WHY ETHNOGRAPHY MATTERS: On Anthropology and Its Publics
نویسنده
چکیده
Based on the experience of researching and writing a book on urban policing in France and its reception by the media and various audiences, this essay discusses the challenges facing a public ethnography—distinguished from public sociology or anthropology. First, I differentiate two tasks (popularizing and politicizing) and multiple publics (imagined or encountered). Second, I plead for the exploration of understudied objects and terrains (black holes) and the attention to the ordinary as a way to transform the perspective on the world (critical potentialities). Third, I evoke the risks related to the appropriation of the work by the media (popular translation) and the loyalties toward the diverse and sometimes opposed subjects of the research (public debt). My conclusion underlines why rendering public the works of critical ethnography matters for contemporary societies. [public ethnography, critical ethnography, audiences, media, policing] NOTES Acknowledgments. This essay is related to a study conducted as part of the “Ideas” Advanced Grant that I was awarded by the European Research Council. A very preliminary and much shorter version of it was presented for the first Walter Goldschmidt Lecture at the University of California Los Angeles. I am grateful to Carole Browner for her invitation to deliver this paper and have it discussed by Jeffrey Brantingham and Jennifer Jackson; to Kabir Tambar for his discussion of an earlier version; and to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
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