0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Dancing Lessons from God
only as specified in the plan. The last is in part validly intended to pre-
vent the abuse of funding by researchers veering too far afield of spec-
ified intentions. Carried to extremes, however, such guidelines rule out
much of field research embedded in communities or in people’s lives.
This is what happens when anthropologists claim that since anthro-
pology is (or should be) a science, every ethnographer should follow
the same procedures. This, it seems, is a prevalent view in many re-
cent methods textbooks. Fortunately, there is also a countertrend ev-
ident. Some of the recent methods texts or works on methodological
philosophy that I reviewed and discuss here include Using Methods
in the Field: A Practical Introduction and Casebook (deMunck and
Sobo 1998 ), Essential Ethnographic Methods: Observations, Inter-
views, and Questionnaires (Schensul, Schensul, and LeCompte 1999 ),
Ethnography: A Way of Seeing (Wolcott 1999 ),The Ethnographer’s
Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology (Grimshaw 2001 ),Ex-
pressions of Ethnography: Novel Approaches to Qualitative Methods
(Claire 2003 ), Narratives in Social Science Research (Czarniawska
2004 ), and Reflexive Ethnographic Science (Aunger 2004 ).
Scientism, Interpretivism, Reflexivism
Here are some tidbits that I found in the first two texts listed above
emphasizing a strictly fact-oriented data-collection approach. The
two works present clearly specified, but severely limited, definitions
of what ethnography is, and what ethnographers do. What (accord-
ing to these texts) is ethnography? According to Schensul, Schensul,
and LeCompte ( 1999 ), “Ethnography is a scientific approach to dis-
covering and investigating social and cultural patterns and mean-
ing in communities” ( 1 ). “Ethnographic Research is Guided By and
Generates Theory” ( 1 ; this is a section heading, repeated on page 2 ).
“Theory is important because it helps us to determine what to con-
sider and what to leave out of our observation” ( 12 , my emphasis).
“The first job of an ethnographer is the organization of questions...
into... formative theory that will guide the collection and, later, the
analysis of data” ( 10 ). The ethnographer is cautioned to be “explicit
and systematic” (deMunck and Sobo 1998 , 20 ) or “systematic” and
