ABSTRACT
In this chapter I argue that criminology is today crippled by its own methodology, its potential for analysis, critique, and appreciation lost within a welter of survey forms, governmental data sets and statistical manipulations. Worse, criminology has given itself over to a fetishism of these methodologies, such that the crisis of contemporary criminology doubles back on itself: criminology first embraces methods wholly inadequate and inappropriate for the understanding of human affairs, and then makes these methods and their consequent obfuscations its message. With these tendencies increasingly exacerbated by the coupling of criminology to criminal justice and its bureaucratic imperatives, I contend that it is now time for radical alternatives to the contemporary enterprise of criminology. Turning next to the conventional criminological and methodological alternative – deeply engaged ethnographic research – I argue that this alternative is also flawed to the extent that it is conceptualized as a carefully calibrated counterweight to surveys and statistics, and so reduced to just one more set of deployable research procedures deserving of endless reification and refinement. I suggest instead that the actual practice of good ethnography is inevitably emergent and unknowable, more a matter of riding the uncertain rhythms of human interaction, and remaining open to ambiguity, surprise, and disorientation, than a matter of methodological application. Rather than constituting a problem to be solved through increased methodological rigor, I propose that this inherently idiosyncratic and impressionistic quality of ethnographic research offers possibilities for confronting the crisis of contemporary criminology. In fact, blurring as it does researcher and research setting, destabilizing the temporal and spatial frames of the research process, undermining the epistemic certainty of social science, the lived practice of ethnography perhaps harbingers the death of criminological method itself. It suggests that ethnography, rather than existing as an alternative ‘method’ of criminological research, operates as an ongoing sensibility about the social world and sensitivity to nuanced ways of knowing it. In this way, I contend, engaged ethnographic practice shares more with the serendipitous adventures of artists, musicians, writers, and documentary photographers than it does with social science methodology – and indeed these and other alternative approaches can provide useful (dis)orientations for extinguishing criminological method, and in the process perhaps saving criminology from itself.
