206 ANALYZING DATA
What he demonstrates so clearly in this chapter is the intertwining of accessing, generating,
and analyzing data in the production of academic claims to knowledge. It was by moving through
the bus stops, organizational offices, factory floors, and cafés that Shehata became able to ana-
lyze the obvious and not-so-obvious aspects of social class in Egyptian society—allowing him to
dig deeply in the habitus of class, thereby demonstrating its generative and re-generative capaci-
ties, in contrast to a more distanced view of class as a “thing” or as a fixed position in a societal
structure. What this chapter communicates is how Weber’s verstehen, empathic understanding,
can become a possibility—not through a thought experiment behind the safety of one’s desk but
in the midst of experiencing aspects of working-class life on the shop floor and in other settings.
The reader vicariously experiences a panoply of sensations as well—panic as Shehata’s bus driver
ignores the road; sympathy with his fellow worker and friend living in poverty; frustration when
those in power confidently tell him to change his research method to something more appropriate
to his societal status.
As Shehata convincingly demonstrates, researcher identities simultaneously generate dynam-
ics of situational inclusion and exclusion. Some individuals embraced him as a fellow Muslim
and man, which, in turn, meant comparatively less, and different, access to Christian Egyptians
and women. Ethnographic research is not for those who seek to avoid conflict and risk. It is an
approach that brings the researcher into direct contact with his fellow human beings, as Shehata
observes, a most “concrete” of methods, which only from the perspective of methodologically
positivist presuppositions would be dismissed, rather than embraced, for its subjectivity.MAKING SENSE OF ACTIONS AS REFLECTED IN TEXTS AND
OTHER ARTIFACTSPatrick Jackson’s analytic method (chapter 14) is concerned with preserving the agency of both
the researcher and societal actors. It is imaginative in its efforts to delineate how this can be
done when working with historical documents, in which projection of scholarly meanings onto
the past is especially tempting since actors cannot “talk back” in the ways that are possible, at
least conceptually, in contemporaneous ethnographic research. Not coincidentally, we believe,
Jackson describes his method as “textual ethnography”—a sort of immersion in the textual
data, complete with “field notes” later systematized and marshaled as part of a specific argu-
ment. What results is a highly contextualized understanding of what legitimation strategies
were, and were not, available to German politicians debating Germany’s post–World War II
relation to the occupying forces.
Mark Bevir’s explanation of narrative (chapter 15) unpacks collective patterns of activity—in
this case, governance—as well as individuals’ actions in terms of historically grounded beliefs.
From this perspective, any method of generating data of any genre type is acceptable so long as
the data analysis provides interpretations of actors’ own meaning making. This analytic method
is holistic; that is, individual human action needs to be understood by connecting individual be-
liefs to societal beliefs and traditions, to what Bevir terms a “wider web of beliefs.” Bevir’s
method assumes a situated agency for human actors rather than a voluntaristic or deterministic
extreme. Human beings construct their own beliefs in the context of the traditions of the societies
they inherit and inhabit, such that individual autonomy is, if not a myth, highly conditioned.
Societal traditions, however, should not be reified in the analysis because individuals recreate
and/or reconstruct them on a daily basis as they seek to solve their personal and collective prob-
lems, what Bevir calls “dilemmas.” These dilemmas create tensions in individual or institutional
belief systems, forcing a reconsideration of existing beliefs.