The Prospects of an Applied Ethnography for Education: A Sociology of Knowledge Interpretation

Abstract

Ethnography as an approach to apprehending and ultimately comprehending social reality no doubt has proven itself to be useful in anthropology and sociology. In many ways, it was the original way of knowing in social science. Based on qualitative methods, inductive logic, and holistic explanation, the approach predated the deductive logic, reductionistic explanation, and quantitative methods of positivism and as such has often suffered degradation by positivists as an outmoded and inadequate method. To those of us, however, who are concerned with the social, cultural, political, and even technological worlds that humans create, reify, and institutionalize, any critique of the approach as outmoded and/or inadequate indicates not the laudable advancement of social science but the almost laughable paradox of humans seeking social understanding. That is, understanding is necessarily unique, but it must be shared. In this process of sharing, the unique interpretations are rendered forth for judgment and some are judged more worthy than others. Because judgments can have various bases, humans disagree and to the extent that both particular judgments and disagreements threaten the interests of some and advantage others, there may be an attempt to change the basis of judgment to benefit ourselves or to seek a basis that is universal, if not universally fair and just. Positivism is predicated on the belief that such universal bases are attainable, and our problem is that, as humans and social scientists, we have not reevaluated this premise of positivism and as a result have reified and institutionalized the approach beyond any assessments of its usefulness to human understanding. Social scientists who use the ethno-