Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 28, No.

1, Spring 2005 (

C 2005)

DOI: 10.1007/s11133-005-2628-9

Ethnography as Translation
Christian J. Churchill, Jr.

Sociologists and anthropologists often struggle over how to accurately convey

ethnographic data from the field setting to a final report. This paper examines
ethnography as a form of translation in order to clarify what occurs between the
acquisition of data and the formulation of a thesis about the data. The paper argues
that the ethnographer’s mind should be seen as a transitional space which in the
act of translating field data into an analytic report (1) poses unique challenges to
ethnography’s claims for providing an accurate account of field situations while
(2) simultaneously offering paths to insight which quantitative and survey research
can not.
KEY WORDS: ethnography; translation; participant observation; qualitative research.

INTRODUCTION

This paper compares the act of translating a text from one language to another
with the process of converting observations made in the field by ethnographers to
written reports.
A new series of Sigmund Freud translations being published in 2003 provides
a useful context for thinking about the problem of translation and its relation to
ethnography. These new translations have been anticipated since 2000 as a fresh
presentation of Freud in contrast to the highly scientific language of the standard
James Strachey translations.1 Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst and the
general editor of the series, has chosen translators with expertise in literature
and philosophy instead of professional psychoanalysts or others who may have a
vested interest in insuring that Freud’s tone remains scientific. This turn toward

Correspondence should be directed to Christian J. Churchill, Jr., Division of Social Sciences, St.
Thomas Aquinas College, 125 Route 340, Sparkill, NY 10976; e-mail: cchurchi@stac.edu.
1 Cf. Robert S. Boynton, “The Other Freud,” New York Times, June 10, 2000, and Daphne Merkin,
“The Literary Freud,” New York Times, July 13, 2003.

3
0162-0436/05/0300-0003/0

C 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.
4 Churchill

literary translators and the decision to employ many instead of one offers clinicians,
academics, and the general public the opportunity to discover the Freud known
for the beauty of his writing in the original German. It also suggests that for
any written text, there are as many versions available as there are translators to
re-imagine them.
In her translator’s introduction to Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life, Anthea Bell writes, “Translators are always trying to get inside the minds of
the authors on whom they are working” (Bell 2001: xliii). That is, to reflect the
essence and transfer the content of the author’s original text, the translator must
do his or her best to enter the psychological inner-space of the author and get to
know his or her era and surroundings. The conceit of these new Freud translations,
then, is that they offer the true, or a more truthful, glimpse into the works of Freud
and the mind behind them than have prior translations.
In this new effort at translating Freud, there is a lesson for ethnographers. The
issues raised by Phillips’s multidisciplinary approach to Freud and the effects it
may have on the reading public mirror the issues ethnographers face in converting
the data they find in the field into a final report. For ethnographers, the human
actions they observe represent to them very much the same thing that the text in
its original language represents to the translator.2 To resolve the ambiguities of
this situation, social science has often made the claim that it seeks to be objective
and, in doing so, renders a precise translation. The idea that objectivity is almost
impossible to achieve is well documented by now and, in any case, is not a
central question of this paper. My concern, rather, is with the transformational
process by which field data is captured by the investigator and reassembled for
the reader. My findings may contribute to the debate over objectivity, but that
debate is only tangential to my aim at understanding the translation which occurs
in the transitional space between event scene and ethnographer’s pen. For I am
arguing here that the ethnographer in the field encounters the subjects and their
environment in much the same way that the translator of fiction encounters a text
in a foreign language. Consequently, the unavoidable reshaping of that data in
the subjective territory of the ethnographer’s mind must be examined as either a
weakness for its skewing of data or a strength for the interpretive light it sheds on
the data.

THE ACT OF TRANSLATION

The ethnographer like the translator is the self-embodiment of a transitional

space. That is, instead of the reader being on the scene to observe and analyze

2I could have chosen any other non-English author as a point of departure for this comparison, but
the immediacy and potential controversy of the new Freud translations combined with Freud’s deep
effect on modern interpretations of the human mind situates him as a current and useful reference.
Ethnography as Translation 5

actions, the ethnographer must relay action second hand to the reader; the ethno-
grapher effectively stands in for the reader. It is through him or her that the action
must pass. The translator of texts bears the same burden in that, we may presume,
the reader of the translation is unable to access the text in its original language
and so must obtain it second hand. The translator’s eyes and mind stand in for the
reader.
The transitional space of the ethnographer’s mind, though, presents a special
methodological problem. For as with the translator of a text, the ethnographer is
always making choices not only about what to report but about how to report.
Anthea Bell’s claim that she must enter Freud’s mind before translating his work
hints at this process. For inasmuch as she must enter Freud’s mind to translate his
text accurately, so too must the ethnographer enter the mind of the subjects in the
field as well as experience action as they do in order to translate their words and
actions into understandable form. Moreover, this must be done in such a way that
differently oriented audiences with different biases and agendas can see the action
with equal clarity. Ethnography, in other words, is never simply about “writing
up” that which one has seen nor simply about providing an interpretation of what
has been written up. Rather it is a process of empathetically entering the psychic
space of other human beings and, to the extent possible, translating the actions of
those subjects by way of seeing the world from their point of view.
There are two specific forms of translation, only one of which applies to the
comparison between ethnography and translation.3 The first kind of translation
is technical in nature and focuses on rendering a precise version of a text from
one language into another. Examples of this include instructions for operating me-
chanical devices and texts written for use in training physicians. In both instances,
one seeks a translator who takes few or no liberties in interpretation of what the
author of the original work meant. Deviation from this precision is likely to create
adverse circumstances. This first kind of translation does not apply to ethnography.
For the ethnographer is required to explore the meanings, not the mechanics, of
human action.
The second kind of translation is literary, and it provides a model for the
central tasks of ethnography. The literary translator’s work is primarily interpretive.
He or she must enter the poetic space of the author and discover words in the second
language which convey the subtle intentions of those used in the first language.
(This becomes doubly complicated when translating a text from another historical
era into a second language many centuries after the original was written. The
process here is similar to an ethnographer analyzing data gathered decades prior
to it being written about.) Similarly, the ethnographer must enter the psychic space

3I am indebted to Florette Koffler, Professor of Romance Languages at St. Thomas Aquinas College,
for her insights on this matter. The distinctions I make here between technical and literary translation
and my discussion of them follow directly from our conversations on the topic.
6 Churchill

of his or her subjects to capture the subtle and nuanced meanings of their actions
and words.
The literary translator is also engaged in a form of authorship in writing a
new text even as he or she defers to the original. So too the ethnographer observes
behavior knowing that he or she must write about it from his or her own perspective
even as he or she tries to give deference to the subjects’ own interpretations,
attitudes, and perspectives. The literary translator, in shifting the original text into
his or her own language, effectively collaborates with the author of the original
text. This may occur literally if the author is alive, but a de facto collaboration
occurs in any case because the translator is working with the original author’s
intentions and his or her own intentions. The ethnographer too is a collaborator in
that he or she participates with and observes subjects in order to inhabit the psychic
and physical terrain of the subject. Extending the ethnographic collaboration, the
participant observer may ask the subject to review the ethnographic account and
provide a more truthful rendering of events (Duneier 1999, pp. 333–357).
If the literary translator has encountered the novel to be translated as a casual
reader in the past, he or she may change his or her assumptions as he or she
re-encounters the text finding that the book he or she thought he or she knew now
reveals deeper meanings and narrative turns. The translator may consequently
develop new respect for the original text and perceive added layers of meaning
which need to be transmitted into the second language. Likewise the ethnographer
may have known his or her subjects long before studying them, but upon revisiting
these subjects to portray them theoretically and analytically the ethnographer is
likely to find new aspects of the subjects’ humanity.
The literary translator must also be a writer. While he or she need not tech-
nically be a novelist or poet in order to translate novels and poetry, it is necessary
that he or she grasp the essence of how a novelist or a poet looks at the world if the
translator is to adequately rewrite the original works into a new language. Simi-
larly the ethnographer need not be a baker, midwife, salesman, or gang member
to write about such people’s experiences. He or she must, however, possess the
empathetic capacity to enter the mindset of these people and see the world both
as they do and as he or she does simultaneously.
Finally, the literary translator must be at home in two languages and be able
to think and converse in each utilizing all the conversational and poetic variations
peculiar to each language yet unknown to the other. So too must the ethnographer
be able to seamlessly shift between his or her own native dialect—which includes
bodily gestures, dress, gender assumptions, and language itself—and that of his
or her subjects without feeling a sense of strangeness and distance. That is, the
ethnographer must be able to inhabit two vernacular territories. Yet through all
of these aspects of ethnography and translation, what remains constant is that
the psychic space of the ethnographer or translator reformulates and reshapes the
original text or action and makes it into something new even as it remains the
same.
Ethnography as Translation 7

To claim that ethnographers are not translators whose own internal psychic
space transforms data which transits through them would be as baseless as to
suggest that the person who translates Pushkin from Russian into English need
only replace the Russian words of the poet for their precise English equivalents.
The translator of a poet must possess a poetic sensibility and must be permitted to
take liberties with his or her own language in order to capture the essence of the
poem in its original tongue. The translator of a poet, in other words, is obligated to
employ interpretive and not merely technical skill. So too must the ethnographer
in bringing the words and actions of subjects from scene to page take interpretive
liberties in how the reality he or she has witnessed is portrayed.
As in reading fiction translated from an unfamiliar language, the reader of an
ethnography must suspend disbelief and accept at face value that the ethnographer
is making the right choices and not misleading him or her with inappropriate
emphasis and selection. This suspension of disbelief comes with risks. Sometimes
we realize that a poet has been poorly translated or that the ethnographer went
beyond his or her license and created a fiction rather than making an honest
attempt at representing reality. The new translations of Freud may be doing just
this. We know in social science that ethnographies once regarded as classics are
sometimes rescrutinized decades later because of the emergence of counter claims
and contradictory data.4
In this way, social scientists share with journalists the unavoidable risk of
having their work contested the moment it is published by people who were
also on the scene being depicted and whose own accounts are at variance with
the ethnographic translation. It adds up to what we might call a Faulknerian
complex5 —that is, a situation in which narrative accounts of human action are
nearly always in tension with one another as well as, paradoxically, building upon
one another’s scheme and content. In this light, every account is a translation for
which there exist competing counter translations. But unless we are on the scene
4 In April 1992, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (21:1) ran a special issue titled “Street
Corner Society Revisited” in which William F. Whyte’s classic ethnography Street Corner Society was
reevaluated in light of new perspectives on Whyte’s data and his methodology. (In his methodological
appendix to the book, Whyte admits to, and regrets, engaging in a voter fraud conspiracy with his
ethnographic informants in order to win their good will.) In November 1997, the erstwhile magazine
Lingua Franca published an article titled “Spies Like Us: When Sociologists Deceive Their Subjects”
which raises similar issues about the reliability of data gathered through covert means. This also
begs a question as to the definition of deception in ethnographic work which seeks to depict activity
conducted in secret. The American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Code of Ethics takes a pointedly
vague position on deception indicating that it is allowable to the extent the ethnographer determines
it is necessary. The Code as approved by the ASA in 1997 reads in item “12.05 Use of Deception
in Research” in part that “(a) Sociologists do not use deceptive techniques (1) unless they have
determined that their use will not be harmful to research participants; is justified by the study’s
prospective scientific, educational, or applied value; and that equally effective alternative procedures
that do not use deception are not feasible, and (2) unless they have obtained the approval of institutional
review boards or, in the absence of such boards, with another authoritative body with expertise on the
ethics of research.”
5 I refer here to William Faulkner, the American twentieth century writer, whose novels often employ
overlapping and conflicted narratives in which time and reality are blurred.
8 Churchill

ourselves, we must trust our translators realizing that even if we were there, our
own internal translation apparatus would transform what is into what might be.
Ethnographies which acknowledge this ambiguity and those that go further by
making it an integral part of their narrative structure offer ways to see this as a
source of illumination instead of obfuscation.

FOUR EXAMPLES

Though quantitative, high-volume, grant-based research dominates many

major sociology departments across the U.S., the flow of innovative qualitative
studies is steady. Among them, many offer examples of ethnographers who are self-
conscious of their role as translators. While my position is that all ethnographers
are translators, those who write their awareness of that position into the narrative of
their reports offer the clearest examples of the process. In the following examples,
the ethnographers’ focus on their writing and data gathering processes is consistent
throughout their narratives offering the reader particular insights on the means by
which data is translated into text.

Susan Krieger, The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women’s Community

Susan Krieger’s 1983 ethnography The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women’s

Community reveals more about the author’s struggle to report what “actually”
happened than about what actually happened. To read The Mirror Dance is to invite
confusion, for rather than entering a clearly articulated narrative in which theory
frames each section of the text, the reader is confronted with a reproduction of
innumerable conversations between Krieger’s subjects, most of which are printed
without the aid of quotation marks.
In the book’s “Introduction,” Krieger does write in a conventional style to
set a theoretical frame. (She repeats this at the end of the book.) But she warns
the reader, “The book reads rather like a novel in that it proceeds by association,
by ordering the stories of many different individuals to create a sense of a whole”
(Krieger 1983, p. xvi). She continues,
[The book] is composed of an interplay of voices that echo, again and again, themes of
self and community, sameness and difference, merger and separation, loss and change. . ..
The reader may find that, at times, the voices of these women merge with one another
and become indistinguishable; individuals with different names speak as if they were one,
reflecting the extent to which the community is a community of likeness. . . . In this way,
the text illustrates its own thesis: that clarity about identity occurs through push-and-pull
processes as individuals join and draw back; respond to loss and confusion; feel on the one
hand, dependence on community and, on the other, apartness from it. The Mirror Dance is
thus both document and analysis. . . . It invites the reader to join, to take part, to overhear the
gossip of women in one particular subcommunity in a midwestern [sic] town, to come to
know the members of this community, to share their insights and their confusions. (Krieger
1983, p. xvii)
Ethnography as Translation 9

Throughout the text, the reader struggles to discern where action takes place
and between whom it occurs. Krieger’s theoretical investigation of identity often
must compete with the way her experimental ethnographic technique dominates
the text. One may appreciate such experimentation in Virginia Woolf, James Joyce,
or William Faulkner, but it is a questionable method for social science. Yet Krieger
ultimately gives us much to debate on the topic of where the line between fiction
and ethnography exists. At the close of the book, she asserts that they are two
versions of the same effort “to model the world” (Krieger 1983, p. 174).
In its self-conscious experimentation, The Mirror Dance creates a territory of
its own separate from the world inhabited by its subjects and from that inhabited
by the reader. This territory is in fact the transitional space of Krieger’s mind
in which the act of translation occurs. In portraying a lesbian community in
the American Midwest—a milieu most readers would find unfamiliar—Krieger
effectively translates that rarefied scene into a text which connects to a broad range
of readers by posing a question with general appeal—i.e.: How is our sense of self
shaped and, once shaped, protected by the manner in which we tell stories about
ourselves? Though Krieger’s methods may either obscure or clarify the answers to
this question, she is never absent as the commanding translator who uses her own
psychic space to filter and reorganize the expressions of others who are pursuing
answers to that question in their daily lives. By confusing (or liberating) the reader
with an experimental narrative, Krieger forces the reader to evaluate what it means
for a person to imagine how he or she is manifest in the mind of another.

Barry Laffan, Communal Organization and Social Transition:

A Case Study from the Counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies

The ethnographer is occasionally faced with the problem of being a full

member of the group he or she observes. There are many reasons not to do ethnog-
raphy of a group to which one is close, primary among them being the difficulty
in separating oneself from personal concern for issues facing the group enough
to gain a degree of objectivity. Though group membership does not necessarily
preclude clear depiction and analysis, it can get in the way—especially if one has
made friends or enemies with one’s subjects.
Barry Laffan, whose 1997 book Communal Organization and Social Transi-
tion: A Case Study from the Counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies portrays the
lives of young adults living on communes in Southern Vermont in the late 1960s
and early 70s, solves the dilemma of being too close to his subjects by reversing
Krieger’s narrative strategy. Laffan splits each of his chapters into two sections:
(1) an account of the action central to the chapter and (2) an “analysis” section
which stands on its own apart from the action depicted. He explains, “Thus each
chapter . . . is divided into two distinct descriptive and analytical sections. This
format will . . . allow the reader to choose the manner in which he or she prefers to
10 Churchill

read the book, focusing on the ‘story line,’ or discussion, or both” (Laffan 1997,
p. 5). Krieger’s project was to create a narrative scheme which makes subject’s
voice and ethnographer’s analysis indistinguishable. Laffan goes in the opposite
direction and makes a clear split between subject voices and authorial analysis.
The split structure of Laffan’s study offers a resolution to the dilemma of
being too deeply embedded in the field by providing two forms of translation.
In his narrative accounts he is more memoirist than scientist. Consequently the
reader has the advantage of feeling close to the action. In the second form of
translation found in the analysis section of each chapter, though, Laffan takes a
more disengaged stance and is transformed into a critic. In both of these methods
of translation, the reader must suspend disbelief and accept Laffan’s accounts at
face value, but the dual lens he offers allows the reader to be as critical of Laffan as
Laffan is of his subjects. How else, one might ask, could an ethnographer provide
a balanced interpretation of events like the following:
The first day alone, I had unwittingly participated in a burglary, nearly got into a wreck
on the interstate as my contacts in my car were exchanging drugs with the occupants of
a speeding tractor trailer truck that had pulled along beside us, and had to sleep on an
uninsulated shack floor that was so painfully cold I was certain I would get frostbite. And
the reason I was forced to sleep there was because, to my horror, I had arrived to find that the
main building had burned to the ground the previous night, incinerating four people alive.
That was only a taste of things to come, which included death threats, sorcery, security
checks by revolutionary groups, surveillance by the FBI who intended to make me testify in
a grand jury investigation, riotous celebrations, and constant coming and going and moving
in and out of different communes and projects. (Laffan 1997, pp. 6–7)

In light of Laffan’s involvement with his subjects’ adventures, his method-

ological comments on the care he applies to the work of ethnographic translation
reveal that he is keenly aware of how difficult it is for the translator to inhabit the
mind of the subject yet subsequently step outside of that perspective in order to
render it in fresh analytical terms for the reader:
Like so many anthropologists in the field who struggle with the objectivity issue, I kept
two sets of notes, one of which was my “content” set, which is the basis for this book. The
other, the “research process” set, consisted of personal railings and musings about people
and events and dealt with various other issues. These included problems of my exhaustion
of keeping pace with and recording so much activity, the sometimes extremely dangerous
situations I had to face, research ethics, and gaining access to underground or secret
organizations. Of special concerns were problems arising from participant observation
research in one’s own society and in close knit groups where everyone, including me, was
regarded as either part of a problem, or part of a solution, but never free to be even remotely
uninvolved. As my research training did not adequately prepare me for all of this, these
notes could also someday become the basis for another book. (Laffan 1997, pp. 5–6)

Laffan’s book is nevertheless a disputable translation. In August 1998, a

conference marking the book’s publication was held in Brattleboro, Vermont, a
town in the vicinity of the communes described. The conference occurred nearly
three decades after the action depicted in it and several years after the author’s
death. Many of the subjects portrayed by Laffan attended and talked about their
Ethnography as Translation 11

experiences at the communes and their impressions of him.6 While many had fond
memories, others were disappointed and disturbed by the way Laffan depicted
them. It is possible that they and Laffan are both correct.
This is similar to the ways in which the title to Marcel Proust’s great series of
novels is variously translated. One version gives it the romantic title Remembrance
of Things Past. Another offers the more practical title In Search of Lost Time. Both
may be correct; it depends on how you read them.

Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days

Barbara Myerhoff’s 1978 study Number Our Days translates the end of life
experience of elderly Eastern European Jews at a community center in Venice,
California, a beach community, in the early 1970s for readers who are likely from
other backgrounds. Myerhoff reflects that while she is like her subjects in that
one day she will be an old Jewish woman,7 she is at the time of her research
very different in life experience and personality. Unlike them, Myerhoff is not
an immigrant to the U.S., and she is an independent woman with a career. Yet
inasmuch as Myerhoff must translate her subjects’ experience for herself and her
readers, she describes too how her subjects are forced into a position between
translating or being baffled and overwhelmed by the local and global cultural and
political changes which surround them. For even as these elderly people embody
the history and culture of the Eastern European shtetls they left behind decades
before, they now live in a beach community which reflects the sexual openness
and lack of inhibition common to young residents of Southern California in the
last third of the twentieth century. Sometimes Myerhoff’s subjects huddle together
in defensive clutches to avoid these alien others. At other times they reach out
to or confront strangers. But always their coexistence is an uneasy one requiring
interpretive acuity.
Myerhoff’s challenge was to convey this struggle without becoming either
sentimental or detached. To solve this dilemma she includes in all of her accounts a
running methodological reflection on what it means to record and comprehend the
life experience of people who are similar to oneself yet who also exist at a remove
from one’s own circumstances. Her book creates, in turn, not only a portrait of her

6 The New York Times ran a story titled “Excesses Blamed for Demise of the Commune Movement”
on August 3, 1998, about the conference the day after its close in which the journalist Sally Johnson
described “a gaggle of aging hippies” who “concluded that theirs was a radical social experiment that
died by its own hand, impaled on its excesses.” The story maintains a dismissive and condescending
tone throughout, yet my impression of the conference was that it gave equal voice to those who felt
the experiment succeeded as well as those who felt it failed and many in between. In effect, the
Times seems to have provided a flawed and extremely biased translation of the subjects’ responses to
Laffan’s translation.
7 Myerhoff died in 1985 at the age of 49 shortly after her book was published.
12 Churchill

subjects but a transforming lens through which one can translate the reality of the
subjects to one’s own reality. She writes,
In the beginning, I spent a great deal of time agonizing about how to label what I was
doing—was it anthropology or a personal quest? I never fully resolved the question. I used
many conventional anthropological methods and asked many typical questions, but when I
had finished, I found my descriptions did not resemble most anthropological writings. Still,
the results of the study would certainly have been different had I not been an anthropologist
by training. (Myerhoff 1978, p. 12)

The transitive space of Myerhoff’s psyche, then, becomes the reader’s and
the power of her book is no longer merely the emotional tug of the life stories
she conveys (though that tug is strong) but also the transformative and liberating
potential which she pushes the reader to see in his or her self as one discovers the
ability to enter the life of another and, having done so, see oneself more clearly.8
But this is only possible because Myerhoff is a translator of lives with an ability
to reorganize her subjects’ experiences in a way that allows the general reader
to relate to them. Simultaneously it follows that Myerhoff’s translation is not an
absolute copy of reality but rather a reformulation of it.

Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

Any researcher doing in-depth participant observation struggles with how

accurate and balanced the report is because he or she is at some level a member
of the group being studied. Barry Laffan resolves this dilemma by bringing to the
page the internal split he established in order to assess the events in which he too
took part. As readers, we are invited by him to explore a kind of dual translation
and discern the point in between depiction and analysis where the truth may dwell.
In his 1996 study In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, Philippe
Bourgois employs a depth of involvement with his subjects equivalent to that
of Laffan, Krieger, and Myerhoff, yet in place of Laffan’s careful separation of
translation methods or Krieger’s total blurring of subject-to-subject boundaries or
Myerhoff’s elegantly crafted self-other dynamic, Bourgois translates his subjects’
experiences by embracing his personal immersion in the field and weaving analysis
and personal experience together. Rather than explicitly separating his analysis
from his description of events and behavior, Bourgois reveals throughout his book
that he has intimately shared the life experiences of his subjects.
In the acknowledgments for In Search of Respect, Bourgois writes,
Finally, I want to thank my family. I will always be grateful to Charo Chacon-Mendez
for immigrating from Costa Rica directly to El Barrio, where we were married at the very
beginning of this research project. Her help was invaluable during our residence in the
neighborhood. I apologize for imposing so much anxiety on her when I regularly stayed

8 Forexample, I have taught this book to an audience of largely Catholic students on the East coast
and the majority of them feel a connection with Myerhoff’s elderly Jews who seemingly dwell in a
universe apart from theirs.
Ethnography as Translation 13

out all night on the street, and in crackhouses, for so many years. I hope that is not one of
the reasons we are no longer together. If it is, I regret it profoundly. (Bourgois 2003, p. xv)

At this early point in the text, the reader is made aware that the author
placed himself at an unusually close range to the activities of dangerous drug
dealing during the time he researched the book. Bourgois never clarifies the extent
to which his wife and child were exposed to drug dealing and taking, but his
transcripts, which frequently dominate the chapters to the exclusion of analysis,
illustrate how the main subjects of his study would do drugs in his presence
while he sat in his living room with them. He also describes himself drinking
malt liquor while sitting in crackhouses. Bourgois’s transcripts are peppered with
parenthetical indications of gunfire on nearby streets and do not indicate that the
participants in these recorded conversations take any special note of these events.
Bourgois’s objective is, in part, to transport the reader to the streets of El
Barrio so he or she may realize what it means to be enveloped by so much physical
violence which itself is a byproduct of the systemic violence of segregation and
poverty. While his focus is often too narrowly upon three or four main characters
and not enough on the sweep of the community structure in El Barrio, Bourgois
succeeds in giving the reader a sense of what it means to begin life in these
surroundings and to grow up sensing that there is no way out.9 One realizes
throughout the text that the reason Bourgois can deliver his readers into the horrors
of his subjects’ lives has as much or more to do with his ability to translate himself
into their world as with his ability to translate their world into an ethnographic
report.
Bourgois’s decision to investigate El Barrio represents for him a reaching
across vastly dissimilar cultures. In an early chapter titled “Violating Apartheid in
the United States,” he writes,
Having grown up in Manhattan’s Silk Stocking district just seven blocks downtown from
El Barrio’s southern border delineated by East 96th Street, I always appreciated the shared
sense of public space that echoes through Spanish Harlem’s streets on warm sunny days.
In the safe building where I grew up downtown, neighbors do not have nicknames, and
when one shares the elevator with them, they usually do not even say hello or nod an
acknowledgment of existence. (Bourgois 2003, p. 35)

In a footnote to this passage, Bourgois adds that the 1990 census listed his child-
hood home “tract . . . as the richest in all of New York City” (Bourgois 2003, p. 358)
with an average household income of $249,556 in contrast to El Barrio’s $21,000
average. Anyone familiar with the social geography of Manhattan is aware that
while these neighborhoods physically abut one another, they are social worlds
9 Inan anecdote illustrating how powerful the majority culture’s prejudicial impressions of the im-
poverished Puerto Rican culture are in the minds of children from El Barrio, he describes bringing
young children from the neighborhood to major museums throughout Manhattan at which they were
frequently transfixed by the exhibits they saw. Yet at the one such event, “Angel [one of the children]
was particularly upset at the Joan Miro exhibit at the Guggenheim when he asked one of the guards—
who himself was Puerto Rican—why he was being followed so closely, and was told, ‘to make sure
you don’t lift your leg’ ” (Bourgois 2003, p. 264).
14 Churchill

apart and that residents of Bourgois’s childhood neighborhood would generally

view a walk to the north as an act involving grave risk.10
In other words, Bourgois was presented with the special problem of not only
struggling to comprehend his subjects’ lives but of doing so from within a personal
context in which those subjects were defined by his neighborhood of origin as dan-
gerous aliens. Bourgois resolves this issue in part by using the classic ethnographic
device of gaining a chief informant who not only passes on information and helps
translate local customs and dialect into terms the ethnographer can understand
but who also vouches for the ethnographer’s trustworthiness to other research
subjects. In William F. Whyte’s study Street Corner Society this informant is Doc;
in Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk it is Hakim; in Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our
Days it is Schmuel; and for Bourgois it is Primo. Without such an informant,
the ethnographer’s report risks becoming a detached clinical summary instead of
an insider’s view of otherwise closed milieux. But the work of mining the rich
data needed to make a vivid report requires that the informant not only give the
researcher access to the world he or she seeks but also work as a collaborator in
translation with the researcher. It is at this level that the informant can either cloud
or clarify the translation.

THREE LEVELS OF ETHNOGRAPHIC TRANSLATION

The collaborative translation occurring between researcher and subject is a

delicate relationship vulnerable to misreadings on both sides which can lead to a
flawed analysis. Yet this work can also lead to a strong bond between researcher
and informant which can result in a better translation. It is also the means by
which the researcher can find veins of material which reveal to him or her the
core substance out of which the group he or she is studying is made. To get at this
material, the ethnographic translation generally occurs on three levels.
The first level of translation is between two individuals, the researcher and
his or her chief informant. From what he tells the reader, Bourgois’s work at this
level involved translating himself for the crackhouse customers so they would
see him as nonthreatening and unconnected to law enforcement. While his range
of contacts extended deep into crackhouse culture, Primo was his route to the
center of the community. Bourgois first needed to convince Primo of his benign
intentions. Primo in turn had to translate for Bourgois the meanings which the
residents of El Barrio give to drug dealing and its physical and cultural effects.
The weakness in this one-to-one translation work is that the reader receives a
perspective on the group filtered chiefly through two people. Yet because this is
one of the best methods ethnographers have devised for entry into territory to

10 Part of the reason for this is the emergence at Park Ave. and 96th Street of the Metro North commuter
rail from its underground tracks to an elevated platform.
Ethnography as Translation 15

which they would ordinarily be denied access, it is a flaw which is difficult if not
impossible to evade.
The second level of translation again involves the researcher and informant but
adds to these two the entire community. This dynamic begins once the researcher
has solidified his or her bond with a chief informant. The chief informant then
vouches for the researcher’s good character to the community. For Bourgois, early
in his investigation he unwittingly offended the macho reputation of a major
crack dealer through a conversational miscalculation which exposed the dealer’s
illiteracy. It was Primo who informed Bourgois of the weight of his mistake and
the potential physical danger to which it exposed him. It was also Primo who
following this incident paved the way back into crackhouse culture for Bourgois.
William F. Whyte similarly discovered upon entering Boston’s North End as an
Anglo young man from Harvard in the 1930s that his efforts to use contacts
with local social workers to crack the shell of Italian immigrant culture were not
working. It was not until he met Doc, his chief informant, that he fully entered the
community. Whyte illustrates this in depicting his introduction to Doc’s friends at
a local “gambling place. . . . There was talk about gambling, horse races, sex, and
other matters. Mostly I just listened and tried to act friendly and interested. We
had wine and coffee with anisette in it, with the fellows chipping in to pay for the
refreshments. . . . [Doc] said he told them flatly that I was a friend of his, and they
agreed to let it go at that” (Whyte 1973, p. 298).
In these two examples, the ethnographer uses an informant to interpret his or
her role for him to the community. In most research settings, there is little to no
precedent for the presence of an ethnographer in daily life. In both Bourgois’s and
Whyte’s work, the subjects would have had good cause to suspect that a young,
well educated man from the majority population had unfriendly intentions. Thus
without the interpretive services of a close informant, the ethnographer would risk
losing access to in-depth information and would be instead confined to the less
in-depth data available through surveys and formal interviews.
In this second level of translation, the dynamic is not merely of the informant
translating the role of the ethnographer to the community but also the reverse of the
informant translating the community for the ethnographer. In both of its directions,
this level of translation places a heavy burden upon the informant. It also gives
the informant power over the way in which subjects will be portrayed in the final
report. It finally provides the informant the chance, depending on the setting, to
make enhanced status claims based on the strength of his or her connection to the
ethnographer. For all of these reasons, this second level of translation is fraught
with the risk of producing a flawed report. No ethnographer can claim the ability
to completely detach from his or her positive or negative personal feelings for an
informant, and no informant with ties strong enough to give the ethnographer deep
access to the research setting can divorce him or herself from the tug of subjective
influences which shape the way he or she interprets the setting to the ethnographer.
Of course, the careful ethnographer never fully depends on a chief informant for
16 Churchill

all or even most interpretation or access and always asks him or herself how to
interpret this person’s statements and actions. To do this well, the ethnographer
must have access to the broader research setting in ways that are independent of
the informant. Ideally, the ethnographer has a number of informants. But even
with these safeguards in place, the researcher usually has a chief informant whose
influence transcends all others. It is for this reason that ethnography at once
provides some of the deepest insights into human social conditions while also
carrying with it the burden of being among the most subjective and therefore most
disputable of methodologies in the social sciences.
The third level of translation is between ethnographer and reader. In his 1999
study Sidewalk, Mitchell Duneier recounts in the book’s methodological appendix
how when he attempted to read back to one of his subjects an account of the
subject’s role in a particular event, the man became restless and distracted. For
him, the ethnographer had already fulfilled his translation duties in the course of
doing the field work. When Duneier says to the man “I’m gonna show you every
part you’re in,” the man replies,
It’s all good with me. After this book, I intend to get like Montel [a television personality].
Get my own show. We gonna call it “Keeping It Real.” Me and brother Hakim [Duneier’s
chief informant] are gonna be like Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. . . . Understand
this here, Mitch. There’s something you don’t understand. To me this is not a money
thing [Duneier promised all his subjects proportional royalties from the book’s sales]. It’s
something good that I did. I had to suffer to prove to my family that I could make it out
here. And I don’t need that. When they kick you to the curb and when they help you, it’s a
bunch of fucking bullshit. Because once you up on your feet, they turn their nose up at you.
Hello you all. Kiss my ass. I got something good out of something bad. (Duneier 1999,
p. 349)

Duneier uses his methodological appendix to convey his concern with getting the
adequate translation of events to the reader from the mass of recorded data he
gathered during his field work. Thus the struggle revealed in the quote above is
not merely a struggle to get the subject to agree that the account of him is accurate
but also to extract from the subject a confirmation that the author’s analysis of the
account is plausible.
The main problem in this third level of translation is that the ethnographer
with good writing skills has the capacity to present the reader with a translation
that reads well but does not accurately represent reality. Duneier’s control for
this problem is to read his accounts to his subjects before he publishes them as
definitive reports for a general audience.11 Limited time and resources, though,
probably make such careful vetting of a report difficult if not impossible. Moreover,
seldom if ever do publishers or peer reviewers require the ethnographer to prove
that the data he or she has gathered is genuine instead of contrived. Unlike the
natural sciences in which an experiment can be duplicated and tested by peers,
11 Duneier also makes numerous references to his outsider status in this setting of ethnic minorities
selling books on New York City sidewalks and indicates that this poses significant obstacles to him
giving an accurate portrait of the setting.
Ethnography as Translation 17

fellow ethnographers can not go to the original field setting and see the past
events reported by the original ethnographer. We depend on the professionalization
processes within sociological and anthropological graduate training programs,
thus, to produce scholars who will not present falsified material. We have little
more than this to serve as a safeguard.12
So inasmuch as the first and second levels of translation place immense
pressure on and trust in the informant, the third level places an even greater burden
upon the ethnographer. A faulty translation may read well and sell even better.
In an age when academic publishers emphasize more each year that studies must
be “marketable,” the ability for a study to sell well may often be valued to the
exclusion of the veracity of its data and claims. Moreover, the chance that the
ethnographer has fully embodied an ethical code against consciously providing
a faulty translation is hardly a safeguard for preventing faulty translations. The
translation, finally, depends for its accuracy upon the intellectual and ethical
equipment stored in the transitional space of the ethnographer’s own psyche and
upon his or her ability to use that equipment independent of the subjective forces
which compete with objective observation for dominance in the psyche. The
question is ultimately: How can the ethnographer or the reader know whether the
report’s translation is the product of objective practices or subjective inclinations?
Psychoanalysts are all required to themselves be psychoanalyzed as part of
their training. The stated intention of this ritual is to make the analyst aware of his
or her own unconscious problems and tendencies so that when a patient turns to
him or her for a translation of personal issues, the analyst can be fully aware of
his or her own subjective (i.e. unconscious) responses to the patient and separate
them out from the analytic translation.13 Sociologists and anthropologists have
no equivalent professional experience. They are not required to be subjects in an
ethnography prior to being credentialed to practice ethnography on others. Yet the
transitional space of the ethnographer’s psyche through which social data must
pass in order to be interpreted is no less threatened by the influence of subjective
forces than is the mind of the psychoanalyst who is trusted to make sense of the
individual patient’s data of life experience. In other words, subjects and readers
of ethnography have no way of knowing whether ethnographers have been forced
to understand what it means to be analyzed by their own techniques. How can we
12 The number of stories and attendant folklore among scholars in these fields centered around senior
practitioners who appropriate the work of graduate students without permission and present it as
their own gives at least anecdotal reason to be wary of the veracity of some ethnographic data as
presented by even the most seasoned and celebrated practitioners. See Guy Oakes and Arthur J.
Vidich, Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans H. Gerth and C.
Wright Mills (1999).
13 Importantly, neither Freud nor Carl Jung, founders of competing branches of psychoanalytic practice
and theory, were analyzed in preparation for treating patients. Thus much of their own work in the
clinical setting which would now be considered highly unethical went unpunished and many of their
patients probably suffered for it. For explorations of this topic, see John Kerr’s A Most Dangerous
Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (1994) and Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis:
The Impossible Profession (1980).
18 Churchill

know if the translator of human social action is reliable if he or she has never been
made to understand what it feels like to be translated?
This question gains salience when we consider the unavoidable influence of
the ethnographer’s theoretical predisposition on his or her account of the field.
Ideally, an ethnographer encounters the field prepared to be instructed by the data
as to what theory to apply in interpreting the data. The ideal ethnographer will,
moreover, be prepared to discover and devise a new theory to explicate data rather
than rely solely on established theories to clarify new observations (Vidich and
Bensman 1960; Glaser and Strauss 1967). These are ideals, though, and as such
they do not provide an entirely viable model for understanding how ethnography
gets done.
In 1987, the journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry published a special issue in
which an analyst, Martin Silverman, presented an account of several sessions with
a patient. His account describes the patient’s words and actions, and it includes
Silverman’s internal responses to her and subsequent thoughts on her case. Fol-
lowing Silverman’s account, Psychoanalytic Inquiry published alternate responses
to the same case material provided by psychoanalysts from a range of theoretical
perspectives different than Silverman’s. This issue of the journal is instructive not
only for how it illuminates the varieties of attitude and approach in psychoanalytic
practice but also for the similarity it reveals between the analysts’ arguments with
one another and the way ethnographers struggle in themselves and with each other
to determine the right theory to use in examining their data.
One respondent to Silverman’s case material, Evelyne Albrecht Schwaber,
claims he relies too much on a preconceived theoretical model. Schwaber then
makes what in sociology would be considered a “grounded theory” argument:
Awareness of our perspective may also point us to a discrepancy between our and the
patient’s ways of viewing the same occurrence—a clue of something yet to discover.
Modern science teaches us that the observer’s participation is an essential and fascinating
element of the data. . . . Acknowledging, from deeply within us, that we do not know,
that when we ask a question we truly are prepared to hear an answer not told us by the
[theoretical] model, or to learn that no answer is yet in sight, may help us to tolerate,
longer, our helplessness and our uncertainty. . . . It is precisely because Silverman assigned
such preeminence to his model in directing his analytic inquiry and interventions that his
position evokes a certain lack of resolution. The material cannot convince because of the
priority assigned to the [theoretical] model. (Schwaber 1987, pp. 274–275)

Yet when I asked Silverman directly, fourteen years after the journal’s publication,
where he places theory in his treatment of patients, he quickly affirmed that theory
always comes second to listening to the patient and dealing with him or her
afresh.14
The problem illustrated by Silverman, Schwaber, and the other contributors
to Psychoanalytic Inquiry in 1987 is similar to that faced by ethnographers at each

14 Personal
communication with Martin Silverman at a meeting of fellows in psychoanalysis at New
York University’s Psychoanalytic Institute on February 23, 2004.
Ethnography as Translation 19

level of translation. The ethnographer’s training, like that of the psychoanalyst or

any other practitioner in the behavioral sciences, is always present in his or her
mind, always operating upon the data regardless of his or her efforts to cleanse the
mind and encounter the field, or patient, without preconceptions. Thus while most
ethnographers and psychoanalysts will give deference to the need to put theory
in a secondary position, theory is there nevertheless and will necessarily affect
the way in which data is absorbed, understood, and analyzed. Asking whether an
ethnographer can adequately perform the craft without being made to feel how
it is to have the craft performed on him or her, then, is not merely an academic
query. It is also an effort to ask whether the ethnographer is aware of what his or
her theoretical training is doing to his or her subjects and to the portrayal of their
lived experience.

TAPE RECORDERS AND OTHER MECHANICAL DEVICES

In the spring of 2003, I attended a case presentation at the therapeutic training

division of a psychoanalytic institute in New York City. The therapist whose patient
was our focus gave a verbatim rendition of an hour-long session with her patient.
At the end of the presentation, I asked a member of the institute faculty if therapists
tape record sessions for the purpose of replicating them in such minute detail. He
replied that no taping occurs but rather this therapist had a good memory.
If the therapist to whose case I listened that day did not tape record her
session, then it is inevitable that the session, in passing through the filter of her
mind, was transformed from one thing into another en route to its presentation
to an audience.15 For ethical and legal reasons, it is understandable why the
therapist would not record the session. Her dilemma, thus, is to do her best to
report the exchange clearly and unaltered while realizing that unless she has
a perfect memory, some aspects of the exchange will not be the same in the
case presentation as they were in the therapy session. Rather than seeing this
transformative process as a flaw, it could be perceived as an asset in the sense that
the therapist in translating the session for her audience brings to her account of
the original therapeutic exchange an interpretive perspective that could illuminate
more than what a simple verbatim transcript would. But regardless of whether
this is a scientific flaw or an interpretive advantage, the therapist is inevitably
translating a therapeutic experience in one region for intellectual consumption in
another. In doing so, the content of the first region is transformed by the fact that
a human mind and not a mechanical device shifts it out of the one and deposits it
into the other.

15 Becausepsychodynamic therapies assume that unconscious dynamics within the therapist intersect
with the data the therapist absorbs from the patient, it seems peculiar that the faculty member I
consulted would not address this transformative problem.
20 Churchill

Ethnographers working prior to the availability of electronic recording de-

vices, especially devices small enough to be used unobtrusively in a field or
interview setting, faced the same dilemma as the therapist above. Regardless of
diligence, data which the ethnographer commits to paper is transformed as it passes
through the internal-psychic translation process. Yet most ethnography until the
1960s or 70s is probably the product of such impressionistic techniques. In reading
these earlier studies, we depend entirely on the reliability of the researcher in the
field to convey to paper what he or she has seen and heard. Even in cases in which
the ethnographer writes down exact responses to interview questions, what he or
she writes first passes through his or her psychic filter and, in being touched in that
way, is changed. It would seem, then, that tape recorders and today’s sophisticated
qualitative data software programs offer a correction to decades of subjectively
skewed ethnographic data gathering. But in seeing such devices as a means to
correcting the qualitative data gathering process, ethnographers might mistakenly
perceive these early non-mechanical techniques to be inherently flawed.
Like the therapists who listen to the case of a fellow clinician, the readers of
an ethnography depend on the author to transform the everydayness of data into
a picture which reveals more than is apparent on the surface of the action in the
field setting. Any single aspect of the data has as many possible translations as
there are ethnographers to observe and collect it. There would be no point in doing
ethnography if the data were not malleable and open to multiple translations.
The point here is not that early ethnography unassisted by mechanical devices
like software and tape recorders is necessarily better or worse than that produced
with currently available tools. Rather, we should see the interpretive dimension
of ethnography as the primary value of qualitative social science while the means
to gathering and sorting data should always be seen as secondary. In effect, this
is a case of craft over utilitarianism. The utilitarian approach wants to certify the
accuracy of the data. The craft approach, alternately, wants to shape the data as a
potter shapes clay—not to change it into false material but rather to bring out of
the basic material a truth or beauty already within it yet which depends on deft
handling to bring it out more fully. As there are as many pots as there are potters
to throw clay, so there are as many conclusions to be drawn from qualitative data
as there are ethnographers to draw them.16
This is also not to say that mechanical devices are innately useless or mis-
leading. To the contrary, they offer excellent tools for gathering and sorting data
efficiently and accurately thereby freeing the ethnographer to be more dynamic

16 For example, in teaching Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral
Life of the Inner City (1999), I have noted that while white students seem convinced by and feel
sympathy for Anderson’s African-American research subjects, my African-American students are
often displeased with Anderson’s account, finding it one-sided and expressing dismay that the book
was written by an African-American. These African-American students, effectively, are reclaiming
from Anderson the right to translate his ethnographic data on their own terms and mold it to a truth
different from the one the author perceives.
Ethnography as Translation 21

in interpreting the data. This principle is as basic as understanding that keep-

ing a personal and professional filing system frees one from being consumed by
panic and confusion when looking for an insurance policy or a student roster.
Similarly, the interviewer with a tape recorder can use written notes to capture
more vividly the subject’s surroundings and gestures instead of trying to write
down everything the subject is saying. Moreover, the tape recording will reveal
variations in the tone and phrasing of the ethnographer’s questions which reference
to a standard protocol will not. If one transfers a voice recording to a qualitative
software program, there are then options for more efficiently isolating sections of
the recording, examining variations in tone and volume of interviewer and subject,
and correlating them with the same or different variations in other interview data.
In other words, mechanical devices allow the ethnographer to achieve a more
precise accounting of what has been gathered by way of tracking, segmenting,
and correlating the data with ever greater accuracy and reach. This offers exciting
possibilities not only for the ethnographer’s own projects but also for cross com-
parisons of data between ethnographers working independently but with similar
software who later decide to merge their data.17
All of this is to some degree possible without mechanical devices. If it were
not, earlier ethnographies would no longer hold intellectual value. This raises the
question: From what source does the legitimacy of an ethnographic study obtain?
The answer is: It does not obtain from the quality of the tool the ethnographer
employs but rather from the care he or she applies to translating that which has
been gathered with the tools available and the elegance by which that translation
and its insights into social structure is conveyed in a final report by the mind of
the author.
We may return, then, to the technique the translator applies to translating a
poem from one language into another. The good poetic translator must have a
wide-ranging knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar in each language with
which he or she is working. But ultimately this knowledge is merely a tool for
rendering a good translation. The quality of the translation depends far less on an
absolute match of vocabulary and grammar between the two languages than on the
translator’s ability to grasp the spirit of the poem in its original form and render that
into the second language. So too must the ethnographer have as wide as possible
an awareness of the tools at his or her disposal for gathering and sorting data; these
tools include not only mechanical devices but also useful human contacts within
the research setting and a firm grasp of his subjects’ mores and habits—that is, the
grammar and syntax of their folkways. But the ethnographer who has expertise in
using these tools yet who is inept at entering the consciousness of the subjects and
their setting will produce a wrong report. His or her data may be “accurate” but
the portrait will be useless.
17 Iam indebted to Shulamit Reinharz for the idea that it is possible and even useful for ethnographers
to interpret qualitative data gathered by other ethnographers.
22 Churchill

CONCLUSION

The chief dilemma in translation is that no two languages possess a precise

equivalent for one another’s idiomatic expressions and dialects. A translation
which is only technically accurate will almost certainly miss the meaning of the
words in the original language. Objects may be adequately indicated (e.g., rain,
snow, a ghost, the ocean),18 but meaning and intent will be lost (e.g., the sadness
of the rain, the hopefulness of fresh fallen snow, the fear brought by perception of
a ghost, the infinite depths of the ocean).
The ethnographic equivalent of this problem is that try as we may, no human
being can fully enter the consciousness of another and thereby definitively know
the other’s meanings and motivations. While individuals can communicate with
each other by defining and talking about shared objects (such as rain, snow, a
ghost, the ocean), they can never fully grasp the inner self of another enough to
fully know what is in the other actor’s mind when he or she verbally indicates
an object or action. Communicative action, thus, is a limited means of conveying
ideas, attitudes, and impressions from one self to another.19
When we apply this principle to the ethnographer’s field experience, it is
apparent that the effort to capture social reality as it is lived is deeply problematic.
Any ethnographer can record the language used and actions taken by subjects
in their native setting. But to understand that language and those actions, the
ethnographer must also be able to enter the mindset of observed. As with Anthea
Bell’s claim that “[t]ranslators are always trying to get inside the minds of the
authors on whom they are working” (Bell 2001, p. xliii), so the ethnographer
must always attempt the impossible act of entering the consciousness of his or
her subjects. This obstacle could be seen as a fatal flaw in the ethnographer’s
technique. But it is possible to understand the flaws in a technique and still use it
advisedly. Unless we are to give up this most fundamental work in sociology and
anthropology, we must accept ethnography’s limitations as a means of translation
and do so while realizing that no technological advance in voice recording or
software-dependent sorting will ever provide a perfect bridge over the gap between
selves.
An extreme positivist, quantitative response to this dilemma might be to claim
that any effort to acquire social data with techniques like participant observation
is unscientific and therefore inaccurate. In a limited way, this may be correct.
But the ethnographer does not aim for pure scientific accuracy. Rather, he or she
hopes to at best capture major aspects of the social structure of the group he or
she is studying while acknowledging that further study is needed to get closer to

18 Cf.
Emile Durkheim’s definition of a “social fact” in The Rules of Sociological Method (50-9) and
Herbert Blumer’s definition of an object in Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (10).
19 Cf.
George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist
(1962) for a theoretical exploration of this problem.
Ethnography as Translation 23

the group’s reality.20 Herbert Blumer argues that qualitative work is not only an
accurate means to get at the social structure of groups but perhaps is more accurate
than the quantitative approach. He writes, “It is not ‘soft’ study merely because
it does not use quantitative procedure or follow a premapped scientific protocol.
That it is demanding in a genuinely rigorous sense can be seen in the analysis of its
two fundamental parts. . . .‘exploration’ and ‘inspection”’ (Blumer 1969, p. 40).
The role he gives to exploration is that of depicting the group while the role of
inspection is analysis of what is shown in the depiction. (Barry Laffan employs
this duality literally in Communal Organization and Social Transition.) Blumer
argues that this is a rigorous scientific approach because it allows the researcher
to grasp the essence of group life far better than the abstracted empiricism typical
of some quantitative research.21
Blumer continues, “the research scholar who is concerned with the social
action of a given individual or group, or with a given type of social action, must
see that action from the position of whoever is forming the action” (Blumer 1969,
p. 56). The most direct means that the social sciences have devised to give the
researcher this empathetic perspective is the ethnographic technique of participant
observation. For as flawed and imperfect as it may be, it offers a solution to the
primary dilemma of one self not being able to enter the consciousness of another.
Blumer’s insight is crucial in understanding why this is so. His theory implicitly
follows the claim that selves are isolated, but he suggests that we also use George
Herbert Mead’s concomitant point that selves resolve this isolation by together
defining in-common objects and that by doing so they create society. Thus when
an ethnographer is placed at the intersection of this communicative activity and
becomes part of and observer to action, he or she gets as close to entering the mind
of the subject as is humanly possible. For the communicative exchange between
isolated selves is nothing more than one individual translating for another his or
her internal language as best as he or she can or as poorly as he or she chooses.
In other words, if ethnography as translation is flawed, it is only as flawed as the
exchange of words and gestures between any two human beings. In its effort to
replicate this dynamic through its methods of translation, ethnography is one of
the most rigorous and reliable means of capturing the essence of social structure
and group life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their helpful comments, either directly on this text or through general con-
versation on the topic, I wish to thank: Deborah J. Cohan, Arthur J. Vidich, Gerald
E. Levy, Gordon Fellman, Shulamit Reinharz, Florette Koffler, Robert Zussman,

20 Most ethnographies make this point in their introductions or methodological sections.

21 Fora discussion of abstracted empiricism, see C. Wright Mills’s chapter of that name in his book
The Sociological Imagination (1959, pp. 50–75).
24 Churchill

Laurel Richardson, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Jody Jeglinski, the anonymous re-
viewers at Qualitative Sociology, and my students. I am entirely responsible for
any errors which occur in the text. The generous financial support of the 2003 fac-
ulty development grant awarded to me by my colleagues at St. Thomas Aquinas
College also aided in the completion of this article.

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