I am not a specialist in the literature on ethnographic methods per se, in spite of being an ethnographer by profession. This, I think, is a common situation for people in cultural anthropology; to judge by the lack of clear methodological discussion in most ethnographic articles, ethnography today doesn’t really demand much explicit methodological reflection. (In contemporary linguistic anthropology, by contrast, research methods are far more clear — though there too, and perhaps this ultimately is true of any empirical science, there is an enormous amount of unspoken choice, often arbitrary, that comes prior to the analysis of any particular object.) There is, of course, an existing literature on qualitative methods, one which in my experience is more often invoked in other social sciences, like sociology, where there is a greater range of possible methods and where method choice may demand more explicit justification. In cultural anthropology, on the other hand, ethnography is the norm and the default, and this literature on qualitative research is seldom invoked. I don’t really know that literature myself; at best I could give you citations of books I haven’t read.

Anyway, here I just wanted to give a little breakdown of ways of using ethnographic data. I won’t try to stipulate what does or doesn’t count as ethnographic data, though I’ll emphasize in passing that, paradigmatically, ethnographic data is what an ethnographer learns by personal observation of some stretch of social life somewhere. It can of course also involve any number of other materials, like photographic images, audio/visual recordings, native texts and artifacts (including genres like journalism that report on other stretches of social life), interviews (which are themselves a form of observed social life), secondary sources like demographic data, and so on.

It seems to me that any particular piece (or form) of ethnographic data can serve one of many epistemological functions, some of which I want here to delineate. Any given piece of ethnographic data can serve as any (or several) of the following:

(1) Historical data: a datum of “what happened” in a particular place and time. Part of the task of ethnography is after all to record events, processes, histories that did take place, and ethnographic data are at one level evidence of what happened. I would emphasize that this kind of “historical” data (for lack of a better word) need not be limited to direct observation, in spite of ethnography’s famous fixation on the concrete. On the contrary, our historical data is frequently quite indirect. My dissertation, for instance, will probably tell a story about French universities that really begins more than ten years ago, which is of course long before my arrival in France, and for which I’m assuming that various secondary sources provide reliable evidence. I will probably end up merging secondary sources and personal observation into one single historical narrative.

(2) Aesthetic data: a datum whose later representation conveys to readers the texture, the feeling, or the sense of a situation. There can, in other words, be ethnographic evidence that helps to create something of the ethnographic “reality-effect,” i.e. the sense of narratively superfluous but aesthetically crucial evidence that, among other things, helps create the impression that the ethnographer “really was there” in their fieldsite. (This is the sort of datum that I take it is central to creating the notorious “ethnographic authority,” but I would note that the employment of aesthetic details does have real epistemological and even emotional or stylistic functions as well as this authority function.)

(3) Exemplary data: a datum that illustrates some larger phenomena, whether an empirical pattern or a more abstract, theoretically defined entity. Here we’re talking about using evidence not to tell a story, nor to give an aesthetic sense of lived reality, but rather to index something else of a different order than the initial piece of data. For instance, earlier today I heard someone at an OECD conference say that it had been “an immense honor to be chair” of the conference. In a historical mode, I could use this tidbit of speech to tell the larger story of the conference. In a more exemplary mode, on the other hand, I might use it to demonstrate certain characteristics of honorific speech genres among academics, as a manifestation of the speaker’s position in a system of status hierarchy, or whatever.

It seems to me we have to distinguish at least two major forms of exemplary evidence: “empirical examples” and “theoretical examples.”

(a) Empirical examples: Data that indicates or reveals some feature of a cultural order, or some other order of empirical generality. I have in mind, for instance, something like using a photograph of a Parisian walking down the sidewalk in black clothes as an example of general norms of bourgeois dress in this city. I know this sounds completely trivial, but I want to emphasize again that we invoke a whole epistemology of “exemplarity” or “indicativeness” whenever we approach some piece of data as illustrative of some larger state of affairs. (Anthropologists, admittedly, are usually quite bad at talking about exactly “how exemplary” their data is.)

(b) Theoretical examples: Data that is made to illustrate, support, disprove, question, etc, some theoretical proposal within the intellectual field of anthropological ideas. So for instance, we could imagine someone using a set of data to question the idea that cultures are unified entities, or to support a semiotic theory of commodity exchange, or whatever. Often, and I think this bears notice, it takes a mental twist, an epistemological leap, to jump from the order of what’s observable to the order of one’s ideas about what one sees. Theoretical examples often have a touch of the arbitrary. because it helps anthropologists to bridge the (usually gigantic) gap between the specificity of their empirical findings and the collective intellectual concerns of the discipline.

(I note in passing that obviously these aren’t all that separable, that any empirical case presupposes some prior theory about the structure of the world, that indeed there is and ought to be lots of interplay between theorization and empirical generalization, and so on.)

(4) Evidence of the possible: data that we read as indicating what had to be the case for it to exist and hence what tacit structure of possibilities must have made it possible. The obvious example is the famous hypothetical scenario (invoked in arguments over God and evolution) where you are on an empty beach, you find a pocketwatch in the sand, and you infer that the necessary condition for the possibility of this watch is the existence of an intelligent designer. Of course, this sort of epistemological move also works with actual data: I have often tried to infer the structure of attitudes towards the future that makes French academic politics possible.

(This is a very abstract point, but I’d note that there’s a contrast here with the logic of “exemplification” that I described previously. Typically, the logic of “exemplification” entails trying to draw a relationship between two actual, existing kinds of things, even if one of them is perhaps more abstract or general than the other. The logic of inferring what had to have been possible for an X to exist, on the other hand, may involve positing more general or abstract phenomena, but more fundamentally involves positing a relationship between an actual X and a larger field (Y) of possible Xs, only some of which will have actually taken place.)

What do you think? What other epistemological relationships to our evidence have I forgotten? This list is avowedly provisional; these categories are basically just drawn from a quick mental inventory of the kinds of knowledge I’ve tried to derive from my own fieldwork experience. I would emphasize that of course these are not mutually exclusive; a little snippet of data can at once convey the texture of a situation, establish “what happened,” show something about a transcontextual empirical pattern, and have ramifications for anthropological theory at large. At the same time, though, these are all quite separable, and probably can’t ever be entirely integrated; it would be impossible to theorize every ethnographic detail that one presents to the reader. Anthropological knowledge, I fear, is unlikely ever to cohere into a nicely bounded whole.

The whole terrain through which we are now struggling is a hotbed of subjectivism, a splendid terrain for the airing of national conceits. For all that, there are a large number of international agreements in opinion as to the salient cultural characteristics of various peoples. No one who has even superficially concerned himself with French culture can have failed to be impressed by the qualities of clarity, lucid systematization, balance, care in choice of means, and good taste, that permeate so many aspects of the national civilization. These qualities have their weaker side. We are familiar with the overmechanization, the emotional timidity or shallowness (quite a different thing from emotional restraint), the exaggeration of manner at the expense of content, that are revealed in some of the manifestations of the French spirit. Those elements of French civilization that give characteristic evidence of the qualities of its genius may be said, in our present limited sense [of culture not as high culture nor as all of a people’s traditions but as the practiced ‘genius’ of a civilization], to constitute the culture of France; or, to put it somewhat differently, the cultural significance of any element in the civilization of France is the light it sheds on the French genius.

From this standpoint we can evaluate culturally such traits in French civilization as the formalism of French classical drama,  the insistence in French education on the study of the mother-tongue and of its classics, the prevalcence of epigram in French life and letters, the intellectualist cast so often given to aesthetic movements in France, the lack of turgidity in modern French music, the relative absence of the ecstatic note in religion, the strong tendency to bureaucracy in French administration. Each and all of these and hundreds of other traits could be readily paralleled from the civilization of England. Nonetheless their relative cultural significance, I venture to think, is a lesser one in England  than in France. In France they seem to lie more deeply in the grooves of the cultural mold of its civilization. Their study would yield something like a rapid bird’s-eye view of the spirit of French culture.

One notes that some of this theoretical advice is still being learned today, as when people take pains to demonstrate that some cross-cultural cultural phenomenon (say, the global presence of McDonald’s chain restaurants) varies radically in local significance. As Sapir points out, the same ‘trait’ can take on very different significances in different places.

If one were to give a more systematic reading, this essay would deserve further note for its hostility to cultural comparison, for its hostility to radical social change (cultures must be taken for what they are, and change slowly, he argues), for its theory of the value of history, for its dialectic between ‘collective’ and ‘individual’ culture, for its quasi-Frankfurt School critique of cultural standardization, and for its lament of a contemporary loss of access to meaningful, valuable forms of activity. David Graeber has recently argued that “American society is better conceived as a battle over access to the right to behave altruistically [than as a site of pure market rationality],” claiming furthermore that liberals have monopolized access to ‘doing good in the world’ by largely monopolizing the culture industries (and alienating the working class in the process). Sapir long before had already written: “The vast majority of us, deprived of any but an insignificant and culturally abortive share in the satisfaction of the immediate wants of mankind, are further deprived of both opportunity and stimulation to share in the production of non-utilitarian values.” Admittedly, the class and political analysis is less developed by Sapir, but the fundamental observation is strikingly similar.

Now, as you might guess from its title, the real thrust of the essay has to do with evaluating cultures not in relation to each other, but in relation to a highly un-politically-correct ideal of ‘genuine’ culture, which, to simplify in the extreme, involves having the possibility for meaningful, creative life in an organically developed cultural landscape that endows everyday social action with some more-than-instrumental significance. By this criterion, Sapir takes pains to point out, the most technically advanced ‘civilizations’ are not necessarily the most genuine cultures; indeed, he suggests that primitive societies, everything else being equal, are more likely to be genuine cultures on account of their lesser degree of social differentiation and division of labor.

But this isn’t a good time for an exposition of Sapirian culture theory: the purpose of this post is simply to remind us all that even famous anthropologists can and do serve as merchants of cultural stereotypes. To offer my own ethnographic perspective, I have yet to encounter a surfeit of epigrams here in France, and to judge by the university system, it is far from obvious that ‘balance’ or ‘clarity’ are indeed the dominant French cultural values. However, if by chance you find yourself entertained by Sapir’s schematic view of French culture, I do recommend that you also look up what he has to say about the existentialist Russians, or again about the Americans — “where a chronic state of cultural maladjustment has for so long a period reduced our higher life to sterile externality.”