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Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- A Note on Transliteration -- Introduction: Modern Clan Politics -- Part One: The Reproduction of Clans -- 1/ Kinship and Modernity -- 2/ Nomads, Diffuse, Authority, and Sovietization -- 3/ Two Face of Soviet Power -- 4/ Continuity and Change after the Soviet Collapse -- Part Two: The Political Dynamic of Informal Ties -- 5/ Clan Conflict -- 6/ Clan Metaconflict -- Part Three: Managing Clans -- 7/ A Vicious Cycle? Kinship and Political Change -- Conclusions: Kinship and Political Change -- Appendix: Methods -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Scholars of politics have sought in recent years to make the discipline more hospitable to qualitative methods of research. Lauding the results of this effort and highlighting its potential for the future, Political Ethnography makes a compelling case for one such method in particular. Ethnography, the contributors amply demonstrate in a wide range of original essays, is uniquely suited for illuminating the study of politics. Situating these pieces within the context of developments in political science, Edward Schatz provides an overarching introduction and substantive prefaces to each of the volume's four sections. The first of these parts addresses the central ontological and epistemological issues raised by ethnographic work, while the second grapples with the reality that all research is conducted from a first-person perspective. The third section goes on to explore how ethnographic research can provide fresh perspectives on such perennial topics as opinion, causality, and power. Concluding that political ethnography can and should play a central role in the field as a whole, the final chapters illuminate the many ways in which ethnographic approaches can enhance, improve, and, in some areas, transform the study of politics.

How do our interpretations link up to our causal claims? How does attention to causality refine our interpretations? In one sense, it is strange that we find ourselves asking these ques-tions. After all, interpretive researchers routinely find them-selves using causal language, and scholars oriented toward establishing causal claims also spend much time interpreting actors' motivations and beliefs. If political scientists ipso facto do both, what's the big deal?

How do our interpretations link up to our causal claims? How does attention to causality refine our interpretations? In one sense, it is strange that we find ourselves asking these ques-tions. After all, interpretive researchers routinely find them-selves using causal language, and scholars oriented toward establishing causal claims also spend much time interpreting actors' motivations and beliefs. If political scientists ipso facto do both, what's the big deal?

Ethnography has long been in the arsenal of approaches available to the political scientist, but recent discussions of qualitative methods sometimes equate ethnography with narrative, with case-studies, with interviews, or with fieldwork (broadly understood). There may be family resemblances and elective affinities among some of these approaches and techniques, but ethnography has its own distinctive intellectual history and its own potential value for the study of politics

Of all the "tribes" that together constitute academic political science, this brief essay considers two. I hope to show that we can learn much about the sociology of academic political science by (artificially) limiting discussion to these two.