ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that criminology is crippled by its 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. The fetishizing of positivist methodology this preoccupation with methodological minutiae and the particles of data they produce pervades criminological inquiry, converting issues from violence and intoxication to perception and inequality into objective data sets available for ceaseless statistical manipulation. Conceptualizing ethnography as intertwined with performance and persuasion in turn repositions it as part of a larger goal: the ethnographer's ultimate goal of communicating with others readers, viewers, community members in the interest of humanistic engagement and progressive social justice.
