6 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
❖❖❖Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal
suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,
I take... the analysis of [those webs] to be therefore
not an experimental science in search of law
but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
—Clifford Geertz (1973, 5)This oft-quoted line from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures has
constituted, for many, the summons to interpretive social science. But that call does not instruct
readers directly and explicitly how to analyze those webs of meaning, and the text makes only
passing mention (through no fault of the author, who had other purposes in mind) of the vast
early- to mid-twentieth-century literature dealing with the tremendously significant compo-
nents of that sentence: phenomenological analyses exploring the ways in which humans weave
not only the social world in which we live but the very identities we construct for ourselves as
we live in those worlds; hermeneutic treatises developing ways of interpreting the various sorts
of webs woven out of human experience; other philosophical works explaining the relationship
between meaning and law, meaning and experiment, meaning and interpretation; and, most
crucially, what it might portend in the context of the human sciences to interpret the social
world in order to understand not only what it means to those for whom specific webs have
meaning, but also how it means, both to situational actors and to researchers studying those
situations.
Reflecting on the problematic of “how” things mean, in the context of doing social science in
the spirit of nineteenth- and twentieth-century science, leads rather quickly to the understanding
that this is not a matter merely of what “tools” to pick up to strike the nail or to plug the hole in the
dike. Rather, we are concerned here, first, with epistemological matters: questions regarding the
“knowability” of the subject of study, the capacity of human animals to “generate” or “discover”
or “find” or “construct” knowledge about the social webs under their analytic microscopes, and,
hence, the character of those claims to knowledge. Moreover, knowing which tool is best suited
to the nail or the hole depends on the character of the subject of study, and so epistemological
presuppositions themselves rest on the presupposed reality status of that subject. Ontological
matters are, then, also a concern: whether the subject of study is considered objectively real in the
world, in which case it is believed to be capable of being “captured” or collected, discovered or
found, and “mirrored” in theoretical writings, or is considered as socially constructed (in the
phrase made widely known through P. Berger and Luckmann [1966]), in which case its character
may be apprehended only through interpretation.^2
Methodological justification, then, cannot be made in the void of ontological and epistemo-
logical entailments. A researcher who presupposes that the social world is ontologically
constructivist and epistemologically interpretive is more likely to articulate research “questions”
that call for constructivist-interpretive methods.^3 These turn a reflexive eye not only on the topic
of study but also on the scientist generating or constructing (rather than “discovering” or “find-
ing”) that knowledge and on the language she uses in that “worldmaking” (in Nelson Goodman’s
[1978] term). Such reflexivity might ask such questions as, for example, what the Middle Ages or
the Middle East are in the “middle” of—and who “put” them there, and why. It is an approach that
sees concepts and categories as embodying and reflecting the point of view of their creators (as
Ido Oren, Robert Adcock, and Dean McHenry do in their chapters with respect to political science