I don’t think that’s any clearer, but I’m in a seeing the trees and not the forest mode these last couple of days.

About the difference between a theoretical example and an empirical example, I think what I meant by the latter was that ethnographers can usually make statements like “oh yes, most people do X in my fieldsite, as exemplified by this incident Y” — which seems quite different from saying in a more theoretical mode “incident Y forces us to rethink our concept of Z.” Pretty much only the second kind of example is given much intellectual credit in the discipline, as far as i can tell.

About your question about extrapolating to other relevant settings, I hadn’t really thought about that at all! But it comes to mind that there would be at least two very different ways of doing that sort of extrapolation. One sort of extrapolation is basically just a way of guessing about what one would see in other similar contexts — “OK, I’ve seen phenomenon A here, I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar in another nearby site.” That sort of extrapolation seems to me something that usually calls for some ethnographic confirmation, along the lines of a hypothesis for further research.

On the other hand, another much more theoretical kind of extrapolation would be like: “OK, based on my analysis of my field data in one place, I think that I can give a better explanation for someone else’s data elsewhere than they’ve given themselves.” So you’d be extrapolating that the analytical ideas that apply in one place would apply someplace else too, aiming basically to reinterpret someone else’s data… I do see this kind of thinking occasionally, though not that often.

Not sure which of these two kinds of extrapolation you had in mind?