demon-stration at the mayorrsquos office By his own

admission he began his research as a non-participating observer and ended as a non-observing participant

These then are constructivist moments inthe field They focus on the way knowledgeof the field changes as though the field it-self remains unchanged The assumption ofa fixed site is a useful but ultimately prob-lematical fiction Fields have dynamics oftheir own that often erupt with outside inter-ventions Again Whyte (1943) was far aheadof his time in focusing on the dynamics ofthe field itself By studying the rise and fallof the Norton Gang its relation to the Ital-ian Community Club the evolution of politi-cal campaigns and the continuing strugglesover the control of gambling houses Whytewas able to tease out the relations betweenindividuals and social structures and amongsocial structures themselves Human behav-ior and the groups to which individuals be-long could only be understood Whyteaverred through analyzing their changethrough time Largely a function of internaldynamics and life trajectories of individualsthese changes were also affected by such ex-ternal events as election campaigns and po-lice raids Whytersquos extensions to macro-structures and history were limited but hedefinitely pointed to the wider world inwhich the gangs were embedded

Reflexive field work in short calls atten-tion to realist as well as constructivist mo-ments It demands that the field be under-stood as always in flux so that the rollingrevisit records the processual dynamics ofthe site itself But more than that the roll-ing revisit demands attention to disruptionsof the field from outside which shift itscharacter and take it off in new directionsStill remember that this field-in-flux can begrasped only through theoretical lenses andthrough the ethnographerrsquos interactions withthose he or she studies

Long-TermFieldResearchNtilde

ThePunctuatedRevisit

Foster et al (1979) have advanced the ideaof long-term field research in which ethnog-raphers either as individuals or as a teamrevisit a field site regularly over many years(they arbitrarily say more than 10) with aview to understanding historical change and


continuity28 Their collection of cases oflong-term field research ranges fromLampherersquos (1979) overview of the densethicket of Navajo ethnographies to Vogtrsquos(1979) account of the Harvard ChiapasProject (1957ndash1975)

A subspecies of this long-term research iswhat I call the ldquopunctuated revisitrdquo in whichthe same ethnographer conducts separatedstints of field work in the same site over anumber of years Thus Colson (1989) de-scribes her own multiple revisits to theGwembe Tonga of Northern Rhodesia sinceher first research there in 1956 She and hercolleague Thayer Scudder followed the re-settlement of the Tonga after the completionof the Kariba Dam in 1959 and subse-quently studied how the Tonga fared underthe postcolonial dispensation (Scudder andColson 1979) They noted how their rela-tions with the Tonga shifted as their concernfor the fate of the Tonga intensified but alsoas they and their informants aged At thesame time their theoretical frameworkshifted from a focus on kinship and ritual tothe absorption of the Tonga into a nationaland regional political economy and fromthere to the broadest analysis of resettlementpatterns and refugee problems in a globalcontext All four dimensions of reflexiveethnography were at work as this projectevolved over three decades

Most punctuated revisits within sociologyare unashamedly realist Thus between 1975and 1989 Anderson (1990) studied unevenurban development in Philadelphia withinwhat he called Village-Northton With theexodus of manufacturing from the surround-ing area one side namely middle-class Vil-lage became gentrified and whiter while theother side lower-class Northton becamepoorer and blacker Anderson describedchanging patterns of social control and eti-quette on the streets the replacement of theldquoold headsrdquo by the young drug dealerschanging sex codes and spillover effectsfrom one community to the other More his-torically self-conscious Venkatesh (2000)studied the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago

over a 10-year period plotting the rise andfall of the modern ghetto He tied changingmodes of community control (the rise ofgangs of informal economy and of mothersrsquogroups) to rising unemployment and thewithdrawal of state services (especially thewithdrawal of police and the destruction ofpublic housing)

Not all punctuated revisits exploit the tem-poral extension of field work to study socialchange Quite the contrary they are oftenused to extract what does not changeHorowitz (1983) studied youth gangs in apoor Mexican-American neighborhood ofChicago for three years 1971 to 1974 Thenshe returned in 1977 to follow their pathsinto the labor market and to discover howthe gangs had sustained themselves Reaf-firming the clash of community culture andthe wider individualism of American societyshe emphasized stasis rather than changeEven more determined to focus on the con-stant Jankowski (1991) studied 37 gangs inthree cities over a period of 10 years Stintsof field work were undertaken and data col-lected as though they were independent ob-servations on a fixed site Focusing on theircommon organizational form and their com-munity embeddedness he was not interestedin how the gangs changed over time or var-ied between cities or how their ties to thepolitical and economic contexts shifted overtime He deployed his long-term field re-search to reveal the stabilizing effects of an-other constantmdashthe defiant individualism ofgang members He dwelt on what stayed thesame despite change and through change

Although technically a punctuated revisitJankowskirsquos (1991) goal was replication inboth constructivist and realist senses As anunobtrusive participant observer he soughtto establish replicable conditions of researchinducing theory from his neutral observa-tions At the same time he decentered thestudy of change whether through internalprocesses or external forces in favor of rep-licating the same result across space andtimemdashthe wider the range of cases the moreconvincing the result One might say para-doxically he mobilized reflexivity in pursuitof replication

Although Jankowski made reference toother studies of gangs it was not to suggestthat time and place explained their different

28 See Phelps Furstenberg and Colby (2002)for a parallel collection of studies that engagessome strikingly similar methodological issues inquantitative longitudinal research


conclusions He could for example havedrawn on Whytersquos (1943) parallel gangstudy with similar findings to ask what hadchanged over the intervening 40 yearsThat however would have turned his studyinto a ldquoheuristicrdquo revisit the antithesis ofreplication

FramingthePresentNtilde

TheHeuristicRevisit

The rolling and punctuated revisits returnethnographers to the familiarity of their ownfield sites In these revisits memory plays anenormous but rarely theorized role (Mayer1989) They contrast with the next two typesof revisit in which ethnographers comparetheir own field work to someone elsersquos re-search documentation or study The first isthe heuristic revisit which appeals to anotherstudymdashnot always strictly ethnographic andnot necessarily of the same site but of ananalogous sitemdashthat frames the questionsposed provides the concepts to be adoptedor offers a parallel and comparative account

Most heuristic revisits in sociology likethe punctuated revisits have a strong realistbent Thus Pattillo-McCoy (1999) usedFrazierrsquos (1957) Black Bourgeoisie andDrake and Caytonrsquos (1945) Black Metropolisto frame her ethnographic account of the so-cial economic and geographical proximityof black middle-class life to the South Chi-cago ghetto Duneierrsquos (1999) study of streetvendors in Greenwich Village goes back 40years to Jacobsrsquos (1961) Death and Life ofGreat American Cities recovering her analy-sis of the same area and in particular therole of public characters Following Jacobsrsquoexample Duneier regarded the street vendorsas ldquopublic charactersrdquo who contrary to ste-reotype stabilize community relations WithJacobs as his baseline Duneier consideredthe broad changes in Greenwich Villagemdashtherising inequality cultural difference andcrimemdashand how it came to be a home for thehomeless He traced the vendors back to theirprevious place in Pennsylvania Station anduncovered the political forces that led to theireviction He practiced what he called ldquothe ex-tended place methodrdquomdashrealist method parexcellencemdashwhich attempts to remove alltraces of constructivism by striving for anobjective record of the behaviors of his sub-

jects and by renouncing theoretical recon-struction in favor of induction29

My final example of a heuristic revisitadopts a more constructivist perspectiveSalzinger (2003) used Fernaacutendez-Kellyrsquos(1983) pioneering study of women as cheapand malleable labor in the MexicanMaquiladora industry to frame her own studyof the same industry 20 years later Salzingerdiscovered a multiplicity of gender regimeswhere Fernaacutendez-Kelly saw only one re-flecting the expansion of the industry and itschanging market context Stressing indeter-minacy of outcomes and reflecting 20 yearsof feminist thought Salzinger also made atheoretical turn Her analysis of productionfocused on the poststructuralist preoccupa-tion with the constitution of subjectivityrather than on the political economy of gen-der regimes History moves on but so doestheory Their trajectories are intertwined

DiggingupthePastNtilde

TheArcheologicalRevisit

If the heuristic revisit moves forward intime from the earlier study to the later onethat it frames the archeological revisitmoves backward in time to excavate the his-torical terrain that gives rise or gives mean-ing to the ethnographic present If notstrictly a revisitmdashsince there is no referencestudy known ahead of timemdashit is a commontechnique for giving historical depth to eth-nography In the archeological revisit mul-tiple sources of data are used whether retro-spective interviews published accounts orarchival documents One could simply trian-gulate and aggregate all the historical datafrom different sources as though they mea-sured a singular and fixed reality This how-ever would violate the rules of reflexivitywhich demand disaggregating ldquodatardquo to re-flect their relations of production namely(1) relations between observers and partici-pants and (2) the theories observers (jour-nalists officials witnesses) deploy

A number of recent sociological studiesturn on archeological revisits Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) explored the historical ante-

29 Needless to say Duneierrsquos engagement withJacobs is already a form of theoretical recon-structionmdashan externally imposed lens


cedents of the gendered streams of immigra-tion from Mexico to the United States Togive specificity to the revelations of her fieldwork in a community in northern Californiashe was led back in time to distinguish im-migrants who came before the end of theBracero Program in 1965 (the program thatchanneled single male migrants into the ag-ricultural fields of California) from thosewho came after its end Through oral histo-ries Hondagneu-Sotelo was able to trace theconsequences of original migration patternsfor the domestic division of labor SimilarlyLevine (2001) produced an unexpected eth-nography of German cattle dealers in NewYork State refugees from Nazi persecutionTo understand their participation in thetransformation of New Yorkrsquos dairy industryshe uncovered details of their lives in ruralGermany before they left Like Hondagneu-Sotelo Levine traced the connection be-tween the community of origin and the com-munity of settlement30

Haney (2002) conducted an ethnographyof the social effects of cutbacks in Hungaryrsquospostsocialist welfare To understand the re-action of the poor women she studied shewas led back to the socialist welfare statefirst to the maternalist welfare regime of re-form communism and then even further backto the societal welfare of the early post-World War II period She turned to archivesand oral histories to reconstruct the past dis-closing a novel periodization of state social-ism and its aftermath

It is no accident that so many of the eth-nographies of the market and of democratictransitions become archeological revisitsexcavating the socialist antecedents of thepostsocialist order (Burawoy and Verdery1999 Kligman 1998 Lampland 1995 Woo-druff 1999) As in the case of the post-colonial transition ethnographers havelooked to the character of the previous re-gime for the source of disappointed expecta-tions The archeological revisit however isnot unidirectional because of necessity theethnographer tacks backward and forward

between the past she or he uncovers and thepresent he or she interprets rendering allsorts of new insights into both

The archeological revisit can be used toconnect the present to the past but it mayalso be used to compare the present to thepast Thus Haney (2002) revised our under-standing of socialist welfare by stressing itsextensiveness and its flexibility SimilarlyLopez (2003) participated in labor organiz-ing campaigns in Pittsburgh He asked whysuch campaigns were successful in one his-torical conjuncture but not in another To un-derstand the conditions of this differentialsuccess Lopez reconstructed an earlier pointin time for each campaign from interviewsarchives legal reports and newspapers Hedisentangled how obstacles to organizingwere overcome (or not) as a function of boththe new context and the cumulative effectsof previous campaigns

In the sometimes desperate search for his-torical data the ethnographer is easilytempted to repress datarsquos constructed char-acter Thus as I alluded to earlier historianssuch as Thernstrom (1964) have been criti-cal of how community ethnographers reducehistory to the mythologies of their partici-pants With theoretical lenses to guide theirinvestigations however ethnographers be-come sensitive to the constructed nature ofhistorical narrative Indeed they are able toexploit its ldquoconstructednessrdquo

ReportingBackNtilde

TheValedictoryRevisit

My last type of revisit is what I call the vale-dictory revisit when the ethnographer re-turns to the subjects armed with the resultsof the study whether in draft or publishedform The purpose is not to undertake an-other in-depth ethnography but rather to as-certain the subjectsrsquo responses to the re-ported research and perhaps to discoverwhat has changed since the last visit Assum-ing the subjects can be engaged this is themoment of judgment when previous rela-tions are reassessed theory is put to the testand accounts are reevaluated It can be trau-matic for both sides and for this reason it isall too rare

Whyte (1955) describes his own valedic-tory revisits to Cornerville to find out what if

30 The ldquoarcheological revisitrdquo goes back toThomas and Znaniecki (1918ndash1920) who usedletters written to Polish immigrants in Chicagoto construct the social structure and malaise ofthe sending communities


anything Street Corner Society had meant tothe gang members Doc his chief informantshowed some ambivalence and embarrass-ment about the central role he played in thebook Chick was more upset by the way hewas portrayed and Sam Franco was inspiredto do field research himself Whyte was notled to any reassessment of the study itselffor he had had a relatively smooth ride ascompared for example with Scheper-Hughes (2001) She was drummed out of herIrish village An Clochaacuten when she returned25 years after her original field work Theinhabitants still remembered her Many hadnot forgiven her for her portrait of their weakand vulnerable community The hostile re-ception prompted her to rethink the argumentin a new prologue and epilogue to her bookIt was also an occasion to reflect on changesthat had occurred during the intervening pe-riodmdashthe impact of Irelandrsquos integration intothe European Union the expansion of thetourist industry and continued out-migra-tion In her case rejection by the participantsled her to qualify her original interpretationsbut also propelled her to write an account ofhistorical change Her valedictory revisit bor-ders on a focused revisit covering all fourprinciples of reflexivity

Frequently the subjects of an ethnographyare simply not interested in what the ethnog-rapher has to say until it comes to the atten-tion of adversarial forces ConsiderVaughanrsquos (1996) historical ethnographymdashitself an archeological revisit that retracedthe steps that led up to the Challenger disas-ter of 1986 Contesting the conventionalstory of human error and individual blameshe uncovered an alternative history of theNational Aeronautics and Space Administra-tion (NASA) incrementally descending intobad judgment and normalizing design flawsShe located the cause of the disaster in thetype of technology organizational cultureand external context Published 10 years af-ter the Challenger disaster her study receivedmuch publicity but not a peep from NASAthe object of her investigation There was novaledictory revisit to NASA until Columbiacrashed on February 1 2003 whereupon herChallenger study revisited her and with avengeance (Vaughan forthcoming) Heroriginal diagnoses of the problems at NASAfound a new lease on life among journalists

engineers and other experts prompting herto investigate the Columbia disaster Hercomparison of the two disasters figuredprominently in the report of the ColumbiaAccident Investigation Board Her valedic-tory revisit turned into a focused revisit thatconfirmed her earlier conclusions much toNASArsquos chagrin As in the case of Richards(1939) examined above ethnographies havetheir own history of effectsmdashignored at onemoment invoked at anothermdashdrawn in bythe play of external forces

It is often said that handing back a fin-ished product is the responsibility of the eth-nographer That may be so but the valedic-tory revisit also serves a scientific functionThis final engagement with the people onestudies confronting them with onersquos ownconclusions deepens both constructivist andrealist insights into the world we study Itmay be traumaticmdashboth for the participantand the observermdashbut through pain thecause of reflexive ethnography advances

WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY

The postcolonial world has driven anthro-pologists back to their early historical andmacro perspectives that they lost in the eraof professionalization As I have tried to ar-gue here in its inception these moves be-yond field work in time and beyond the fieldsite in space were invariably positive Nowhowever these moves could be taking a self-defeating turn As anthropologists releasetheir subjects from conceptual confinementin their villages they mimic their migratorycircuits Bouncing from site to site anthro-pologists easily substitute anecdotes and vi-gnettes for serious field work reproducingthe cultural syncretism and hybridity of thepeoples they observe (Hannerz 1996)

As they join their subjects in the externalworld anthropologists have also all too eas-ily lost sight of the partiality of their partici-pation in the world they study They begin tobelieve they are the world they study or thatthe world revolves around them Beharrsquos(1993) six-year dialogue with her single sub-ject Esperanza fascinating though it isbrackets all concern with theoretical issuesand thus fails to grapple with change inMexican society Her view of reflexivity re-


duces everything to the mutual orbiting ofparticipant and observer It dispenses withthe distinction between internal and externalfirst in the constructivist dimension whereanthropological ldquotheoryrdquo is reduced to thediscourse of the participant and second inthe realist dimension where there is nothingbeyond ldquomulti-sitedrdquo ethnography Further-more the very distinction between realismand constructivism folds into an autocentricrelation of ethnographer to the world

Geertz (1995) whose recounting of thequandary of the changing anthropologist ina changing world introduced this papersimilarly fails to address the dilemmas of re-visits dissolving his reflections into a vir-tuoso display of literary images In his handsethnography becomes a mesmeric play oftexts upon texts narratives within narrativesBy the end of its cultural turn anthropologyhas lost its distinctive identity havingdecentered its techniques of field work sac-rificed the idea of intensively studying aldquositerdquo abandoned its theoretical traditionsand forsaken its pursuit of causal explana-tion Theory and history evaporate in a wel-ter of discourse Anyone with literary ambi-tion can now assume the anthropologicalmantle making the disrupted discipline vul-nerable to cavalier invasion by natives andimposters Once a social science anthropol-ogy aspires to become an appendage of thehumanities Although this is only one ten-dency within anthropology it is significantand ascendantmdasha warning to ethnographer-sociologists as they emerge from their ownwilderness

As the examples above have shown eth-nographer-sociologists are following anthro-pologists out of seclusionmdashmore cautiouslybut more surely As I have said within soci-ology ethnography has had to wrestle witha positivist legacy which was also reduction-istmdasha tradition that reduced the external tothe internal (theory induced from observa-tion context suspended to insulate the mi-cro-situation) at the same time that it privi-leged realism over constructivism (the worldis purely external to us) As anthropologistsveer toward the center of the universe look-ing out ethnographer-sociologists are com-ing from the margins and looking in Eth-nographer-sociologists may be latecomers tohistory and theory but therein lies their ad-

vantage For as they leave their guarded cor-ner they are disciplined by the vibrancy ofsociologyrsquos comparative history and theo-retical traditions This dialogue within soci-ology and with social science more broadlywill help the ethnographer-sociologist retaina balance between constructivism and real-ism Such indeed are the benefits of back-wardness The ethnographer-anthropologiston the other hand has no such disciplinaryprotection and unless new alliances areforged faces the onrushing world alone

The divergent orbits of ethnography in so-ciology and anthropology reflect the histo-ries of our disciplines but they are also re-sponses to the era in which we live The spa-tially bounded site unconnected to othersites is a fiction of the past that is no longersustainable Under these circumstanceswhat does it mean to undertake a revisit es-pecially a focused revisit What is there torevisit when sites are evanescent when allthatrsquos solid melts into air How for examplemight I revisit Allied todaymdash30 years aftermy first encountermdashif I cannot find it whereI left it One possibility all too popular isto simply study myself I could trace myown research trajectory from Chicago tocommunist Hungary to postcommunist Rus-sia reflecting on the world-historical shiftsof the last 30 years Moving beyond suchsolipsism I might follow my work-mates asMacleod (1995) did with his two gangs Wemight call this a biographically-based re-visit31 Or I could study the homeless recy-clers that now hypothetically inhabit thevacant lot that used to be Allied We mightcall this a place-based revisit Or I could gooff to South Korea where again hypotheti-cally Alliedrsquos new engine division can befound We can call this an institution-basedrevisit These different types of revisit mightall coincide if we were studying the sameenclosed village or the old company townbut with globalization they diverge into threeprofoundly different projects The only way

31 Or since most have retired perhaps I shouldstudy the occupations of their children in agenerationally based revisit This is whatSennett implicitly does when he moves from hisaccount of blue-collar workers in Hidden Injuriesof Class (Sennett and Cobb 1972) to studying thenew service workers in the Corrosion of Charac-ter (Sennett 1998)


of connecting them is to look upon each as aproduct of the same broad historical processexamining for example the implications ofthe shift in the United States from an indus-trial to a service economy This could inter-connect biographies of workers and theirchildren the redeployment of place and thefleeing of capital to other countries

But we can no longer stop at the nationallevel Today the recomposition of everydaylife is also the product of transnational orsupranational processes A comprehensiverevisit might involve following individualbiographies institutional trajectories andthe reconstitution of place locating them allin regional national and also global trans-formation Verdery (2003) conducted such acomplex of nested revisits in her ethnogra-phy of decollectivization in Aurel VlaicumdashaTransylvanian village she studied undercommunism and then again during the post-communist period She followed individualkin members specific groups (insiders andoutsiders) the village land restitution com-mittee and different economic organizations(state farms cooperatives and individualproduction) all in relation to the transforma-tion of property relations which itself onlymakes sense within the local politicaleconomy the national law of privatizationthe conditionalities of the World Bank andthe IMF and the global spread of marketfundamentalism With so many parts of theworld dissolving reconfiguring and recom-posing under the pressure of their globalconnections and at the same time otherparts stagnating because of their global dis-connections ethnographic revisits with aglobal reach become irresistible The moreirresistible is the global revisit however themore necessary is theory to track and makesense of all the moving parts

Privatization and market transition pushethnography to global extensions which re-quire not only theoretical frameworks fortheir interpretation but also historical depthThe only way to make sense of global forcesconnections and imaginations is to examinethem over time In other words global eth-nographies require focused heuristic punc-tuated and particularly archeological revis-its to excavate their historical terrains(Burawoy Blum et al 2000) Approaching aglobal ethnography of Allied today would re-

quire resituating the company of 1973ndash1974in its global market in the global connec-tions between the engine division and otherdivisions in the global imagination of itsworkers and managersmdashbefore I could un-dertake a parallel investigation This is howNash (2001) turned a focused revisit into aglobal ethnography of the Zapatista move-ment Every summer between 1988 and 1993she returned to Chiapasmdashthe site of her own1957 studymdashwith a team of students Whileacknowledging the shortcomings of the de-scriptive anthropology extant in the 1950snamely the tendency to insulate communi-ties from their determining context shenonetheless partially recuperated that insula-tion as a political struggle to defend au-tonomy In the early 1990s such defensivemaneuvers were no longer effective In theface of the North American Free TradeAgreement (NAFTA) the rollback of land re-form through privatization the erosion ofsubsistence agriculture the attrition of statewelfare and the violation of human rightsChiapas autonomy could no longer be de-fended by withdrawal and insulation It re-quired aggressive political organization andthe development of an indigenous movementof national focus and global reach Nashdemonstrated that without history to groundit and theory to orient it global ethnographyis lost

The time is nigh for the sociologist-eth-nographer to come out of hiding and join therest of sociology in novel explorations ofhistory and theory (Adams Clemens andOrloff forthcoming) We should not forgetthat Marx Weber and Durkheim groundedtheir history as well as their theory in anethnographic imagination whether of thefactories of nineteenth-century England thereligious bases of economic behavior or therites and beliefs of small-scale societiesFoucault founded his originality in a virtualethnography of prisons and asylums DeBeauvoir and her daughters set out from theprivatized experiences of women whileBourdieu launched his metatheory from thevillages of Algeria Thus not only does re-flexive ethnography require the infusion ofboth theory and history but theory and his-torical understanding will be immeasurablyadvanced by the conceptualization and prac-tice of ethnography as revisit


Michael Burawoy is Professor of Sociology atthe University of CaliforniandashBerkeley He hasdone ethnographic field work in Zambia Chi-cago Hungary and Russia

REFERENCES

Abbott Andrew 1999 Department and Disci-pline Chicago IL University of ChicagoPress

mdashmdashmdash 2001 Chaos of Disciplines Chicago ILUniversity of Chicago Press

Adams Julia Elisabeth Clemens and AnneShola Orloff Forthcoming Remaking Moder-nity Politics History and Sociology DurhamNC Duke University Press

Anderson Elijah 1990 Streetwise Race Classand Change in an Urban Community ChicagoIL University of Chicago Press

Asad Talal 1972 ldquoMarket Model Class Struc-ture and Consent A Reconsideration of SwatPolitical Organisationrdquo Man 774ndash94

mdashmdashmdash ed 1973 Anthropology and the ColonialEncounter Atlantic Highlands NJ Humani-ties Press

Bahr Howard 1982 ldquoThe Perrigo Paper A Lo-cal Influence upon Middletown in TransitionrdquoIndiana Magazine of History 781ndash25

Bahr Howard Theodore Caplow and BruceChadwick 1983 ldquoMiddletown III Problemsof Replication Longitudinal Measurementand Triangulationrdquo Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 9243ndash64

Barth Fredrik 1959 Political Leadership amongthe Swat Pathans London England Athlone

Becker Howard 1998 Tricks of the Trade Chi-cago IL University of Chicago Press

Behar Ruth 1993 Translated Woman BostonMA Beacon

Bock Philip 1980 ldquoTepoztlaacuten ReconsideredrdquoJournal of Latin American Lore 6129ndash50

Boelen Marianne 1992 ldquoStreet Corner SocietyCornerville Revisitedrdquo Journal of Contempo-rary Ethnography 2111ndash51

Bourdieu Pierre 1990 The Logic of PracticeStanford CA Stanford University Press

Bourdieu Pierre and Loiumlc Wacquant 1992 AnInvitation to Reflexive Sociology Chicago ILUniversity of Chicago Press

Burawoy Michael 1979 Manufacturing Con-sent Chicago IL University of Chicago Press

mdashmdashmdash 1982 ldquoThe Written and the Repressed inGouldnerrsquos Industrial Sociologyrdquo Theory andSociety 11831ndash51

mdashmdashmdash 1998 ldquoThe Extended Case Methodrdquo So-ciological Theory 164ndash33

Burawoy Michael Joseph A Blum ShebaGeorge Zsuzsa Gille Teresa Gowan LynneHaney Maren Klawiter Steven H LopezSeaacuten Oacute Riain and Millie Thayer 2000 Glo-bal Ethnography Berkeley CA University of

California PressBurawoy Michael Alice Burton Ann Arnett

Ferguson Kathryn J Fox Joshua GamsonNadine Gartrell Leslie Hurst Charles Kurz-man Leslie Salzinger Josepha Schiffman andShiori Ui 1991 Ethnography Unbound Ber-keley CA University of California Press

Burawoy Michael and Katherine Verdery 1999Uncertain Transition Ethnographies ofChange in the Post Socialist World LanhamMD Rowman and Littlefield

Caccamo Rita 2000 Back to Middletown ThreeGenerations of Sociological ReflectionStanford CA Stanford University Press

Caplow Theodore 1984 ldquoSocial Criticism inMiddletown Taking Aim at a Moving TargetrdquoQualitative Sociology 7337ndash39

Caplow Theodore and Howard Bahr 1979ldquoHalf a Century of Change in Adolescent Atti-tudes Replication of a Middletown Survey bythe Lyndsrdquo Public Opinion Quarterly 431ndash17

Caplow Theodore and Bruce Chadwick 1979ldquoInequality and Life-Styles in Middletown1920ndash1978rdquo Social Science Quarterly 60367ndash86

Caplow Theodore Howard M Bahr Bruce AChadwick Reuben Hill and Margaret HolmesWilliamson 1982 Middletown Families FiftyYears of Change and Continuity MinneapolisMN University of Minnesota Press

Caton Hiram 1990 The Samoa Reader Anthro-pologists Take Stock Lanham MD UniversityPress of America

Chapoulie Jean-Michel 1996 ldquoEverett Hughesand the Chicago Traditionrdquo SociologicalTheory 143ndash29

Clifford James and George E Marcus eds1986 Writing Culture The Poetics and Poli-tics of Ethnography Berkeley CA Universityof California Press

Colignon Richard 1996 Power Plays Criticalevents in the Institutionalization of the Tennes-see Valley Authority Albany NY State Uni-versity of New York Press

Collins Harry 1985 Changing Order Replica-tion and Induction in Scientific Practice Lon-don England Sage

Collins Harry and Trevor Pinch 1993 TheGolem What You Should Know about ScienceCambridge England Cambridge UniversityPress

Colson Elizabeth 1971 The Social Conse-quences of Resettlement Manchester EnglandManchester University Press

mdashmdashmdash 1989 ldquoOverviewrdquo Annual Review ofAnthropology 181ndash16

Comaroff Jean and John Comaroff 1991 OfRevelation and Revolution Chicago IL Uni-versity of Chicago Press

Comaroff John and Jean Comaroff 1992 Eth-nography and Historical Imagination Boul-


der CO WestviewDrake St Clair and Horace Cayton 1945 Black

Metropolis A Study of Negro Life in a North-ern City New York Harcourt Brace andCompany

Du Bois William Edward Burghardt [1899]1996 The Philadelphia Negro Reprint Phila-delphia PA University of Pennsylvania Press

Duneier Mitchell 1999 Sidewalk New YorkFarrar Strauss and Giroux

Epstein Steven 1996 Impure Science Berkeleyand Los Angeles CA University of CaliforniaPress

Evans-Pritchard Edward E 1940 The Nuer ADescription of the Modes of Livelihood andPolitical Institutions of a Nilotic People Ox-ford England Oxford University Press

mdashmdashmdash 1951 Kinship and Marriage among theNuer Oxford England Clarendon

mdashmdashmdash 1956 Nuer Religion Oxford EnglandClarendon

Ferguson James 1999 Expectations of Moder-nity Berkeley and Los Angeles CA Univer-sity of California Press

Fernaacutendez-Kelly Mariacutea Patricia 1983 For WeAre Sold I and My People Women and Indus-try in Mexicorsquos Frontier Albany NY StateUniversity of New York Press

Fine Gary 1995 The Second Chicago SchoolThe Development of a Postwar American So-ciology Chicago IL University of ChicagoPress

Firth Raymond 1936 We the Tikopia LondonEngland George Allen and Unwin

mdashmdashmdash 1959 Social Change in Tikopia LondonEngland George Allen and Unwin

Foster George Thayer Scudder ElizabethColson and Robert Kemper 1979 Long-TermField Research in Social Anthropology NewYork Academic

Franke Richard and James Kaul 1978 ldquoTheHawthorne Experiments First Statistical Inter-pretationrdquo American Sociological Review43623ndash43

Frazier Edward Franklin 1957 Black Bourgeoi-sie Glencoe IL Free Press

Freeman Derek 1983 Margaret Mead and Sa-moa The Making and Unmaking of an Anthro-pological Myth Cambridge MA HarvardUniversity Press

mdashmdashmdash 1999 The Fateful Hoaxing of MargaretMead Boulder CO Westview

Fujimura Joan 1996 Crafting Science Cam-bridge MA Harvard University Press

Gans Herbert 1982 The Urban Villagers Up-dated and expanded ed New York Free Press

Geertz Clifford 1995 After the Fact TwoCountries Four Decades One AnthropologistCambridge MA Harvard University Press

Gilbert Nigel and Michael Mulkay 1984 Open-ing Pandorarsquos Box Cambridge EnglandCambridge University Press

Glaser Barney and Anselm Strauss 1967 TheDiscovery of Grounded Theory Chicago ILAldine

Gluckman Max 1961 ldquoAnthropological Prob-lems Arising from the African Industrial Revo-lutionrdquo Pp 67ndash82 in Social Change in Mod-ern Africa edited by A Southall London En-gland Oxford University Press

Gottfried Heidi ed 2001 ldquoFrom ManufacturingConsent to Global Ethnography A Retrospec-tive Examinationrdquo Contemporary Sociology30435ndash58

Gough Kathleen 1971 ldquoNuer Kinship A Re-examinationrdquo Pp 79ndash121 in The Translationof Culture Essays to E E Evans-Pritchardedited by T O Biedelman London EnglandTavistock

Gouldner Alvin 1954 Patterns of Industrial Bu-reaucracy Glencoe IL Free Press

Grinker Richard 1994 Houses in the Rain For-est Berkeley CA University of CaliforniaPress

mdashmdashmdash 2000 In the Arms of Africa The Life ofColin M Turnbull New York St Martinrsquos

Hannerz Ulf 1996 Transnational ConnectionsLondon England and New York Routledge

Haney Lynne 2002 Inventing the Needy Gen-der and the Politics of Welfare in HungaryBerkeley and Los Angeles CA University ofCalifornia Press

Heimans Frank 1988 Margaret Mead and Sa-moa New York Brighton Video

Holmes Lowell D 1987 Quest for the Real Sa-moa South Hadley MA Bergin and Garvey

Hollingshead August B 1975 Elmtownrsquos Youthand Elmtown Revisited New York JohnWiley and Sons

Hondagneu-Sotelo Pierrette 1994 GenderedTransitions Mexican Experiences of Immigra-tion Berkeley and Los Angeles CA Univer-sity of California Press

Horowitz Ruth 1983 Honor and the AmericanDream New Brunswick NJ Rutgers Univer-sity Press

Hughes Everett 1958 Men and Their WorkGlencoe IL Free Press

mdashmdashmdash 1971 The Sociological Eye Chicago ILAldine-Atherton

Hunter Floyd 1953 Community Power Struc-ture Chapel Hill NC University of NorthCarolina Press

mdashmdashmdash 1980 Community Power SuccessionAtlantarsquos Policy Makers Revisited ChapelHill NC University of North Carolina Press

Hutchinson Sharon 1996 Nuer Dilemmas Cop-ing with Money War and the State Berkeleyand Los Angeles CA University of CaliforniaPress

Jacobs Jane 1961 The Death and Life of GreatAmerican Cities New York Random House

Jankowski Martiacuten Saacutenchez 1991 Islands in theStreet Gangs and American Urban Society


Berkeley and Los Angeles CA University ofCalifornia Press

Kligman Gail 1998 The Politics of DuplicityControlling Reproduction in Ceausescursquos Ro-mania Berkeley CA University of CaliforniaPress

Lamphere Louise 1979 ldquoThe Long-Term Studyamong the Navajordquo Pp 19ndash44 in Long-TermField Research in Social Anthropology editedby G Foster T Scudder E Colson and RKemper New York Academic

Lampland Martha 1995 The Object of LaborCommodification in Socialist Hungary Chi-cago IL University of Chicago Press

Latour Bruno 1988 The Pasteurization ofFrance Cambridge MA Harvard UniversityPress

Latour Bruno and Steve Woolgar 1979 Labo-ratory Life Beverly Hills CA Sage

Leach Edmund 1954 Political Systems of High-land Burma Boston MA Beacon

Leacutevi-Strauss Claude 1969 The ElementaryStructures of Kinship Boston MA Beacon

Levine Rhonda 2001 Class Networks andIdentity Lanham MD Rowman andLittlefield

Lewis Oscar 1951 Life in a Mexican VillageTepoztlaacuten Restudied Urbana IL University ofIllinois Press

Lopez Steve 2003 Re-Organizing the Rust BeltAn Inside Study of the Contemporary LaborMovement Berkeley CA University of Cali-fornia Press

Lupton Tom 1963 On the Shop Floor TwoStudies of Workshop Organization and OutputOxford England and New York PergamonPress

Lynd Robert S 1939 Knowledge for What ThePlace of Social Science in American CulturePrinceton NJ Princeton University Press

Lynd Robert S and Helen Merrell Lynd 1929Middletown A Study in Modern AmericanCulture New York Harcourt Brace andWorld

mdashmdashmdash 1937 Middletown in Transition A Studyin Cultural Conflicts New York HarcourtBrace and World

MacLeod Jay 1995 Ainrsquot No Making It Aspi-rations and Attainment in a Low IncomeNeighborhood Boulder CO Westview

MacDonald Judith 2000 ldquoThe Tikopia andlsquoWhat Raymond Saidrsquordquo Pp 107ndash23 in Ethno-graphic Artifacts Challenges to a ReflexziveAnthropology edited by S Jaarsma and MRohatynskyj Honolulu HI University ofHawailsquoi Press

Malinowski Bronislaw 1922 Argonauts of theWestern Pacific London England Routledge

Mayer Adrian 1989 ldquoAnthropological Memo-riesrdquo Man (new series) 24 203ndash18

Mead Margaret 1928 Coming of Age in SamoaNew York William Morrow

Merton Robert 1957 ldquoPriorities in ScientificDiscovery A Chapter in the Sociology of Sci-encerdquo American Sociological Review 22635ndash59

mdashmdashmdash 1980 ldquoLetter from Robert Merton toHoward Bahrrdquo Lynn Perrigo Papers Archivesand Special Collections Department Ball StateUniversity Muncie IN

Merton Robert Marjorie Fiske and PatriciaKendall 1956 The Focused InterviewGlencoe IL Free Press

Michels Robert [1910] 1962 Political PartiesA Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Ten-dencies of Modern Democracy New YorkFree Press

Mills C Wright 1959 The Sociological Imagi-nation New York Oxford University Press

Mintz Sidney 1985 Sweetness and Power ThePlace of Sugar in Modern History New YorkViking

Moore Henrietta and Megan Vaughan 1994Cutting Down Trees Gender Nutrition andAgricultural Change in the Northern Provinceof Zambia 1890ndash1990 Portsmouth NHHeinemann

Morawska Ewa 1997 ldquoA Historical Ethnogra-phy in the Makingrdquo Historical Methods 3058ndash70

Nash June 2001 Mayan Visions The Quest forAutonomy in an Age of Globalization NewYork and London England Routledge

Nugent David 1982 ldquoClosed Systems and Con-tradiction The Kachin In and Out of HistoryrdquoMan 17508ndash27

Orans Martin 1996 Not Even Wrong NovatoCA Chandler and Sharp

Orlandella Angelo Ralph 1992 ldquoBoelen MayKnow Holland Boelen May Know Barzini butBoelen lsquoDoesnrsquot Know Diddle about the NorthEndrsquordquo Journal of Contemporary Ethnography2169ndash79

Pattillo-McCoy Mary 1999 Black PicketFences Privilege and Peril among the BlackMiddle Classes Chicago IL University ofChicago Press

Phelps Erin Frank Furstenberg and AnneColby eds 2002 Looking at Lives AmericanLongitudinal Studies of the Twentieth CenturyNew York Russell Sage Foundation

Popper Karl 1962 Conjectures and RefutationsThe Growth of Scientific Knowledge NewYork Basic Books

Rabinow Paul 1977 Reflections on Fieldworkin Morocco Berkeley CA University of Cali-fornia Press

Redfield Robert 1930 Tepoztlaacuten A MexicanVillage Chicago IL University of ChicagoPress

mdashmdashmdash 1950 A Village That Chose ProgressChan Kom Revisited Chicago IL Universityof Chicago Press

mdashmdashmdash 1960 Little Community and Peasant So-


ciety and Culture Chicago IL University ofChicago Press

Richards Audrey 1939 Land Labour and Dietin Northern Rhodesia An Economic Study ofthe Bemba Tribe London England OxfordUniversity Press

Roy Donald 1952a ldquoQuota Restriction andGoldbricking in a Machine Shoprdquo AmericanJournal of Sociology 57427ndash42

mdashmdashmdash 1952b ldquoRestriction of Output in a Piece-work Machine Shoprdquo PhD dissertation De-partment of Sociology University of ChicagoChicago IL

mdashmdashmdash 1953 ldquoWork Satisfaction and Social Re-ward in Quota Achievement An Analysis ofPiecework Incentiverdquo American SociologicalReview 18507ndash14

mdashmdashmdash 1954 ldquoEfficiency and the lsquoFixrsquo Infor-mal Intergroup Relations in a Piece-Work Ma-chine Shoprdquo American Journal of Sociology60 255ndash66

mdashmdashmdash 1980 ldquoReview of Michael BurawoyManufacturing Consentrdquo Berkeley Journal ofSociology 24329ndash39

Salzinger Leslie 2003 Genders under Produc-tion Berkeley CA University of CaliforniaPress

Scheper-Hughes Nancy 2001 Saints ScholarsSchizophrenics Berkeley CA University ofCalifornia Press

Schorske Carl 1955 German Social Democ-racy 1905ndash1917 The Development of a GreatSchism Cambridge MA Harvard UniversityPress

Scudder Thayer and Elizabeth Colson 1979ldquoLong-Term Research in Gwembe ValleyZambiardquo Pp 227ndash54 in Long-Term Field Re-search in Social Anthropology edited by GFoster T Scudder E Colson and R KemperNew York Academic

Selznick Philip 1949 TVA and the Grass RootsBerkeley CA University of California Press

Sennett Richard 1998 The Corrosion of Char-acter New York W W Norton

Sennett Richard and Jonathan Cobb 1972 TheHidden Injuries of Class New York AlfredKnopf

Shore Bradd 1983 ldquoParadox RegainedFreemanrsquos Margaret Mead and SamoardquoAmerican Anthropologist 83935ndash44

Smith Mark 1984 ldquoFrom Middletown toMiddletown III A Critical Reviewrdquo Qualita-tive Sociology 74327ndash36

mdashmdashmdash 1994 ldquoRobert Lynd and Knowledge forWhatrdquo Chap 4 in Social Science in the Cru-cible Durham NC Duke University Press

Susser Ida and Thomas Patterson eds 2001Cultural Diversity in the United States NewYork Blackwell

Thomas William I and Florian Znaniecki 1918ndash1920 The Polish Peasant in Europe and

America Boston MA Richard G BadgerThernstrom Stephan 1964 Poverty and

Progress Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Cen-tury City Cambridge MA Harvard UniversityPress

Van Maanen John 1988 Tales of the Field OnWriting Ethnography Chicago IL Universityof Chicago Press

Van Velsen Jaap 1967 ldquoThe Extended CaseMethod and Situational Analysisrdquo Pp 29ndash53in The Craft of Social Anthropology edited byA L Epstein London Tavistock

Vaughan Diane 1996 The Challenger LaunchDecision Risky Technology Culture and De-viance at NASA Chicago IL University ofChicago Press

mdashmdashmdash Forthcoming ldquoPublic Sociology by Ac-cidentrdquo Social Problems

Venkatesh Sudhir 2000 American Project TheRise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto CambridgeMA Harvard University Press

Verdery Katherine 2003 The Vanishing Hect-are Property and Value in PostsocialistTransylvania Ithaca NY and LondonEngland Cornell University Press

Vincent Joan 1990 Anthropology and PoliticsTucson AZ University of Arizona Press

Vogt Evon 1979 ldquoThe Harvard ChiapasProject 1957ndash1975rdquo Pp 279ndash302 in Long-Term Field Research in Social Anthropologyedited by G Foster T Scudder E Colson andR Kemper New York Academic

Warner W Lloyd and J O Low 1947 The So-cial System of the Modern Factory New Ha-ven CT Yale University Press

Weiner Annette 1976 Women of Value Men ofRenown Austin TX University of TexasPress

mdashmdashmdash 1983 ldquoEthnographic Determinism Sa-moa and the Margaret Mead ControversyrdquoAmerican Anthropologist 85909ndash19

Whyte William Foot 1943 Street Corner Soci-ety Chicago IL University of Chicago Press

mdashmdashmdash 1955 Street Corner Society 2d ed Chi-cago IL University of Chicago Press

mdashmdashmdash 1992 ldquoIn Defense of Street Corner Soci-etyrdquo Journal of Contemporary Ethnography2152ndash68

Williamson David 1996 Heretic Based on thelife of Derek Freeman Melbourne AustraliaPenguin Books

Wolf Majory 1992 A Thrice-Told Tale Femi-nism Postmodernism and Ethnographic Re-sponsibility Stanford CA Stanford UniversityPress

Wolf Eric 1982 Europe and the People withoutHistory Berkeley CA University of Califor-nia Press

Woodruff David 1999 Money Unmade Barterand the Fate of Russian Capitalism IthacaNY Cornell University Press


locate just what has altered and howrdquo (Geertz19952) This is the challenge of the ethno-graphic revisit to disentangle movements ofthe external world from the researcherrsquos ownshifting involvement with that same worldall the while recognizing that the two are notindependent

With their detailed ethnographic revisits toclassic sites the earlier anthropologiststended toward realism focusing on the dy-namic properties of the world they studiedwhereas more recently they have increas-ingly veered in a constructivist direction inwhich the ethnographer becomes the centralfigure They have found it hard to steer abalanced course On the other hand sociolo-gist-ethnographers grounded theorists inparticular have simply ducked the challengealtogether Too often they remain trapped inthe contemporary riveted to and containedin their sites from where they bracket ques-tions of historical change social processwider contexts theoretical traditions as wellas their own relation to the people theystudy While sociology in general has takena historical turnmdashwhether as a deprovincial-izing aid to social theory or as an analyticalcomparative history with its own missionwhether as historical demography or longi-tudinal survey researchmdashethnography hasbeen slow to emancipate itself from the eter-nal present My purpose here is to encour-age and consolidate what historical interestthere exists within sociology-as-ethnogra-phy transporting it from its unconscious pastinto a historicized world by elaborating thenotion of ethnography-as-revisit This inturn lays the foundations for a reflexive eth-nography1

Let me define my terms An ethnographicrevisit occurs when an ethnographer under-takes participant observation that is study-ing others in their space and time with aview to comparing his or her site with thesame one studied at an earlier point in timewhether by him or herself or by someoneelse This is to be distinguished from an eth-nographic reanalysis which involves the in-

terrogation of an already existing ethnogra-phy without any further field workColignonrsquos (1996) critical reexamination andreinterpretation of Selznickrsquos (1949) TVAand the Grassroots or Franke and Kaulrsquos(1978) reexamination of the Hawthornestudies are both examples of reanalyses Arevisit must also be distinguished from anethnographic update which brings an earlierstudy up to the present but does not reengageit Hollingsheadrsquos (1975) empirical accountof changes in Elmstown is an update becauseit does not seriously engage with the origi-nal study Gans (1982) updates The UrbanVillagers not so much by adding new fielddata as by addressing new literatures onclass and poverty These are not hard andfast distinctions but they nonetheless guidemy choice of the ethnographic revisits I ex-amine in this paper

There is one final but fundamental distinc-tionmdashthat between revisit and replicationEthnographers perennially face the criticismthat their research is not trans-personally rep-licablemdashthat one ethnographer will view thefield differently from another2 To strive forreplicability in this constructivist sense is tostrip ourselves of our prejudices biasestheories and so on before entering the fieldand to minimize the impact of our presenceonce we are in the field Rather than dive intothe pool fully clothed we stand naked on theside With the revisit we believe the contraryThere is no way of seeing clearly without atheoretical lens just as there is no passive

1 A reflexive ethnography can also be devel-oped through synchronic comparisonsmdashcompar-ing two factories communities schools and soonmdashin different spatial contexts as well asthrough the diachronic comparisons of the tem-poral revisit that form the basis of this paper

2 Or even worse the same ethnographer willhave divergent interpretations of the ldquosamerdquoevents Thus Van Maanen (1988) describes hisfield work among police on patrol successivelyas a ldquorealistrdquo tale that strives for the ldquonative pointof viewrdquo as a ldquoconfessionalrdquo tale that is preoc-cupied with the field workerrsquos own experiencesand as an ldquoimpressionisticrdquo (from the paintinggenre of Impressionism) tale that brings the fieldworker and subject into a dynamic relationshipWolf (1992) similarly presents her field work onshamans in Taiwan in three different ways asfield notes as fictional account and as profes-sional article While recognizing the importanceof experimental writing and the contributions ofthe postmodern criticism of ethnography Wolfends up defending the professional article withits rules of evidence and interpretation Such po-lyphony calls for a vocabulary and frameworkbeyond ldquoreplicationrdquo





FROMANTHROPOLOGY


























CONSENT






















InternalProcesses




ExternalForces






























FocusedRevisits




















FOCUSEDREVISITSOFA

CONSTRUCTIVISTKIND


TypeIRefutation


































FOCUSEDREVISITSOF

AREALISTKIND









TypeIIIEmpiricism



























TypeIVStructuralism



























ALLETHNOGRAPHY

































TheHeuristicRevisit

















ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES






































































































































































FROMANTHROPOLOGY


























CONSENT






















InternalProcesses




ExternalForces






























FocusedRevisits




















FOCUSEDREVISITSOFA

CONSTRUCTIVISTKIND


TypeIRefutation


































FOCUSEDREVISITSOF

AREALISTKIND









TypeIIIEmpiricism



























TypeIVStructuralism



























ALLETHNOGRAPHY

































TheHeuristicRevisit

















ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES






















































































































































































CONSENT






















InternalProcesses




ExternalForces






























FocusedRevisits




















FOCUSEDREVISITSOFA

CONSTRUCTIVISTKIND


TypeIRefutation


































FOCUSEDREVISITSOF

AREALISTKIND









TypeIIIEmpiricism



























TypeIVStructuralism



























ALLETHNOGRAPHY

































TheHeuristicRevisit

















ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES















































































































































































InternalProcesses




ExternalForces






























FocusedRevisits




















FOCUSEDREVISITSOFA

CONSTRUCTIVISTKIND


TypeIRefutation


































FOCUSEDREVISITSOF

AREALISTKIND









TypeIIIEmpiricism



























TypeIVStructuralism



























ALLETHNOGRAPHY

































TheHeuristicRevisit

















ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES






























































































































































































FocusedRevisits




















FOCUSEDREVISITSOFA

CONSTRUCTIVISTKIND


TypeIRefutation


































FOCUSEDREVISITSOF

AREALISTKIND









TypeIIIEmpiricism



























TypeIVStructuralism



























ALLETHNOGRAPHY

































TheHeuristicRevisit

















ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES





































































































































































FOCUSEDREVISITSOFA

CONSTRUCTIVISTKIND


TypeIRefutation


































FOCUSEDREVISITSOF

AREALISTKIND









TypeIIIEmpiricism



























TypeIVStructuralism



























ALLETHNOGRAPHY

































TheHeuristicRevisit

















ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES






























































































































































































FOCUSEDREVISITSOF

AREALISTKIND









TypeIIIEmpiricism



























TypeIVStructuralism



























ALLETHNOGRAPHY

































TheHeuristicRevisit

















ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES






































































































































































TypeIIIEmpiricism



























TypeIVStructuralism



























ALLETHNOGRAPHY

































TheHeuristicRevisit

















ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES























































































































































































TypeIVStructuralism



























ALLETHNOGRAPHY

































TheHeuristicRevisit

















ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES






















































































































































































ALLETHNOGRAPHY

































TheHeuristicRevisit

















ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES































































































































































































TheHeuristicRevisit

















ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES









































































































































































ReportingBackNtilde










WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES







































































































































































WHATANTHROPOLOGYCAN

LEARNFROMSOCIOLOGY


















REFERENCES

















































































































































































REFERENCES


































































































































































REVISITS 645 Revisits:AnOutlineofaTheory ...burawoy.berkeley.edu/Methodology/Revisits.ASR.pdf ·...

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Transcript of REVISITS 645 Revisits:AnOutlineofaTheory ...burawoy.berkeley.edu/Methodology/Revisits.ASR.pdf ·...