The Architecture of Ethnographic Knowledge: Narrowing Down Data and Contexts in Search of Sociological Cases

Abstract

Building ethnographic knowledge is a tacit epistemic process involving two steps: narrowing down the framework through which ethnographers hold constant empirical units as social relationships of the same kind, and paring down the boundaries of time and space to contextualize the data as levels of analysis. This article explicates the workings of and relationships between these hermeneutic and phenomenological processes as the underlying architecture of ethnographic knowledge. It shows that narrowing down data and contexts is fundamental to moving beyond the substantive contribution to the development of sociological cases. In this regard, case development is paradoxical: Narrowing down is necessary for generalizing up.