Expanding Ethnographic Insights into Global Politics

Abstract

Ethnographic research methods are an important but largely neglected source of insight into international relations. Some of the issues at stake are exposed—or at least implied—in Iver Neumann's (2007) compelling recent examination of diplomatic speech writing. Drawing on his experiences in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, Neumann explores how deeply entrenched institutional habits gear the process of speech writing toward producing and sustaining ministry identity, harmony and a stable view of an external world over and against other goals. By examining the tension between his personal ambition as a speech writer and the dictates of bureaucratic behavioral norms, Neumann suggests opportunities for scrutinizing rather than reproducing taken-for-granted entities, such as the individual or the state. The ethnographic challenge entailed in Neumann's (2007) work raises methodological questions which deserve to be discussed in the pages of IPS. Central here is the need to acknowledge how the author of a scholarly work occupies an ambiguous position as both the subject and object of knowledge (Foucault 1970:312). It is, of course, a truism to say that the scholar is central to research: the self is the cognitive and material hub through which the world is known. But the perplexities, challenges and contradictions of this situation remain under-examined. As a result, we routinely fall back on commonsense presuppositions about what it means to be a self and to know. Prevailing conceptualizations tend to assume that the self is an autonomous cognitive and emotional entity, set against other such entities and the natural and social world (Geertz 1979:229). The epistemological companion of the accomplished and autonomous self is the presupposition that knowing is a commonsensical affair: a practice whereby the sovereign subject assimilates the world through models of recognition and representation (Deleuze 1994:134–135). While anthropology has long critiqued such culturally neutral conceptions of self, their reproduction in scholarship affirms our complicity with a particular view of social and political life which serves as the model for the sovereign state and other central elements of international affairs.