Make Me Reflexive, but Not Yet: Strategies for Managing Essential Reflexivity inEthnographic DiscourseAuthor(s): Graham WatsonSource: Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), pp. 29-41Published by: University of New MexicoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3630465Accessed: 12/12/2010 18:03

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=unm.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of New Mexico is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal ofAnthropological Research.

http://www.jstor.org

MAKE ME REFLEXIVE--BUT NOT YET: STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING ESSENTIAL REFLEXIVITY IN

ETHNOGRAPHIC DISCOURSE

Graham Watson The University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

T2N 1N4

There is much muddled thinking about reflexivity in the writing of members of the in- terpretive school of anthropology. The muddle consists, in the first place, in paying lip service to relativism while stubbornly clinging to realism and, in the second place, in claiming to confront reflexivity while merely managing it. The root of the trouble lies in anthropologists' failure to acknowledge that reflexivity is not merely something which one "does," such as engaging in self-reflection, but is, rather, an essential and inevitable property of all discourse. The fact that reflexivity is essential is potentially subversive of the authority of the author; hence numerous strategies for managing it.

INTERPRETIVE ANTHROPOLOGISTS take anthropology to be "not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning" (Geertz 1975b: 5). 1 They hail a "new paradigm" (Ruby 1982b: 126) in which the fact that the field researcher is continuously and inescapably engaged in interpretation is not only acknowledged but celebrated. The field researcher, far from being seen as plagued by "errors of observation ... because he himself is the instrument of observation" (Kaplan 1984:34), is regarded as "the research instrument par excellence" (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983:18), for "what is of significance is competence of introspection and ability to reflect on experi- ence" (Holy 1984:33). Even "total immersion and becoming the phenomena" (Jules-Rosette 1978:82) has its advocates." Thus, interpretive ethnographers have discovered reflexivity.3

Reflexivity was the theme of papers read at the 1984 conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists, entitled Anthropology at Home. While listening to papers being presented there, it occurred to me that when an- thropologists talk about reflexivity, either they do not know what they are talking about or they are talking about something other than what they seem to be talking about. Their reasoning appears muddled in the light of work done by social scientists who espouse a radically relativist position-Clifford (1983), Crick (1982), and Webster (1982) in anthropology; Edmonson (1984) and Fish (1979) in sociology and literary studies; and, above all, Ashmore (1984), Wool- gar (1984), and Yearley (1981) in the sociology of scientific knowledge.

The interpretive muddle consists, in the first place, in paying lip service to relativism while stubbornly clinging to realism and, in the second place, in claiming to confront reflexivity while merely managing it. The root of the trouble lies in anthropologists' failure to acknowledge that reflexivity is not merely something which one "does," like engaging in self-reflection or seeking validity,

29

30 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH

but is, rather, an essential and inevitable property of all discourse (including, of course, this).

So long as this muddle persists, interpretive anthropologists needlessly ex- pose themselves to murderous cross fire directed at them both by positivists (e.g., Hollis and Lukes 1982; Shankman 1984) and by those anthropologists (e.g., Webster 1982) who take the issue of reflexivity seriously. More impor- tantly, as I shall argue, the muddle is a significant impediment to anthropologists confronting their own essential reflexivity.

To begin, I must explain that the relationship between reality and accounts of it may be formulated in a number of ways and that these may be ranged along a continuum.4 At one end of the continuum is the formulation we may call the correspondence theory. According to this theory, our accounts of reality mirror reality. Difficulties are presented by things like observer bias, which lead to worries about validity (that is, about the degree to which a research instrument actually measures the underlying variable under investigation), but in principle it is possible to match a discourse point for point with reality. This is the epistemological basis for much adverse criticism of "impressionistic" work and for the advocacy of quantification and operationalization.

At the opposite end of the continuum is the constitutive theory, according to which our accounts of reality are constitutive of reality. The seeming ab- surdity of this theory may be dissipated if the reader first grasps the ethno- methodological conception of reflexivity (which differs significantly from the linguistic and legal conception of reflexivity). According to ethnomethodologists, reflexivity is a property of accounts, which are intentional communications that describe features of a situation (Leiter 1980:162). Their reflexivity consists in the fact that they not only describe a situation but are embedded in it (Garfinkel 1967:1-9). Such embeddedness manifests itself in two principal respects. The first is that accounts have consequences within the setting in which they are embedded; accounts are not the disinterested vehicles of unadulterated news which voice-overs in movie travelogues purport to be. The embeddedness of accounts is manifested, secondly, in the way in which accounts and the setting they describe mutually elaborate and modify each other in a back and forth process. Accounts, which describe a setting, are made up of expressions which derive their specific sense from that setting. For example, the word "projection" could refer to a mental projection, to a cinematographic projection, to a needle, or to a mountain. Here, its context, the diagram, provides it with its specific sense as a truncated pyramid. At the same time, the word constitutes the diagram as a projection. Without the embedded instruction "read this diagram as a projection, " the diagram could be read as an indentation or even as a mere assemblage of lines. It is important for the reader to grasp that in the consti- tutive formulation the word "projection" is not an interpretation superimposed on a preexisting reality: rather, it is constitutive of that reality; it makes it what it is.5

From this perspective, reflexivity is a pervasive and ineluctable feature of all accounts; it is not something to be remedied; it is not a special problem of

MAKE ME REFLEXIVE-BUT NOT YET 31

PROJECTION

anthropology at home, or of psychology, or of the sociology of science, as some have claimed (e.g., Oliver and Landfield 1962; Gruenberg 1978). By the same token, no refuge from essential reflexivity is to be found in the discourse of geometricians or physical scientists (see Barnes and Law 1976; Barnes 1981a; Collins 1975).

The radically relativist position I have outlined should not be confused with anarchic subjectivism, for it entails no ontological commitment; its only com- mitment is methodological. As to what might undergird the constituted realities we know, that is a question we are not obliged to address. We leave it to philosophers (and by and by we shall get around to analyzing their practices). On the other hand, it is a methodological imperative that we suspend judgment on the status of informants' knowledge claims; for unless we do so, we will find ourselves explaining the credibility of some claims in terms of their cor- respondence with reality, the anthropology of knowledge will become the an- thropology of error (Bloor 1976), and we will preclude ourselves from taking as topic the work which all informants do to make their discourse appear to match reality.

Between the two extremes on our continuum formed by the correspondence and constitutive formulations lies the interpretive theory of the relationship between accounts and reality. According to this theory, accounts do not pas- sively mirror a world presumed to be out there; rather, they are actively constructed interpretations of it. The ontology is realist; it suggests a real world about which various interpretations can be made.

The archetypal formulation of the interpretive position in anthropology is given us by Clifford Geertz, who is frequently identified as the inspiration of the interpretive school. He writes, "The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong" (Geertz 1975a:452). Significantly, Geertz here represents himself as standing outside of the situation he describes. While he admits to interpreting a manuscript, the possibility that

32 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH

he is embedded in it, or constitutive of it, is simply not entertained. (I am not convinced by your characterization of Geertz.-Ed.)

It is characteristic of the discourse of interpretive anthropologists, such as Geertz, that it implies an external world, given and uninterpreted, which it interprets and even matches, point for point. This implication is manifest in the introduction to SemanticAnthropology, where David Parkin observes, "The interpretation and description of any 'social fact' is a personal creation. That two observers disagree on their views of the same society normally owes more to this than to one of them perceiving more clearly some objective reality. Certainly some ethnographers misinterpret and so 'get things wrong' more than others, but this is a matter of degree. . . ." (Parkin 1982a:xviii, emphasis added). Note the ambivalence conveyed by the inverted commas and by the qualifying phrase "more ... than."6

The equivocation characteristic of interpretive anthropologists is evident in Myerhoff and Ruby's (1982:6) definition of reflexivity: "Being reflexive is struc- turing communicative products so that the audience assumes the producer, process and product are a coherent whole." So far so good, but they continue, "scientists--have also been engaged in reflexive activities. . . . scientists con- tinuously test their own assumptions and procedures" (Myerhoff and Ruby 1982:9). By this route they reach the bemusing conclusion that "being reflexive is virtually synonymous with being scientific" (Myerhoff and Ruby 1982:28).

The popularity of interpretive analysis may owe something to the fact that it permits the practitioner to pay lip service to relativism while clinging for dear life to realism. It enables the practitioner to subvert others' accounts of the world by demonstrating that they are socially contingent; at the same time it enables him to ground his own accounts securely in "reality."

Apart from the equivocation embedded in anthropological versions of re- flexivity, I would draw your attention to two respects in which these differ from constitutive reflexivity. The first is that reflexivity is a variable, rather than an essential, property of accounts. The possibility is thus left open that some accounts are not reflexive, or are less reflexive, than others. The second is that reflexivity is not only a variable but may also be a morally loaded one. Participants in the Anthropology at Home conference not infrequently adopted a "more reflexive than thou" stance.

Such characterizations of reflexivity may be collected together as instances of innocence, in the sense that heathens ignorant of the Gospel were once said to be innocent, for it is clear from the literature which anthropologists cite that the source of their notions of reflexivity lies outside of ethnomethodology. While the name of Thomas Dilthey is invoked frequently and that of Kenneth Burke routinely, Harold Garfinkel's name is conspicuous for its rarity in an- thropologists' citations; indeed, it is altogether absent from Ruby's A Crack in the Mirror, from Semantic Anthropology, and from the recent special issue of Semiotica devoted to anthropology as text. However, I think it perfectly pos- sible to fear the very damaging implications that essential reflexivity carries for the expertise of the expert and the authority of the author without being

MAKE ME REFLEXIVE-BUT NOT YET 33

familiar with the work of Garfinkel and without articulating the source of that fear in ethnomethodological terminology. Babcock (1980:1) observes that "self- reference is something that, as anthropologists concerned with the objective, the social, and the shared, we are likely to denounce or at least not talk about." Myerhoff and Ruby (1982:26) tell us why: "The more the ethnographer [re- ports] on methods, the more he or she must acknowledge that his or her own behavior and presence in the field are data. Statements and methods then begin to appear to be more personal, subjective, biased, involved and culture bound ... [so] ... it is not too difficult to see why most anthropologists have been less than candid about their methods." Parker (1985:65) puts it succinctly when he observes that the anthropologist becomes "as much the question as the questioner."

As evidence of fear of the implications of essential reflexivity, I nonironically employ passages of the very discourse I have earlier quoted ironically. I could have avoided the appearance of being inconsistent by avoiding Ruby and every- one else whose words I have earlier used ironically, but that would have been to conceal what I, trendily and oh so boringly, am content to display: my own essential constitutive reflexivity. Had I, rather than privileging the perspective of ethnomethodology as the one right perspective, privileged instead the per- spective of Marxism, then instead of looking for, and finding, fear of the im- plications of reflexivity, I should have looked for, and found, signs of class interest, false consciousness, and the rest. What I find is squarely the effect of my discoursive practices, even though I have repeatedly made the implicit and unexamined claim that my discourse matches reality, that, for instance, anthropologists really did write what I have attributed to them.

An audience's realization that reflexivity is essential is potentially subversive of the authority of the author: hence numerous strategies for managing it. Of these the most effective may be that of refusing to entertain the notion of reflexivity at all, tacitly referring the skeptic to nature, for whom one acts as a mere messenger.8

Running this class of strategies a close second in effectiveness is the class which consists of attempts to contain essential reflexivity by characterizing it as not relevant to social science (Garfinkel's application for membership in the American Sociological Association was contested on the grounds that he was not a sociologist), or not relevant to my kind of social science (Marxists are given to saying this; Chua 1977), or not relevant on this occasion (which strategy, being involved on every particular occasion, means never).

But to me the most interesting method of containing reflexivity is the kind of equivocation in which it is conceded that some discourse is indexical or reflexive, leaving open the possibility that other discourse, including, by im- plication, the author's, is not. For example, in SemanticAnthropology, Salmond (1982:66) remarks that "tropes are semantically shifty and resist definition and cannot be made to stand beside features of reality in any reliable manner." The implication is that some speech can be reliably matched with reality. At the conference Anthropology at Home, Anthony Cohen (1985:5) remarked that a

34 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH

special problem of symbolism is that "the interpretation of behaviour as sym- bolic in character is itself a matter of judgement." The implication is that there exists a kind of discourse which is not plagued by this special problem of judgment.

Another class of strategies for managing reflexivity is the class in which, like the last one, the relevance of reflexivity is conceded, but the concession is accompanied by the claim that the writer is dealing with it. What is of interest to me is what comes to count as "dealing with it." "Dealing with it" invariably involves transforming essential reflexivity into something familiar, anodyne, and nonthreatening, like validity or personal psychology.

When Edmund Leach (1984:22) writes "every anthropological observer ... will see something that no other such observer can recognize, namely a kind of harmonious projection of the observer's own personality," he is psychol- ogizing, diverting attention from problems presented by essential reflexivity, and leaving open the possibility that there exists an essentially objective world with which he can match his discourse once he has overcome threats posed to the validity of his descriptions by the mediating influences of individual psyches.

It should be evident that concern with the extent to which results are "swayed" by extraneous factors, far from being a threat to realism, actually fortifies it. The equation of "dealing with" reflexivity with a search for validity is most transparent in Hammersley and Atkinson's Ethnography: Principles in Practice. They write, "one of the distinguishing characteristics of science for us is precisely its reflexive self-consciousness about methodology. . . . In sci- ence . . there is an obligation placed upon practitioners to scrutinize system- atically the methodology by which findings, their own and others, are produced, and in particular to consider how the activities of the researcher may have shaped those findings" (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983:236, emphasis added).

The last means of "dealing with" reflexivity I wish to consider consists of turning reflexivity into a topic for investigation. Here there is no more re- markable example than the paper you are now reading, unless it be Marcus and Cushman's celebrated survey of experimental ethnographies, "Ethnogra- phies as Texts." Marcus and Cushman (1982:25) remark that the major char- acteristic of experimental ethnographies is that "they integrate, within their interpretation, an explicit epistemological concern for how they have con- structed such interpretation and how they are representing them textually as objective discourse about subjects among whom research was conducted." They conclude, however, that gestures in the direction of reflexivity are de- ceptive: "self-reflection" and "epistemological worrying, " they say, are means by which textual authority is achieved in the context of the hermeneutic program (Marcus and Cushman 1982:39). Thus, "despite all the epistemological quali- fication, most experimental writing stubbornly holds to the goal of presenting an anthropologically real view of other forms of life for a professional readership" (Marcus and Cushman 1982:43).

MAKE ME REFLEXIVE-BUT NOT YET 35

Ironically, in their crushing account of "the realist genre," Marcus and Cush- man do not themselves abandon realist objectives and rhetoric. They confine their analyses to ethnographies, thus exempting their own analytic genre from scrutiny. Likewise, they employ the term "realist" in such fashion as to deflect the reader's attention from an alternative use of the term, one which is po- tentially subversive of their enterprise. Whey they allude to "the realist genre," they mean "a mode of writing that seeks to represent the reality of a whole world or form of life" (Marcus and Cushman 1982:29). This usage derives from literary studies and forestalls the use of the word in the related but disturbing sense in which it is used in ethnomethodology, where it refers to discourse in which it is assumed a real world exists independently of the methods used to describe it. It is in that preempted sense that Marcus and Cushman's essay is itself wholly realist. The paper has all the hallmarks of the conventional scientific paper: the definitive talk, the dispassionate camera-like observer, the academic paraphernalia of footnotes and works cited which warrant the au- thority of the authors. In sum, Marcus and Cushman do not practice what they preach.

In these ways, in the very act of pillorying realism and advocating self- reflexivity, interpretive anthropologists have defused essential constitutive re- flexivity and invigorated the realist genre they declare abandoned. (Is the alternative to baste oneself in one's own ontological fat?-Gus Brannigan.) Judging by Marilyn Strathern's summing-up of the conference Anthropology at Home, anthropologists seem well content. She reports that the outgoing chair- man expressed satisfaction "at anthropology's growing up, able to take reflex- ivity in its stride." For her own part, she observes that there had been "no lapses into the self-indulgence some feared. In fact, the external world was always there, as a social context wider than and differentiated from that of the ethnographer's immediate experience" (Strathern 1985:26). Ah, well, say I- smugly.

Since we may no longer credibly ignore the pervasive and irremediable fact of reflexivity, we might as well own up to it and display it. In my opinion, an adequate display of reflexivity would entail, minimally:

1. that the writer be aware of techniques used by others to (a) establish their authority and (b) achieve the appearance of a separation between their objects of study and their methods of studying them;

2. that the writer be aware that he is probably using the identical methods for identical purposes;9

3. that the writer ensure that his readers are fully and continuously alerted to these. 10

Now the continuous display of one's reflexivity has its disadvantages. For one thing it could have the consequence of crowding out other things. This is what Filmer (1975:154) calls "reflexive" sociology's "central paradox." It is a paradox some scholars view with dismay; Bell and Newby (1981:9), for ex- ample, argue that "'reflexive' sociology has degenerated into a 'narcissistic'

36 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH

sociology." But it is a paradox Woolgar appears to face with equanimity; he quotes approvingly Geertz's (1975b:22) declaration that "the locus of study is not the object of study. Anthropologists don't study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods . . .); they study in villages." Woolgar (1982:487, 494) con- cludes that "ethnographies should not be intended so much as reports as occasions for reflexive analysis"; further, he argues that "reflexive ethnography need not entirely exclude the production of news about laboratories; this be- comes an incidental product of research, rather than its main objective."11

The trouble with this proposal is that it is precisely for news of the world, conveyed by an accredited reporter, that the reader consults an ethnographic text; if he suspects that news brought to him is an effect of the writer's discoursive practices, then, as things stand, he will not warrant it as anthro- pology.

For Ashmore news is no mere "incidental product"; he proposes to confront his own reflexivity without sacrificing news at all. He argues that writing should "'show' or 'display' (i.e. talk around) its own socially constituted nature, its own textuality and its own paradox, rather than (always) talk of these things. In this way we can talk of other things" (Ashmore 1984:40). This proposal brings in its train further troubles. One is that it takes as unproblematic the distinction between talk about "these things" and talk about "other things.""12

Ashmore (1984:39-40) proposes, further, that since inquiry, to be inquiry, does not require realist writing, we should experiment with new literary forms such as plays, multiple voices, and fictionalizing. Latour and Woolgar's Labo- ratory Life (1979) is an example of fictionalizing. In this book the authors, in an attempt to heighten the reader's sensitivity to the way in which reporting is done, place the burden of observation on the shoulders of a mythical "an- thropological" observer and stress his trials and tribulations in making sense of strange surroundings. Judging by my own reaction on first reading the book, the device is largely ineffective, for the purpose of the authors in fictionalizing quite escaped me: displays of reflexivity are not self-evidently such. 13

This serves to shift the focus of our attention from the frailty of "reflexive" writers to the frailty of the reader. It is not enough that writers stop hankering after authority; it is necessary also that readers stop requiring authoritative accounts from writers. At the very least readers must be ready to entertain scientific publications presented in other than the very objectivist form which covertly denies its own reflexivity. Perhaps too, readers should learn to tolerate unending ambiguity: that seems to be what Woolgar (1982:489) asks of readers when he observes that "our concern for reflexive ethnography would perhaps have begun to succeed where the text suggests to the reader that he ask himself whether or not the observations really took place, whether or not Jonas Salk really wrote the introduction, and so on." Woolgar is asking a lot. It bears reiterating that the reader consults an ethnographic text for news of the world conveyed to him by an accredited reporter. If he suspects that news brought to him is conveyed, not by a qualified professional social scientist, but by a layman, then he will not warrant it as anthropology; he will deem it unsifted

MAKE ME REFLEXIVE-BUT NOT YET 37

raw material of undetermined validity and significance. So an ethnography in which the writer continually confronts and displays his essential reflexivity, thus prompting the reader to question his authority, is a contradiction in terms. This is the vexation of an ethnography which takes reflexivity seriously.

It is a vexation we shall have to learn to live with. It may be that scientists are rewarded for results and not for dialectical propriety; nevertheless, so long as there are commentators with the wit of a Woolgar or an Ashmore to goad us, we can neither credibly pretend that our reports of the world are not essentially reflexive, nor can we continue quietly managing our reflexivity in the hope that no one will notice.

This brings us up sharp against the question of how to differentiate ethnog- raphy from fiction and good ethnography from bad ethnography. We need to treat ethnography selectively. What the relativist argues is that the justifications that can be given for these selections, including his own, will be relative to time and place and of merely local creditability (Bloor 1982:322). Acceptance of the relativist position entails not merely abandoning attempts to endow our value judgments with transcendental meaning; it entails also accepting that facticity is a status, rather than a self-evident condition, and thus that the distinction between ethnography and fiction is socially constituted through and through.'4 It seems to me that an avowal of relativism is more profitable than clinging to the equivocal and debilitating ontology which permits Geertz (1975b: 15- 16) to dismiss as hollow the threat to the "objective status" of anthropological knowledge, seemingly posed by the fact that ethnographies are fictions in the sense that they are "something made," by asserting that "the determining question" of ethnography is whether or not it sorts "real winks from mimicked ones"; such dismissals foreclose enquiry into how in practice we constitute our realities, our "real winks, " and preclude the emergence of an anthropology which acknowledges its own essential, constitutive reflexivity.

NOTES

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a meeting of the Discourse Analysis Research Group, The University of Calgary, in 1985. For written comments I am indebted to J. Baker, A. Brannigan, P. Carstens, J. Comaroff, and H. Meynell.

2. Among the best-known works of interpretive anthropologists are experimental ethnographies, such as Jean-Paul Dumont's The Headman and I (1978), and program- matic declarations, such as Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1975a), Jay Ruby's A Crack in the Mirror (1982a), George Stocking's Observers Observed (1983), and the collection of papers presented at the 1982 conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists and published under the title of Semantic Anthropology (Parkin 1982b). Recently, interpretive anthropologists have focused their attention on the mak- ing of ethnographic texts. Since 1980 at least one conference (reported in Marcus and Clifford 1985) and two special issues of journals (Semiotica [30(1-2), 1980] and An- thropology and Humanism Quarterly [9(4), 1984]) have been devoted to the topic, but the seminal work is undoubtedly Marcus and Cushman's celebrated paper "Ethnogra- phies as Texts" (1982).

3. Belatedly. Sociologists have long been familiar with the concept of reflexivity

38 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH

through the work of ethnomethodologists, "critical" theorists, and sociologists of sci- entific knowledge.

4. I have derived this account of reflexivity from Ashmore (1984) and Woolgar (1983, 1984). The term "essential, constitutive reflexivity" is Woolgar's. The diagram is derived from Zimmerman (1974).

5. The objection that at least there exists on the paper before us some parallel straight lines which are capable of being perceived as a truncated pyramid merely displaces sideways the problem of description, for what is to count as "straight," as "parallel," and as "lines" is negotiable. Description is, in principle, inexhaustible and indeterminate.

6. In a similar ambivalent vein, Hollander (1967:29) concedes that our data are determined by our interests and that we have a tendency to "project our own culture onto the alien one," but he nevertheless concludes that "since a 'reliable' author may still produce a distorted picture, the question of validity arises." To invoke the problem of validity is to presuppose a given reality which the scientist's discourse is intended to reflect.

7. Sometimes the term seems to be little more than a badge of approbation, as in "an anthropology that is reflexive and freed from its positivistic moorings makes an integrative anthropology more likely and possible at the very time when fragmentation into countless specialties and absorption into other disciplines seem to threaten it" (Lynch 1982:90).

8. Typical is Adam Kuper's (1983:204, 205) bluff dismissal of matters philosophical: "Observational techniques yield particular kinds of data and the business of anthropology is with these data. . . . Reality is the business of mystics." Other ways of dismissing essential reflexivity include condemning one's condemners, as Anthony Cohen did at Anthropology at Home when he dismissed ethnomethodologists as "the new positivists"; or as Richardson (1985:377) fears unfriendly critics of A Crack in the Mirror might do by condemning "reflexive" ethnography as narcissistic; or as Hobart (1982:40) does in SemanticAnthropology, where he alarms us with the bogeys of self-refutation and infinite regress in the remark that "there has been a trend towards seeing figurative language ... as somehow ... constitutive of knowledge. This may hide a paradox: if all utter- ances are structured figuratively, why should the analyst's utterance be exempt? A currently voguish approach to meaning may then be hoist on its own petard."

9. Our self-awareness is limited, and such insights as we have could be displayed for self-serving ends; but progress can be made, not in the sense of vanquishing the problem, but in the sense of becoming less naive than before.

10. Reflexivity is not something to be "done" in an appendix or an introduction. To invite the reader to monitor one's reflexivity post hoc, while suspending the display of it in the course of analytic practice, is merely another management strategy masquer- ading as a solution. See Woolgar (1984:12).

11. Might we infer from Woolgar's willingness to produce news, even incidentally, that he is a closet realist? Elsewhere, Woolgar and Pawluch (1985:224) have remarked (despairingly?) that "perhaps all attempts at accounting (explaining) depend upon pre- senting at least some state of affairs as objective." Barnes (1981b:493), who, like Woolgar, is a relativist, employs realist prose unabashedly, because "it is a marvellous instrument." The difference is that, while Barnes displays the methods used by others to achieve a realist effect, Woolgar displays also his own.

12. This distinction is problematic, if only because the work which Ashmore cites as an example of a writer explicitly treating his own findings as reflexively achieved is

MAKE ME REFLEXIVE-BUT NOT YET 39

Wieder's Language and Social Reality (1974). That book is about the reflexivity of accounts, Wieder's included.

13. Another "new literary form" is a paper by Michael Mulkay (1984) which is published in the form of a one-act play. It seems unlikely to be widely imitated, as few editors of scientific journals are indulgent enough to accept reports in dramaturgical form. But see Oehler and Mullins (1986).

14. The distinction between fact and fiction is constituted by means of instructions embedded in our texts (forewords, footnotes, and other subtle rhetorical devices which proclaim them as works of nonfiction-see Gilbert and Mulkay 1984, Law and Williams 1982, and Yearley 1981) and also by means of interpretive practices which the reader brings to bear on these instructions; as White (1978:122) observes, "We cannot easily distinguish between [histories and novels] on formal grounds unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in."

REFERENCES CITED

Ashmore, M., 1984, Beyond the Tu Quoque: Alternatives to Standard Reflexive Criticism by Way of Kuhn and Ethnomethodology. Paper presented at the Discourse Analysis Workshop, Surrey University, England.

Babcock, B.A., 1980, Reflexivity: Definitions and Discriminations. Semiotica 30(1- 2):1-14.

Barnes, B., 1981a, On the Conventional Character of Knowledge and Cognition. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11:303-33.

Barnes, B., 1981b, On the "Hows" and "Whys" of Cultural Change (Response to Woolgar). Social Studies of Science 11:481-98.

Barnes, B., and J. Law, 1976, Whatever Should be Done with Indexical Expressions? Theory and Society 3:223-37.

Bell, C., and H. Newby, 1981, Narcissism or Reflexivity in Modern Sociology. The Polish Sociological Bulletin 1981(1):5-19.

Bloor, D., 1976, Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bloor, D., 1982, Reply to Steven Lukes. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

13(4):319-23. Chua, B., 1977, Delineating a Marxist Interest in Ethnomethodology. American

Sociologist 12:24-32. Clifford, J., 1983, On Ethnographic Authority. Representations 1(2):118-46. Cohen, A. P., 1985, The Symbolic Construction of Social Boundaries. Paper presented

at the Association of Social Anthropologists conference entitled Anthropology at Home. Collins, H.M., 1975, The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon,

or the Replication of Experiments in Physics. Sociology 9:205-25. Crick, M., 1982, Anthropological Field Research, Meaning Creation and Knowledge

Construction. Pp. 15-37 in Semantic Anthropology (ed. by D. Parkin). London: Aca- demic Press.

Dumont, J., 1978, The Headman and I. Austin: University of Texas Press. Edmonson, R., 1984, Rhetoric in Sociology. London: The MacMillan Press. Filmer, P., 1975, Sociology and Social Stratification: Issues of Reflexivity and Tra-

dition. Pp. 148-64 in Problems of Reflexivity and Dialectics in Sociological Inquiry: Language Theorizing Difference (ed. by B. Sandywell, D. Silverman, M. Roche, P. Filmer, and M. Phillipson). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Fish, S., 1979, Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the

40 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes Without Saying "and Other Special Cases." Pp. 243-65 in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (ed. by P. Rabinow and W.M. Sullivan). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Garfinkel, H., 1967, Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Geertz, C., 1975a, The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Hutchinson. Geertz, C., 1975b, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.

Pp. 3-30 in The Interpretation of Cultures (by C. Geertz). London: Hutchinson. Gilbert, G.N., and M. Mulkay, 1984, Opening Pandora's Box: A Sociological Analysis

of Scientist's Discourse. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press. Gruenberg, B., 1978, The Problem of Reflexivity in the Sociology of Science. Phi-

losophy of the Social Sciences 8:321-43. Hammersley, M., and P. Atkinson, 1983, Ethnography: Principles in Practice. Lon-

don: Tavistock. Hobart, M., 1982, Meaning or Moaning?: An Ethnographic Note on a Little-Under-

stood Tribe. Pp. 39-63 in Semantic Anthropology (ed. by D. Parkin). London: Academic Press.

Hollander, A.N.J., 1967, Social Description: The Problem of Reliability and Validity. Pp. 1-34 in Anthropologists in the Field (ed. by D.G. Jongmans and P.C.W. Gutkind). New York: Humanities Press.

Hollis, M., and S. Lukes, eds., 1982, Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Holy, L., 1984, Theory, Methodology and the Research Process. Pp. 13-34 in Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct (ed. by R.F. Ellen). London: Academic Press.

Jules-Rosette, B., 1978, Toward a Theory of Ethnography: The Use of Contrasting Interpretive Paradigms in Field Research. Sociological Symposium 24:81-98.

Kaplan, A., 1984, Philosophy of Science in Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthro- pology 13:25-39.

Kuper, A., 1983, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modem British School. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Latour, B., and S. Woolgar, 1979, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Sci- entific Facts. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

Law, J., and R.J. Williams, 1982, Putting Facts Together: A Study in Scientific Persuasion. Social Studies of Science 12:535-58.

Leach, E.R., 1984, Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 13:1-23.

Leiter, K., 1980, A Primer on Ethnomethodology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lynch, O.M., 1982, Kuhn and Crisis in Anthropology. Pp. 78-90 in Crisis in An-

thropology: View from Spring Hill, 1980 (ed. by E. A. Hoebel et al.). New York: Garland Publishing.

Marcus, G.E., andJ. Clifford, 1985, The Making of Ethnographic Texts: A Preliminary Report. Current Anthropology 26(2):267-71.

Marcus, G.E., and D. Cushman, 1982, Ethnographies as Texts. Annual Review of Anthropology 11:25-69.

Mulkay, M., 1984, The Scientist Talks Back: A One-Act Play, with a Moral, about Replication in Science and Reflexivity in Sociology. Social Studies in Science 14:265- 82.

MAKE ME REFLEXIVE-BUT NOT YET 41

Myerhoff, B., and J. Ruby, 1982, Introduction. Pp. 1-35 in A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology (ed. by J. Ruby). Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.

Oehler, K., and N.C. Mullins, 1986, Mechanisms of Reflexivity in Science: A Look at Nontraditional Literary Forms. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science, October 1986, Pittsburgh, Pa.

Oliver, W.D., and A.W. Landfield, 1962, Reflexivity: An Unfaced Issue of Psychology. Journal of Individual Psychology 18:114-24.

Parker, R., 1985, From Symbolism to Interpretation: Reflections on the Work of Clifford Geertz. Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 10(3):62-67.

Parkin, D., 1982a, Introduction. Pp. xi-li in Semantic Anthropology (ed. by D. Parkin). London: Academic Press.

Parkin, D., ed., 1982b, Semantic Anthropology. London: Academic Press. Richardson, M., 1985, Review of A Crack in the Mirror by Jay Ruby. American

Ethnologist 10:376-77. Ruby, J., ed., 1982a, A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology.

Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Ruby, J., 1982b, Ethnography as Trompe l'Oeil. Pp. 121-31 in A Crack in the Mirror:

Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology (ed. by J. Ruby). Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.

Salmond, A., 1982, Theoretical Landscapes: On Cross-Cultural Conceptions of Knowledge. Pp. 65-87 in Semantic Anthropology (ed. by D. Parkin). London: Academic Press.

Shankman, P., 1984, The Thick and the Thin: On the Interpretive Theoretical Pro- gram of Clifford Geertz. Current Anthropology 25(3):261-79.

Stocking, G.W., 1983, Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Strathern, M., 1985, Not a Field Diary: "Anthropology at Home"-With the Asso- ciation of Social Anthropologists. Anthropology Today 33:25-26.

Webster, S., 1982, Dialogue and Fiction in Ethnography. Dialectical Anthropology 7(2):91-114.

White, H., 1978, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Wieder, D.L., 1974, Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code. The Hague: Mouton.

Woolgar, S., 1982, Laboratory Studies: A Comment on the State of the Art. Social Studies of Science 12:481-98.

Woolgar, S., 1983, Irony in the Social Study of Science. Pp. 239-66 .in Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science (ed. by K.D. Knorr-Cetina and M. Mulkay). London: Sage.

Woolgar, S., 1984, A Kind of Reflexivity. Paper presented at the Discourse Analysis Workshop, Surrey University, England.

Woolgar, S., and D. Pawluch, 1985, Ontological Gerrymandering: The Anatomy of Social Problems Explanations. Social Problems 32(3):214-27.

Yearley, S., 1981, Textual Persuasion: The Role of Social Accounting in the Con- struction of Scientific Arguments. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11:409-35.

Zimmerman, D.H., 1974, Preface. Pp. 9-26 in Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code (by D.L. Wieder). The Hague: Mouton.