WE CALL IT A GRAIN OF SAND 373373CHAPTER 21
WE CALL IT A GRAIN OF SAND
The Interpretive Orientation and a Human Social Science
TIMOTHY PACHIRAT
Growing up in Thailand with a Thai father of Chinese descent and an American mother of En-
glish-Norwegian descent, I devoted a lot of explicit attention to meaning making from a very early
age. Being caught between Thai and American identities meant that I never felt completely a part
of either, and yet I had an exhilarating freedom to travel between the two and selectively appro-
priate from them as I pleased. Although I didn’t think of it in these terms at the time, this in-
between quality of my childhood made me something of a perpetual stranger and shaped my
understanding of the world as a complex and multilayered place where meanings are continually
negotiated and renegotiated. When in my late adolescence the Thai military brutally repressed a
pro-democracy demonstration in the streets of Bangkok in the name of traditional Thai values, my
love affair with the study of politics through the lens of contested meanings was born.
Eventually, this love led me to graduate school at Yale University, where I took the standard
offerings in statistical and advanced quantitative methods. Although I excelled in and recognized
the potential of these approaches, they left me feeling strangely empty and disengaged from the
problems I cared so much about. What I loved about the study of politics was its potential to carry
me closer to the lived experiences and understandings of people, its potential to transform me as
well as the world around me. Framing research problems in terms of hypotheses that specified
independent and dependent variables seemed to prematurely foreclose on so much of the stuff of
politics by asking and answering through researcher fiat the very questions that perhaps should
be asked and answered in large part through sustained interaction between a researcher and
those she seeks to understand. I also began to chafe against the constraints of disciplinary lines of
sight, and reaching out to literature and fellow students in anthropology, sociology, and the
humanities helped me to envision the very definition and study of politics as a profoundly inter-
disciplinary endeavor.
Talking to my fellow graduate students and picking up on the just-burgeoning perestroika
movement within political science, I saw how a desire for grant money, departmental resources,
and success on the “job market” can lead many students to accede to the dominant ways of seeing
in the discipline before they’ve really examined the going alternatives. This can result in a disci-
plinary methodological orthodoxy that reproduces itself primarily through funding and training
pressures, rather than because of a genuine intellectual attractiveness and persuasiveness. As
someone still engaged in my own dissertation research, I’m keenly interested in opening up a
more expansive universe of possibilities for defining and approaching the study of politics.