Writing and Ritual: Abbott’s Lyrical Sociology and Law’s Elusive Method

Abstract

The article examines the problem of the sensible object and research on sensitive topics in sociology, using a pilot study of the Korean diaspora in Almaty (Kazakhstan) conducted in 2025, which included interviews with diaspora representatives as well as an analysis of its institutional environment. From a theoretical perspective, studying sensitive topics and objects requires abandoning ‘strong’ narratives, both positivist and constructivist, that dominated sociology until the early 1990s. The turn toward ‘weak’ descriptions, which began to develop actively in the early 2000s, is examined in the article through two approaches: Andrew Abbott’s lyrical sociology and John Law’s ‘care-ful research’. Although there are no theoretical or methodological intersections between the two approaches, the article demonstrates that they work with the problem of subjectivity; moreover, their methods complement each other, making it possible to offer a full-fledged alternative to the strong sociological narrative. Using the empirical example of the public representation of the Korean diaspora in Kazakhstan and its elusive character, the article shows how strong narratives, lyrical descriptions, and elusive research can complement each other at different levels of approaching the object and discovering its sensibility. As a result, it is shown how the same research object can take on a stable, open-to-discussion form or a sensitive, sensible form in different situations, and how the object’s variable character, its inaccessibility to formalization and clear description, make it elusive and sensitive to external approaches.