ABSTRACT
The question that this chapter aims to tackle is: if the researcher and the actor is separated by an epistemological break and the former cannot capture directly the experience of the latter, on what epistemological grounds can one claim that the researcher’s perspectivization (or, explicit theorization) in an ethnographic text captures the actor’s experience-as-such that it is irreducible to the researcher’s explanation? The author offers a two-part answer to this question as he divides the ethnographic process into two parts: first, from fieldwork to fieldnotes; and second, from fieldnotes to ethnography. Such conceptual partition is important as the two sub-processes entail two different epistemological concerns. The first sub-process is concerned with the epistemological status of the ethnographic data; the second, that of the ethnographic analysis. The primary task of this chapter is to conduct an epistemological excursion into these two sub-processes with a purpose to identify a coherent epistemological foundation that bolsters the foregoing claims of actor–researcher distanciation and the postulate of minimizing the interpretive potential of an ethnographic text. By the end of the chapter, the author puts forward the notion of engaging realism, which can hopefully settle several intricate and interrelated epistemological dichotomies inherent in the process of ethnographic inquiry, including actor versus researcher, observation versus theorization, and relativism versus science.
