Alpa Shah
Ethnography?: Participant observation, a
potentially revolutionary praxis
Article (Accepted version)
(Refereed)
Original citation:
Shah, Alpa. (2017) Ethnography?: Participant observation, a potentially revolutionary praxis.
HAU: Journal of Ethnography, 7 (1). ISSN 2049-1115
DOI: 10.14318/hau7.1.008
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2017 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 7 (1): 45–59
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Alpa Shah.
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.008
DEBATE
Ethnography?
Participant observation, a potentially
revolutionary praxis
Alpa S, London School of Economics
and Political Science
This essay focuses on the core of ethnographic research—participant observation—to argue
that it is a potentially revolutionary praxis because it forces us to question our theoretical
presuppositions about the world, produce knowledge that is new, was confined to the
margins, or was silenced. It is argued that participant observation is not merely a method
of anthropology but is a form of production of knowledge through being and action; it is
praxis, the process by which theory is dialectically produced and realized in action. Four core
aspects of participation observation are discussed as long duration (long-term engagement),
revealing social relations of a group of people (understanding a group of people and their social
processes), holism (studying all aspects of social life, marking its fundamental democracy),
and the dialectical relationship between intimacy and estrangement (befriending strangers).
Though the risks and limits of participant observation are outlined, as are the tensions
between activism and anthropology, it is argued that engaging in participant observation is
a profoundly political act, one that can enable us to challenge hegemonic conceptions of the
world, challenge authority, and better act in the world.
Keywords: ethnography, theory, participant observation, India, revolutionary praxis
“That’s enough about ethnography!” says Tim Ingold (2014). It was a provocation
to those who value ethnography, but it seems to me that the substance of the de-
bates that have ensued, in the Cultural Anthropology Forum and in this volume of
H, shows more agreement than disagreement with what is special about the pro-
cess of our fieldwork and writing. In this essay I seek to clarify why ethnographic
research carried out by anthropologists is important beyond the confines of our
own discipline, why how we do it has the potential to contribute new knowledge
2017 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 7 (1): 45–59
Alpa S 46
about the world, why—as I will argue here—participant observation is a potentially
revolutionary praxis.
I am entirely in agreement with Tim Ingold and Signe Howell that when schol-
ars in other disciplines—whether it is in geography, sociology, or education—talk
about ethnographic research, it does not always come with the same potential as
an anthropologist’s fieldwork, even when it is more than a set of open-ended in-
terviews, even when they claim to have spent a year doing it. There are, however,
brilliant exceptions. Two books that attracted me to anthropology were written by
scholars trained in other disciplines: Paul Willis’s Learning to labour (1978) and
James Scott’s Weapons of the weak (1985). I will return to these books, but it is
true that ethnography is often used so loosely in other disciplines (or by marketing
firms for that matter) that one cannot assume much more than attention to qualita-
tive research when the word is evoked.
I also empathize with Ingold’s sentiments that there is a danger that anthropol-
ogy can become too introverted, too obsessed with naval gazing in “the theater of
its operations” and with mystification. There are self-imposed threats that can re-
duce what we do to mere qualitative data collection or producing case studies. This
situation can arise from our failure to recognize the significance of our praxis, our
diluting the rigor of our fieldwork, and our own apathy.
This nonrecognition, dilution, and apathy are compounded by forces from
within our own universities and funding councils, forces that today prioritize very
corporate notions of time-space efficiency in research, writing, and its assessment.
In this era of metric measures and “value for money,” I know from personal experi-
ence that it is not uncommon for ESRC Grants Assessment Panels to raise ques-
tions about the cost of field visits if you can contact someone on the phone or
through a computer, to question whether it is necessary to go and speak to a person
face-to-face!
It is undeniably evermore difficult to continue to make the case for research that
prioritizes living for a year and a half with one group of people in an open-ended
study, beginning with the premise that we can’t possibly know what we will find or
even what the right questions will be. Moreover, with language learning centers be-
ing forced to close, it is difficult to argue for the time (forget cost) necessary to learn
the often-obscure languages of the people we work with. And, even if we tell our
doctoral students that we expect them to eventually discard their proposals because
of the new knowledge they will acquire in the process of fieldwork, that fieldwork
itself will produce not only new research questions but also new fields of enquiry
that they could not possibly conceive would be important from the corridors of our
departments, we have still compromised by ensuring they produce prefieldwork
proposals that in form resemble those of other disciplines—with research themes,
questions, and sometimes hypotheses. In the compulsion to work beyond our dis-
ciplines and work with activists, practitioners, and in interdisciplinary teams, we
are often under pressure to produce fast results and quick-fix solutions. It is easy to
give in, to compromise, to not fight our ground.
My own fieldwork with Maoist-inspired Naxalite revolutionary guerrillas in
India has taught me that self-criticism should be a crucial part of any struggle and
that it is important to recognize the limitations of our allies. To that extent, Ingold
is correct to call us up on where we may be faltering and to critically analyze distant
2017 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 7 (1): 45–59
47 E
others who claim to be close to us. But rather than waste our time disparaging over
what they are doing in the name of ethnography, we should take courage from the
fact that we are recognized, that others are trying to emulate what they think we do
(even if it is not the same), that our potential is celebrated; that BBC Radio 4 even
have an annual Ethnography Prize. These are our friends not our foes.
We do need to be ever clearer about what we do, why we do it, and why it
is important. And to that extent Ingold has helped us by generating this debate.
Rita Astuti puts it the most clearly. “We do fieldwork. We write ethnography.” In
this spirit, rather than fuss around about whether we need more or less ethnogra-
phy, dillydallying hither and thither about whether it is too corrupted or should be
resurrected, my proposition is that we keep our eye on the ball and focus on the
strength that does in fact unite us. Both Tim Ingold and Signe Howell have iden-
tified what this is. I would like to take their arguments further and propose that
we are the inheritors, practitioners, and proponents of a potentially revolutionary
praxis; and that praxis is participant observation.
Participant observation can be revolutionary praxis for at least two reasons. The
first is that through living with and being a part of other people’s lives as fully
as possible, participant observation makes us question our fundamental assump-
tions and preexisting theories about the world; it enables us to discover new ways
of thinking about, seeing, and acting in the world. It does so by being inherently
democratic not only because of its pedagogy of a two-way process of exchange be-
tween educator and educated but also because it ensures that we explore all aspects
of the lives of the people we are working with, recognize their interconnections.
For instance, we can’t just produce a study of voting behavior or labor relations or
market activity, but must explore the interrelations between all the different as-
pects of life—politics, economics, religion, and kinship that matter to those we are
studying—to understand any one issue. Second, a point to which I will return in
my concluding section, is that by taking seriously the lives of others, participant
observation enables us to understand the relationship between history, ideology,
and action in ways that we could not have foreseen, and is therefore crucial to
understanding both why things remain the same and in thinking about how domi-
nant powers and authority can be challenged, that is crucial to revolutionary social
change.
Others may borrow from us, may try to emulate us, are welcome to join us, but
it is we—in the discipline of anthropology—that even when the forces are stacked
up against us, who create the space for and fight for participant observation.
Why is participant observation a potentially revolutionary praxis?
Anthropology is often critiqued by those who don’t know it or can’t understand
its potential to produce at worst detailed descriptions or at best interesting case
studies—Ingold’s charge of ethnography. While there is nothing wrong with a case
study, the implication is that we can’t produce much else through our localized field-
work. This supposition misses the point that unlike other disciplines—which most
commonly rely on finding data to confirm or negate preexisting theoretical frame-
works or hypotheses—the in-depth and holistic experiences and understandings of
2017 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 7 (1): 45–59
Alpa S 48
participant observation provide to us the possibilities of reaching general proposi-
tions we could never have arrived at before we embarked on fieldwork and to thus
question dominant theoretical and political positions.
Since I do not wish to argue that participant observation as revolutionary praxis
is the preserve of anthropology, let me illustrate with examples from the two eth-
nographies I began this essay with, to show how and why the in-depth and holistic
research of participant observation can lead to new general propositions. In Learn-
ing to labour, Paul Willis (1978) challenges the proposition that working class kids
are left to working class jobs because they are less capable of acquiring the skills to
move on. Through participant observation with a group of working class boys in
their last year-and-a-half at school and their first few months at work, Willis shows
how in fact the lads recognized that there was no such thing as an equal opportu-
nity for them—that no matter how hard they tried, they would always be far less
successful than middle-class students. They thus developed an antagonism to the
ethic of modern education as enforced in the school system and developed a coun-
terculture against it that came across in their linguistic and visual expression and
style. Over the formal knowledge prioritized in school, they glorified hard manual
labor and privileged practical knowledge, life experience, and “street wisdom.”
They challenged obedience and shunned meritocracy for they knew all too well
that their fate was not going to be determined by their individual ability to acquire
a skill but the ways in which the labor market works to marginalize them and was
beyond their control. Not only does Willis show the complex dynamics through
which working class kids get working class jobs but also illustrates how their youth
culture of resistance in fact buttressed the status quo.
Similarly, in Weapons of the weak, James Scott (1985) challenges dominant theo-
ries—in this case, theories of class struggle that look for or focus on large-scale
resistance and epochal events—by living for eighteen months with Malaysian peas-
ants. Instead, he shows how with the polarizing effects of the Green Revolution that
spread capitalism in agriculture in Malaysia, the far more significant form of class
struggle was the everyday resistance that stopped short of outright defiance—the
foot dragging, the lying, the arson, the stealing from the rich, the gossip about and
the jokes that are told of the rich—that most often were unseen by the powerful
groups. The Malaysian peasants were dominated without hegemony but their ev-
eryday forms of resistance would—without Scott’s participant observation living
with them—have gone unnoticed by those coming in looking for symbols, out-
comes, and rhetoric that match the book theories of class struggle.
Of course, these books—like all good books—are not without problems or
critiques, but what they illustrate is that participant observation is a potentially
revolutionary praxis and understanding why entails a consideration of the relation-
ship between method and theory. Willis once said about participant observation’s
relation to theory, “It has directed its followers towards a profoundly important
methodological possibility—that of being ‘surprised,’ of reaching knowledge not
prefigured in one’s starting paradigm” (Willis 1980: 90, cited in Malkki 2007: 174).
Indeed, I would argue that participant observation is not merely a method of an-
thropology but is a form of production of knowledge through being and action. It
is thus praxis, the process by which theory is dialectically produced and realized
in action. It has more in common with and is better thought of in relation to Marx