NEITHER RIGOROUS NOR OBJECTIVE? 77to the subject of study, but rather as potentially prejudiced against persons or settings (e.g., for
reasons of political ideology or race-ethnicity or class or gender, and so on), resulting in analytic
findings that cannot be relied upon as the basis for subsequent research or action (such as policy
or administrative actions). Such a view emerges, in particular, concerning the epistemological
subjectivity of the person or persons acting as “guide(s)” to knowledge in the situation under
study, as well as of the researcher, subjectivities that seemingly appear to be so individualistic as
to be idiosyncratic. Part of what detailed descriptions of interpretive methods delineate is the very
procedural systematicities that transcend individual idiosyncracies.
Several interpretive research practices intentionally and self-consciously address the oblique,
partial sight that characterizes all human observation. (This also forms part of the systematic and
reflexive character of the research.) These include the purposive selection of texts, respondents,
and/or observational posts that map across times, locations, experiences, and/or interpretive (or
epistemic) communities. This comparative “mapping” of views includes “snowball sampling”—
not really sampling at all,^31 in which those interviewed are asked to suggest others—as well as a
heightened attention to the possibility that the network of personal ties that such recommenda-
tions often draw on may create patches of silent or silenced voices in data sources, requiring
additional purposive selections to fill these gaps. Similar techniques are used in identifying and
selecting documents. The image of the wagon train circling the campfire, each wagon having its
own vantage point on the fire (J. Murphy 1980), or the Picassoesque portrait that enables the
physically impossible view of the back of the ears and the side of the nose and the front of the
forehead all at the same time capture this research ideal.^32
Single case field research is often comparative in this way, implicitly, if not formally, as is
historical analysis, and such comparative vision constrains idiosyncrasy, both of researcher and
of “guide” (whether human or textual). The multiple observational “points” encountered and
engaged in texts, in activities and events, and in interviews provide endless opportunities for
comparison of ideas from different vantages, checking idiosyncratic interpretation. Furthermore,
the researcher almost always carries some expectations for what constitutes “normal” or antici-
pated activity, often based on what she is accustomed to in her own place or time, and this, too,
serves as a comparative anchor. Additional comparison emerges in juggling the familiarity that
grows through prolonged exposure with the “stranger-ness” of new encounters. Comparison is
also brought to bear through extended observation over time, as well as in attending to the ways
in which times of day, days of the week, and seasons of the year influence variability in human
activity in the setting. Historical and contemporary text-based research have their own parallels to
these comparative elements.
With respect to research “guides,” the researcher is constantly alert to wildly idiosyncratic or
even mildly divergent sense making by situational actors (including in their textual half-lives as
reported meanings linger on long after the researcher has left the field), looking instead, in cases
of collective sense making, to discern collective, public meanings rather than individual, private
ones. (The obvious exception is studies of key individuals in which personal response is central to
the analysis.) Moreover, interpretive researchers rely on a sort of “projective imagination” (Kemper
1990, 95), drawing on personal experiences in all their dimensions (kinesthetic, affective, cogni-
tive, and so on) as proxy for understanding others, contextualized by intersubjective knowing, in
a comparative context.^33
Anthropological literature and lore has long been full of cautions about taking this to what was
perceived as an extreme: losing the “stranger” aspect of epistemological distance and crossing
over—“going native”—in a way that is more projective identification than projective imagina-
tion. Much of that discussion has been framed in terms of the costs to objectivity of “losing