Abstract
Should political theorists engage in ethnography? In this letter, we assess a recent wave of interest in ethnography among political theorists and explain why it is a good thing. We focus, in particular, on how ethnographic research generates what Ian Shapiro calls “problematizing redescriptions”—accounts of political phenomena that destabilize the lens through which we traditionally study them, engendering novel questions and exposing new avenues of moral concern. We argue that (1) by revealing new levels of variation and contingency within familiar political phenomena, ethnography can uncover topics ripe for normative inquiry; (2) by shedding light on what meanings people associate with political values, it can advance our reflection on concepts; and (3) by capturing the experience of individuals at grips with the social world, it can attune us to forms of harm that would otherwise remain hidden. The purchase for political theory is considerable. By thickening our understanding of institutions, ethnography serves as an antidote to analytic specialization and broadens the range of questions political theorists can ask, reinvigorating debates in the subfield and forging connections with the discipline writ large.
Highlights
In 2002, Ian Shapiro issued a challenge to political theorists—and the discipline more broadly—to stop “navel-gazing.” The problem, he claims, is specialization and the division between normative and positive thinking, which leaves political theorists increasingly unmoored from the empirical world and unable to comment critically on it, and political scientists incentivized to chase questions that are methodologically expedient rather than meaningful on their own
More than 15 years later, while political theorists are embroiled in methodological debates over realism and ideal versus nonideal theory, something appears to be brewing in political science that speaks directly to Shapiro’s challenge
We argue that (1) by revealing new levels of variation and contingency within familiar political phenomena, ethnography can uncover new topics ripe for normative inquiry; (2) by shedding light on what meanings people associate with political values, it can advance our reflection on concepts; and (3) by capturing the experience of individuals at grips with the social world, it can attune us to forms of harm that would otherwise remain hidden
Summary
The problem, he claims, is specialization and the division between normative and positive thinking, which leaves political theorists increasingly unmoored from the empirical world and unable to comment critically on it, and political scientists incentivized to chase questions that are methodologically expedient rather than meaningful on their own To correct for this he suggests we refocus research around problems, rather than methods and theories, which predetermine the problems we look for (and the solutions we find)—or as he puts it, “if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything around you starts to look like a nail” (Shapiro 2002, 598). We argue that (1) by revealing new levels of variation and contingency within familiar political phenomena, ethnography can uncover new topics ripe for normative inquiry; (2) by shedding light on what meanings people associate with political values, it can advance our reflection on concepts; and (3) by capturing the experience of individuals at grips with the social world, it can attune us to forms of harm that would otherwise remain hidden
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