[Interpretationandmethods] thick description and realist
ethnography
Patrick Jackson
patrickthaddeusjackson at gmail.com
Fri Apr 27 09:44:03 EDT 2007
Short answer/response: when she says "realist" in the last paragraph
I don't think that she means "scientific realist" -- and in any event
she is trying to displace even that "realism" (which I read as
something like "descriptive accuracy") via the use of confession and
metacommentary (both of which I would prefer to call "reflexion",
which catches up "reflection" and "reflexive" together).
Longer answer/response: this touches on something I've been trying to
puzzle through for a while which concerns major divisions in the
philosophy of (social) science. With everyone's permission I'd like
to think about it out loud for a few minutes and see if my mental
meandering sparks any reactions.
For a while now I've been arguing in various fora that a central
issue not often enough foregrounded in philosophy of (social) science
discussions (at least in polisci) is the subject-object, observer-
observed problem -- or, rather, the nature of the relationship
between researcher and object. Broadly, there seem to me to be two
categories under which such a relationship can be conceptualized:
dualism, in which we have some kind of ontological gap between knower
and known, and monism, in which we have no such gap, but rather the
knower is complicit in production of the known as an object of
knowledge. When this shows up, it usually comes out as "outside" vs.
"inside" knowledge or as objectivist vs. participatory epistemology,
terminology I'm not comfortable with for reasons I don't want to
expound on here [I have a paper forthcoming on why this is an
ontological problem rather than an epistemological one, if anyone's
interested]. But it's a crucial issue: the location of the knower
with respect to the known underpins a lot of the discussions we try
to have about "positivism," "realism," "constructionism," and other
such perspectives.
But I think there's another issue, perhaps even less remarked on in
these debates (again, in polisci at any rate) than the dualism/monism
question. That second issue concerns the status of knowledge, and
involves a distinction between something like "empirical-factual"
knowledge versus "critical-transfactual" knowledge. "Empirical-
factual" seems pretty self-explanatory, since that's about the (re)
presentation of experiential data -- in practice this is all kinds of
complicated, but the basic notion seems pretty clear. "Critical-
transfactual" knowledge -- I borrow the terminology from the seminal
scientific realist Roy Bhaskar -- goes beyond facts and experiences
to elucidate various kinds of supersensory [and I am using "sensory"
here to mean not just the unassisted senses of members of the species
homo sapiens, but also those kinds of sensory experiences enabled by
various measurement-tools and apparatuses] factors or structures or
powers of whatever that in some way produce the empirical-factual-
experiential data that we actually observe. Thus in critical-
transfactual mode we can talk relatively easily about deep generative
structures, unacknowledged tensions or contradictions, unthematized
oppression, and the like; in empirical-factual mode that's a lot
harder to do, because the status of such notions is rather unclear.
Combining these two dichotomies, we get an overly simple but perhaps
still revealing four-part distinction between philosophies of
(social) science, one that I think clarifies several things about the
debates I've been involved in with people in polisci for the past few
years about this stuff. (And I think it clarifies more than just my
own issues, which is why I am sharing it :-) Empirical-factual
dualism is what we erroneously call "positivism" in contemporary
social science: limited to facts, skeptical about the reality of
theoretical terms, focused on accounting for observed patterns of
data. Critical-transfactual dualism is scientific realism,
Habermasian critical theory, and similar post-Marxist emancipatory
projects: knowledge goes beyond facts to elucidate putatively "real"
structures and processes with an eye to altering them. Empirical-
factual monism is Weber and Foucault and Dewey and James: this is the
sense in which Foucault calls himself a "positivist," Weber
steadfastly refuses to attribute ontological status to his ideal-
typical constructions, and James and Dewey direct our attention back
to the phenomenon and away from elaborate conceptual mechanisms --
but all are acutely aware of their own complicity in the generation
of knowledge.
The remaining category, critical-transfactual monism, is the quandry.
I think it's unstable, and I think that that instability is precisely
what Bishop's piece is dwelling within. It's difficult to both say
that one is complicit in the production of one's objects and that one
has disclosed something that "really" underpins experiences. If one
goes for descriptive accuracy, then one abandons the critical-
transfactual element; if one goes for critical disclosure of real
underlying factors, then the monistic element is downplayed in favor
of something like dualism. Another alternative is to just be
explicitly political, I suppose. By calling for confession and
metacommentary I think that Bishop is calling for ethnographers to be
more explicit about the tensions -- but for me that's not really a
stable solution. (Of course, that's probably because I'm more of an
empirical-factual monist.)
Just some musings.
PTJ
On Apr 26, 2007, at 7:08 AM, Dvora Yanow wrote:
> here it is….
>
>
>
> Dvora
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson [mailto:ptjack at american.edu]
> Sent: woensdag 25 april 2007 22:12
> To: Dvora Yanow
> Subject: Re: [Interpretationandmethods] thick description and
> realist ethnography
>
>
>
> Our library doesn't subscribe to this journal. Do you have an
> electronic copy of the piece you could send my way? Sounds
> interesting, even if wrong about realism :-)
>
>
>
> PTJ
>
>
>
> On Apr 24, 2007, at 10:17 AM, Dvora Yanow wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Colleagues:
>
>
>
> I have just finished reading a terrific article on writing and
> ethnography, written by a scholar of composition. I recommend it
> to any interested in the subject (and thank whoever sent it my way;
> I’m sorry, I forget who that was):
>
>
>
> Wendy Bishop, “I-witnessing in composition: Turning ethnographic
> data into narratives.”
>
> Rhetoric Review 11:1 (Autumn 1992): 147-58.
>
>
>
> But something she wrote has given me pause: does ‘thick
> description’ necessarily go with (presume) a realist approach to
> ethnography?
>
>
>
> Dvora Yanow
>
>
>
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>
> ===
>
> Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
>
> American University, SIS
>
> patrickthaddeusjackson at gmail.com
>
> http://profptj.blogspot.com | http://www.kittenboo.com
>
> calendar: http://ical.mac.com/onyxdr/Patrick
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ===
>
> Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
>
> Director, General Education Program
>
> American University
>
> ptjack at american.edu
>
> http://profptj.blogspot.com | http://www.kittenboo.com
>
> calendar: http://ical.mac.com/onyxdr/Patrick
>
>
>
>
>
>
> <I-witnessing in composition Wendy Bishop.pdf>
===
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
American University, SIS
patrickthaddeusjackson at gmail.com
http://profptj.blogspot.com | http://www.kittenboo.com
calendar: http://ical.mac.com/onyxdr/Patrick
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