Misère de l’ethnographie de la misère

By Loïc Wacquant.Misère de l’ethnographie de la misère (The Poverty of the Ethnography of Poverty, published by Raisons d’agir Éditions, “Cours et travaux,” 2023) is a book of ethnographic epistemology, theory, and advocacy: a critique of ethnographic reason. It recapitulates the three ages of “urban ethnography” over a hundred years to extract its roots in a philosophy of knowledge and action characterized as “moral empiricism” that turns out to be profoundly anti-sociological. The book makes a plea for an enactive, structural and historicized ethnography that is at once more theoretical and more deeply embedded, socially and symbolically, and it warns against the trap of “ethnographism” and its five associated fallacies. It develops the Bourdieusian notion of “thick construction” against the two reigning models of ethnographic practice, Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” and “grounded theory” à la Glaser and Strauss, while also marking its difference with the extended-case method and abductive theorizing.