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Ethnographic Mode of Inquiry                                     

Nature of "Knowledge"

Whatever authority a phenomenological-based knowledge has must derive from sources different from that of the positivist-based Researcher modes. Ethnographic inquiry produces stories, fictions, the meaning of the speech event, not the event as event. He turns a passing event into an account which exists in its inscription (via "thick description") and can be reconsulted. Ethnographic findings are made in the context of, and thus tied to, the specific phenomena accounted for.

While Clinical inquiry is canonical, the grounds for coherence within the canon derive from its positivist assumptions are paradigmatically driven. In Ethnographic inquiry, individual studies simply don't add up in the same way. With no single, paradigmatic reality to close in on, the phenomenologically-based Ethnographers are essentially in the business of collecting multiple versions of what is held to be real by the people they investigate. No two investigations can ever be of the same "text," the same reality. This is the essence of phenomeno-logic.   What the Ethnographer tries to do is understand what is happening in this new context in terms of the rules of meaning-making that operate there. The aim of Ethnographic inquiry is to enlarge "the universe of human discourse," in Geertz' phrase—not to describe it, or account for it, or codify it, but to enlarge it, make it bigger.

There can be no phenomenologically-based Ethnographic study without participant-observation. The phenomenological Ethnographer's chief investigative tool must be his or her own consciousness. The cycle of inquiry runs from experience to inscription to interpretation and back to experience again, with interpretation thus emerging as a series of attempts to ease the tension between event and inscription.

Dangers of ethnographic inquiry—question of fidelity. How much will the investigator's interpretation represent a compromise between what she has come to see and what happens?

Inquiry—Ethnographic Inquiry

  1. Identify Problems
  2. Entering the Setting
  3. Collecting Data: Inscription
  4. Interpretation: Identifying Themes
  5. Verification
  6. Dissemination

 

 

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This site contains direct excerpts from The Making of Knowledge in Composition by Stephen North. Portsmouth: Heineman, 1987.
Lirvin Researching | Site created by Lennie Irvin, San Antonio College (2007) | Last updated August 20, 2007