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This paper describes a simple strategy for doing more reliable ethnography: after fieldwork has commenced, investigators can use thought experiments to recognize inconvenient phenomena. Two examples are discussed: "the ethnographic trial" and the "inconvenience sample." The paper uses Clifford Geertz's classic "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" as a case of how work could be made more reliable with such strategies. It highlights the value of systematically identifying aspects of the situation under study that have been excluded from the analysis.
One of the most popular ways to gain access in ethnographic research is known as convenience sampling: phenomena are included in a study on the basis of their availability, rather than through random sampling. Because such data cannot be representative in a statistical sense, and cannot necessarily even tell us anything about the larger population from which they come, there is no small amount of hand wringing and distress about the horrors of such procedures. In response, some very insightful things are sometimes written to teach field researchers the logic of better scientific inference (See, for example, Small 2009).
Though many ethnographers would wish to proceed in accordance with the logic of "best" scientific practices, they bracket that knowledge and still keep to the old ways of doing things, choosing their subjects on the basis of availability. In that context, we should supplement our lectures about scientific sampling with discussions of strategies that might help mitigate the impact of the procedures ethnographers are in fact using.
In "Science as a Vocation," Max Weber wrote that "the primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts," by which he meant "facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions." Following Weber, I would argue that for every ethnographic project there are phenomena that are extremely inconvenient from the standpoint of the line of thinking or theory that has emerged from the fieldwork. The method of ethnography should accustom itself to explicitly identifying such phenomena.
1. THE ETHNOGRAPHIC TRIAL
One of the ways that I can accustom myself to inconvenient phenomena is to imagine that I will stand trial for ethnographic malpractice. An attorney has brought a claim against me on behalf of my study's readers. The trial will be held...