DOING SOCIAL SCIENCE IN A HUMANISTIC MANNER 391tions of analytic processes that identify the first steps as: establish the context, formulate/define
the problem, specify objectives/determine evaluation criteria, and explore/evaluate alternatives (see,
e.g., Bonser, McGregor, and Oster 1996; Patton and Sawicki 1993). Such a formulation implies
that researchers generate issue-relevant knowledge in a void, from their heads. Nowhere does it
ask which or whose knowledge should be included in these steps or how to access or generate
such knowledge.
But suppose we could get out of this cycle of expectations and back to the kinds of acts that
communal, organizational, policy, governmental, and other processes actually entail, drawing on
an ethnographic sensibility. Such an approach legitimates the role of local knowledge in social
life—whether that “locale” is the grass roots of a neighborhood in Cairo (Singerman 1995) or in
Ellen Pader’s (chapter 8) housing density studies in New York, the shop floor of a Japanese
industry (Kondo 1990) or of Samer Shehata’s factory in Alexandria (chapter 13).
Increasingly complex modeling along with computational methods, themselves increasingly
abstracted from human social realities, enable social scientists using them to distance themselves
from that human, semiotic world, replacing “explanation[s] in terms of meaning... with
explanation[s] in terms of mechanism” (Turkle 2004, B26). To paraphrase Sherry Turkle’s com-
ments on the effects of computerization, our methods are doing things not just for us, but also to
us, “changing the way we see ourselves, our sense of human identity” (2004, 1326); presentation
has fetishized form at the expense of content.
The challenge is to enact our theories (a point made also by Kondo 1990, 43). Theories of
knowledge have implications for researcher conduct, but also for writing practices. For example,
are questions of the origins of research topics admitted as useful, as in the narratives that precede
the book chapters here, or treated as purely theory driven or as irrelevant? Does the knowing “I”
get buried in the passive voice in order to create objectivity-by-rhetoric?
To some extent, and perhaps a great one, the battle over methods and methodologies is not so
much one about the ontological or epistemological character of evidence, but, not to be overly
melodramatic, a battle for the soul of social science and its practitioners. Seen from the perspec-
tive of the “disciplines” of social science, the battle is a reactionary war against the forces of
depersonalizing technicism and depersonalized rationalism, manifested in the “person” of the
ever-encroaching late-twentieth-century machine, the computer, and its computational abilities.
If they are nothing else—and we hardly maintain that—interpretive methodologies and methods
are efforts to hold out for a central humanism in the practices of the human sciences. They reject
the dehumanizing move of positivist-influenced scientific procedures that seek to control for
researchers’ humanity, rendering survey researchers as close to emotionless automatons as is
humanly possible (which, in our view, is not possible at all), ridding statistical analyses of any
vestiges of human presence, turning models into mechanical portraits.
The challenge posed by interpretive methods goes far beyond a question of mere tools.
Insisting on the primacy of context resists a flattening out of detail and difference, a globalizing
homogenization of spatial particularities. Schatzman and Strauss recognized this with respect
to field research, describing its practice as “pragmatist, humanist, and naturalist” (1973, vi).
We believe that this impulse holds for all those methods that are conjoined within the interpre-
tive category. For some who hold to other schools of thought, proponents of interpretive work
may appear to be a group of Luddites fighting a rearguard action. We hope not—we do not see
ourselves in this light—but we also see that the point of contention has less to do with whether
social scientists are practicing an “engaged” research—after all, many (if not all) practitioners
of rational choice, modeling, and regression analyses would claim to be doing work that will
have some impact on improving “the world”—than with the character of that engagement: a