Over-Complexifying Social Reality: A Critical Exploration of Systematicity and Rigidification in Ethnographic Practice and Writing

Abstract

Qualitative methodological development has produced canonical tendencies that over-complexify and fix a fluid and lived social world. Meanwhile, critical theory has produced critiques on methodology but without enough attention to the qualitative tradition. I bridge these gaps by using an Adornoian position to interrogate the concepts of systematicity, rigidification, complexification, and their problems in ethnographic research and qualitative methodology. I conduct an urban ethnography and autoethnography of the metropolitan blasé as a public attitude of indifference to articulate an alternative, quotidian approach to ethnography that better captures social embeddedness, meaning-creation, and how contexts should drive data collection, analysis, and method-selection.