Interpretive reflexivity in ethnography

Reflecting on social position: The limits of certainty

Of course positionality can mean different things, and relationships, including any that ethnographers enter in the field, always can be seen in terms of two or more ‘positions’. It helps, though, to distinguish a couple of broadly different approaches to positionality in sociological, ethnographic literature. On the one hand, classic statements such as those of Middletown researcher Robert Lynd (1939) or theorist Alvin Gouldner (1968) called on social scientists to use their position to communicate a society-serving or globally-critical purpose. Gouldner criticized the populist stance he thought common at mid-century, which sided with the stigmatized ‘underdog’, disdained ‘middle dog’ bureaucrats or experts who tried to control the underdogs that ethnographers often studied, and left the elite ‘top dogs’ of society out of the picture. More recently, Pierre Bourdieu similarly takes the ethnographer as the incumbent of a professional position with the potential for a universalizing view. Or in Bourdieu’s terms, the professional sociological field is the field distinctive for its claim to objectify all other social fields. For Bourdieu’s sociologist, the task of reflexivity is centrally about scouting out common-sense assumptions, the doxa induced by power relations which distort the sociologist’s ability to demystify domination (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992).

Other, currently more popular views of positionality see the ethnographer situated in one or more identity positions in social-structural hierarchies. These say that positionality yields partiality, not universality. Gender, race, class, sexual, and other positions cultivate affinities for some questions and concepts over others. In a parallel way, academic, policy, or social activist positions each cultivate different interests that lead to different research agendas (Burawoy, 2004). In these views, reflexivity means asking who originates, shares or bears interests in the terms of the research question (Lipsitz, 2008), or who participates in carrying out the research (Kiang, 2008). Here, academics’ skepticism about their own positions as authoritative observers produces an epistemological populism different from the kind Gouldner criticized, along with sometimes troubling ambivalence, and self-searching. ⁴ These newer concerns with positionality in the past two decades, too numerous to review in a short essay, scrutinize knowledge claims as a kind of symbolic violence wielded by those in dominant positions (for example Wacquant, 2004; DeVault, 1999).

Concerns with social positionality oscillate between theory and practice. The implicit theory behind many recent reflections on social position depends on a realist epistemology, in Reed’s sense. That implicit theory supposes that the ethnographer’s position in one or more social hierarchies forges interests and perceptual biases that shape the choice of research questions and subjects of study more or less mechanically, whether the researcher realizes it at the outset or not. It supposes that identifying those positions is relatively easy. The theoretical insight behind the reflexive preface or afterword, then, is that there are correlations between the researcher’s social position and the research product, much as social scientists might claim any other kind of correlation. On the other hand, the practice of reflexivity aims to demystify social-science claims-making; it unveils the pretensions to objective knowledge, perhaps in the interest of a freer, more egalitarian circulation of claims and counter-claims among researchers and researched. In Reed’s terms, the practice, though not the theory, is normativist.

Combining the realist theory and the normativist practice of positional reflexivity produces some strains. First, while epistemological modesty is always a good thing, ethnographers end up having to limit any practical implications of their reflection on social position if they are going to write and publish as academics. In elegant and un-bashful reflections on studying a co-op bakery, Ann Ferguson wrote that while she could have produced ‘something truly practical and grounded in questions inspired by [co-op members’] most pressing needs’, disagreements with one member’s assessment in the end strengthened her claim that ‘what I have seen… was actually there.’ In closing, she mused on having found herself firmly positioned on one side of the mental/manual labor divide she had set out to study at the bakery. She went with her findings as she had understood them, appealing to the realism of her account (Ferguson, 1991: 131–2). ⁵ And she published. Reflections such as these add some empirical weight to Bourdieu’s argument that the most important position informing the ethnographer’s research practice is that of researcher in the academic field. This is not necessarily an intellectual or political weakness: Michael Burawoy’s (2004) well-received defense of public sociology argues for a solid ‘core’ of unapologetically professional sociological knowledge, around which we might build out sociology in policy-relevant or activist directions.

But there is a deeper intellectual problem beyond the professional one. The synthesis of realist logic and normativist practice risks dogmatism, in the sense of (partial) knowledge taken too much as truth without test. It may pull us toward excessive certainty about which positions made us ask which questions and study which people; social critique is impotent if it is uncertain about which power relations to criticize. How do we know for sure which power relations were operating in a study?

If we are going to be modest about our research claims – which is what reflexivity about social position intends to convey – we simply should be consistent: We should be modest in our claims about the influences of our social positions on our researching and writing, too. We need not assume too much realist faith in our ability to identify which positions affected which of our field or writing practices, in which field settings. Or as Lynne Haney put it (1996: 776), reflecting on her research in women’s penal institutions, ‘As the daughter of a teenage mother, was I more attuned to the girls’ resistances? Maybe. As a well-educated woman, did I identify with the Alliance [institutional] staff and underestimate their control? Maybe.’ ⁶

Asking how our potential social positions may narrow our view is a fine way to start a dialogue with readers. Taken in a tentative vein, it avoids some of the more troubling implications of a simple realist epistemology that supposes social position is a reality ‘out there’ that works mechanically on the ethnographer’s claims-making process. One of the biggest problems with that view is that if social position is real, it is not working ‘out there’ in the abstract; it is irreducibly mediated by ongoing interpretation and communication in the field. That is why a more interpretive and less realist or normativist understanding of reflexivity is helpful for any set of researcher reflections, including reflections on social positionality.

Making reflexivity fully interpretive

Reed’s argument re-writes the research process beyond the confines of realist epistemology. It does not want to separate off interpretation from explanation. While realism still is a kind of default position for many ethnographers, whether or not they ponder it deeply, ethnography’s dedication to interpretive work has long made the default unsatisfying. Reed offers a valuable alternative for ethnographers. He argues that good explanations build on, rather than bracket, the good interpretations most ethnographers aspire to craft; hence full explanations really are ‘interpretive explanations’, as Reed puts it. If we ethnographers want to make our explanatory claims more transparent and disputable by readers, then we need to show readers how we came up with our interpretations, how we made mistakes and lucky guesses along the way to capturing other people’s meanings. That is what interpretive reflexivity discloses. A brief, closer look at the logic of interpretive explanation will help us understand why a fully interpretive reflexivity strengthens our invitation to readers to think critically about the explanations we offer.

Max Weber famously argued that explanations of social action must take into account what action means to the actor; interpretation and explanation are not separate universes of concern. Reed’s book gives this foundational maxim a fresh articulation in light of current philosophical debates. Ethnographers are well-positioned to produce interpretive explanations of everyday action. Ethnographic observation potentially offers a sharp view of the meanings of action in situ – even when some of those meanings originate or circulate far beyond the place or time of the ethnographic site. The ethnographer’s relations with the researched are the royal route to interpretively valid meanings – meanings that are part of the action we are trying to explain. To capture those meanings, we take risks with the researched, and our reflexivity can help make that risk-taking more transparent to readers.

Ethnographic research is, like much other human action, an attempt to solve a problem of communication (Dewey, 1922, 1927): The ethnographer must learn how to communicate with the researched well enough to maintain an acceptable presence in the field before any scholarly claims-making can happen. So we constantly are trying out interpretations of everyday action. Through mundane reality tests, over time, we produce more valid interpretations in that we accomplish ordinary interaction with the researched more successfully, make better guesses and fewer big mistakes, and realize in retrospect that we have made fewer mistakes (Sanders, 1999). What we learn becomes part of our understanding of what the action is and how it is unfolding. Explaining that action well depends partly on our interpretive acumen and experience, beyond our ability to map causes and consequences. ⁷

Interpretive explanation especially needs reflection on our interpretive work, then, if the primary goal of reflexivity is to invite readers into a critical dialogue about our claims. We need to represent our experience of trying to learn from our inevitable cluelessness. Interpretive reflexivity takes the researcher’s problems (and resolutions) of communication as interesting facts in themselves. Simply explaining these problems by socially positioned differences in background experience does not help authors or readers learn from these problems with future field practice in mind. And explanation in terms of social position may sometimes be wrong; the problems may be caused simultaneously, or instead, by different experiences with cultural structures, different facilities for symbolic and emotional work, different access to structures of feeling.

While reflexivity centered on social position claims to demystify the effects of position on the researcher, interpretive reflexivity claims to reveal cultural miscues and convergences. It focuses on mistakes, gracelessness, hard-won insights, experiments in attribution, and other inter-cultural encounters whose outcomes may or may not correlate predictably with social position. Interpretive reflexivity tracks missed connections, lost opportunities to act differently by attributing meanings differently, as well as the ethnographer’s little reality tests that get it right. Demystifying the power in positional relations can be a good thing, but it does not necessarily sensitize us to the clues we need in order to pick up quickly on what people mean. People communicate in language, gesture, silence, and we don’t wear positional identity-tags on our backs when we do so. Ethnographers need a more setting-specific, nuanced map of cultural differences to reflect on how communication succeeded or failed. When we start to sketch that kind of map, showing the signs we used to determine these successes or failures, we are performing interpretive reflexivity.

Interpretive reflexivity reads somewhat differently from at least the self-consciously demystifying forms of reflexivity on social position. A reflection on the ethnographer’s position, like Ferguson’s earlier, engages a poetics of social fate. In one prominent example of this kind, Loïc Wacquant tells us at the close of his study of boxing that while other boxers christen him a ‘soul brother’ after his night in the ring, his boxing mentor Dee Dee intrudes with a scrappy sociological truth that seems to work as a reminder, not revelation, to the author: ‘You got enough to write your damn book now. You don’t need to get into d’ring’ (2004: 255). The gym has been a stopover on a privileged social trajectory, and Wacquant already knew the gym’s African-American habitués have no such destinations.

Interpretive reflexivity works better with a poetics of misunderstanding. Paul Rabinow’s reflections on gaining entrée to field work in Morocco are a classic example. As a young anthropologist searching earnestly for ‘otherness’, Rabinow discovers his own obtuseness repeatedly, but in the process learns something about living, cultural patterns from mundane embarrassments. His first Arabic language teacher charms him while maintaining distance, giving language lessons that in effect limit Rabinow’s Arabic language skill to a kind of outsider’s trinket, not a conduit for penetrating a cultural world in any depth. ‘What was upsetting was the realization that I had been engaged with this man every day for well over a month.… I had been conceiving of him as a friend.… But Ibrahim, a lot less confusedly, had basically conceptualized me as a resource’ (1976: 29). While Wacquant used positionality to figure out what Dee Dee meant, in the more interpretive genres of reflexivity, the researcher shows how he put clues together, figured out what the researched took him for, and why he did not get it earlier on.

Whether or not we want to produce interpretive explanations as Reed delineates them, interpretive reflexivity enhances our reflections on social position and makes them more useful. It produces a richer if always uncertain account of how and where which position might matter to the researcher and the researched. It also reveals everyday cultural patterns and puzzles that ethnographic practice must accommodate, and that often will be part of what we consider our findings themselves. The difference between an interpretively thin kind of reflexivity on positions and an interpretively thicker one may be easier to grasp if I illustrate both as applied to an awkward experience recorded in my own field notes. Neither the reflections nor the research practice they are reflecting are particularly exemplary, but I draw on them in hopes of revealing what the different kinds of reflexivity are capturing. In the following conversation I have just introduced myself to leaders of a small network of local activists, thinking that I may want to participant-observe with them later on. One responds:

Rick asked what else I had written … I named my two books, he wrote down both. I said the second one was about church groups in the midwest who wanted to ‘do something about welfare reform’ and the other book was about different kinds of environmental activists.

Rick: ‘The reason I ask is that – sometimes the academy comes to us, and observes for a while and publishes some stuff.’ He said such an observer writes things that are not at all what the people under study really think. He said that someone who comes to observe has to ‘get really involved and think and feel like’ the people he’s writing about. Otherwise ‘the academy’ is just writing things that don’t ‘do anything for the community at all’. Launching a comment from one of the book titles, he said that ‘elusive togetherness’ was an ‘interesting’ term to him and that maybe I thought their togetherness was elusive but maybe ‘that’s just the way they hang.’ In other words, maybe I was missing something meaningful to the church volunteers I wrote about. I nodded, didn’t defend anything I do, and passed up the temptation to say that he might understand intuitively how togetherness could elude white, middle-class church volunteers’ efforts to create social ties with low-income, African-American former recipients of welfare. I said a little later that one of the reasons I come and observe ‘instead of coming in and saying “I have 20 questions” and then leaving and writing something up’ is to avoid the kind of problem that Rick was talking about.

Rick’s comments sound like they beg reflection on contrasting social positions at the outset. If I represented ‘the academy’ and Rick identified with ‘the community’, then my academic interest in a research site might blind me to what mattered most to the community. How would I learn to see beyond the academic-bred, hegemonic gaze? It was not an easy question. I actually did think that the findings in this project could be practical both for activists in this study and progressive citizens in general, but my idea of ‘practical’ was different from what I guessed – maybe wrongly – that Rick would describe by this term, and would take some academic-sounding explaining. ⁸ So I responded to him briefly in a way that I thought represented my research practice truthfully, if tepidly. Here was just the kind of positional difference, already articulated by the researched, that ethnographers have become reflexive and awkward and sometimes defensive about.

If we push the reflection further, though, it is only fair to ask: Does ‘the academy’ really represent a uniform set of interests? Who is ‘the community’? In Reed’s terms, we might take these as ‘minimally’ interpretive (2011: 23–4) questions that ask us to determine the exact social location of the academy and the community. Or, thinking still within the realist mode, we might ponder which intersection of social positions shaped my research practice. Was it a question of a white academic wielding representational power over non-academics of color? Or was the overriding reality that an evidently white male was proposing to observe a man who identifies as an African American advocating on behalf of socially oppressed people? Maybe all the researcher’s positional identities here needed reflective scrutiny; maybe all worked together to make some of the researcher’s practices more likely than others. We don’t need to and shouldn’t take these as solid statements on the social determinants of knowledge production; they are invitations to discuss the positional sources of an ethnographic project.

Yet the excerpt also begs for a more fully interpretive reflexivity that moves beyond positional sources alone: Reflecting back on the conversation, I realize I was interpreting Rick’s combination of statements as saying that an outside researcher can’t understand what things mean to the researched unless the researcher gets emotionally involved and commits to them. In the situation I got as far as interpreting to myself that ‘understand’, ‘engage’ and ‘commit to’ lined up together in opposition to an ‘academy’, the unitary other defined partly by a failure to conjoin these sensibilities. But the conversation was awkward, and I regretted missing some connections I might have tried making to Rick’s own theory of how to ‘understand’ people. Frankly startled by his questions, hesitant to risk sounding defensive by starting a longer riff on the benefits of my research for the community or others outside it, I went on automatic pilot and affirmed a distinction between ethnography and survey research. I assumed, maybe in error, that Rick would appreciate being observed for a long time more than being questioned briefly. But the encounter did teach me something beyond the not-so-remarkable observation that academics and activists sometimes wear different hats. It gave me more evidence for a tentative interpretation of these activists’ multi-layered and evaluative meaning of ‘community’, a cultural fact in itself, and perhaps a less dramatic parallel to the way that Rabinow’s experience with Ibrahim taught him something about the different meanings of personal contact.

The surprisingly complex, enduring meanings of ‘community’ continue to be central in the interpretive explanations emerging from this study. ⁹ They are part of the causal chain, not ornamental add-ons. Knowing something about how the ethnographer arrived at these participant meanings can advance a dialogue about the study’s knowledge claims. Culturally speaking, community advocates in low-income neighborhoods of color sustain a variety of relations with academics; in my larger study I see subservience and boosterism as well as sharp critique. We will not apprehend different, situation-specific ways of acting as ‘the community’ if we content ourselves with pegging that community’s social position(s) to a skeletal grid in realist fashion. Doing that by itself would not help us, as ethnographers, to have less cringe-worthy conversations with the people we write about, either.

Interpretive reflexivity tries to show how we came up with the patterns we call meaningful, or cultural. Rick and I interpreted each other as occupying some finite variety of positions. We also had different ideas about what one needs to do in order to understand people. The fact that Rick linked his ideas closely with a stark social opposition while I do not reveals interesting differences in how we understand relations between knowledge, emotion and partisanship. Different ideas about those relations do not line up cleanly with different social-structural positions; some academics’ understandings are close to Rick’s (see Hale, 2008). It certainly is possible to reflect on social position inside a broader, reflexive dialogue about how we figured out what other people mean, how we came up with our interpretative as well as explanatory claims. A more narrowly demystifying, positional reflexivity, in the realist mode, neglects the process through which we produce our knowledge claims, and gives us little clue on how to get along better in the field the next time. It risks misplaced concreteness and normative certainty. A more interpretive reflexivity grasps ethnography’s ultimately realistic perplexity.