THE LIMITS OF ETHNOGRAPHY VERSUS THE POVERTY OF THEORY:PATRON-CLIENT RELATIONS IN EUROPE RE-VISITED

Abstract

Calls for anthropology to move ‘beyond ethnography’ are not new, but the frequency of their utterance suggests that they tend to go unheeded. A question increasingly asked today is ‘is it possible to do ethnography on an awkward scale’? (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003). In our increasingly globalized world, the material and moral conditions that animate local events are not easily captured by the ethnographer’s lens. In a recent critique, Paul Willis (2002) chastises anthropology for its lingering empiricism and persistent humanism, concluding with a plea for more ‘theoretically informed ethnographic studies’. This paper shares these concerns. Too often ‘social anthropology’ (the study of human cultures and societies in its broadest sense) is conflated with ‘ethnography’, understood either as the process of participant-observation or fieldwork, or as the textual product arising from that experience: a case of the methodological tail wagging the theoretical dog. This paper sets out to demonstrate why going ‘beyond ethnography’ is necessary if we are to transcend the constraints of empiricism and make sense of wider socio-cultural patterns and processes. I illustrate my argument by reference to the European Commission, the European Union’s civil service, and the strengths and limitations of ethnography for understanding its complexity. While most local, ‘insider’ and ethnographic accounts highlight the hybrid nature and ‘uniqueness’ of the Commission’s organizational culture – and still define the EU as an ‘inter-governmental’ body – I argue that a very different picture emerges when we use a wider theoretical lens that takes into account class and political economy perspectives. I also show how debates over EU institutions recall anthropological arguments over the analysis of patron-client relations: i.e. what appears from an ethnographic perspective as a loose set of inter-personal ties between individuals of unequal status and wealth often turns out to be, on reflection, an emergent class system and the beginnings of a process of state-formation.