Dr Strangelove,or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Methodology and Love Writing

Abstract

This rejoinder pays special attention to two of Jason Rancatore’s main points of criticism: that I advance a purist notion of ethnography and that ethnography is a data-collection method like any other. Firstly, I defend my earlier interdisciplinary reading of ethnography, arguing that, while anthropology does not maintain a monopoly over the ‘pure’ or ‘proper’ dispensation of ethnography, the history and complexity of this practice cannot be grasped in its entirety unless we engage its ‘home field’ of anthropology. Secondly, I approach ethnography as a critique of the way in which knowledge is commonly produced and communicated within social science research. Rather than obsessing over questions of research design, ethnography is an exercise in being truthful about the distance we travel from research questions to finished manuscript, with all its doubts, epiphanies and improvisations. If the case of ethnography and IR is a strange one, as Rancatore suggests, it is because the contribution of ethnography continues to be assessed in terms of the purchase power it has for disciplinarity and not in light of the avenues it opens for making academic writing useful to a wider variety of purposes and audiences.