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Ethnography
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From How to Why

On Luminous Description and Causal Inference in Ethnography (Part I)

Jack Katz

University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Ethnographers often start fieldwork by focusing on descriptive tasks that will enable them to answer questions about how social life proceeds, and then they work toward explaining more formally why patterns appear in their data. Making the transition from `how?' to `why?' can be a dilemma, but the ethnographer's folk culture provides facilitating resources for detecting and appreciating especially compelling descriptions. Recognitions of luminous data often implicitly light the path to causal inference. In this, the first of a two-part article, three of seven forms for characterizing the rhetorical effectiveness of ethnographic data are illustrated and the distinctive resources they offer for causal explanation are analyzed.

Key Words: ethnographic methods • participant observation • qualitative methodology • philosophy of science • Chicago school • evidence • data analysis

Ethnography, Vol. 2, No. 4, 443-473 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/146613801002004001
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