Ethnography,theory,and sociology as a human science: An interlocution

Reflexivity

Perhaps no part of ethnographic discourse articulates the fundamental symmetry problem of social science (humans studying humans) more intensely than does the ongoing debate over how sociologists – but especially ethnographers – can ‘be reflexive’. This issue is addressed directly by Paul Lichterman and, in a different register, by Claudio Benzecry.

The idea of being reflexive – in essence, reflecting upon one’s own existence in the field – and the problem of saying clearly how one should do it is one of the most longstanding and fiery debates in ethnographic sociology since the 1960s and, if we include anthropology, as Lichterman does, it would perhaps also qualify as the most overwrought. Does power disable understanding? Are well-meaning scholars complicit with brutal colonialism and neo-imperialism or with the continuation of radical forms of status and class inequality in the USA? Can we even know anything about what used to be called ‘another culture’? What is the standpoint of the investigator, and how does the standpoint at the beginning of a study become the achieved standpoint at its conclusion? And so on.

Lichterman argues that positional reflexivity is not enough, and that it cannot be saved only by appending a Bourdieusian reflexivity concerned with the field of sociology qua academic pursuit. Furthermore, his critique is that positional reflexivity is drained of insight when it becomes a ritual invocation in introductions and appendixes. His proposal is to recontextualize the understanding of the ethnographer’s position in various structural hierarchies by connecting it to a deeper reflexivity and transparency in written texts about ‘how we came up with our interpretations’. In particular, if reflexivity is supposed to open up further dialogue about our inscriptions, rather than merely defend them against claims of bias, the process of interpretation itself must become part of the text. Lest we are unsure of what this could look like (after all, a lot could be manifested in response to such a call), Lichterman grounds this kind of reflexivity as a highly practical version of the very basis for hermeneutics, ² namely a recording of the in situ process of misunderstanding and its repair. What he wants ethnographers to do is track the confusions and misunderstandings that served as a spur to further interpretation in the course of a study, and thus ultimately to the positing of ‘the patterns we call meaningful, or cultural’. This tracking will both connect up with and manifest a more nuanced version of positional reflexivity. It will also produce surprises and new insights – the polar opposite of the ritual incantation of a series of identity categories in the introduction to a text.

In my view, it is important to note a subtle shift in Lichterman’s critique of positional reflexivity, which makes his argument quite different than the usual critiques we hear about the issues of ‘standpoint’. His argument is not that positional reflexivity has bad politics, has given in to political correctness, or is problematic because it invites politics into interpretation. Rather, the problem with the reified version of positional reflexivity is that it suffers from crude, insufficient, or bad theoretical schemas, schemas that jettison the causal complexity that ethnography itself is particularly good at grasping. In a sense, then, Lichterman is offering an imminent critique of positional reflexivity as an ethnographic project. For, if the point is that the positioning of the ethnographer affects causally the production of knowledge, then surely our account of this affecting must be as complex, and as concerned with how social forces are formed by meaning, as are the accounts of action and interaction that ethnographers are producing in the first place. And to actually do this requires, then, a reflexivity about how interpretations are developed out of misinterpretations. Thus Lichterman shows how the reflexive version of the hermeneutic circle is not vicious, but productive of a subtle social knowledge that is capable of reflecting upon itself. ³

Of course, it is still, as Claudio Benzecry makes clear, a folie à quatre, an encounter both symmetric and asymmetric. Ethnographic interpretation is symmetric in that investigator and investigated present a certain version of the self to the other, and simultaneously develop an interpretation of each other’s self-presentation that attempts to reach beyond that self-presentation. It is asymmetric because the ethnographer claims a mantle of knowledge-privilege, grounded not only in ‘the academy’ or his or her particular social status, but also in his or her theories and methodological expertise. In this way, the ethnographer, as simultaneously participant and expert in the encounter, is like the shaman or the psychoanalyst. After many arguments with Benzecry over the distance of social scientific interpretation from that of psychoanalysis, even in its most sympathetic conceptualization, he has convinced me of one important similarity. This is worth quoting at some length from his contribution to this special issue:

… We also partake in effective symbolization by inducting, using homologies that jump between different levels of analysis, from particular actions and utterances to what is being said … Aiming to find homologies between disparate situations (like Bourdieu does, for instance) is a pragmatic exercise, which aims to weave disparate materials into larger signification structures … Much like psychoanalysis we push to find when and how meaning and actions go together – and in finding that out, we retrospectively attribute causality.

I cannot emphasize enough how much this captures the unfinished project of ISK, and my ongoing hope that the text will not only prove useful to sociologists but also serve to make the work of sociologists useful to those working in other human sciences. It is also why I refused, despite many urgings from colleagues better informed than I, to give up on the metaphor of depth as a way to think about explanation. For, the basis for the analogy that drives Benzecry’s paper is that a ‘deep’ interpretation relies both on the creativity of the investigator and on his ability to reveal something about the setting or scene that is fundamentally true, which is to say, there to be discovered. I would note, then, that the surplus interpretation of the psychoanalyst, ethnographer, or shaman is also the key to its claim to depth.

For Benzecry, the particular cusp upon which ethnographers of the current generation stand is one where the search for insight and depth in explanation requires venturing out beyond the theoretical confines of symbolic interactionism and its related discourses. He makes the compelling point that three different arguments have been tied far too closely together: (1) the rejection of grand theory’s deductive approach; (2) the embrace of an openness to the potential diversity of meaning-in-action that cannot be easily predicted in advance of fieldwork; and (3) the specifically phenomenological approach to interaction and social life. For Benzecry, the search for depth in explanation requires ethnographers to break up this tightly knit, paradigmatic knowledge formation and move instead towards a version of sociological ethnography that is similarly suspicious of deduction but whose theoretical palette is wide and unhampered by the fear of deduction.

But note: all of this venturing out does mean that ‘theory’ takes us away from the informant as knowledgeable agent. It means that, at some point along the way, we will have to claim to know something about our subjects that they do not directly, obviously, or consciously know about themselves, and that this claim will in part derive from the abstractions about social life that we call theory. This will always leave us as human scientists open to critique. The piecing together of a ‘deep’ interpretation may happen in a variety of ways: it may be that connections are drawn by the investigator in a way that reveals a new pattern; it may be that the link between talk and action is revealed to be quite different than informants, or sociologists who knew a little but not a lot about the case, thought it would be; it may be that the possibilities for change were great when informants thought they were small or small when informants thought they were great. Across these different ways of producing surplus interpretation, furthermore, we must acknowledge that knowledge claims emerge from specific academic fields, are inflected by the particular position of the investigator, and are carefully tethered to the statements and actions of our subjects. But the claims will not be reducible to any or all of these influences. For, the knowledge claim will also rest upon the insightful use of previously gained knowledge, codified theory appropriately and creatively modified, and the rigors of careful argument. The irreducibility of ethnographic interpretations to academic field, investigator’s position, or informant information is what opens a space for her to use, and make, social theory.

I think that this issue of surplus interpretation is what makes the human sciences, in the long arc of modernity, simultaneously essential and controversial. It takes a different form in the ‘restless normativity’ that Mats Trondman’s essay focuses upon. His perspicacious reading identifies what is either an essential tension or a missing chapter in the book. Given my understanding of the relationship between theory and evidence in the interpretive mode, the ensuing triangle, he argues, should be empirics/theoretical concepts/utopia. He thus troubles my own attempt to co-opt, subvert and reinterpret the positivist distinction between theory and fact. For Trondman, while the concluding chapter of ISK rewrites explanation from within interpretivism (thus reconfiguring the chapter on realism), it does not rewrite critique. I plead guilty; and indeed the question is how to operate normative critique from what is, broadly, a Walzerian, hermeneutic perspective.

In response, then, I would simply note that ‘power’ would appear to link together utopian and theoretical referents, in so far as the concept retains both analytic and evaluative dimensions. Given this, one question for the perspective he articulates is how his vision of the importance of the utopian referent relates to the call, by Evren Savci and Claire Decoteau, to account for how some landscapes of meaning dominate others (addressed below). The great insight of Walzer’s (1987) short, brilliant (and, for me, life changing) book was to show, first, that the paths of discovery and invention in moral philosophy have their flaws laid bare by a third path, interpretation, and, second, that the paths of discovery and invention were, all along, unknowing and thus truncated or damaged versions of the interpretive path. This argument works especially well for Walzer’s reading of Karl Marx. Yet Walzer works, nonetheless, at a certain remove from analytic debates about how social domination works. Thus, for Trondman’s normative project to find its feet in sociology, the link between utopia and the critique of actually existing social arrangements needs to be filled out with an account of the workings of power. And this brings me back to the problem of explanation, while recognizing that the idea of a critical sociological hermeneutics is ripe for further investigation.

Towards explanation

Frederick Wherry begins his contribution by noting that the inscriptions of ‘economically-oriented ethnographers’ begin with some evidential statements, and connects these to a why-question motivated by variation. I could not agree more with this articulation of how explanation works, but Wherry troubles it in two ways. First, he explicates the tremendous interpretive work that goes into even the most ‘minimal’ interpretations (work which was not well attended to in the text of ISK, with the possible exception of my examination of the Sahlins-Obeysekere controversy). And second, he suggests that the spectrum that runs from ‘minimal’ to ‘maximal’ interpretation that I proposed (wherein maximal interpretations make claims about the world that are deeply infused with theoretical language) is not so easily understood as a spectrum. ⁴ For, he argues, the skepticism and doubt necessary for the ethnographer to collect evidence and validate even minor hypotheses must also be applied to theory use. He furthermore explains the risks that come with every negotiation of the position and role of the investigator. So, Wherry renders an understanding of ethnographic interpretation that departs from some of the schematic dichotomies of my book.

Yet in the end I think that Wherry and I have a quite similar view of sociological explanation: variation is tracked down through the methods appropriate to finding it; the difficulties and messiness of this variation are not only acknowledged but worked over several times (‘the data changes’) until a certain satisfactory point is reached; having conceptualized this variation in a way that is already somewhat theory-informed, a why-question is generated; finally, an answer to that why-question is proposed that attempts simultaneously (1) fidelity to the bits of evidence generated by the investigator; (2) synthesis in piecing together of this evidence into a larger story of meaning-embedded process and practice; and (3) relevance, via theoretical leaps, to others studying other subjects in other contexts.

In other words, I believe Wherry’s account of the complexity of minimal interpretation in ethnography, but I want to note the importance of theoretical leaps not only for studying other subjects in other contexts, but also for the synthesis of evidence that produces an explanation of the case at hand. The specifics of the ethnographic method should not obscure entirely from view how the pluralistic use of theoretical language to generate context-sensitive explanations can be a model for sociological explanation more generally. In ISK, I tried to show how what Wherry describes as the ‘plurality of theories in the service of explanation’ can inform historical sociology in a way that departs from the modus operandi of research ‘programs’ and ‘schools’ of thought. The differences of method and methodology are important – how could I deny that? – but they are not everything when it comes to understanding the nature and purpose of sociological knowledge. There is, in addition, the complex way in which explanation emerges from the use of theory, and when we focus our attention on this issue, the differences between historical methods and ethnographic methods in sociology recede. The commonality is the attempt to think through patterns of social causality as they obtain in a context defined by historical specificity and the interaction of creativity and habit that characterizes human subjectivity.

This deep affinity between historical sociology and the ethnographic imagination is clear from Evren Savci’s contribution. ⁵ The complex causality radiating out from the Turkish Minister of State’s speech act could easily be the center of conceptual debate in historical sociology, which would proceed in slightly different language but ultimately with similar purpose: what conjuncture of causes created the moment into which the Minister stepped? How did his actions create a space for certain constituencies to have their demands heard and even perhaps met, while foreclosing the access of others? And how can the whole episode be understood as a working out of larger disjunctures bequeathed by various imperialisms and their accompanying understandings of modernity as a western creation?

It is perhaps worth pausing to note how much this particular ‘message in a bottle’ will, if I understand her use of it correctly, enter Savci’s forthcoming ethnography not only as a revealing synecdoche (see Katz, 2002: 65–9) – where a particular episode stands in for and opens up for the reader a larger pattern that characterizes her case – but also as an eventful moment (see Sewell, 2005: 100–13) that pushes the patterns Savci is studying to go one way or another. In this sense, her critique of the theoretical schemas proposed in ISK is, in my view, very much a sympathetic critique, since it shares my understanding of how careful counterfactuals (how could it have been different, if the controversy was sparked by a different speaker?) could be generated via in-depth case knowledge, with the result that the causal relevance of particular events (or even particular speech acts) could be traced. ⁶

This brings me to the issue of how, exactly, one should understand sociological explanation in eventful sociology, and the relationship between ethnographic research and causality, something that I have briefly addressed in response to Wherry but that I now take up again in response to Lund’s and Khan’s contributions.

Cases and causes

Kristen Luker’s (2008) discussion of ‘non-canonical’ research in sociology touches on many of the issues that arise in this symposium. In particular, she argues that intensive qualitative studies of a concrete phenomenon or social setting, properly constructed and driven by well-defined research questions, can address questions at greater levels of abstraction and generality than is usually assumed. She often uses Annette Lareau’s (2011) study of class and parenting as a well-developed comparison that, while lacking a statistical argument for its representativeness vis-à-vis the wider population of American parents, is nonetheless on fairly solid ground ‘logically’. ⁷

This distinction between statistical representativeness and other logics of inquiry is articulated in Mario Small’s 2009 article, ‘How many cases do I need?’. Therein, he describes two hypothetical studies – a set of 35 interviews of black working-class men in a given city, and an ethnographic study of a poor neighborhood – and shows, via extremely careful reasoning, how (1) neither will ‘qualify’ as representative of a population in the standard sense; ⁸ (2) attempts to make them qualify in this way invite not only mistaken assertions but distortions of the studies themselves; and (3) there are ways, nonetheless, that these studies contribute to sociological knowledge broadly defined, and if these ways are properly understood, they can inform the logic of inquiry by which such studies are carried out. What particularly interests me is that, while focusing overwhelmingly on the similarity between an in-depth interview study and an ethnography, Small nonetheless addresses the questions that Jerolmack and Khan (2014) raise in their argument about culture in action. He invites the reader to consider how such studies may access ‘subtle causal relationships’, answers to ‘how and why questions’, and thus the discovery of key mechanisms and, more broadly, an understanding of social process. ⁹

Now, there is much debate currently in sociology about what a study constructed in the way Small and Luker propose has to tell us beyond the confines of the study itself. With a certain air of inevitability, a tremendous argument has emerged about whether anything more can be said beyond the ‘ontological’ statement that a phenomenon exists and has been found in a certain setting (see in particular the argument that emerges between Small [2009] and Lucas [2014]). Debates about generalization are of tremendous importance in social science. However, there are nonetheless other issues to be addressed, namely (1) how, within the study itself, we imagine ethnographers as able to access social processes that are causal; and (2) what this access has to do with social theory. ¹⁰ To address these, I need to first say something about contrastive explanation.

In my view, the intellectual operation of explanation involves three steps. The first step is the choice and construction/rendering of something to explain. ¹¹ The second is the construction of the difference between the object of explanation and other things that could have happened, or perhaps that happened elsewhere under similar (‘comparable’) circumstances (what philosophers of explanation call a contrast space, or the ‘foils’ to the topic of explanation). Finally, third, an accounting for that difference that points to an aspect of the causal history of that which happened that is significant because it helps differentiate what happened from its contrast space.

This understanding of explanation can apply to highly general and to highly specialized, particular, or spatiotemporally bounded explanations. The requirement that an explanation account for a contrast, then, should be understood as a different requirement than generality. Also, I would note that this understanding of explanation relies on contrasts and counterfactuals, though not a hyper-strict, philosophical sense of counterfactuals (e.g. ‘if he had thrown the rock at the bottle three seconds earlier …’). For, in sociology, if the elements of one case can be argued to be ‘comparable’ to another case in a way that is suitable, the latter case can function as part of the contrast space for the case being explained. ¹²

Given this, we can immediately say that the best ethnographies reveal that the construction of a contrast space is not a strictly formal operation, easily standardized across studies. Rather, it is in the process of developing a holistic understanding of a setting that the investigator develops a good account of what the contrasts to the object of explanation should be, and therefore what, in a fuller sense, the explanation is an explanation of. An extension to the arguments in ISK that I would propose, then, is that knowing the case to produce counterfactuals can be an essential part of a maximal interpretation, and perhaps should be if that interpretation is going to claim to be explanatory. And I think that the production of these effective contrasts and counterfactuals relies on the fusion of evidence and theory whose dynamics I tried to trace in my book.

If this account of explanation (admittedly only sketched here) is a good one, it means that ethnographers – and, to be clear, those doing in-depth interviews as well – are, generally speaking, not developing their counterfactuals and contrasts explicitly enough when they mobilize their understanding of their subjects into sociological knowledge claims. I find very little about contrasts, counterfactuals, and rather than clauses in Small’s advice to graduate students starting their research, and almost none in Khan's and Jerolmack’s arguments for ethnography as the royal road to explaining behavior. But I think it is in fact key to the nature of careful interpretation in historical and ethnographic sociology.

The idea that the ethnographer’s expertise for understanding and explaining social process rests upon his ability to develop incredibly careful and context-sensitive contrasts is represented well in Anna Lund’s description of her ethnography in this issue. Lund paints a picture of action and interaction defined by contrasts drawn from careful interpretations. When Lund explains the complex way in which specific maneuvers within a patriarchal and religious family structure enabled one of her informants to pursue both a change in her life and in her family’s behavior and expectations, she is not only addressing the normative issue of her informant’s gender consciousness, but also clarifying the route in this specific context towards things going differently:

So the feminine position of seeing the landscape of meaning both from the point of view of a subject and from an object position, parallel with living between and across different landscapes of meaning, identified the ambiguous layers of meaning that could be open to change, and the male religious authority became an important cause that reverberated on masculine codes, allowing Michael’s incorporation into the family. (emphasis added)

Privilege is the story of the production of a new, discursively meritocratic and democracy-embracing American elite, who step into, navigate, and ultimately will in all likelihood help reproduce a world of radical economic inequality. Over the course of the text, Khan puts his ethnographic fieldnotes into a complex discursive relationship with the history of the American elite, and Bourdieu’s theory of the reproduction of elite power through cultural capital and habitus (and, specifically, Bourdieu’s more concrete explanation of the role of the grandes écoles in French society). In my view, the primary function of this intertextuality is to narrow the space of explanation to manageable levels. ¹⁴ In other words, Khan seeks in the book to account for the difference between the kinds of elites actually emerging from St. Paul’s school, and a series of different stories that ‘could have happened’. In particular, I see three clear contrasts: (1) how the school worked 10 years before his study, linked in turn to a wider understanding, drawn from secondary literature, about how the American elite reproduced itself during the industrial era via WASP cultural closure and entitlement; (2) how, if one recontextualized Bourdieu’s theory of class reproduction through educational capital into the context of St. Paul’s, one would expect things to work; and (3) what a real meritocracy would look like, as opposed to the paradox that fills the book’s pages. The first two contrasts are closely related to each other, though not exactly the same. The latter is normatively motivated, and serves to give the book tremendous intellectual torque and indeed public relevance. Against this contrast space, Khan explains the emergence of a culturally omnivorous, WASP-impatient, anti-entitlement, experience-centric, open-to-diversity, rhetorically merit-embracing, but ultimately ‘at ease’, not-so-hardworking, privileged elite. And his theoretically infused maximal interpretation of how and why what happened happened makes up the core of the ethnography – this is why we, qua sociologists, care about the gendered performances, inscribed-on-the-body habituses, various imaginaries and identities, and interactional snafus that Khan recounts for us. They are the key to a causal story about why St. Paul’s did what it did, rather than something else. Thus I would argue that Khan is not ‘refuting’ or ‘negating’ theoretical claims; he is setting up an explanation, the generalizability or representativeness of which can be debated, but whose contours are designed to explain a quite precisely and elaborately described set of contrasts.

In some ways, the ‘alternative expectations’ that make up the contrast space could be viewed as a mere restating of the frustrated or negated expectations that Kham makes them out to be. But this different way of stating the issue matters, because it leads to a different answer to the question of the relationship of ethnography to causality. In restating his and Jerolmack’s argument from ‘Talk Is Cheap’ in this issue, Khan explains that his argument depends on a key distinction between ‘actor’s descriptions of their motivations or justifications of their activities and actual observations of what [they] really did. Part of the reason actors are bad at explaining or anticipating their activities is because such activities are often done in relationship to others in situations which they do not fully control.’ Thus Khan connects his emphasis on situations and interactions to the Jerolmack and Khan argument that ethnographers, unlike interviewers and survey researchers, are positioned to observe behavior, and thus have access to how culture really works in action, and thus to social causality. But I disagree.

In my view, ethnographers can construct explanations (including, but not limited to, explanations of ‘culture in action’) because, in some research situations, they are exceptionally well positioned to develop really sound and detailed contrasts and counterfactuals in their examinations of social process, not because they directly observe what others will never see. In other words, while Jerolmack and Khan think ethnographers can be good at causality because they witness action, I think ethnographers can be good at causality because they know their cases so well, and have melded theory and evidence together so carefully, that they can construct really good contrasts. Ethnographers know, based on both thousands of hours of research and their own theoretical perspicuity, the other ways things could have gone. And this capacity to develop a good contrast space and eventually infer an explanation that differentiates what happened from its contrast space via causal information is not a capacity that depends absolutely on direct observation. Participant observation may indeed be a particularly effective way to know a setting so well that theory can be molded effectively into good contrasts. But the project of causal explanation is still an inferential one, and thus ‘good contrasts’ might come from other practitioners of other methods.

To know the other ways things could have gone, I have argued, requires the use of theory, not only to sort and organize data, but also to create contrasts between what happened and what could have happened. In drawing on theory to construct such contrast spaces, the ethnographer is reaching for affinities that are simultaneously structured by her informants and by the community of sociological inquiry. Thus Bourdieu’s study of the grandes écoles inflects Privilege, not as a theory to be destroyed or negated, but as a useful way to develop a clear and distinct contrast. Butler’s account of gender provides a way for Lund to organize certain data from her study, but she also develops Douglas’s theory of dirt as matter out of place so as to develop a deep understanding of the difference, in the setting she is studying, between an unwanted pregnancy and a celebrated one. This understanding then becomes part of her explanation of change.

Note, however, that in constructing this argument, I have not yet addressed the generalizability – empirical or theoretical – of Lund and Khan’s studies. Thus, I would hazard that theory is not only a route to ‘generalization’ or a way to connect ‘macro’ to ‘micro’, a la the extended case method (see discussion in Small, 2009: 20–7). Rather, it is also essential to the building up of particular empirical explanations. And, in turn, ethnographic studies will, when so executed, become locations for the development of social theory (as Savci argues in this issue). To me, this deep link between theory and the construction of contrastive explanations has to be understood as part and parcel of interpretive social science.

Fields and landscapes

Both Claire Decoteau and Anna Lund argue that missing from ISK is an account of how landscapes of meaning intersect, overlap, and are partially, insufficiently, or variably translated into each other. Decoteau is, furthermore, skeptical about the horizontal aspect of the landscape metaphor, in so far as I offered no clear account of how some landscapes (or parts of landscapes) might dominate other landscapes (or parts of landscapes), and how this domination might be ‘encoded’ not only in language and in symbolic usage, but also in and on people’s bodies. Where, she asks, is the verticality and domination she found in her case? This leads her to field theory, whose metaphorical associations she might not like any better, but whose attached theoretical apparatus offers the clear and distinct possibility of placing both ‘landscapes of meaning’ and specific fields (e.g. the field of health and healing) within an overarching field of power.

Using a similar critique, Lund pursues the inverse argument to Decoteau’s, taking up the question of resistance and, indeed, agency. She proposes that by looking at the overlaps and intersections between landscapes of meaning, one might be able to generate a more robust, socially and culturally embedded conceptualization of agency and how it varies. This is, interestingly enough, precisely what Decoteau has suggested about the relationship between agency and fields in a recent paper, wherein she argued against an understanding of agency as an inherent human quality and for an understanding of agency as emerging from the ways people operate in multiple fields at once (Decoteau, 2013).

A few issues attend this debate. First is the need to resist the total reification of the field metaphor in sociological usage, whereby it congeals into an abstract image of reality variously manifested in different empirical settings. Is everything fielded? Are fields everything? Here, ironically enough I suppose, I am following Bourdieu: one must rigorously avoid ‘sliding from the model of reality to the reality of the model’ (Bourdieu, 1980: 39). ¹⁵ This resistance is well under way; one encouraging sign is the way many scholars have recently taken up degree of enfieldment as an empirical question, something that Decoteau does in her own work as well. The risk of reification was one of the reasons that I pushed against field as a metaphor in ISK.

More aggressively, perhaps, I also wanted to circumscribe the metaphor of field. In ISK I argued – rather telegraphically, to be sure – that the implied homogeneity of a field space, and the conceptualization according to which fields are isomorphic with other fields, inherently limits the field metaphor, making it more appropriate for certain situations than others. In contrast, I described a landscape painting of Breughel’s, and I used this landscape to argue that the concept of field was, in certain situations, too neat and well-ordered. Thus I proposed the landscape metaphor as a counterpoint to field and network, two dominant metaphors of the current era. ¹⁶ To this relatively sympathetic critique of fields, I would now add a further difference between fields and landscapes. The concept of field, at least as it has been used in American sociology, would appear to make an a priori commitment to a specific version of the relationality of meaning – meaning functions, in a field, along various gradients or axes, and thus the relations between signifiers are well-captured by the image of an n-dimensional space with corners, dividing lines, etc. In contrast, I wanted to have a metaphor for meaningful social life that could capture some of what Michel Foucault meant by ‘discursive formations’ (which Bourdieu famously eschewed), and which could render the symbolic space of action more varied, particularly in terms of the subject positions that could emerge from it and look out upon it. Meaning does not always ‘lock in’ to the particular form of relationality that is contained in the field concept. It has, instead, hills and valleys, back alleys, and other twists and turns. This riot of metaphors is perhaps too much, but we have to start somewhere. The point is not that fields do not exist, nor that the theory of fields is not powerful, but rather that the question of when and where field dynamics obtain is an empirical one, and thus that the theory should not be used paradigmatically.

Interestingly, Evren Savci criticizes the landscapes metaphor in terms of something it shares with the metaphor of field. In addition to pointing out the difference between language as a metaphor for culture and language properly understood (and the consequences of this for interpretive sociology), ¹⁷ she also articulates the way in which the landscape metaphor remains a bit too static. It is explicated, after all, with reference to a single Breughel painting whose landscape was in fact part of a series. Thus, even as this painting is used and appropriated in my text as a metaphor for understanding the twists and turns of the human creation of meaningful context, it retains aspects of its origin, and in particular certain connotations. In contrast, Savci’s argument points us towards the dynamism and asymmetric flows of spoken and written words, whose power to (in part) create what they name should not be underestimated. She thus points towards the idea of a performative use of language. Can this be translated into an interpretive sociology of meaning? I have tried (Reed, 2013).

And yet, after all of it, the critique stands. In the epilogue to ISK I argued that the distinction between studies of power and interpretations of meaning did not make sense; this distinction is in part the fault of the hermeneutic tradition from which ISK drew so much inspiration. Paul Ricoeur famously distinguished between the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ and the ‘hermeneutics of commentary’, and I suggested that – but did not work through how – this distinction had perhaps exhausted its utility. In essence, I was suggesting we return (again!) to the theorization of power in social theory. Decoteau’s and Savci’s ethnographies inform my own efforts in this regard.

Motivation, interaction and the end of structure and agency?

Andrea Voyer and Shamus Khan both articulate an interactionist, relational critique of the theoretical vocabulary in ISK. That vocabulary, they argue, is too Weberian in its concern with social action, individual motivation, and the interpretation of subjective meaning and adequate causation. They take issue with the theoretical schema of motivations, mechanisms, and landscapes of meaning that is developed in Chapter 5, not because of the pride of place it gives to landscapes of meaning, but rather because of the way it points investigation towards the internal states of individual actors. Provocatively, Voyer asks ‘is this imposed methodological individualism necessary?’, and Khan explains that the emphasis on the ‘motivational/agentic obscures that processes are collectively negotiated within interactions between units rather than constituted within them (motivations) or imposed upon them (mechanisms)’. Is the language of ISK too oriented towards the high European theory tradition, with Weber as its representative and the ‘left Weberianism’ of the comparative-historical section of the ASA as its contemporary embodiment in social research? Let me explore this issue further.

It is, I think, true that the understanding of interpretive social science I tried to articulate in the book both has room for, and should in the book have been more focused on, interactions, the framing and reframing of situations, and various other conflicts and negotiations that occur within an interaction, variously defined, or a situation, variously framed. There is not very much about co-presence in the book; and no mention of certain key Goffmanian concepts such as directorial and dramatic power (for example). There should have been. Furthermore, there is clearly some percentage of sociological knowledge claims wherein the interpretation of inner motives may not be, and perhaps should not be, essential to explanation. Making this allowance is not, however, really about ‘individualism’. For I maintain that the internal motivations of individuals are movers and shakers in the universe; that as such they deserve careful attention from sociologists as empirical subjects of study and sites of methodological and theoretical reflection; and that one does not have to be a methodological (or ontological) individualist to give them an important place in the theoretical toolkit that we use to build maximal interpretations. I do not want to make the rational choice mistake in reverse, and absorb individuals into the situations of which they are a part. Neither do Voyer and Khan.

Yet the critique runs deeper. They would not (I hope!) deny the potential relevance of motivation to explanation, but they would object to the emphasis placed by certain theoretical languages on ‘action’ which, they would argue, is decontextualized by these theoretical languages in a way that disables effective description and explanation. As they develop their criticisms in this symposium, the reader begins to see that underneath the dispute about individual motives is, in fact, a critique of the theoretical language game of agency versus structure. And here it has to be admitted that they are on to something.

For what are ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ and the many, many papers and books devoted to their intersection? In sociology, they mean a great many things – and the terms on their own have been subject to extensive specification – but together they do become obfuscatory, at least at the particular intellectual conjuncture that we are participating in today. Something about this way of thinking clouds our ability to grasp the in-between-ness of life, the odd combinations of coercion and choice that make up life trajectories, and the workings of power and domination in its many manifestations. In other words, perhaps we should admit that ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ have become, when twinned together, barriers to a complex, relational, historical, interpretive sociology. (As counterpoint, consider Lund’s articulation of a layered concept of agency informed not by an opposition to an abstract concept of ‘structure’ but instead by, first, certain strands of feminist theory and, second, the idea that landscapes of meaning intersect in ways that enable creative solutions to problems.)

I think ISK itself tries to move beyond agency and structure with the motivations/mechanisms/landscapes of meaning triad, but it is certainly the case that the text was still, in certain moments, inflected by this longstanding dichotomy. The point relevant for ethnographic research would appear to be that the dichotomy prevents other connections being drawn between ethnographic studies and social theory. This is because agency and structure have become a placebo theory, or, as John Levi Martin (2003) calls it, a ‘détente’ between theoretical camps, allowing peace without progress. The investigator, having completed his study, can always find some way or another to connect it into the dualism of agency and structure, and therein lies the problem. So, if I admit that this Giddensian language still had too much influence – despite my attempts to the contrary – on the writing of ISK, may I ask simply what we might put in its place? Any full consideration has to admit that the triad of field/capital/habitus is, of course, the language game of choice for many, and for good reason. But here, rather than going down that particular path, I want to engage Voyer’s provocative suggestion that an interpretation of being rather than action provides a route forward. I think this idea both clarifies an important aspect of ISK and suggests a productive opposition or axis of debate for interpretive sociology.

Hermeneutics of action, hermeneutics of being, and explanatory ethnographies

In the middle of Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989: 254–71) explains to the reader, with significant enthusiasm, why Martin Heidegger is so important to the history of hermeneutics. Heidegger’s philosophy – of being and of fore-understanding, in particular – Gadamer writes, broke the last link with the modern, scientific approach to philosophy that began with René Descartes, was inherited by Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm Dilthey, and reached its paradoxical apotheosis in Husserl. In contrast, Heidegger throws the question of understanding back to Greek metaphysics, and makes a link between ‘understanding’ and ‘being’ at such a universal level that the worries of a historical or social science look small. Gadamer is relieved to be rid of the problem of justifying the human sciences as Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber had worked to do, with the success of the natural sciences, and the power of economics, hanging over their heads. Instead, he is off to the races, having relegated scientific success to a ‘special form’ of understanding.

In ISK I tried to move away from this line of thinking about interpretation. Although I began by arguing that explanation is a subcategory of human understanding, I concluded the book with a chapter-length attempt to bring understanding back into dialogue with social science qua explanatory science. The idea was to do this in a way that maintained the integrity of certain aspects of interpretation (particularly as I found it manifested in empirical investigations such as those of Clifford Geertz and Susan Bordo). But in so doing, I did indeed intend to render a hermeneutic version of analytic parsing, causal argument, contrasts and counterfactuals, and so on. ¹⁸

In attempting this rapprochement between explanation and interpretation, I pushed hard to move away from the ontological hermeneutics of being, which I found simultaneously too universalizing and, in its manifestation in continental philosophy, too vague. How could we ever explain variation if we were busy explicating, at the most abstract possible level, ‘being’? Instead, I articulated the concept of landscapes of meaning with the core explanatory notions of sociological theory as I knew them: interest and motive, mechanism and network, and so on. All of this was supposed to show that, if an interpretive approach to social research reconstructs landscapes of meaning as the underlying, historical and cultural context for action, reaction, and social process, that this reconstruction did not deny the way motivations and mechanisms have the power to push social life this way and that. ¹⁹ Instead of absorbing the world entirely into a tapestry of culture or a landscape of meaning, or ‘giving in’ to a more mechanistic format of explanation tout court, I wanted to reposition the investigator’s use of the theoretical concepts of ‘motive’, ‘interest’, ‘reason for action’, and so on, and thus to reinterpret the idea of sociological explanation.

I explain all of this as a way of emphasizing how Voyer’s idea that ‘being’ rather than ‘action’ could be the focal point of the interpretation of meaning contains perhaps the fiercest articulation of a possible difference between the project of an interpretive sociology as outlined in ISK and the working epistemics of sociological ethnography. Her critique is certainly friendly, but it is also radical. (It can be both because it is a suggestion for the development of a causal hermeneutics for sociology, not a rejection of hermeneutics for something else.) Voyer’s idea, in other words, goes beyond the other criticisms because it proposes that ‘the flow that people are going with’ should not only be disclosed by interpretive ethnographies, but that doing so might be a route to explanation for which ISK did not allow.

In making this proposal, Voyer is resisting the analytic parsing of the setting into motives, mechanisms, and meanings. Her argument is that sometimes, in sociological investigations, the explanation is in the ways of being that people, as self-interpreting creatures seeking various forms of recognition and understanding from each other, are constantly attempting to adhere to. She also wants to say that in these cases – that is, when the explanation is in the being, not the action – subjects and subjectivity are produced as much as they are productive. To a certain degree, for Voyer, it is backwards to say that some sort of clearly defined racist motivation produced the pig head incident; rather, the pig head incident produced the racist scapegoat, in a complex transfer of emotion and guilt derived from the ways of being in place in Lewiston.

This is an immensely interesting and powerful shift; it takes the same starting point as ISK, but instead of reintegrating landscapes of meaning with the sociology of action and social mechanisms, sets out on a different path. It is evident as the underlying hermeneutics of Strangers and Neighbors, wherein Voyer articulates the need to study, empirically, the ‘epistemology and praxis’ of diversity training in Lewiston. What she means by this is the in-between-ness of going with the flow, negotiating settings and situations, and thus just ‘being’ in place. How do people do this while trying to live up to and act like the inclusive subjects they already think they are? Her view leads her to a creative combination of Foucault and Heidegger that is empirical in its manifestation: she wants to see how being-in-the-world works in a particular setting. Certainly, in her own text, it helps her explain how train-the-trainer diversity sessions manage to simultaneously project ambiguity and vagueness, and discipline the subjects who participate in them (Voyer 2013: 82–146).

It must be stated with admiration: this is a radically anti-atomistic, anti-mechanistic view. It is a project for a hermeneutics of being that is empirically driven and specifies ‘being’ as particular to certain social groupings and settings. Its core claim is that aggregations of meaningful actions – what I might call ‘chains of action’, or Andreas Glaeser might call ‘action-reaction sequences’ – should not always be understood with the theoretical apparatus, derived ultimately from Weber, of understanding individuals’ ‘social actions’. Instead, doing takes a backseat to being, and a series of different ways of thinking come attached to this. The goal of interpretive analysis, then, is to disclose the inherent, meaningful ‘flow’ of the setting. In this sense it is a different vision than what I proposed in ISK. For, while the landscape metaphor appears to bring my own project and Voyer’s together, the clear preference I indicated for motivations and mechanisms grates against Voyer’s more being-centric perspective.

I can only hope that the two projects will develop in close dialogue with each other, and in that spirit I offer two (admittedly highly leading) questions. First, I suspect that Voyer’s language of being does bring us back to the special capacities of ethnographers. The disclosure of being-in-setting would appear to have a special affinity for methodological techniques that involve being there. Upon reading her article, I was drawn to Voyer’s own ethnographic text, which she notes at one point involves using Duenier’s extended place method. Can her sort of disclosure be achieved, and her language of being be successfully applied empirically, with methods that do not center on participant observation, and in particular with historical methods?

Second, I suspect that a hermeneutics of being will orient the ethnographic interpreter towards a generative, rather than a counterfactual, understanding of causality (Goldthorpe, 2001). There is something piecemeal about counterfactual and contrastive causal arguments, wherein one approaches a setting – and even the meaningful wholes in that setting – with an eye towards taking them apart and putting them back together in a variety of ways, so as to develop useful contrasts. The concept of being that Voyer proposes, on the other hand, suggests that counterfactual dependence is not the essence of causal inference. Rather, a process of generation or production – of subjects, of events, of certain kinds of actions – is what must be grasped to build explanation. It is being that produces people, in other words, and the variety of ways of being will account for variation in what happens in the world (e.g. how multicultural integration happens in Lewiston versus how it happens in Atlanta). So, is generative causality the secret epistemology of Voyer’s new hermeneutics?