An afternoon with John Van Maanen

I had the privilege of attending Prof. John Van Maanen's talk this afternoon. He was the professor of Prof. Stephen Barley, who has been advising me on my research on the Stanford Police (so, he could be one of my intellectual grandfathers).

I noted some gems on ethnography:

• Ethnography is the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanitarian of the sciences.
• You can assert the textuality of ethnographic fact and factuality of the ethnographic text at the same time.
• In the long run we'll all be dead. In the long run, we'll all be proved wrong. A good academic career is when the first precedes the second.
• You have to begin with spectacular ignorance.
• Historians have the problem of getting rid of their presentness to get into the past. Ethnographers have the same problem but it is more spatial. Two approaches may be taken:
  
• The first approach is to cut your ties.
• Second, put yourself into the same position as those you're studying.
• Logic of discovery vs logic of verification
  
• Five Templates/Temptations:
• Realism: Getting out the news, labor-intensive, selection, emphasis, letting other people do the telling, first-person accounts ok, e.g. Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day, Going Tribal: Extreme Ethnography. Danger: What you get in coverage, you lose theoretical acuity. Not too big a price to pay.
  
• Importance of History: Historians moving into ethnography, ethnographers moving into history. Critical ethnography, Marxist scholars criticize ethnography - too close to see big picture of systems.
• Fluidity of Meaning: Post-modernism..
• Missed the fourth..
• Advocacy: Good being represented, begins with a preface, ends with a point-of-view.
  

If you were present at the meeting and have any corrections/additions, please let me know.