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Closeness, Distance and Honesty in Prison Ethnography

  • Chapter
The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology ((PSIPP))

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).

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Further readings

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Authors
  1. Ben Crewe
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  2. Alice Ievins
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Open University, UK

    Deborah H. Drake (Senior Lecturer in Criminology) & Rod Earle (Lecturer in Youth Justice) (Senior Lecturer in Criminology) &  (Lecturer in Youth Justice)

  2. Sheffield Hallam University, UK

    Jennifer Sloan (Senior Lecturer in Criminology) (Senior Lecturer in Criminology)

Copyright information

© 2015 Ben Crewe and Alice Ievins

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Crewe, B., Ievins, A. (2015). Closeness, Distance and Honesty in Prison Ethnography. In: Drake, D.H., Earle, R., Sloan, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403889_7

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