How to Study People Who Do Not Want to be Studied: Practical Reflections on Studying Up

Abstract

In attempts to gain a wider understanding of the social worlds they encounter, anthropologists have exhorted their colleagues to “study up” and pay attention to wealthy and powerful people, not just those at society's margins. Anthropology has met this call. However, anthropologists could stand to be more forthcoming in explaining readily generalizable research strategies for studying people who are difficult to access. This article offers a brief methodological introduction to the literature on studying up and the anthropology of finance, and then shares a sampling of failures and successes from my own two‐year research, using private equity investors as one case of accessing an elite network. I suggest anthropologists are best served in finding multiple public sites and building informant networks with people from these sites.

How to think about people who don’t want to be studied: Further reflections on studying up

“…Much of this thought has taken the form of methods innovation and reimagining what an appropriate field site should look like for an anthropologist who can’t live, work and recreate all in one place, with one group of people (i.e. do traditional village fieldwork and join the ‘Malinowski Reenactment Society’; see Souleles, 2018: 53).…”

“…Generally speaking, anthropologists have come to the conclusion that researchers, when studying up, should imagine multiple field-sites for a single project (Marcus, 1995); use methods other than participant observation (Gusterson, 1997); and think about their informants as existing in and across networks (Souleles, 2018) which materialize in occasional, semi-public ‘interface’ events (Ortner, 2010). Taken together, this tactical reflection and reimagining of what fieldwork can look like has been exceptionally generative for anthropological research, leading to studies on everything from Hollywood film production (Ortner) to nuclear weapons scientists (Gusterson) and private equity financiers (Souleles) among many, many others.…”

Portable Values, Inequities, and Techno‐Optimism in Global Health Storytelling

“…There are now many examples of projects that involve studying people in power and numerous discussions of methods for completing these projects (e.g.. Cohn 1987; Conti and O’Neil 2007; Ortner 2010). Of special significance for my project and the above discussion is Souleles' (2018) insight that power should be conceptualized not as residing in any particular individual but rather as a set of social processes that move across persons, social spaces, and activities. This means that to study power, ethnographers might need to be less concerned about traditional long‐term participant‐observation with a single social group and more concerned about triangulating data from multiple sites and data collection methods.…”

The distribution of ignorance on financial markets

“…True to form, my contact Solomon, his colleagues and their lawyer redirected the conversation numerous times. Again, I expected this (see also: Souleles, 2018). What I did not anticipate, though, was what they could not tell me.…”