ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA 121sense used by mathematicians) elegance” (Ortner 1996, 281). This “richness, texture, and detail”
is the Geertzian notion of “thickness”—a layering of observations that situates both knower and
known in their respective contexts. What Pader means by an ethnographic “sensibility” is enter-
ing this world-space and looking beneath its surface not only to find the modes of thinking that
shape patterns of activity there, but also to attend to what is, intentionally or otherwise, not being
“seen” or spoken about.
Choosing a single chapter to represent such a complex mode of data access and generation was
daunting, and, indeed, other chapters in part III (notably Samer Shehata’s chapter 13 and Clair
Ginger’s chapter 19) should also be read for the ways in which they describe observational meth-
ods. Pader’s chapter accomplishes two things that we wish to underscore. First, she “makes strange”
for us the everyday observational processes that ordinary human beings take for granted and that
researchers, ordinary humans themselves, have to denaturalize. Learning how to look and how to
see for scientific purposes can take considerable practice. Second, in recounting examples from
her own experiences and from the ethnographic literature, she makes plain how exceedingly
difficult this task can be. Her accounts illustrate how easy it can be for policy analysts and other
researchers who have not developed an ethnographic sensibility to misread others’ actions be-
cause they have not grasped those others’ operating assumptions, often because they have not
reflected on and, hence, cannot “see” their own.
Pader’s chapter offers a welcome contrast, indeed, a critical corrective, to the sorts of analyses
built on a priori assumptions about a universal human nature. Such analyses might be character-
ized as theory driven, as analyses that attempt to “force fit” observations into the framework
generated by a given theory (Kuhn 1970; I. Shapiro 2002) in an attempt to “save” the theory,
rather than altering it or developing a new one that would give a better account of the observa-
tions. They are found most prominently in economic analyses of public policy and economic and
human behavior (e.g., Gary Becker’s 1981 exchange theories of marriage and the family). Many
analysts (e.g., W. Brown 1988; Charusheela and Zein-Elabdin 2003) have noted that “economic
man” is a theoretical perspective that is not only male, but culturally Western, and that its use
imposes particularistic, rather than universally held, assumptions on cultures and societies that
assume quite different things about human goals and human flourishing, thereby running the risk
of misunderstanding and misanalyzing them. Pader’s treatment of observation harkens back to
the roots of the scientific enterprise in which the curiosity to know about a particular phenomenon
meant hours and days of intense, direct observation, partnered with theoretical thinking, in a way
that allowed theories to emerge out of observational data.^3
READING
Humans inscribe and communicate what is meaningful to them in the context of their political,
social, cultural, organizational, and communal lives in, on, and through a wide range of artifact
types. Many analyses, especially in political science, have restricted their understanding of docu-
mentary evidence to the literal sense of written records—and even further narrowing that sense,
sometimes, to those records produced by governing elites. Public policy studies examine legisla-
tive and agency documents; international relations studies look at transcripts of negotiations, for
example; public law studies analyze court records and Supreme Court opinions; and so on.
Depending on the research question, however, restricting “documentary” evidence to materi-
als produced and approved by governing elites can be overly limiting. By contrast, for example,
in his study of communist and postcommunist Russian identity, Hopf (2002) drew on popular
novels purchased at corner kiosks, high school textbooks, the daily press, and other written materials