Closeness, Distance and Honesty in Prison Ethnography

Abstract

In their famously combative exchange in the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) in 2002, one of Loic Wacquant’s many charges against Elijah Anderson, Mitchell Duneier and Katherine Newman is a putative lack of critical distance from their research participants. Wacquant’s accusation is that all three authors detail rather than explain the behaviours and orientations of their research subjects and present (at least some of) them in a manner that is naively and needlessly favourable. The goal of ethnographic research, he argued, ‘is not to exonerate the character of dishonoured social figures and dispossessed social groups’, or to ‘attract sympathy for their plight’, as such, but to describe and dissect the ‘the social mechanisms and meanings that govern their practices, ground their morality […] and explain their strategies and trajectories’ (Wacquant, 2002: 1470).