Punishing Poets.

Interpretive ethnography faces a cross-road, as of December 1996. It is time to take stock, to review where ethnography has come, to examine the experimental work of the last decade, and the critiques it has produced and confronted. As the boundaries of the realist ethnographic text are challenged, counter-forces, like the article "The Responsibilities of Sociological Poets," by M. Schwalbe, are mobilized. Criticisms of writing are never innocent activities. Schwalbe would purge sociology of the new writing. According to Schwalbe, poetry is an inaccessible, improper sociological form. Good qualitative sociology, in contrast, is accessible to large audiences, makes the social world and its meanings visible to others, and makes its rules known to outsiders, including the claim that writing is not analysis. Schwalbe's prescriptions for good writing enact a theory of the social. The social makes itself visible to those who look and listen. There are stories in the world waiting to be written by careful ethnographers who write good, clean prose.