It is strange: A reply to Vrasti

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 65-77

  Rancatore, Jason P ^a  

^a AMERICAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Ethnography; International relations; Methodology

Indexed keywords

EID: 77955387611     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829810370938     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. Wanda Vrasti, 'The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37, no. 2 (2008): 279-301.
2. See Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, 'Can Ethnographic Techniques Tell Us Distinctive Things about World Politics?', International Political Sociology 2, no. 1 (2008): 91-3.
3. See also Norman Denzin, Interpretive Ethnography (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997).
4. Arguably, these issues, in the past two decades, seem to return in different iterations within IR. For example, Yosef Lapid, 'The Third Debate: On the Prospects of International Theory in a Post-Positivist Era', International Studies Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1989): 235-54
5. Gary King, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
6. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
7. Friedrich Kratochwil, 'Constructing a New Orthodoxy? Wendt's "Social Theory of International Politics" and the Constructivist Challenge', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 1 (2000): 73-101.
8. For example, Ole Waever, 'The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline: American and European Developments in International Relations', International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 687-727.
9. As a reviewer rightly points out, this is an essentialising move that stands somewhat in contrast to the philosophical position that we are producers of 'IR' and/or 'anthropology'.
10. Inspired by Analects 1.1: 'Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?' Confucius, Analects, trans. by Arthur Waley (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1964).
11. Vrasti, 'The Strange Case', 291.
12. Ibid, 293.
13. Ibid, 293-4. 11. To be clear, Pouliot seems to identify with IR constructivism, as his 2007 article presents 'a constructivist methodology', whereas Neumann appears to not subscribe to a particular 'IR' approach, though he engages well-known constructivists (e.g. Alexander Wendt) and their inspirations. In this case, I am not concerned about who 'really is' a constructivist or what really is 'constructivism'. Nor am I suggesting that the use of ethnographic methods is somehow most compatible with IR constructivism. Rather, I am more concerned with comparing my interpretation of the set of arguments with Vrasti's.
14. Vincent Pouliot, 'Sobjectivism: Towards a Constructivist Methodology', International Studies Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2007): 359-84.
15. Vincent Pouliot, 'The Logic of Practicality: A Theory of Practice of Security Communities', International Organization 62, no. 2 (2008): 257-88.
16. Pouliot, 'Sobjectivism', 369.
17. See the discussion in Pouliot, 'Sobjectivism', 365-7, especially 369-70. Bourdieu provides much inspiration for Pouliot, as he calls on him when stating how historicisation 'neutralizes, at least theoretically, the effects of naturalization'. Pouliot goes on to state that 'no social realities are natural, they are all the result of political and social processes that are rooted in history'.
18. Iver Neumann, 'To Be a Diplomat', International Studies Perspectives 6, no. 1 (2005): 72-93.
19. Iver Neumann, '"A Speech that the Entire Ministry May Stand For," or: Why Diplomats Never Produce Anything New', International Political Sociology 1, no. 2 (2007): 183-200.
20. Iver B. Neumann, 'Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31, no. 3 (2002): 627-51.
21. Neumann, 'To Be a Diplomat'. Cf. James Clifford, 'Introduction', in Writing Culture - The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).
22. Neumann, 'Returning Practice', 628.
23. Vrasti, 'The Strange Case', 293.
24. See also Neumann's comments on the English School, where he lauds the attention paid to both meaning and materiality in Iver Neumann, 'The English School and the Practices of World Society', Review of International Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 503-7
25. Iver Neumann, 'Discourse Analysis', in Qualitative Methods in International Relations: A Pluralist Guide, eds Audie Klotz and Deepa Prakash (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 61-77.
26. See also in the same volume, Hugh Gusterson, 'Ethnographic Research', 93-113.
27. Neumann, 'Returning Practice', 628.
28. Vrasti, 'The Strange Case', 292.
29. Neumann, 'Returning Practice', 627, 632.
30. Ibid., 627.
31. Vrasti, 'The Strange Case', 281-286.
32. Wendt, Social Theory, 39.
33. Carol Cohn, 'Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, no. 4 (1987): 687-718.
34. Carol Cohn and Cynthia Enloe, 'A Conversation with Cynthia. Enloe: Feminists Look at Masculinity and the Men Who Wage War', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 4 (2003): 1187-207.
35. Carol Cohn, 'Motives and Methods: Using Multi-Sited Ethnography to Study US National Security Discourses', in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, eds Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 91-107.
36. Cohn, 'Motives and Methods', 92, 107.
37. Cohn and Enloe, 'A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe', 1188, emphasis added.
38. Momentarily holding an analytical separation to see what can be gained or learned is quite different from holding this separation to maintain 'moral innocence and narrative authority'. Thanks to Christoff Lührs for pushing for greater clarity on this point.
39. Cohn, 'Motives and Methods', 107, emphasis added.
40. Vrasti, 'The Strange Case', 289. According to the American Anthropological Association's 2004 statement on ethnography and institutional review boards: 'Ethnography involves the researcher's study of human behavior in the natural settings in which people live. Specifically, ethnography refers to the description of cultural systems or an aspect of culture based on fieldwork in which the investigator is immersed in the ongoing everyday activities of the designated community for the purpose of describing the social context, relationships and processes relevant to the topic under consideration'. See American Anthropological Association, 'Statement on Ethnography and Institutional Review Boards', adopted 4 June 2004, retrieved from: http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/irb.htm.
41. Vrasti, 'The Strange Case', 288.
42. Cynthia Enloe, Beaches, Bananas and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 19.
43. Enloe, Beaches, 4.
44. For example, there is no reason why well-worn historical documents cannot be given a different 'reading' under a new methodological light. Indeed, there is no reason to assume that the observations of two researchers in the same environment will be at all similar. The employment of methodological concepts that explain why attention is given to particulars explicates why and how the readings might be different.
45. Indeed, methodological statements by a variety of scholars become important statements for redefining social science practice. See for example, King et al., Designing Social Inquiry.
46. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
47. Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006).
48. Jackson, 'Ethnographic Techniques', 91. See also Lisa Wedeen, 'Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science', American Political Science Review 96, no. 4 (2002): 713-28.
49. For an example of the use of an ethnographic method of data collection (informal interviewing) combined with statistical (factor) analysis, see W. Penn Handwerker, 'The Construct Validity of Cultures: Cultural Diversity, Culture Theory, and a Method for Ethnography', American Anthropologist 104, no. 1 (2002): 106-22.
50. Vrasti, 'The Strange Case', 281.
51. Ibid., 281, 295, emphasis added.
52. Two related points: (a) one can imagine all sorts of political research that could be useful to policy-makers even if not immediately obvious or intended, and (b) what policy-makers 'do with' academic work can be largely out of the hands of the researchers.
53. It should be noted that Cohn and Enloe's research do provide some sense of 'what actually is occurring' and are also more actively engaged in recreating their world to align with their normative commitments. This suggests that there is variation among scholars regarding the use of ethnography in IR as well as methodological commitments.
54. Turn of phrase indebted to Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, 'Beyond Belief: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations', European Journal of International Relations 3, no. 2 (1997): 193-237.
55. Michael Barnett, 'The UN Security Council, Indifference, and Genocide in Rwanda', Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 4 (1997): 553-4.
56. Iver Neumann, A Speech that the Entire Ministry May Stand For'.
57. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military- Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).
58. Jackson, 'Ethnographic Techniques', 92.
59. Vrasti, 'The Strange Case', 286-7.
60. For a recent extended treatment of this idea, see Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, 'Foregrounding Ontology: Dualism, Monism, and IR Theory', Review of International Studies 34, no. 2 (2008): 129-53.
61. See, for example, Max Weber, 'Objectivity in Social Science', in Essays in Sociology, eds H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).
62. Vrasti, 'The Strange Case', 300.
63. See also Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994).
64. James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 10.
65. Space and scope permits only a brief exploration and illustration of this argument.
66. Barnett, The UN Security Council, Indifference, and Genocide in Rwanda', 554-8;
67. Neumann, A Speech that the Entire Ministry May Stand For, 191-2.
68. Der Derian, Virtuous War, 8-11.
69. To be clear, this point is philosophical, not empirical.
70. Shapiro articulates what I would call the 'political responsibility' of the scholar: 'to exercise "patience" (as Foucault put it) and consistently disclose what is lost by fixing interpretations that permit the legitimation of action.'.
71. See Michael J. Shapiro, 'Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions by Pauline Marie Rosenau, Political Theory and Postmodernism by Stephen K. White', American Political Science Review 86, no. 3 (1992): 788-9.
72. This line of argumentation builds on the one offered by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson in 'Foregrounding Ontology'.
73. A helpful reviewer made it possible for this additional emphasis on 'situation' as part of an explanatory endeavour.
74. This is not the same as identifying and then 'repairing' the ethical position of the researcher or of the discipline.
75. To give an example, it was my experience in one 'development' community that questions and discussion about the ethics of international development (e.g. its relationship with human rights) did occur. As a part of this community, I witnessed other 'members' discussing issues that affected the lives of millions of people living in poverty. These were ethically charged political issues that were not taken lightly. As a part of that community, I did not take them lightly either. However, I noted that in order to talk about the problems of 'doing development' in the here and now, the colonial histories of 'developing countries' were bracketed. Instead, the community discussed private and public sector incentives and building institutions. Such discussion and thinking assists my observations of meaning-making in that community as I come to understand how members are conditioned to problematise particular phenomena and disregard others. The researcher, in this instance, is both the research instrument and the analytical apparatus. Part of this process is reflecting on how I am being conditioned, and how I manage contending ethical perspectives. It causes emotions such as frustration and anxiety, but it also produces, I believe, a useful thoughtfulness and a potential explanation of discursive-practical power.
76. In this manner, the methodological position is ethical insofar as it is philosophically, not empirically, grounded. It may still be agnostic as to whether or not the ethical dilemmas encountered are 'good' or 'bad'.
77. My training in IR ranged from disciplinary work, such as King et al.'s doctrinal Designing Social Inquiry, to the intervention of Norman Denzin and Yvonne Lincoln's edited tome, the Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000) and Douglas McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly's Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), which attempted to make clear what is at stake in relational methodology using causal mechanisms. The last two books stand outside the usual IR programme, so reflecting on ethnography in IR is strange, and that is indicative of a need for greater dialogue about methodology and method.
78. In this way, the 'cart' (explanatory answer) and the 'horse' (question) are something of a package rather than distinct.
79. Though space limits a full engagement here, another recent article addresses issues of field research and political science. See Julian Eckl, Responsible Scholarship after Leaving the Veranda: Normative Issues Faced by Field Researchers - and Armchair Scientists', International Political Sociology 2, no. 2 (2008): 185-203.