James Treadwell - Criminological Ethnography: An Introduction

This chapter looks at the history and development of qualitative research in criminology, and criminological ethnography more specifically. It explains the roots of criminological ethnography as an iterative and inductive approach tied to qualitative criminology and charts the emergence of the terminology of criminological ethnography. By the end of this chapter you should have a better understanding of:

• early ethnography and the link between ethnography and social documentation and journalism
• Chicagoans first and second wave interactionism
• the National Deviancy Symposium and the emergence of British social criminology and cultural studies
• the place of criminological ethnography today.

This chapter serves as an introduction to ethnography more broadly, and its specific criminological sensibility. In that way it is in keeping with the general assertion that there is something specifically criminological about some forms of the ethnographic endeavour, and that these works, and their contribution, can be examined meaningfully as a collective. Ethnography has a long history and intellectual trajectory, and by no means is all that record linked to issues of crime and control. This chapter will seek to focus on both the conduct and conceptualisation of ethnography, although immediately such an aim requires a conceptual clarification. The term criminological ethnography is not necessarily one that has a contemporary currency, though for those who occupy the criminological field it carries a common sense and familiar meaning that is far from perplexing or inexplicable. For decades now, the ethnographic tradition has formed part of the bedrock of social scientific research techniques on which empirical social study and policy draw. Yet the field and studies that constitute that ethnographic tradition in the social sciences are diffuse, and in many ways escape neat categorisation or the long-established tendency to attempt to usher into neat, clearly demarked categorical configurations of discernible difference. Ethnography generally escapes neat categorisation, and while on one level it is self-evident and commonly understood by those familiar with the social sciences generally, the headline descriptors betray the complexity of the realities of the subject.

There is no single definition of ethnography, and nor should there be. Ethnographic research practice arguably is one of the most flexible and adaptable, and the fieldworker responds and adapts to field research situations. As ethnography, through participant observation, interviewing and other qualitative techniques, is a deliberate attempt to generate data and is thus eminently suited to the study of unpredictable situations and outcomes, it is, by its very nature, fluid and adaptable.

Yet while ethnography has long been part of the wider project of constructing sociological accounts of deviant life and documenting the rich variety of human interaction that is associated with crime and law-breaking, the very word often does not feature prominently within the internal discipline of sociology in these same oft cited seminal works. Ned Polskys often highly praised Hustlers, Beats and Others (1967), a seminal study of deviance and the value of the unconvicted felon, which unashamedly promotes empirical qualitative engagement (and is often used as a go-to by ethnographers) yet does not employ the term ethnography nor cite it in the books index. That is similarly the case for William J. Chambliss seminal study of organised crime in the United States of America, On the Take (1978). Although Jason Ditton incorporates the term in his seminal study Part-Time Crime (1977), he first talks of a period of relatively unstructured participant observation research wherein I hoped that those studied would suggest the direction and substantive content of analysis (Ditton, 1977: 4). In many ways, Ditton evokes the very often prominent image of what Westmarland calls:

the classic, or some might argue over-romanticised, view of this sort of approach is the young single graduate student, going to live in an exotic, unheard-of, off-the-beaten-track place. They learn the language, become immersed in the lives of people, become a trusted friend. The aim of this approach is to live or walk in someone elses shoes, to see the world from their point of view or, as some have described it, understand their world-view. (Westmarland, 2011: 118)

Of course, there is a range of ethnographies both historical and contemporary that accord with this characterisation. Recent ethnographic works in a criminological vein, for example Randol Contrerass ethnography on Dominican men who violently rob drug dealers (2013) or Sandra Buceriuss five-year study of a group of 55 second-generation Muslim immigrant drug dealers in Frankfurt, Germany (2014), have inspired wider academic debates about the extent to which the ethnographer can claim outsider status and difference from those studied, which is, of course, always a matter of variation. What is more certain is that ethnography as a term is somewhat imprecise.

The texts above (and a wider range of criminological, ethnographic studies) have clearly been part of the driver of various and increasingly prominent public debates about the approach, and accompany the rejuvenated recent interest in it as a research technique partly prompted by the growing popularity of emergent criminological perspectives that are cultural (Ferrell et al., 2015), narrative (Presser and Sandberg, 2015) or ultra-realist (Hall and Winlow, 2015). As this book will demonstrate, the ethnographic tradition within criminology has a long and venerable history, and it underpins many of the theoretical perspectives and empirical studies in criminology that are now regarded as seminal. Yet despite the very firm foundations, there is a continuing debate about what ethnography is. Broadly speaking, ethnography involves the study of people in their natural setting, typically resulting in the researcher being present for extended periods of time in order to collect data systematically about daily activities, and the meanings that are attached. As Fassin has suggested:

For most people, the term evokes far-away societies and probably traditional cultures [Yet ethnography is] about entering and communicating the experiences of men and women in a given context: Their way of apprehending the world, of considering their place in society and their relations with others, of justifying their beliefs and actions. It is an attempt to go through the looking glass, so to speak, and explore another universe, often initially foreign but progressively becoming more familiar. In other words, it is not about producing otherness but on the contrary, it is about bringing closeness, discovering that those who seemed so different, irrational or incomprehensible resemble us more than we thought, act more coherently than we conceive, and, in any case, think and behave in a manner that can be rendered intelligible to everyone. (Fassin, 2013: x)

When it comes to crime this issue of proximity that Fassin raises is an interesting one, because while for some individuals, crime will feel close and constitute a pressing issue, for others it may largely be quite abstract and rarely intrude on their lives. However, for me, ethnography is largely a sentiment and an approach that keeps the academic subject of criminology anchored to everyday lived realities of crime. What I ought to start by saying is that, although on occasion it is possible to fall into the trap of looking at ethnography as a research method, for me, it is far more. It is crafting a willingness to be in the world and to look at the world critically. Ethnography is not, as I note above, a research method