Searching for knowledge: method, gloss, and the failure of information :: Ethnography

I. Sketching KnowledgeI have a recurring nightmargon that I am on my panache to becoming a post-modern positivist. In the fatal recesses of my inner sanctum, my constant justifications of the worth of inductive, nonhypothesisdriven,participatory, and emic-centered research finally give way under the pressure of graduatestudents dismissal of methods as unimportant and an all too much dismissal of anthropology by nighgiven that its just anecdotes. These fears are backed by a frightening realization that I have colleaguesin other disciplines (i.e., critical geography, loving work, and even sympathetic political science) whoappear to take our method more seriously than we do. Is anthropology doomed?This semester I am teaching ethnographic methods to a class of first year graduate students and Iam often struck by how keen they are to know how it is done. But simultaneously, how knockout it isfor them to specify any concrete method beyond interviewing and observing. Often they are actually mostinterested in uncertaintys of logistics the real how is it done questions. How did you trance a visa, where didyou live, how long did you stay, how did you afford it, did your partner come with you, were youinsured? And of course, a professor who has taught the course before advised me that I shouldnt gear uplectures, but rather just tell stories. So I leave out a lot of my time in this class telling stories, (whichsatisfies my pedagogical fears over not knowing enough about method to showing 20 hours of course-time having had a significant part of my own training in the go out and do it approach), but also imploringthese anthropologists-in-training to weigh about what information they are interested in, and the best waysto retrieve it. I tell them that we need to take data collection seriously, or at least we need to have a serious recall about what pull up stakes answer our questions. However, some of them seem to think of it as busy-work.As they repeatedly te ll me, one of the dogmas of Malinowski-as-practiced dissertation fieldwork is your2questions will change once you are in the field, so why should they pass away loads of time thinking abouthow to answer their original question? Also, some ask, doesnt this jeopardize the nature of inductiveresearch? I believe in the necessity of the anthropological flexibility that these students are highlightthrough their questioning of research preparation. However, it seems to me that some of them areconflating fixity and research design, rather than giving real consideration to particular methodological