Ethnography as Nonlinear Feral Child

           The practice of ethnography is more than a century old, yet it still struggles to find a language for its own characterization. Typically it is learned like lawyers learn law, by studying case after case and then doing an apprenticeship. Methods training is rare and, when it does exist, it often regresses to a positivist mean that misses ethnography’s core processes. There have been historical moments when a systems view surfaced in ethnographic writing, most notably when anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead participated in the Macy conference that developed cybernetics.
           But, as I continue down the nonlinear dynamic road, agent-based modeling bears a striking family resemblance to ethnography that goes well beyond a simple systems view. Core concepts of nonlinear dynamics have clear referents in ethnographic practice. More striking still is the fact that the application of the concepts is reflexive, that is, they apply both to the doing of ethnography as well as to its product. Most striking of all is the replication of patterns marked by the concepts across several domains in which I currently work, including recent efforts to model relationships between epidemiology and history.  Intriguing here are several possible coherent applications, where a method of social research applied to a single case is designed to yield local relevant agent knowledge, where that knowledge then maps onto a model that allows generation of multiple comparative cases, and where that model then maps onto an intervention that prescribes change.
           In the presentation several core concepts of nonlinear dynamic work will be discussed as they relate to issues in ethnography. The tentative list includes: History, Distributed Authority, Networks, Scale, Landscapes, Self-Organization and Emergence. Following that, an argument will be made, with a critical gaze, that the issues bridge into analogous issues in ABM. Finally, Michael Patton’s criticism will be seriously considered, namely, haven’t we just re-named the same old problems in ethnography without solving any of them?


Michael Agar
Friends Social Research Center, Baltimore
The Redfish Group, Santa Fe
magar@anth.umd.edu