Copyright © Sarah Daynes and Terry Williams 2018

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First published in 2018 by Polity Press

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There is another world, but it is in this one.

Ignaz Troxler, via Paul Éluard

The ideas and materials for this book were assembled with the assistance of many – mentors, colleagues, friends, and people we met along the way – who have read and sometimes written for us, provided us with feedback and advice, engaged with us in discussions, shared their fieldnotes, provided advice on anything from design to technology to writing, and opened up to us about their experiences in the field. The assistance they offered provided an important contribution to the making of this book in more ways than they know. Thus we deeply thank Jeffrey Alexander, Ken Allan, Elijah Anderson, Andrew Arato, Vernon Boggs, Shelly Brown-Jeffy, Steve Cureton, Sophie Diallo, Erwan Dianteill, Mitchell Duneier, Agnès Gautier, Frédéric Gautier, Alice Goffman, Hakim Hasan, Sharon Hays, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Nancy Hodges, Daniel Huebner, Laënnec Hurbon, Bernard Monte Issac, William Kornblum, Steve Kroll-Smith, Marie-Claire Lavabre, Orville Lee, Hylan Lewis, Brian Malek, Peter Martin, William Milberg, Monica, Françoise Morin, Arthur Murphy, Catherine Murphy, Philip Oberlander, Jim Petersen, Jackie Phillips, Alexander Riley, Jonsara Ruth, Philip Smith, Carol Stack, Mats Trondman, Teun Voeten, Sarah Wagner, Saundra Westervelt, Robert Wiley, Paul Willis, and Kevin Yelvington.

We thank our students at the New School for Social Research, the University of North Carolina, Princeton University, and Columbia University, including Adrian Leung, Leslie Ribovich, Adam Bailey, Amy Donovan, Marisol López-Menéndez, Peter Marina, Erin O'Connor, Charles Du, Rachel Ferguson, Tim Jacks, Rina Bliss, Mark Flora, Tom Turner, Scott Beck, Ye Lui, Rezvaneh Ganji, and Dara Levendosky.

At Polity Press we wish to thank our anonymous reviewers and we warmly acknowledge the help and guidance provided by our editor Jonathan Skerrett as well as by Neil de Cort, Helen Gray, Elen Griffiths, Rachel Moore, and Amy Williams.

Although all of the aforementioned assisted in some way to the completion of this book, we take complete responsibility for any of its shortcomings.

“The most common thing is the mission,” Shayna says, and continues:

The mission is played out in the darkness of the city, in the hope that daylight will not arrive until the deed is accomplished. Until the pipe is clenched between burnt lips and the smoke is anchored in darkened, exhausted lungs, until the head rests in a familiar stuporous hallucination, the mission is a kaleidoscope of fallen promises, a camp of walking wounded who are at one moment predator, another prey. The thirst for the smoke binge must be quenched, and the nightly maneuvers exemplify only one manner in which it is done.

It's late on an August Saturday night. Headache, Joan, Venus, TQ, and Monica's friend Bunny are at the crackhouse, but all the crack is gone. The pipes are cool, and everyone is jittery. This situation, called “the monkey,” is common. Monica offers to go out on a mission to get more crack, but only 10 dollars can be scraped up, hardly enough to purchase a half-gram. Headache promises to give her more if a friend shows up who owes him money. She waits a few more minutes, then decides to go on her way. On an impulse, I walk out with her. It is now three-thirty in the morning.

We walk south, past Mambi's restaurant, Diego's meat house, and several beggars. There is a flurry of activity near each corner. It is a cool night and getting cooler. Sugar's bar is open and has few customers; Tiny's after-hours spot in the basement next door is also open. Some stretches of sidewalk are broken, mostly, it seems, in front of stores owned by those who speak English; new concrete appears in front of stores owned by Dominicans. The city is responsible for making these repairs at the property owner's request, but the word is that “connections” help here too. There are fewer “head shops” (stores specializing in drug paraphernalia) than there were five years ago, because music shops, candy stores, drugstores, restaurants, and grocerias like Santana's all sell mini-torches, baking soda, beer, and little debbie cookies – just about everything compulsive crack users need.

We stop by at three buildings along Broadway, but there is no activity in any of them. Finally, we turn toward Riverside Drive. As we walk, Monica talks sadly.

We enter yet another building, looking for one of the spots that Monica is convinced will have the best crack-cocaine. In the lobby, Frank, a dealer, offers her a two-dollar piece of crack he has rolled up in a dollar bill. He says all the places on the lobby floor are closed, and there is nothing to buy. Monica has not asked me for money and, as far as I know, has only the 10 dollars she collected in the apartment, two of which are now gone. We go into an adjacent building and walk up to a second-floor apartment. A Puerto Rican girl in her teens sits near the door, arms folded, and before Monica can say anything announces that this place is closed.

At a six-story building several doors down the block, though, the activity in the first-floor hallway is intense. People of all ages are coming and going from elevators, stairwells – from everywhere. We stand for a moment in the building entrance while six teenage boys bop through wearing rabbit-ear hats, crooked caps, or hooded parkas. A group of girls with two older Spanish-speaking women walk through and down the hall toward the elevator. A Dominican boy comes in with a white buyer close behind; he must be a regular, because he knows enough to stand by the door of the cocaine spot without trying to go inside before he has been checked out.

As we walk through the hallways, Monica goes over to a Puerto Rican man of about 30, in jeans and sneakers, who is standing a few feet away from the elevator. He looks furtively over his shoulder toward the front door when she introduces me. “You got anything?” she asks. “Yeah,” he offers, and he too opens a wrinkled dollar bill to indicate three small white pebbles. “How much is that?” she queries, with a frown on her face. “Two dollars,” he says. She pays him the two dollars and drops a few words in Spanish on him. As we move toward the elevator, she asks him if he's seen somebody – she cannot recall a name but provides a description. He says no.

As we go up in the slow elevator, I ask which floors have selling operations. Monica doesn't answer but presses the buttons for two, four, five, and six. She says that the third floor is a “ho” (whore) house where the people have torn down the walls between rooms. Otherwise, the entire building belongs to the dealers. With four apartments on each floor, there may be as many as 20 dealers' spots. In most situations, each spot has its own territory, with touts and lookouts who stand around guarding the turf, asking passers-by if they want to buy, competing for customers. But here, if a place is just for smoking, nobody is outside trying to lure people in – the user either knows about the place or does not.

On the sixth floor, a short, heavyset black man of about 20 with a scar over his left eye – a friend of Monica's – greets us. “What are y'all looking for?” he asks. “Scotty,” she says. “I've got him,” he says, placing a few crack pebbles in her hand. She smokes them and the ones she got downstairs too, commenting that they are not any good. Then she asks her friend if he knows me. He says no, then stops and asks if maybe we met on “the Rock” (Rikers Island prison). He goes on with fervor about all he learned there: con games, ways of picking locks, lessons he will never forget.

“The Rock was the best experience I ever had in my life,” he states proudly. When he's done praising prison education, Monica says she is still looking for Scotty, and he says she can have some more at his apartment downstairs. She tells him that she wants to go with him to his place, but not just now, indicating that it may be because I'm with her. She has introduced me as a friend, and he senses that I am only accompanying her, though she is now acting as if I am more than that. Her motivations are not clear: she does want the drug, but it may be she has decided she would rather keep looking than go with this man and is using me to help her avoid complications. The mission is a complex process of manipulation and submission, of charm, false acquiescence, and guile. Every actor has a task to perform, wittingly or unwittingly, as the chance encounter becomes a sexual possibility, a monetary con game, a linguistic chess game, or even a violent brawl. The crackhead on a mission moves through a labyrinth of streets, heavy with loose traces and false leads, past stairwells filled with mystifying and suspenseful language. Reducing glances to affirmations, the crackhead soft-pedals through the night, pirouetting around catastrophe, crawling on rooftops, banging on doors, begging, conning friend and foe, manipulating body language to tease out a result. A mission takes hours, sometimes days, of convoluted steps until the high is found.

We move on. As we start down the stairs, we pass a Latino teenager asleep on the fifth-floor stairwell, his face smutty, hands clamped together between his legs, a dirty jeans jacket draped over him. The putrid pungency of crack and urine fills the air.

The fourth floor has more action than the others. On the landing there are lookouts and runners from the street bringing in buyers, there are teens and older men, and a bevy of young girls with arrow and “gumby” haircuts and ponytails: all parade in and out of the red-door apartment where, Monica says, the best crack is sold, crack of a quality not available in other places. Three boys and a girl come out of that door. The girl is Jennifer. Her eyes are ringed with black shadows, her white jeans dark and grimy, and her jacket has faded from its original deep blue into a nondescript gray. Monica introduces us, and the girl stares at me with red eyes, then glances all around the corridor. When she looks back at us, her eyes are lost – she's “thirsty” for crack-cocaine.

She looks down again, hoping to find a white object, sees something, zooms in on it for a moment. Nothing. She looks up. Her face is sunken, her skin sallow and pale; her body expresses pain. She never gets her mouth to say much, but she mumbles something to Monica about coming right back and then follows the three boys.

We take the stairway down. Some graffiti on the walls reads “Goin off. Rock till you drop.” The stairs are covered with broken cigarettes, butane-less lighters, old newspapers, matchbook covers, spent matches, bottle caps, color-coded vials, a torn sneaker, empty beer cans. A girl of about 14 walks by us, her arm sliding along the railing. She is tiny, with dirty fingernails and pockmarked arms. Her jeans are dark, discolored, unwashed, and raggedy. She asks Monica for money. There is desperation in her eyes. If there was any dignity before she started using crack, there is no sign of it now. On the third floor, we see a well-dressed couple. He is in a suit, she in a long gown, standing expectantly at a door. Monica reminds me that it's a house of prostitution. “I oughta know; I used to work there one time myself. A Cuban guy runs it now, and it's open all night.”

By the time we reach the first floor, I feel only nausea. The elevator opens and is literally smoking as seven people emerge in a daze, while smoke billows toward the hallway ceiling as if from the bowels of a nineteenth-century industrial plant. In buildings that have six floors or more in these copping zones, crackheads often use the elevator as if it were the Starship Enterprise, lighting their pipes (“beaming up”) to simulate the action of the Star Trek crew. Outside, walking toward Broadway, Monica follows me a few steps but is called back by a friend. “Have you seen Scotty?” the girl asks. Monica shakes her head in the negative. The girl pats her pocket, saying, “I got him right here,” and motions for Monica to come with her. She says I can come too, but I feel exhausted, dizzy, and have to get out. I could not stand another unexpected act. I decide to hail a gypsy cab, and they go back into the building.

When he heard about that night, Venus said it was a case of a person going on a mission and getting lost. Headache agreed: “Yes, sometimes they go on a mission and they do get lost.” He laughs. “You know? They just say, I'm going out to get something. You know? They don't come back, or they come back 15 hours later or two days later, when it doesn't matter any more because everybody's sobered up.”

*

Books on ethnographic methods typically start with a definition of what ethnography is. Yet what matters most is what ethnography does. The night during which Monica got “lost on a mission” exemplifies the way in which the ethnographer gains access and becomes a witness to everyday life, whether in the most ordinary situation or, as in the mission, in circumstances that might appear extraordinary to the outsider. But ethnography is much more than mere access, and if we opened this book with Monica's mission, it is because this one moment in several months of fieldwork embodies what ethnography alone, among the various methodologies available to the social scientist, provides to our knowledge of the social world.

A simple question might come to mind first. How did the ethnographer get to be allowed to accompany Monica, a crack-cocaine user in a time of intense discrimination,¹ on a nocturnal quest for an illegal substance that leads them through uptown Manhattan streets and buildings, meeting strangers engaged in various illegal activities? The answer, of course, is about the trust that Monica placed in the ethnographer because she was certain he would not embarrass or endanger her by his behavior on the street, and that he would not later on report her or anything he witnessed (even inadvertently, for instance through identifiable data).

She also thought he was worthy of her trust further along, when the time would come for him to write about her and her life. And such trust is not, of course, given readily: the mission is the result of the commitment of the ethnographer over weeks and months, of his proving over and over again that he deserves to be trusted, of the slow development of a relationship based on mutual, intimate understanding. No other method, in the social sciences, brings forth such relationship between the researcher and “subjects” or research participants. For we should always remember, and deeply understand, it is with real people that ethnographers work, and their real life that they observe and narrate. It could be argued that an ethnographer is not only worth the data he collects, but the trust he is deemed deserving to receive in the field.

This intimacy allows for access to a culture, to the norms and codes shared by insiders, but it also yields a deep understanding that is difficult and sometimes impossible to attain when using other research methods: the time spent observing, participating, talking, and listening, gradually allows the ethnographer not just to see, but to understand what he sees. Indeed, as Marcel Mauss once warned us, we should not believe that we know something simply because we have seen it.² Short enquiries, either quantitative or qualitative, allow the researcher to see, but they provide little understanding, and limited verification, in contrast to ethnography and its extensive involvement over time. It is because he has been doing fieldwork with crack users for months, that when he goes on a mission with Monica the ethnographer is able to decode what is happening. He is also able to assess what is ordinary and what is an oddity, what is typical and what is not. In other words, he has gained access not just to social behavior, but rather to contextualized, meaningful practices. Therefore, with others³ we argue that, to the quantitative validity brought forth by large populations and subsequent data-sets (and commonly claimed to be the only form of validity), ethnography answers with qualitative validity, through the deep understanding it allows. As Mitchell Duneier clearly illustrates in the accompanying film to his book Sidewalk, ethnography provides for a high level of verification: as an intensive (rather than extensive) method, it allows the ethnographer to decipher lies or inconsistencies, by situating actions, words, and thoughts within the context of the subject's life. The ethnographer's knowledge, in that sense, is not based on a fleeting moment – on one interview, one phone call, or the murky circumstances of an online survey – but on life as it unfolds in and over time.

Another question raised by Monica's mission concerns its anecdotal quality. Certainly, it is a unique story, situated in time and space. It is but a moment in her life. Yet the ethnographic story is not simply a snapshot of someone's life, even in this case. It is a narrative, built a posteriori by the ethnographer.⁴ He did not record the journey, at least not as it unfolded. He did not videotape it, and neither did he descend the stairs holding a tape recorder or notebook in his hand: neither would have been possible in such a setting, and even in more hospitable circumstances most of what an ethnographer hears and sees happens when the camera is in a bag, the recorder off, the journal tucked in one's pocket. Even though recorded interviews are one of the cornerstones of ethnographic fieldwork, they cannot replace everyday life. In that regard, ethnography is at the antipodes of the experimental method, widely used for instance in psychology: in ethnographic fieldwork the goal is to observe people over extended periods of time and in their daily routine, disrupting it as little as possible. It follows that data collection is, most often, put in written form a posteriori. From what we call “bathroom notes” or “scratch notes,” quickly jotted down on store receipts, pieces of paper, or a small notebook, as soon as the opportunity to be alone arises, to more elaborate fieldnotes written at the desk upon returning home in the evening and to yet another set of fieldnotes typed on the computer, to the narrative developed for publication: each happens in different circumstances and with a different goal, yet none are entirely instantaneous recordings in a fleeting moment, and therefore all are, to some extent, reconstructions. In addition, most published narratives will incorporate fragments from different moments and sometimes from different individuals, both to ensure participants remain anonymous and for analytical reasons.

And still the ethnographic narrative is not fiction, far from it. Ethnographers use several techniques to ensure the accuracy of their accounts; but, more importantly, the length and depth of fieldwork, and the deep understanding they yield, allow for accuracy. When Terry Williams gave the book manuscript to Monica, she was amazed by the depiction of the mission: that's exactly what I said and did, she exclaimed. While qualitative interviewing has been likened to “learning from strangers,”⁵ ethnographic fieldwork is guided by the idea that one has to get to know strangers in order to learn from them.

For these reasons, ethnography is an irreplaceable method for the social sciences: it is a unique way of doing research, for it provides unmatched depth in understanding not just behavior, but the meaning attached to it. And just like any other method, it has flaws and qualities, as well as limitations. It is commonly argued that what it loses in reproducibility and generalizing ability, it gains in depth and verifiability, for the ethnographer gets to know the individuals he works with and accompanies them in repeated occurrences in their daily life.

Throughout this book, we will expand on those issues, and others, as they play out in ethnographic fieldwork, from objectivity to validity to generalization. Yet, we will not reflect on these issues because they are acutely raised in ethnography, but because they arise in all research, quantitative or qualitative, analytical or interpretive, deductive or inductive. We are unapologetic about the work we do, but this should not be interpreted as being careless. If we are able to claim ethnography as a good method for sociology, it is precisely because we question it.

Hence while this book is about doing ethnography, it is grounded in thinking about ethnography. Harry Wolcott has called fieldwork an art, and like art it is not without technique, and neither is it random or aimless.⁶ So in this book we will muse about the various techniques employed by ethnographers, but we will not do so without enquiring into the theoretical and epistemological ramifications that accompany them, for technique is only as good as the researcher's understanding of its context, consequences, and limitations. Most of the methods commonly used in ethnography, from participant observation to open-ended interviews, cannot be learned quickly, and neither can they be learned solely from a book: it is in practice – and, further, in repeated practice – that they are learned and refined. Consequently, this book should be read as a launching ground, which your own ethnographic practice can use as a starting point to build itself through experience in the field or in the classroom. We have tried to write it with this goal in mind, and so it is concise, based on actual fieldwork experience, and it uses many actual fieldnotes. Our goal is to spark discussion and reflection, rather than to provide an exhaustive review of techniques.

At the beginning of this book, we start thinking about fieldwork and take a theoretical reflection as our point of departure, in order to look at the distinctiveness of ethnography. So, in chapter 1, we address the emergence of ethnography in British social anthropology, French ethnology, and American sociology. Rather than providing a history of the uses of fieldwork in the social sciences, we focus on its emergence as a methodology of enquiry in connection with a theoretical and epistemological context. We then explore the many hats worn by the ethnographer: she plans and designs her research project; she observes; she participates; she writes. In chapter 2, we reflect on what ethnographers rarely call research design; nonetheless, it is a crucial step in ethnographic research. In chapter 3, we start thinking about the cornerstone of ethnographic research: participant observation. We focus on the “observation” pole of the binomial. But thinking about fieldwork is not enough, and so somewhere in chapter 3 we wanted to switch our focus to practicing fieldwork, by using the nitty-gritty ethnographic work as our point of departure, rather than a theoretical reflection. We set out to think about the ethnographer as participant, and the various modalities of participation, in chapter 4. And we finally reflect on the ethnographer as writer in chapters 5 and 6: first with a focus on fieldnotes in chapter 5, and then with a focus on coding, analyzing, and writing up in chapter 6.

Throughout, we are essentially doing one thing: we link theory and practice as equal and imbricated components of ethnographic research. It was crucially important for us, in this book, to ground our reflection in actual practice, rather than to use fieldwork snapshots as a convenient illustration for theoretical points, epistemological issues, or a didactic exposé of techniques. We hope the reader will appreciate our attempt to speak in a book as we work in the field: through a constant back-and-forth between thought and practice, between reflexivity and instant reaction, between distance and intimacy. It is that messy but organic voice we have tried to find in this book. We value a plurality of voices, standpoints, and experiences both in our life and in our research, and we think of this plurality as one (and perhaps the) main reason why ethnography is such a rich and fruitful way to conduct research about the social world. And so we have called on the voices of our colleagues and former students to flesh and instill variety in what we like to think of as an ethnographic mind or, to paraphrase C. Wright Mills, an ethnographic imagination. For we do not conceive of ethnography simply as a specific implementation of techniques and methods of data collection. Rather, we think of it as a way of being in the world – one that does not neatly tuck within the clear beginning and end of experimental science, for instance, as much as one that resists the distinction at the basis of what human resources offices call “life/work balance.” It might be that some professions allow for such a clear boundary between the self at work and the self “in life” – but ethnography is not one of them. An observer, a participant, a writer: the ethnographer is all three, and then some.