For a Political Epistemology of Fieldwork

Abstract This chapter starts by reflecting reflects back on the controversy triggered by “Scrutinizing the Street” and discusses the social and academic conditions of epistemic reflexivity. It moves to characterizing ethnography as “embodied and embedded” social inquiry. It develops a critique of ethnographic reason by dissecting “ethnographism”: the tendency to want to describe, interpret and explain a phenomenon based solely on the elements discerned through fieldwork. It calls for the practice of an enactive, structural, and historicized ethnography that sets out to embed the micro-actions observed in the interlocking series of nested social spaces that shape them and give them sense. Such an ethnography allows us to avoid falling into one or another of the five “organic fallacies” of participant observation: interactionism, inductivism, populism, presentism, and the hermeneutic drift. And to move beyond Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” with the “thick construction” inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, whose mission is to construct scientifically the ordinary social construction of reality. Illustrations and tips from an immersive field study of the county criminal are provided to indicate how to construct the ethnographic object by fusing theory, method, and observation.