Special Issue Article

Ethnography

Interpretive reflexivity 2017, Vol. 18(1) 35–45

! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1466138115592418
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Paul Lichterman
University of Southern California, USA

Abstract
Many would argue that ethnographic knowledge claims are partial. Many say this pre-
dicament demands the researcher’s self-reflexivity about ethnographic claims.
Commonly, ethnographers perform reflexivity by discussing how their research may
reflect interests or biases that accompany their positions in hierarchies of domination.
Positional reflexivity uneasily straddles a realism that claims to know which position(s)
affected the research, and a normativism that aims to demystify what we claim to know.
Both stances suppress the interpretive work that researchers and researched constantly
are doing. In a more interpretive practice of reflexivity, ethnographers explore how they
figured out other people’s meanings in the field, instead of focusing on correlations
between their claims and their social position. Interpretive reflexivity considers social
positions within ongoing circuits of communication between researcher and researched.
Since interpretations are part of explanation in much ethnography, interpretive reflex-
ivity widens our ability to assess causal as well as interpretive claims.

Keywords
reflexivity, interpretation, positionality, ethnography, knowledge

Interpretation and Social Knowledge gives us new terms for grappling with the
puzzle of how social scientists can know what we claim to know. In the past
three decades, ethnographers often have treated the topic of knowledge claims
warily. For some, the topic elicits long-standing, and entirely appropriate, discom-
fort with standards based on statistical reasoning. For others, it calls to mind
skepticism about how much our claims can really represent, beyond our own per-
sonal or social biases. Skepticism about knowledge claims has led many ethnog-
raphers to build into their accounts some amount of reflexivity.1
Ideally, reflexivity invites a dialogue with readers about the worth of our inter-
pretations and explanations. While a relatively few sociological ethnographers join

Corresponding author:
Paul Lichterman, Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, 851 Downey Way, HSH 314,
Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
Email: lichterm@usc.edu
36 Ethnography 18(1)

a reflexive voice to the analytic narrative throughout a study, it has become con-
ventional to perform reflexivity in a preface, an introductory chapter, or an after-
word that tells the reader who the author is and how that might matter for the
study at hand. Reflexivity communicates to readers our recognition that knowledge
claims are conditioned and partial, a notion that has been uncontroversial in eth-
nography circles for some time. Often, being reflexive means exploring the question
of how our social positions may influence our knowledge claims.2 Isaac Reed’s
book gives ethnographers a vocabulary that can help us by-pass a confusion that
tempts us when we reflect – as I think we should – on the social sources of our
claims to know the researched. With the help of Reed’s epistemological vocabulary
I want to introduce3 the benefits of an ‘interpretive reflexivity’. This kind helps us
converse with nuance about relations between our social positions and our claims.
It opens us to other important questions about our knowledge claims, too.
Interpretive reflexivity enables ethnographers to craft more epistemologically con-
sistent and more practical responses to skepticism about our knowledge claims
than we can fashion if the main goal of reflection is to locate and demystify
those claims’ social sources.

Reflecting on social position: The limits of certainty

Of course positionality can mean different things, and relationships, including any
that ethnographers enter in the field, always can be seen in terms of two or more
‘positions’. It helps, though, to distinguish a couple of broadly different approaches
to positionality in sociological, ethnographic literature. On the one hand, classic
statements such as those of Middletown researcher Robert Lynd (1939) or theorist
Alvin Gouldner (1968) called on social scientists to use their position to commu-
nicate a society-serving or globally-critical purpose. Gouldner criticized the popu-
list stance he thought common at mid-century, which sided with the stigmatized
‘underdog’, disdained ‘middle dog’ bureaucrats or experts who tried to control the
underdogs that ethnographers often studied, and left the elite ‘top dogs’ of society
out of the picture. More recently, Pierre Bourdieu similarly takes the ethnographer
as the incumbent of a professional position with the potential for a universalizing
view. Or in Bourdieu’s terms, the professional sociological field is the field distinct-
ive for its claim to objectify all other social fields. For Bourdieu’s sociologist, the
task of reflexivity is centrally about scouting out common-sense assumptions, the
doxa induced by power relations which distort the sociologist’s ability to demystify
domination (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992).
Other, currently more popular views of positionality see the ethnographer situ-
ated in one or more identity positions in social-structural hierarchies. These say
that positionality yields partiality, not universality. Gender, race, class, sexual, and
other positions cultivate affinities for some questions and concepts over others. In a
parallel way, academic, policy, or social activist positions each cultivate different
interests that lead to different research agendas (Burawoy, 2004). In these views,
reflexivity means asking who originates, shares or bears interests in the terms of the
Lichterman 37

research question (Lipsitz, 2008), or who participates in carrying out the research
(Kiang, 2008). Here, academics’ skepticism about their own positions as authori-
tative observers produces an epistemological populism different from the kind
Gouldner criticized, along with sometimes troubling ambivalence, and self-
searching.4 These newer concerns with positionality in the past two decades, too
numerous to review in a short essay, scrutinize knowledge claims as a kind of sym-
bolic violence wielded by those in dominant positions (for example Wacquant,
2004; DeVault, 1999).
Concerns with social positionality oscillate between theory and practice. The
implicit theory behind many recent reflections on social position depends on a
realist epistemology, in Reed’s sense. That implicit theory supposes that the eth-
nographer’s position in one or more social hierarchies forges interests and percep-
tual biases that shape the choice of research questions and subjects of study more
or less mechanically, whether the researcher realizes it at the outset or not.
It supposes that identifying those positions is relatively easy. The theoretical insight
behind the reflexive preface or afterword, then, is that there are correlations
between the researcher’s social position and the research product, much as social
scientists might claim any other kind of correlation. On the other hand, the practice
of reflexivity aims to demystify social-science claims-making; it unveils the preten-
sions to objective knowledge, perhaps in the interest of a freer, more egalitarian
circulation of claims and counter-claims among researchers and researched. In
Reed’s terms, the practice, though not the theory, is normativist.
Combining the realist theory and the normativist practice of positional reflex-
ivity produces some strains. First, while epistemological modesty is always a good
thing, ethnographers end up having to limit any practical implications of their
reflection on social position if they are going to write and publish as academics.
In elegant and un-bashful reflections on studying a co-op bakery, Ann Ferguson
wrote that while she could have produced ‘something truly practical and grounded
in questions inspired by [co-op members’] most pressing needs’, disagreements with
one member’s assessment in the end strengthened her claim that ‘what I have
seen. . . was actually there.’ In closing, she mused on having found herself firmly
positioned on one side of the mental/manual labor divide she had set out to study
at the bakery. She went with her findings as she had understood them, appealing to
the realism of her account (Ferguson, 1991: 131–2).5 And she published.
Reflections such as these add some empirical weight to Bourdieu’s argument that
the most important position informing the ethnographer’s research practice is that
of researcher in the academic field. This is not necessarily an intellectual or political
weakness: Michael Burawoy’s (2004) well-received defense of public sociology
argues for a solid ‘core’ of unapologetically professional sociological knowledge,
around which we might build out sociology in policy-relevant or activist directions.
But there is a deeper intellectual problem beyond the professional one. The
synthesis of realist logic and normativist practice risks dogmatism, in the sense
of (partial) knowledge taken too much as truth without test. It may pull us
toward excessive certainty about which positions made us ask which questions
38 Ethnography 18(1)

and study which people; social critique is impotent if it is uncertain about which
power relations to criticize. How do we know for sure which power relations were
operating in a study?
If we are going to be modest about our research claims – which is what reflex-
ivity about social position intends to convey – we simply should be consistent:
We should be modest in our claims about the influences of our social positions
on our researching and writing, too. We need not assume too much realist faith
in our ability to identify which positions affected which of our field or writing
practices, in which field settings. Or as Lynne Haney put it (1996: 776), reflecting
on her research in women’s penal institutions, ‘As the daughter of a teenage
mother, was I more attuned to the girls’ resistances? Maybe. As a well-educated
woman, did I identify with the Alliance [institutional] staff and underestimate their
control? Maybe.’6
Asking how our potential social positions may narrow our view is a fine way to
start a dialogue with readers. Taken in a tentative vein, it avoids some of the more
troubling implications of a simple realist epistemology that supposes social position
is a reality ‘out there’ that works mechanically on the ethnographer’s claims-
making process. One of the biggest problems with that view is that if social position
is real, it is not working ‘out there’ in the abstract; it is irreducibly mediated by
ongoing interpretation and communication in the field. That is why a more inter-
pretive and less realist or normativist understanding of reflexivity is helpful for any
set of researcher reflections, including reflections on social positionality.

Making reflexivity fully interpretive

Reed’s argument re-writes the research process beyond the confines of realist epis-
temology. It does not want to separate off interpretation from explanation. While
realism still is a kind of default position for many ethnographers, whether or not
they ponder it deeply, ethnography’s dedication to interpretive work has long made
the default unsatisfying. Reed offers a valuable alternative for ethnographers. He
argues that good explanations build on, rather than bracket, the good interpret-
ations most ethnographers aspire to craft; hence full explanations really are ‘inter-
pretive explanations’, as Reed puts it. If we ethnographers want to make our
explanatory claims more transparent and disputable by readers, then we need to
show readers how we came up with our interpretations, how we made mistakes and
lucky guesses along the way to capturing other people’s meanings. That is what
interpretive reflexivity discloses. A brief, closer look at the logic of interpretive
explanation will help us understand why a fully interpretive reflexivity strengthens
our invitation to readers to think critically about the explanations we offer.
Max Weber famously argued that explanations of social action must take into
account what action means to the actor; interpretation and explanation are not
separate universes of concern. Reed’s book gives this foundational maxim a fresh
articulation in light of current philosophical debates. Ethnographers are well-posi-
tioned to produce interpretive explanations of everyday action. Ethnographic
Lichterman 39

observation potentially offers a sharp view of the meanings of action in situ – even
when some of those meanings originate or circulate far beyond the place or time of
the ethnographic site. The ethnographer’s relations with the researched are the
royal route to interpretively valid meanings – meanings that are part of the
action we are trying to explain. To capture those meanings, we take risks with
the researched, and our reflexivity can help make that risk-taking more transparent
to readers.
Ethnographic research is, like much other human action, an attempt to solve a
problem of communication (Dewey, 1922, 1927): The ethnographer must learn
how to communicate with the researched well enough to maintain an acceptable
presence in the field before any scholarly claims-making can happen. So we con-
stantly are trying out interpretations of everyday action. Through mundane reality
tests, over time, we produce more valid interpretations in that we accomplish
ordinary interaction with the researched more successfully, make better guesses
and fewer big mistakes, and realize in retrospect that we have made fewer mistakes
(Sanders, 1999). What we learn becomes part of our understanding of what the
action is and how it is unfolding. Explaining that action well depends partly on our
interpretive acumen and experience, beyond our ability to map causes and
consequences.7
Interpretive explanation especially needs reflection on our interpretive work,
then, if the primary goal of reflexivity is to invite readers into a critical dialogue
about our claims. We need to represent our experience of trying to learn from our
inevitable cluelessness. Interpretive reflexivity takes the researcher’s problems (and
resolutions) of communication as interesting facts in themselves. Simply explaining
these problems by socially positioned differences in background experience does
not help authors or readers learn from these problems with future field practice in
mind. And explanation in terms of social position may sometimes be wrong; the
problems may be caused simultaneously, or instead, by different experiences with
cultural structures, different facilities for symbolic and emotional work, different
access to structures of feeling.
While reflexivity centered on social position claims to demystify the effects of pos-
ition on the researcher, interpretive reflexivity claims to reveal cultural miscues and
convergences. It focuses on mistakes, gracelessness, hard-won insights, experiments in
attribution, and other inter-cultural encounters whose outcomes may or may not
correlate predictably with social position. Interpretive reflexivity tracks missed connec-
tions, lost opportunities to act differently by attributing meanings differently, as well as
the ethnographer’s little reality tests that get it right. Demystifying the power in pos-
itional relations can be a good thing, but it does not necessarily sensitize us to the clues
we need in order to pick up quickly on what people mean. People communicate in
language, gesture, silence, and we don’t wear positional identity-tags on our backs
when we do so. Ethnographers need a more setting-specific, nuanced map of cultural
differences to reflect on how communication succeeded or failed. When we start to
sketch that kind of map, showing the signs we used to determine these successes or
failures, we are performing interpretive reflexivity.
40 Ethnography 18(1)

Interpretive reflexivity reads somewhat differently from at least the self-

consciously demystifying forms of reflexivity on social position. A reflection on
the ethnographer’s position, like Ferguson’s earlier, engages a poetics of social fate.
In one prominent example of this kind, Loı̈c Wacquant tells us at the close of his
study of boxing that while other boxers christen him a ‘soul brother’ after his night
in the ring, his boxing mentor Dee Dee intrudes with a scrappy sociological truth
that seems to work as a reminder, not revelation, to the author: ‘You got enough to
write your damn book now. You don’t need to get into d’ring’ (2004: 255). The
gym has been a stopover on a privileged social trajectory, and Wacquant already
knew the gym’s African-American habitués have no such destinations.
Interpretive reflexivity works better with a poetics of misunderstanding. Paul
Rabinow’s reflections on gaining entrée to field work in Morocco are a classic
example. As a young anthropologist searching earnestly for ‘otherness’, Rabinow
discovers his own obtuseness repeatedly, but in the process learns something
about living, cultural patterns from mundane embarrassments. His first Arabic
language teacher charms him while maintaining distance, giving language lessons
that in effect limit Rabinow’s Arabic language skill to a kind of outsider’s trinket,
not a conduit for penetrating a cultural world in any depth. ‘What was upsetting
was the realization that I had been engaged with this man every day for well over
a month.. . . I had been conceiving of him as a friend.. . . But Ibrahim, a lot less
confusedly, had basically conceptualized me as a resource’ (1976: 29). While
Wacquant used positionality to figure out what Dee Dee meant, in the more inter-
pretive genres of reflexivity, the researcher shows how he put clues together,
figured out what the researched took him for, and why he did not get it
earlier on.
Whether or not we want to produce interpretive explanations as Reed delineates
them, interpretive reflexivity enhances our reflections on social position and makes
them more useful. It produces a richer if always uncertain account of how and
where which position might matter to the researcher and the researched. It also
reveals everyday cultural patterns and puzzles that ethnographic practice must
accommodate, and that often will be part of what we consider our findings them-
selves. The difference between an interpretively thin kind of reflexivity on positions
and an interpretively thicker one may be easier to grasp if I illustrate both as
applied to an awkward experience recorded in my own field notes. Neither the
reflections nor the research practice they are reflecting are particularly exemplary,
but I draw on them in hopes of revealing what the different kinds of reflexivity are
capturing. In the following conversation I have just introduced myself to leaders of
a small network of local activists, thinking that I may want to participant-observe
with them later on. One responds:

Rick asked what else I had written . . . I named my two books, he wrote down both. I
said the second one was about church groups in the midwest who wanted to ‘do
something about welfare reform’ and the other book was about different kinds of
environmental activists.
Lichterman 41

Rick: ‘The reason I ask is that – sometimes the academy comes to us, and observes for
a while and publishes some stuff.’ He said such an observer writes things that are not
at all what the people under study really think. He said that someone who comes to
observe has to ‘get really involved and think and feel like’ the people he’s writing
about. Otherwise ‘the academy’ is just writing things that don’t ‘do anything for the
community at all’. Launching a comment from one of the book titles, he said that
‘elusive togetherness’ was an ‘interesting’ term to him and that maybe I thought their
togetherness was elusive but maybe ‘that’s just the way they hang.’ In other words,
maybe I was missing something meaningful to the church volunteers I wrote about. I
nodded, didn’t defend anything I do, and passed up the temptation to say that he
might understand intuitively how togetherness could elude white, middle-class church
volunteers’ efforts to create social ties with low-income, African-American former
recipients of welfare. I said a little later that one of the reasons I come and observe
‘instead of coming in and saying ‘‘I have 20 questions’’ and then leaving and writing
something up’ is to avoid the kind of problem that Rick was talking about.

Rick’s comments sound like they beg reflection on contrasting social positions at
the outset. If I represented ‘the academy’ and Rick identified with ‘the community’,
then my academic interest in a research site might blind me to what mattered most
to the community. How would I learn to see beyond the academic-bred, hegemonic
gaze? It was not an easy question. I actually did think that the findings in this
project could be practical both for activists in this study and progressive citizens in
general, but my idea of ‘practical’ was different from what I guessed – maybe
wrongly – that Rick would describe by this term, and would take some aca-
demic-sounding explaining.8 So I responded to him briefly in a way that I thought
represented my research practice truthfully, if tepidly. Here was just the kind of
positional difference, already articulated by the researched, that ethnographers
have become reflexive and awkward and sometimes defensive about.
If we push the reflection further, though, it is only fair to ask: Does ‘the acad-
emy’ really represent a uniform set of interests? Who is ‘the community’? In Reed’s
terms, we might take these as ‘minimally’ interpretive (2011: 23–4) questions that
ask us to determine the exact social location of the academy and the community.
Or, thinking still within the realist mode, we might ponder which intersection of
social positions shaped my research practice. Was it a question of a white academic
wielding representational power over non-academics of color? Or was the over-
riding reality that an evidently white male was proposing to observe a man who
identifies as an African American advocating on behalf of socially oppressed
people? Maybe all the researcher’s positional identities here needed reflective scru-
tiny; maybe all worked together to make some of the researcher’s practices more
likely than others. We don’t need to and shouldn’t take these as solid statements on
the social determinants of knowledge production; they are invitations to discuss the
positional sources of an ethnographic project.
Yet the excerpt also begs for a more fully interpretive reflexivity that moves
beyond positional sources alone: Reflecting back on the conversation, I realize
42 Ethnography 18(1)

I was interpreting Rick’s combination of statements as saying that an outside

researcher can’t understand what things mean to the researched unless the
researcher gets emotionally involved and commits to them. In the situation I got
as far as interpreting to myself that ‘understand’, ‘engage’ and ‘commit to’ lined up
together in opposition to an ‘academy’, the unitary other defined partly by a failure
to conjoin these sensibilities. But the conversation was awkward, and I regretted
missing some connections I might have tried making to Rick’s own theory of how
to ‘understand’ people. Frankly startled by his questions, hesitant to risk sounding
defensive by starting a longer riff on the benefits of my research for the community
or others outside it, I went on automatic pilot and affirmed a distinction between
ethnography and survey research. I assumed, maybe in error, that Rick would
appreciate being observed for a long time more than being questioned briefly.
But the encounter did teach me something beyond the not-so-remarkable observa-
tion that academics and activists sometimes wear different hats. It gave me more
evidence for a tentative interpretation of these activists’ multi-layered and evalu-
ative meaning of ‘community’, a cultural fact in itself, and perhaps a less dramatic
parallel to the way that Rabinow’s experience with Ibrahim taught him something
about the different meanings of personal contact.
The surprisingly complex, enduring meanings of ‘community’ continue to be
central in the interpretive explanations emerging from this study.9 They are
part of the causal chain, not ornamental add-ons. Knowing something
about how the ethnographer arrived at these participant meanings can advance a
dialogue about the study’s knowledge claims. Culturally speaking, community
advocates in low-income neighborhoods of color sustain a variety of relations
with academics; in my larger study I see subservience and boosterism as well as
sharp critique. We will not apprehend different, situation-specific ways of acting as
‘the community’ if we content ourselves with pegging that community’s social
position(s) to a skeletal grid in realist fashion. Doing that by itself would not
help us, as ethnographers, to have less cringe-worthy conversations with the
people we write about, either.
Interpretive reflexivity tries to show how we came up with the patterns we call
meaningful, or cultural. Rick and I interpreted each other as occupying some
finite variety of positions. We also had different ideas about what one needs to
do in order to understand people. The fact that Rick linked his ideas closely with a
stark social opposition while I do not reveals interesting differences in how we
understand relations between knowledge, emotion and partisanship. Different
ideas about those relations do not line up cleanly with different social-structural
positions; some academics’ understandings are close to Rick’s (see Hale, 2008).
It certainly is possible to reflect on social position inside a broader, reflexive
dialogue about how we figured out what other people mean, how we came up
with our interpretative as well as explanatory claims. A more narrowly demystify-
ing, positional reflexivity, in the realist mode, neglects the process through which
we produce our knowledge claims, and gives us little clue on how to get along
better in the field the next time. It risks misplaced concreteness and normative
Lichterman 43

certainty. A more interpretive reflexivity grasps ethnography’s ultimately realistic

perplexity.

Acknowledgements
This paper benefitted much from lively conversation at the mini-conference ‘Between Theory
and Social Reality: Ethnographic Engagement with Reed’s Interpretation and Social
Knowledge’, New York, 9 August 2013. Thanks especially to Claudio Benzecry for wonder-
fully incisive comments.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

Notes
1. It’s a large literature. A now-classic set of statements on the topic is Clifford and Marcus
(1986); see also a helpful discussion of different notions of reflexivity in Marcus (1998).
2. For a current collection of explicitly political views on positionality in social research, see
Hale (2008). See also a challenge to this genre of reflexivity in Robertson’s (2002) fem-
inist-identified critique of ‘ready-to-wear identity’ politics.
3. This conversational essay will not be a final, fully developed statement on reflexivity. In
the end, researcher reflexivity is guided by our notions of what social research is for;
along those lines I proposed a ‘practical’ cultural sociology elsewhere (Lichterman, 2007).
Further development of these ideas on reflexivity awaits completion of the study that
includes the ethnographic illustration at the end of this essay.
4. Feeling ambivalent about observing people may be the original ethnographer’s occupa-
tional hazard. Shulamit Reinharz (1984) gave such dilemmas sensitive voice in narrating
her intellectual journey from survey researcher to feminist analyst of personal experience.
Contributors to a well-known collection of student research essays (Burawoy et al., 1991)
often expressed an obligation to ‘show your paper’ to the people they studied; their
thoughtful reflections manifested awkward feelings about having studied others, even
apart from political or ethical commitments. One recent, forthright statement of epis-
temological populism is Peter Nien-chu Kiang’s reflection that ‘my core qualification and
legitimacy to teach in and direct an Asian American studies program has little to do with
my doctoral training but rather comes from and has been sustained by my years of
organizing in Boston Chinatown and with various immigrant communities of color’
(2008: 299).
5. This example serves here because Ferguson’s reflections are exceptionally telling, and
they append a thoughtfully crafted study.
6. For a recent example of modest, open-ended researcher reflections on social position, see
Wherry’s ruminations (2011: esp. 158–60) on studying neighborhood gentrification in
Philadelphia.
44 Ethnography 18(1)

7. For a more developed argument on the role of meanings in ethnographic explanation, see
Lichterman and Reed (2014). Certainly there are other notions of ethnographic research
that would feature the ethnographer’s interpretive understanding less – or avoid the
whole idea of ‘interpretation’ – and emphasize the ethnographer’s cognitive and bodily
entrainment to a social location more (for example, Wacquant, 1995). The vision of
ethnographic practice here is informed by Geertz (1973), as well as a pragmatist under-
standing of relationships implicit in Geertz, among others (see Lichterman, 2011).
8. For a start to the academic explaining, see Lichterman (2007).
9. For an astute discussion of activists’ use of the word ‘community’, and telling examples
from the field, see Dasgupta (2013).

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Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Author Biography
Paul Lichterman currently is Professor of Sociology and Religion at the University
of Southern California. His books and articles examine civic, political and religious
associations; he writes on cultural theory and ethnographic methodology as well.
Paul is finishing a team research project that uses ethnographic, archival, and
network data to investigate urban housing advocacy. The project has paid special
attention to how different organizational practices lead to different ways of articu-
lating housing problems, and different ways of building coalitions.