Interpretive Ways of Knowing in the Study of Politics

Abstract

In studying human political acts, actions, interactions, and their attendant language and material culture, can the researcher generate understanding from a point external to that which is being studied? It is this sort of question that has driven the development of what are increasingly becoming known as “interpretive research methods“ (Yanow/Schwartz-Shea 2006a), influenced by the so-called interpretive turn within the social sciences over the last several decades (e.g., Burrell/Morgan 1979, Rabinow/Sullivan 1979, 1985, Hiley et al. 1991), itself drawing on earlier 20 century philosophies — phenomenology, hermeneutics, (some) critical theory, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and pragmatism. Answering the question in the negative, these ways of knowing political life argue, instead, that researchers’ understandings come about through the vehicle of their own essential humanity. A phenomenologically-informed constructivist ontology and an interpretive epistemology informed by hermeneutics combine in support of a subjectivist methodology: that is, a position that argues that “knowers“ (researchers and participants) and what is known are both situated in specific historical and cultural contexts, such that objective knowledge — by definition, that obtained from some external vantage point — is not possible (for a more detailed discussion, see Yanow 2006b). Such a position has led to several other “turns“ — the linguistic turn (e.g., Rorty 1967, Van Maanen 1995), the rhetorical turn (e.g., McCloskey 1985), the narrative turn (see Stone 1979), the historic turn (McDonald 1996), the metaphorical turn (Lorenz 1998), the argumentative turn (Fischer/Forester 1993), the cultural turn (Bonnell/Hunt 1999), even the practice turn (Schatzki/ Knorr Cetina/Von Savigny 2001) — all of them engaging questions of not only what meanings are at play in the situations under study, but how policy, organizational, and other political meanings are made and conveyed among various actors in the situation, including the researcher herself.