PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 17process, a practice that itself constitutes a significant departure from positivist-qualitative writ-
ing. It has become increasingly common in ethnographic writing to find in methods chapters not
only extensive discussion of the physical setting of the research and the political, economic, and/
or sociocultural characteristics of the people studied but also reflective descriptions of the re-
searcher and his background and how these might have affected observations, interactions, and
what was learned and seen. Diane Singerman (1995), for example, and Samer Shehata (2004; see
also chapter 13, this volume), in their respective studies of neighborhoods and organizations in
Cairo and Alexandria, reflect on their own researcher-identities at the time as Americans, as
female and male, as Jew and as Muslem, as unmarried people of marriageable age, as educated
beyond the local norm, and so on. The point of such explicit reflexivity is to examine the ways in
which their own “positionality” potentially shapes the ways researchers generate their data and
analyses, as Shehata discusses at length in his chapter.
Acknowledging the ways in which writing practices—from what one chooses to reveal about
oneself as a researcher to word choice to the construction of a logical argument—create the social
reality one is writing about has led several authors to argue that writing, itself, is a method (e.g.,
Richardson 1994). Some have even argued for the role of their “informants” or study subjects
themselves as coauthors or cocreators of the research; among these scholars, some reflect also on
the dimensions of power that are inscribed through this process on the setting and/or participants in
question (see Behar 1993 for one example). At the very least, such arguments enable us to under-
stand that interpretation does not stop with the experience of an event or its narration. Rather, inter-
pretive moments continue in the writing of research findings, too, a point I will return to below.
What phenomenology seeks to bracket, hermeneutics has made central; where phenomenol-
ogy focuses on processes of perception, hermeneutics focuses on principles of interpretation. In
methodological practices, the distinctions are subtle. Seen from outside the procedural steps of
specific methods, from a perspective that seeks to understand the central shift from methodologi-
cal universalism in search of generalizable principles to contextualized meaning making, the two
approaches bear a family resemblance.
PROCESSES OF MEANING MAKING
Neither phenomenology nor hermeneutics engages methods directly (although qualitative meth-
ods journal articles and textbooks are starting to discuss “phenomenological research design” and
“hermeneutic research methods”). As social philosophies, their concerns were (and continue to
be) directly with ontological and epistemological matters. But the orientations of both, and espe-
cially their ontological and epistemological questions and positions, undergird the “logics” of
interpretive methods (and, one might even say, their ethical concerns as well). That is, a method
that focuses on lived experience—such as participant-observation, ethnography, interviewing with
that focus, and so on—is phenomenologically inflected; and a method that treats texts and text
analogues is hermeneutic in its sense. What these share in common is an orientation to questions of
meaning. Although these methods did not develop in any linear, causal sense out of these philoso-
phies, the latter provide grounding—in the form of a clarifying epistemological foundation—for
some of the central methodological elements characterizing interpretive research methods.
Issues in the Artifact-Meaning Relationship
Although twentieth-century hermeneutic scholars did not explicitly treat it as such, the relation-
ship between meanings and artifacts is a representational, or symbolic, one: Artifacts come to