Stuck Together: A Correspondence on Protocols between Scholars and Objects

Through a correspondence between two scholars, this paper explores and critiques various ways in which scholars working in ethnography and cultural analysis frame and construct their methodology and object of study. Through the close reading of theoretical accounts of methodology in ethnography and cultural analysis, we examine how these accounts construct the relationship between the scholar and her object of study. We read these scholarly practices as protocols, referring to the ways in which accounts of methodology may be understood as rules/guidelines by which scholars in these fields conduct research. Protocol etymologically refers to protos (first) and kolla (glue). Through the figure of the protocol, we delineate how scholars in ethnography and cultural analysis themselves become implicated in giving accounts of their research methodologies.