Local Knowledge and Local Power

The study of elites by definition must be concerned with power, and power also enters into the ethnographer's research relationships. The reflexive interplay of knowledge and power in research therefore involves a political act as it affects the differential distribution of knowledge and power in society. The ethnographic study of local community elites specifically requires an understanding of the community context in which elites are embedded, the communal system that is the base and arena of their power. Three dimensions of community—the ecology of the community and its physical setting, the social structure of informal individual and formal institutional relationships, and the cultural symbolic system, “the local patois”—must be explored to come to an understanding of local elites. These three elements are seen to enter into the very conduct of field research itself, and fieldwork can be sensitively and self-reflexively used, in turn, to elucidate the operation of these elements among elites. Selected examples are drawn from the extensive literature of community power studies and from over two decades of different field studies by the author on local community elites.