Special Issue Article
Between theory and social reality: Ethnography and Interpretation and Social Knowledge: Introduction to the special issue
Ethnography 2017, Vol. 18(1) 3–9 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1466138115592415 journals.sagepub.com/home/eth
Andrea Voyer Pace University, USA
Mats Trondman Linnaeus University, Sweden
Abstract Difficulties distinguishing the ethnographic object and the ethnographer’s analysis can pose a challenge to the conduct and dissemination of ethnographic work. The close distance between ethnographic observation and the ethnographer’s interpretation elides the boundary between considerations of theory and method. In his book, Interpretation and Social Knowledge, Reed describes interpretivism as an epistemological approach aimed at harnessing the potential of social explanations developed in ethnography’s interstitial position – the space between theory and social reality. This issue of Ethnographyc provides a forum for ethnographers coming from different theoretical positions and working in different empirical areas to reflect upon on the value and limitations of interpretivism in ethnography. Keywords culture, ethnography, interpretivism, method, epistemology
What is the value of ethnography in the information age? Contemporary social analysts have an exponentially increasing stream of data at their fingertips. A growing set of manageable tools allows researchers to tease social facts out of multiple, sizeable, and disparate streams of information. When satellite data can be used to determine how people interact with the land (Liverman et al., 1998), Corresponding author: Andrea Voyer, Pace University, 41 Park Row, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10038, USA. Email:
[email protected]
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online social networking data can predict associations (Healy, 2013), education (Wohn et al., 2013), and political views (Pew Research Center, 2014), and natural language internet searches can reveal social preoccupations and cultural scripts (Rudder, 2014), is ethnography a vestige of the pre-digital past – destined to go the way of telephone lines and audio cassettes? On the contrary, it seems that a glut of digital data has intensified the need for thick, contextualized ethnographic accounts. As the success of this and related journals and the rise of interdisciplinary ethnography conferences attest, ethnography is alive and well in the social and cultural sciences. In fact, sociology – the discipline of the contributors to this issue – ‘has seen a resurgence in ethnographic research’ (Venkatesh, 2013). However, while ethnography has gained a seat at the cultural and social scientific table, the method’s importance as the counterbalance to other forms of research carries requirements that may limit the independence and creativity of ethnographers. Small (2009) notes two factors that can make the increasingly mainstream ethnographic enterprise particularly fraught. First, ethnographic work is more often ‘evaluated – even on methodological grounds – by quantitative researchers’ (2009: 8). Second, some ethnographers work in empirical areas where their in-depth fieldwork is sought after for the detailed descriptions it can provide about everyday life in hard-to-access communities and populations. At the same time ethnographic data and analyses are susceptible to challenge by those who are ‘either skeptical or uncertain about the relationship between these ‘‘smalln’’ studies and the larger population of groups, neighborhoods, and communities that the case studies are expected to represent’ (2009: 9). The search for a remedy to ethnography’s position as the least ‘scientific’ of the social sciences has prompted internal divisions and debates regarding ethnographic method. Such methodological innovations do not rectify the underlying theoretical presuppositions that often undercut the ethnographic enterprise. The aforementioned challenges of method derive in large part from ethnography’s position between theory and social reality. In other words, in ethnography the method of theory and the theory of method are irrevocably intertwined (Willis and Trondman, 2000). Yet, for the most part, theory and method are considered separately. Isaac Reed’s slim yet heavyweight text, Interpretation and Social Knowledge (hereafter ISK), aims to harness the potential of social explanations developed in this interstitial space between theory and social reality: So let us begin by asking: are all of our problems, as researchers and as theorists, understandable in terms of differences in method, practically conceived as that which we do to establish factual statements, broad or narrow, about social life? Or do disputes over method, when considered carefully, reveal other problems, problems not reducible to measurement and technique, problems that point to deep divides in our fundamental conception of how a community of inquiry can expect to know something about other human communities and their various dynamics?
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. . . We have disagreements, that is, not only about how we establish the sheer existence of this or that phenomenon, but also about how we can claim to correctly and effectively explain, criticize, or interpret it. In my view it is these latter disagreements . . . that are at the core of controversies about social knowledge. (Reed, 2011: 3)
Reed’s work joins a growing collection of mainstream works (in his piece in this issue, Reed refers to this genre as working epistemics) that seek to bring our theories into conversation with our methods and vice versa. Working epistemics, and ISK in particular, map the logic of interpretive inquiry and provide theoretical support for the accumulation of context-specific, meaning-focused explanatory social science. The rise of such work should be welcomed by any ethnographer who would claim that ethnographic data support rigorous and substantive causal accounts. ISK pushes us beyond the argument that ethnography is effective at describing some knowable, objective reality that is out there waiting to be discovered. On the contrary, Reed’s interpretivist approach calls ethnographers and other social scientists to relinquish their reliance on positivistic tendencies and their corresponding methodological requirements – obligations that can grate against the nature of the ethnographic enterprise. Instead, ISK argues that careful observation and analysis of social contexts, phenomena, and the actions and actors that inhabit them characterize all social scientific inquiry and explanation. In Reed’s view, then, good social science is concerned with developing case-specific causal accounts that derive their authority from in-depth explication of the cultural contexts of action. Interpretivists build maximal interpretations that explicate landscapes of meaning – the historically grounded, discursive sense-systems motivating action and forming the ways in which people act. Landscapes of meaning are the key element of Reed’s epistemological approach because they allow him to wed the particular and the general, the agent and social structure, the researcher and the researched. As Reed states in his contribution to this issue, thoroughly knowing one’s case and its complexities provides the ethnographer with the information s/he needs to develop good counterfactuals and thus contrastive explanations. These explanations hinge upon the researcher’s ability to spell out the factors that account for the difference between what happened in a given case and what plausibly might have happened. In 2000, Paul Willis and Mats Trondman founded Ethnography as a journal that would emphasize the importance of theory in ethnography, the centrality of culture and meaning in the social world, critical consideration of power inequality, and ethnographic observation that connects broader institutional and policy contexts by bringing local mores to bear on institutional logics. As such, we designed this issue of Ethnography as a ‘Field for Thought’ (Willis and Trondman, 2000) – a forum for short papers that engage with Reed’s interpretivism. We asked several ethnographers coming from different theoretical positions, working in different empirical areas in sociology, and at different points in their careers to draw upon their ethnographic material and experiences in the field in order to reflect upon on a delimited issue that arose in their reading of Interpretation and Social Knowledge. In summer 2013, the contributors met at Columbia University to discuss each other’s
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work. Reed responded to the collected pieces. The resulting texts range from discussions of the nature of reflexivity to theories of action, understandings of culture, challenges of developing legitimate and defensible interpretations and explanatory accounts, the role of normativity in ethnographic research, and consideration of the benefits and limitations of Reed’s interpretive approach. Mats Trondman engages Reed’s construction of interpretivism as a mode of inquiry that is distinct from a normative epistemic mode in which research and theory derive authority from a philosophical commitment to an envisioned better world. If we are to understand ethnographers as actors in the world as well as observers of it, argues Trondman, we must acknowledge the restive normativity shaping our work – the ideals and values that guide ethnographers and the normative weight that their social scientific conclusions carry. In drawing out the role and contributions of the ‘utopian referent’ to the theoretical and empirical influence of social science, Trondman claims that the culturally attuned normative sense of sociology is too essential to be excluded from interpretivism. Claudio E. Benzecry describes interpretivism makes to thinking through the ethnographic enterprise. Ethnography, he writes, ‘is always an exercise in misscommunication, in which: a) total control about what is being communicated is impossible; and b) understanding ‘‘what is really going on there’’ is more a horizon of intelligibility than a potential to be fulfilled’. Interpretivism does not see the limits of communication and knowledge as an obstacle to be overcome. Instead, a focus on interpretation and social knowledge demands that social scientists objectify themselves and their practices as part of their investigations: ‘The responsibility bestowed upon us . . . is to attempt to communicate what kind of choices we’ve made to be able to produce data, not in order to discount them or bracket them, but to understand them as the pulleys and wedges that actually allow for knowledge to be produced’. Paul Lichterman takes ISK as a point of departure to consider the role and practice of reflexivity in ethnography. Reflexivity is typically characterized by a reflection on the researcher’s positions within various social hierarchies and discussion of the positions’ limiting influence on objective data acquisition and interpretation. This common approach, Lichterman claims, may lead us to place ‘too much realist faith in our ability to identify which positions affected which of our field or writing practices, in which field settings’. Interpretive reflexivity, on the other hand, takes the position of the ethnographer as a key element of the analysis and explanation instead of as an obstacle to a clear view of what might really be going on in the field. Thus, interpretive reflexivity in ethnography focuses upon ‘how we came up with our interpretations, how we made mistakes and lucky guesses along the way to capturing other people’s meanings’. Frederick F. Wherry hears Reed’s call to recognize the role that interpretation plays in social science. However, in reflecting on his own ethnographic practices, Wherry points out that accepting the role of interpretation must not detract from an emphasis on the importance of correctly establishing the phenomenon: ‘Too often it is left unsaid: no matter how well intentioned we are as ethnographers –
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especially those of us who claim to have connected with the people we study and to have sided with their cause – we could very well be wrong in our conclusions, in our interpretation of our fieldnotes, and in our evaluation of whose side needs defending’. Wherry describes three techniques that assist ethnographers in developing accurate interpretations: a search for variation and conflicting evidence in the field; careful attention to the way that detailed field observations are interpreted in ‘thick minimal matches’ with social scientific concepts; and excavating the discourses, understandings, and social forces that provide the theoretical scaffolding of the lives of the people we observe. Evren Savci moves us from the details of ethnographic practice to theories of meaning. Meaning and interpretation, claims Savci, are intertwined with language. Social theorists frequently neglect the pivotal role that language plays in the social world, and the same may be said for ISK. Drawing heavily upon her fieldwork in Turkey, Savci lays out a case for greater emphasis on the role of language, particularly language that crosses cultural borders. Savci demonstrates that new vocabulary ‘such as homosexual rights, gender identity, sexual orientation, and homophobia creates new frameworks for interpreting the social world for the very subjects who occupy it’. Far from being new words for old groups and group boundaries, this new language has transformed political practices, determined political alliances, and altered the nature of public discussion. Claire Laurier Decoteau considers the structural impediments to employing landscapes of meaning as a theoretical tool for making sense of ethnographic data. Reed claims that action occurs with landscapes of meaning that shape motivations and the modes of acting upon them. However, Decoteau notes that structural forces have resulted in the ‘hybrid subjectivities’ of black South Africans and Somalis in the United States and Canada that she encountered in her field research. In their medical practices, and given their structural positions, Somali-American and black South Africans operate between different landscapes of meaning when it comes to the definition of illness and the conception of remedy. This position leads them to develop new ‘epistemic communities’ that shape their medical practices. Therefore, Decoteau writes that ‘maintaining a balance between structural and interpretive causes is essential’, and that balance must be constructed by the ethnographer on the ground. Drawing upon a powerful case to demonstrate that action can occur ‘within, across and between’ cultures, Anna Lund also takes issue with the boundedness and singularity of Reed’s landscapes of meaning. In describing a case in which one woman getting pregnant by the same man at two different times can have completely different social meanings, Lund’s provides an important critique of the theory laid out in ISK. Focusing on the individuals and events occupying interstitial meaning spaces makes it clear that in-between-ness produces agency, but interstitiality also introduces constraints on individual freedom and action. Shamus Khan furthers the theoretical intervention into interpretivism with a critique of the Weberian foundation upon which ISK is built. The classic tradition upon which Reed relies, argues Khan, results in an emphasis on the individual
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actor and is, therefore, not the most suitable approach to conceptualizing the important role that meaning plays in social life because ‘meaning-making happens not through individual actors enacting their motivations within structural conditions, but instead through collective (interactional) coordination between actors’. Khan suggests that the more relational traditions of pragmatism, interactionism, and phenomenology would offer more stable theoretical ground upon which to build investigations into meaning. Drawing upon Reed’s assertion in ISK that ethnography often derives its power from elucidating those aspects of social life that are systematic, predictable and regular, Andrea Voyer argues that a focus on individual motivations and goaldirected action can obscure broader cultural forces creating behavioral regularities that span different motivations and social locations. She advocates for interpretivism to incorporate the idea that action can be shaped just as much by an actor’s being-in-context as by subjective motivation. Reed’s gracious response to these varied engagements with ISK concludes the issue, and demonstrates working epistemics’ value for the craft of ethnography. Artfully articulating the ‘productive dissonances and interesting affinities’ between ISK and the essays herein, Reed corroborates interpretivism’s contributions to reflexivity, reflects on the challenges of moving the emphasis on interpretation and landscapes of meaning from theory to the social reality of field research, and acknowledges that interpretivism does have something to gain from relational sociology, the role of the ideal in sociological practice, and the potential of being-in-context for explanatory accounts. It is our hope, in organizing this issue, that these discussions will encourage further consideration of working epistemics in social analysis and the special position of ethnography as a mode of inquiry that operates uniquely between theory and social reality. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
References Healy K (2013) Using metadata to find Paul Revere. Available at: http://kieranhealy.org/ blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ (accessed 8 June 2015). Liverman D, Moran EF, Rindfuss RR and Stern PC (eds) (1998) People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Pew Research Center (2014) Political Polarization and Media Habits. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
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Reed I (2011) Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rudder C (2014) Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). New York: Crown. Small ML (2009) ‘How many cases do I need?’ On science and the logic of case selection in field-based research. Ethnography 10: 5–38. Venkatesh SA (2013) The reflexive turn: The rise of first-person ethnography. The Sociological Quarterly 54: 3–8. Willis P and Trondman M (2000) Manifesto for ethnography. Ethnography 1: 5–16. Wohn DY, Ellison NB, Khan ML, Fewins-Bliss R and Gray R (2013) The role of social media in shaping first-generation high school students’ college aspirations: A social capital lens. Computers & Education 63: 424–436.
Author Biographies Andrea Voyer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Pace University. Mats Trondman is Professor in Cultural Sociology in the Department of Cultural Sciences and Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural Sociology at Linnaeus University.
