Interpretation and Method Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn

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ETHNOGRAPHY, IDENTITY, AND THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE 263


  1. Egypt, like much of the Third World, has experienced mind-boggling rural-urban migration in the
    decades since World War II. Many of those I worked with had migrated to the city where the factory was
    located. I, quite literally, witnessed both rural-urban migration and a related process, proletarianization—the
    transition from agricultural to factory labor.

  2. See, for example, Stocking’s (1992, 36–40) account of William Rivers’s “General Account of Method.”

  3. The term “findings” often suggests a positivist model of the human sciences in which knowledge is
    assumed to be “out there,” existing already, independent of us, pre-research and pre-theory, waiting to be
    “discovered”—very much like Columbus “discovered”—or shall I say found—America. This is in contrast
    to a model of the human sciences based on the idea that knowledge is produced.

  4. Whether this model is even appropriate for the natural sciences is a legitimate, although thoroughly
    different, question. As such, it cannot be addressed here.

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