Para-Ethnography

The concept of para-ethnography was formulated to address the challenges of pursuing anthropological ethnography within new contexts of fieldwork, notably, though not exclusively, in settings dominated by scientific knowledge and/or a technocratic ethos. The concept refers to wide-ranging experiments in ethnographic method currently underway in the early 21st century in the domains of science, engineering, finance, law, medicine, politics, government, design, art, and architecture. These experiments speak to a particular problem: How do we pursue our inquiry when our subjects are themselves engaged in intellectual labors that resemble approximately or are entirely indistinguishable from our own methodological practices? Para-ethnography answers this question by proposing an analytical relationship in which we and our subjects—keenly reflexive subjects—can experiment collaboratively with the conventions of ethnographic inquiry. This methodological stance demands that we treat our subjects as epistemic partners who are not merely informing our research but who participate in shaping its theoretical agendas and its methodological exigencies. By treating our subjects as collaborators, as epistemic partners, our analytical interests and theirs can be pursued simultaneously, and we can share insights and thus develop a common analytical exchange. Crucially, we can pursue [Page 596]this kind of collaboration even if the ultimate aims of our analyses are different, if not radically opposed.

Para-ethnography is, on the one hand, premised on the central intellectual imperative of classical anthropological ethnography, notably as espoused by Branislaw Malinowski, to evoke and to reproduce the native point of view. On the other hand, it is predicated on relationships of complicity with our subjects—a state of ambiguity and improper seeming alliance—that now pervade ethnographic encounters establishing new possibilities for creating anthropological knowledge.

Para-ethnography is a concept that is very much in the making, yet it has already yielded a series of important insights on the changing nature and shifting contingencies of anthropological fieldwork. Five of these orienting insights are noted very briefly below.

• 1.
  The para-ethnographic is a self-conscious critical faculty operating in diverse domains as a way of dealing with contradictions, exceptions, and facts that are fugitive, suggesting a social realm and social processes not in alignment with conventional representations and reigning modes of knowledge and analysis. The para-ethnographic operates as a kind of social thought—expressed in genres such as the anecdotal, hype, and intuition—within institutions dominated by a technocratic ethos, an ethos that, under changed contemporary circumstances, simply does not discipline thought and action as efficiently as it once did. Making ethnography from these found paraethnographic narratives redefines the status of the subject or informant and asks what different accounts one wants from such key figures in the fieldwork process.
• 2.
  If the opening gambit of the ethnography is an orienting foray into a strategically selected culture of expertise, then that milieu of fieldwork cannot be treated conventionally or traditionally. Experts are to be treated not as colleagues helping to inform fieldwork to occur elsewhere but instead as subjects fully within our own analytical ambit whose cognitive purview and social action range potentially over multiple, if not countless, sites and locales. Nor can they be treated as conventional natives or tokens of their cultures to be systematically understood; instead, they must be treated as agents who actively participate in shaping emergent social realms. These subjects must be treated like partners in research, a fiction to be sustained more or less strongly around the key concept of para-ethnography. This concept is distinctly not about an ethnography of elite cultures; rather, it is about access to an imaginary for fieldwork that can be shaped only by alliances with makers of visionary knowledge who are already in the scene of fieldwork. The imaginaries of these knowledge makers who have preceded the ethnographer are what the dreams of contemporary fieldwork are made of.
• 3.
  The para-ethnographer is typically an expert subject, for example, a scientist, who is perplexed by the significance of his or her own professional practices and who, in the shadow of his or her formal knowledge work, creates intricate cultural narratives that might never be fully voiced but nonetheless mimic the form and the content of an ethnographic engagement with the world. Various fragmentary discourses are continuously spun off from this kind of knowledge work that connects formal scientific inquiry to the existential condition of the scientist cum para-ethnographer. Ethical and moral apprehensions as well as political and commercial preoccupations, although typically not fully articulated, nonetheless circulate in complex relationship to formal scientific practices, thereby constituting the ecologies of discourse that create the field or ground in which strategies and designs of anthropological research take form. In effect, every project of ethnography enters sites of fieldwork through a zone of collateral counterpart knowledge that it cannot ignore in finding its way to the preferred scenes of ordinary everyday life with which it is traditionally comfortable. The fundamental problem here is in confronting the politics of knowledge that any project of fieldwork involves and the ethnographer's efforts to make this politics of knowledge itself part of the design of investigation.
• 4.
  The questions, motives, and purposes that project anthropologists into fieldwork are thus not simply those raised within the discipline of anthropology or posed by the contextualizing social theories or historical narratives of contiguous academic specializations; rather, they arise from orienting engagements with counterparts and actors already defined within the field of ethnographic inquiry.
• 5.
  Under the conditions we are stipulating, where meaning is fugitive and social facts are elusive, distinct dilemmas are created for the individual. Cultural innovations continually destabilize social consensus, posing acute struggles for the perplexed subject—struggles that gain expression through various manifestations of the para-ethnographic. We are interested in how these narratives become linked together—through networks [Page 597]of interlocutors—conferring a distinctive social character on, for the most part, technical knowledge allowing expertise to be juxtaposed in ways that render them acutely relevant to a broad range of anthropological questions.

For example, biotech startup companies are infused with shifting stories in which science is relentlessly narrated in relationship to the requirements of finance and a future in which scientists and financial backers have a stake. The optimism of science is continually mediated by the anxieties associated with commercial risk. For the scientists, who themselves are also typically investors in these startups, these risks often have a deeply personal character. Their stories—their para-ethnographic narratives—are not merely about professional reputation, career possibilities, or shareholder equity, but also about the fate of their children's education, their retirement savings, their mortgages, and their marriages. And of course, these stories premised on yet unpatented or fully tested drugs or other devices to relieve human afflictions and prolong life are addressed to a particular community of suffers—the market—and to the public at large. Again, these discourses continually move among personal, professional, commercial, financial, scientific, ethical, and political domains of meaning and significance framing consciousness and subconsciousness of our time.

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