Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal

This essay traces the effects of what I call ethnographic refusal on a series of studies surrounding the subject of resistance. 1 I argue that many of the most influential studies of resistance are severely limited by the lack of an ethnographic perspective. Resistance studies in turn are meant to stand in for a great deal of interdisciplinary work being done these days within and across the social sciences, history, literature, cultural studies, and so forth.