Law Professor Puts Ethnography on Trial in New Book!

Dear Commons Community,

Ethnography research, one of the more popular research methodologies in the social sciences especially anthropology, is the subject of a new book by Stephen Lubet  entitled, Interrogating Ethnography: Why Evidence Matters (Oxford University Press). Lubet, a law professor at Northwestern University, concludes that ethnography suffers from an accuracy problem, one that scholars in the field have largely overlooked. Essentially he writes that ethnography should adopt methods for dealing with evidence that more closely resemble those practiced in other fields, like law and journalism.  Here is an excerpt from a review of this book that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“ Mr. Lubet — a self-described fan of ethnography — also found many assertions that were “dubious, exaggerated, tendentious, or just plain wrong.”

The problem, as Mr. Lubet sees it, is ethnographers’ inconsistent approach to reporting and documenting facts. Often, he says in an interview, they state as fact what is really “hearsay”: something they heard, rather than observed. He argues that ethnography should adopt methods for dealing with evidence that more closely resemble those practiced in other fields, like law and journalism.

“When a fact is stated in a newspaper, if it was told to the reporter by somebody, it’s presented that way,” Mr. Lubet says. “If it’s something the reporter saw, it’s presented that way. If it comes from a document, it’s presented that way. And, in ethnography, those three were often confused — or not drawn precisely.

Mr. Lubet’s book has touched off a debate about what ethnographers might learn from legal scholars, and vice versa.

“Tone deaf” is how John Van Maanen, an organizations ethnographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes Mr. Lubet’s writing.

“If ethnography was concerned only with verification and, quote, facts, it would be a kind of dismal endeavor,” he says. “We wouldn’t get the narrative. We wouldn’t get the story. We wouldn’t get the feel for the culture that is being explored. And to think about ethnography as just seeking out facts is sort of missing the point.”

But another ethnographer, Colin Jerolmack of New York University, finds much of Mr. Lubet’s book compelling. He cringed reading the book’s accounts of ethnographers who reported their informants’ stories as facts, without much effort at verification.

“When you just go through hundreds of pages, with dozens of examples of it, in well-regarded ethnographies, it makes it hard for me to just say, ‘Oh, well, those are the few outliers who aren’t really careful,’” says Mr. Jerolmack, who joined a prominent cast of scholars at Northwestern for a symposium on Mr. Lubet’s book in October.”

This book should be of interest to ethnographers and other researchers.  Fact verification is not the only purpose of social science research but it does play an important role.  Researchers employing any type of qualitative or quantitative method should do their best to state as true that which can be verified.  That which cannot be verified should be presented as opinions or assertions that subjects believe to be true.

Tony

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