I thought the Slate article on the nature of ethnography was very interesting. On the question of whether or not obfuscating identities and events in ethnographies is a problematic practice or a relatively harmless, integral aspect of these studies, I am inclined to believe the latter. The Slate article talks quite a bit about how institutional review boards require complete anonymity as a condition of ethical, publishable research. I would suggest that anonymity is probably also a required condition on the other end. For studies like Goffman’s, I imagine many subjects request anonymity before allowing ethnographers to study and record their lives. Because so many of their daily actions are illegal – ranging from driving with an expired/revoked license to dealing drugs to unlawfully sharing electricity with neighbors – it is hard to believe any of these subjects would want to be identified in a nationally published study. Who would choose to be entirely truthful with an ethnographer without a promise of anonymity and, thus, immunity from embarrassment and legal consequences? In these cases, anonymity is sometimes the only way for a researcher to get any valuable information.

Because of this, it seems that readers must simply trust authors to tell the truth. It is good practice, as well, for readers to take more wild claims (such as some made by Goffman) with a grain of salt. Because the entire field of ethnography is grounded in the promise of anonymity to subjects as well as institutional review boards, there is just no way to thoroughly verify a work. I think this is just a part of the nature of the discipline. Ethnography may not be a precise science – or even a precise social science – because it is rarely entirely truthful and can never be truly proven, but that is not necessarily its goal. Ethnography is not a regurgitation of facts and statistics. Rather, it is a detailed look into a specific community and its distinctive inhabitants. While it may sometimes read like a fantastical piece of fiction, this is only because it depicts real life: messy and not able to be fully understood by numbers alone. Rather, ethnography shows how recorded statistics affect individuals’ everyday lives. I think that, because this is the function of ethnography, muddying dates, names, and characters a bit is not very harmful. It does prevent the reader from ever knowing the precise truth of what happened, but readers trust that ethnographers make their writing choices in a way that is faithful to the overall spirit and culture of the community they study. While this can possibly lead to deliberately misleading ethnographies, these are the exception rather than the rule.