Researching 'Race' and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power.

Hier, Sean P.

Researching 'Race' and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power. Yasmin Gunaratnam. London: Sage Publications, 2003. 218 pp. $32.95 sc; $84.95 hc.

In a recent paper ("Enacting the Social" in Economy and Society 33, 3 [2004]: 390-410) discussing the power of the social sciences and its methods, John Law and John Urry argue that social inquiry and its methods are "productive." What they mean is that social scientists do not simply describe the social world in its objective form(s), but they also enact the social through a complex set of assumptions made at every stage of the research process. For Law and Urry, this is both a positive and negative state of affairs. Although the productive nature of social scientific research speaks to possibilities for the social sciences to re-imagine a more desirable, twenty-first-century social world, the production of social scientific methods and practices has hitherto remained tied to nineteenth-century politics.

It is this general problematic that comprises the foundation for Yasmin Gunaratnam's Researching 'Race' and Ethnicity. Gunaratnam argues that the production of knowledge about people, places, and social spaces in the social sciences is fraught with knowledge/power formations of race, ethnicity, similarity, and difference. It is unfortunate, however, that Gunaratnam is unable to resolve this problematic. While the analysis is an admirable attempt to reconcile tensions in social scientific research on social constructions of race and ethnicity, it ultimately fails to articulate fresh, alternative, progressive analyses. To be fair, the book is designed primarily to facilitate critical classroom discussion, and I do not doubt that it would do so. The book offers several examples drawn from ethnographic studies, and it synthesizes contemporary thinking on racialized meanings and identities. What it does not do is provide new avenues of theorization and research.

One of the greatest failures of Researching 'Race' and Ethnicity derives from the limited analytic depth presented in the first chapter. Like many other books on these and related topics, the discussion begins by conceptualization (for example, race, ethnicity, racialization). Even more than for other books, however, achieving conceptual clarity is absolutely necessary in this book. The point of the analysis, stated in the first chapter, is to formulate a non-essentializing, theoretically informed, qualitative methodology that takes lived reality and the social construction of difference seriously. But the author fails to adequately differentiate the analytic concepts of race and racialization, as well as the analytic concepts of ethnicity and ethnicization, presenting alternatively basic definitions of each process/concept. Consistent with common practice, she insists on placing the term race in quotation marks to signify the socially constructed nature of the concept, but she uses the term racial as though it is unproblematic. A critical reader would not be so quick to criticize if the aim of the book were other than to problematize race and ethnicity in critical research. The failure to achieve conceptual clarity is reflected throughout the rest of the discussion.

Researching 'Race' and Ethnicity offers interesting commentary on the dilemmas faced in what is conceptualized as inter-racial research, on the fluidity of identity, and on the importance of multi-sited data collection. The book draws attention to the complexity involved in doing empirical research with diverse communities, and it addresses important debates on power, representation, and reflexivity. Despite the critical comments presented here, Researching 'Race' and Ethnicity will provide undergraduate students with a considerable amount of information to reflect upon and debate. The book would work well as a supplemental text in courses seeking to foster critical research strategies, and some instructors may find it helpful in courses on race and ethnicity. Researchers who are familiar with these literatures and who are looking for new perspectives on researching race and ethnicity, however, will not find the book very helpful.

Sean P. Hier

Department of Sociology

University of Victoria

Email: shier@uvic.ca