Cartel biographies: The researcher as storyteller and the preservation of the research wilderness on the inside of the subject

Abstract

What follows here as an exercise in refl exivity is primarily a contemplation of the researcher’s constitution and construction of the subject of the research, and the dilemma of the independent identity of the latter. Does the subject of any research exist in an autonomous way, ‘out there’, ‘in the real world’, or is it the product of a particular ‘external’ narrative, the researcher’s story telling? Th is question can be located in the fi eld of scientifi c and academic discourse as ‘the fundamental problem of anthropology, that of the relations between the ethnographer and authochthonic subject’. 1 As an aspect of researcher refl exivity the discussion here connects with that twentieth into twenty-fi rst-century element of self-refl ection in social science concerning the role of social inquiry and its methods in the ‘enactment’ of social reality and the social world. 2 Summarising their argument that social scientifi c research methods are ‘performative’, Law and Urry state: form another part of the social world … the argument made by Anthony Giddens and others is that the social sciences can be understood as an expression of – and a refl exive moment in – the continuing elaboration and enactment of social life … this has become more important in high modernity with its apparently increasing commitment to ‘refl exive modernisation’.