SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Social science has witnessed a growing respect towards ethnography albeit in an uneven way across regions and disciplines [1]. The tolerance for ethnography in parliamentary studies seems to be far higher in the United Kingdom (UK) than in the USA, but perhaps less fulsome than it is in France (Rozenburg, 2018). This is hardly surprising as the first ethnographic study of a parliament in Europe was carried out by Marc Ab eles on the French Assembly and the relationship between the local and the centre in French politics (1991, 2000). Assessing attitudes among scholars towards ethnography requires an ethnography in itself, and this is a complex task because it demands more than a survey of outputs. Just as parliaments should not only be judged by the laws, policies and other texts they produce but by its embodied performances, so too the history of any branch of scholarship requires more than a study of publications. The community of ethnographic enquirers in parliaments is not only writers but also students, networkers, speakers, activists and teachers, with allies and critics in the academy but also in civil society as well as organisations of the state, contending with a web of academic hierarchies and national or disciplinary regimes and norms. Furthermore, what and how they study is not only shaped by their location and discipline but their own varying sources of inspiration, habitus and identity. In this essay, I will merely offer some preliminary insights into the thought collective of ethnographers of parliament.