Abstract
Reflecting on 30 years of conducting criminological ethnography, I argue in this chapter that phenomenological attentiveness to the world on its own terms lays the foundation for useful ethnographic research. Such research also requires that the ethnographer learn how to know the world: by paying attention to subtlety and nuance, by humbly embracing elegant knowledge, by theorizing within ethnographic findings, and by seeking the emotional accuracy and situated vulnerability of verstehen. Criminological ethnographers face in addition issues of legality and illegality in field research, with such research inevitably shaped by decisions about breaking the law or obeying it. This necessary entanglement of the ethnographer in the research process is reflected in the more recent development of autoethnography, which also suggests new forms of narrative engagement. In summary and conclusion I argue that criminological ethnography is less a technical procedure than an unfolding process of informed improvisation—less a “method” in the traditional sense than a way of knowing and living in the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Sometimes non-ethnographic scholars critique ethnographic accounts for being overly romantic, or overly sympathetic, or overly dramatic in their depiction of research subjects—because these scholars are uncritically comparing such accounts to what they think they know of the subject matter from media coverage of it!
- 2.
If you’re interested in developing your ethnographic writing skills, I’d suggest reading novels, short stories, nonfiction reporting, classic ethnographies, and Agee and Evans’ (2001 [1939]) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—and avoiding traditional social scientific reports. I’d also encourage you to experiment with forms of writing, toward the goal of reproducing the rhythms of particular groups and particular settings in your writing about them. For me, this has meant experimenting with foreshadowing, vignettes, accounts that unfold beyond the limits of a single chapter, and other narrative devices. In short, think about ways in which you can make your style of writing homologous with its subject. See Clifford and Marcus’s (1986) classic collection, Writing Culture.
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Ferrell, J. (2018). Criminological Ethnography: Living and Knowing. In: Rice, S., Maltz, M. (eds) Doing Ethnography in Criminology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96316-7_12
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