ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the critical dialogue between researchers and informants as social actors. It concentrates on the politics of fieldwork, in which actions and contexts shape each other through dynamic power relationships. The chapter analyses how theoretical preoccupations inform the construction of ethnographies during fieldwork. It explores the methodological dualism that arises when the ethno-graphic moment is disconnected from analysis and theorization. The chapter moves beyond the standard meaning of the Mexican metaphor ‘plunging into the garlic’ to probe into the politics of fieldwork and sociological analysis. The metaphor’s richness is based on the difficulty of peeling garlic by removing the husks of the closely joined segments and the pungent, lingering smell. We might extend the metaphor to the challenge sociologists confront when they get involved in complex social situations and analyses. Researchers’ ‘plunge into the garlic’ of the people researched has a political dimension in so far as both parties communicate the complexities of power relationships.
