Following my recent article and post on vivid details in storytelling – explaining their usefulness to emphasize both true and faux facts – I received a very critical email from an old friend, who happens to be a social scientist. The email raised arguments that I have frequently heard from sociologists, so they seemed worth addressing here. I have copied the message below, with my responses interspersed. The sender will remain unidentified.
Steve, just one more small attempt to convey to you the ways your work seems itself cherry-picked and unwilling to admit of contrary evidence: trials are rife with false facts, and attorneys lie to courts and juries all the time.
Having devoted much professional time and effort to reversing wrongful convictions, I have not once ever – in the recent article or in Interrogating Ethnography, or anywhere else – said that trials are perfect means of fact-finding or that lawyers and witnesses are always truthful. I haven’t even held trials out as an actual model for ethnography other than by metaphor, and the metaphor itself was first suggested by esteemed ethnographer Mitchell Duneier. Nonetheless, I encounter this misinterpretation fairly often, claiming that I want ethnographers to act like lawyers. As one considerably more perceptive sociologist has pointed out, that is a "superficial caricature" of my writing. An accurate description would be that ethnographers can learn something about fact-checking and facticity from other professionals such as lawyers, journalists, and historians.
I recently had a chance to see that first-hand in a trial. You are taking a few examples from (to-be-sure actual) ethnographies and counterposing them to an utterly idealized picture of law as it actually functions in action.
Once again, I have not presented anything close to an idealized picture of law. I have written only that legal systems have developed means of fact testing that could be useful by analogy in ethnography, if ethnographers were willing to learn from other disciplines and rigorously fact-check one another.
I have no doubt you conduct yourself ethically but I can assure you that this is far from the norm out there in the world, as empirical work could help elucidate.
In the recent article, I said only that lawyers have ethical rules against false evidence, and when that fails “cross examination is available to expose deceptions, exaggerations, or undue embellishments.” My clear assumption is that the rules against lying will sometimes fail, and we have at least a built-in means of uncovering and responding to falsehoods, imperfect as it may be. In contrast, as I have repeatedly shown, ethnography has no convention against over-dramatization and reliance on rumors, composites, or “faux details,” and no strong tradition of fact checking.
Why don’t you go do some years of actual ethnographic work in courtrooms yourself, not cherry-picked, not at the more elite levels of trial practice, and let us know what you find? I promise we’ll fact-check you.
This is a variation of the tiresome "you can't critique it if you haven't done it" argument, which requires no response, but I do welcome fact-checking of everything I write.
And on the other hand, a challenge – can you employ some basic basic techniques of balanced inquiry and challenge yourself to find some accurate ethnographies – there are huge numbers, very well done, providing crucial information we can’t get any other way. If you can only cherry-pick “bad apples” then your own account and method remain suspect … and honestly will not be taken seriously by people in the field who know the larger picture and think this is a quite thin and self-serving picture.
Interrogating Ethnography provided dozens of examples of accurate ethnographies, including those where my initial intuitions turned out to be wrong upon investigation. Far from cherry picking, I made a point of noting ethnographers whose methods of assuring accuracy ought to be followed by others.
And someone trained as a trial advocate who takes a position and then goes out to gather only the evidence that proves his position is not a particularly good source for “good method.”
We will always have lawyer-bashing, I guess, but let’s be more specific. My recent article included a critique of Sudhir Venkatesh’s widely praised ethnography Off the Books, which was published in 2006. As readers may recall, Venkatesh included the faux detail that a murder victim had been shot twenty-two times because he had stopped working for a drug dealer. I noted that there was in fact no such murder in the time frame and in the neighborhood Venkatesh claimed, and in any case the reference to twenty-two shots had to be a rumor or an embellishment, given the absence of any first-hand source. The point of this is not really that I caught Venkatesh in an exaggeration, but rather that no ethnographer or other sociologist – in the fifteen ensuing years – had recognized or commented on the inclusion of an obvious faux detail, which demonstrates a consistent weakness in the field.
No conceivable number of well-supported facts can counterbalance ethnography’s general unwillingness or inability to question the accuracy of each other’s work. My old friend’s unhappiness with me only underscores my observations about the defensiveness of so many sociologists, and their inexplicable (to me) inability to understand and accept outside criticism and suggestions.