In praise of “thick construction”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/dra.2024.1070Keywords:
Ethnography, Theory, Epistemology, Thick Description, BourdieuAbstract
Building on my book The Poverty of the Ethnography of Poverty ([2023]2025), I make the case for “thick construction” as a rationalist approach to framing and conducting ethnography. Infused by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological epistemology, thick construction is a “construction squared,” that is, a scientific (analytic) construction of an ordinary (folk) construction. Anchored by the concept of social space, thick construction aims to dodge the danger of “ethnographism,” the tendency to want to describe, interpret and explain a phenomenon based solely on the elements discerned through fieldwork. It allows us to avoid committing one or another of the five organic fallacies of participant observation: interactionism, inductivism, populism, presentism and the hermeneutic drift. I diagram how thick description, grounded theory, the extended-case method, abductive theorizing and thick construction configure the duet of theory and observation. Eschewing the false opposition between concept and percept, thick construction aims to build heuristics for fabricating new objects. In this approach, contrary to conventional views, theory is not the haughty master but the humble servant of empirical research as approximation of the real.
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