[Xmca-l] Re: The Science of Qualitative Research 2ed

[Martin Packer]

Hi David,

I just want to comment on two things. First, what Wacquant writes on page 494 is that *in the current article* he’s not going to address "the broader matrix of class inequality” etcetera. He *does* address these things in other articles and in his book.

Second, you write "To me... it's very important to make an analysis replicable; it's what makes analysis understandable, teachable, scientific, and ultimately democratic.”

I completely agree. I criticized Wacquant, a few messages back, for conducting his analysis off-stage, so to speak, and only showing us the results.

But in how many research reports, qualitative or quantitative, is the analysis actually displayed? The usual format is to state what *kind* of analysis was conducted, then present the results.  “A chi-squared analysis was conducted….”  and “the p-value was found to…”  The actual conduct of the analysis — the summing of squares, etc. — is hidden. This is one of the (many) things that makes “teaching research methods” so difficult.

Martin


> On Jan 7, 2018, at 4:28 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Martin:
> 
> I'm not sure to what extent your bepuzzlement is genuine misunderstanding
> and to what extent it is simply a polite form of disagreement. There is
> always a lot in what I write that is opaque and even obtuse. For example, I
> always seem to have a lot of trouble writing clauses that have more than
> one sentient actor in them: I can't get the names and the pronominal
> reference right (I also have that strange mental disability where when you
> are driving and your wife tells you to take a left, you turn right, and
> vice versa). For example, I wrote: "He even speculates that Goldmann does
> this because he is writing for worker autodidacts and not other
> professors." I should have written: "He even speculates that Lukacs does
> this because he is writing for worker autodidacts and not other professors."
> 
> But of course we politely disagree too. You are an anthropologist and a
> professor; I am a linguist and a translator. Both callings require a
> modicum of courtesy and decency towards opponents (as in boxing); both
> involve "sciences of a natural whole" given by the environment rather than
> by some act of analysis (unlike boxing); but our two sciences are as
> different as the methods must inevitably be. As I said, I think I "get" the
> point of anthropological study, at least to the extent that outsiders
> usually get it ("Oh, right--he joined a gym in South Chicago to see what
> boxing felt like...."). You, on the other hand, said you didn't get the
> point of looking at grammar, and I was trying to explain.
> 
> I'll try again. I can understand South Chicago English, although my wife
> cannot, and even has trouble understanding the "eye dialect" which Wacquant
> uses to quote his data, even though she reads texts in seventeenth century
> English with great ease. There are interesting historical reasons which
> explain this difference between me and my wife, but they will only
> make sense if we understand what exactly the difference is. The fact that
> the data comes to us AS WRITTEN SPEECH in Wacquant's article means that we
> are not simply talking about dialect, because dialect is overwhelmingly
> phonological in its variation. Something else is varying which impedes
> comprehension for her and facilitates it for me. I think it is not dialect
> but register, and I think the variations are not simply phonological but
> grammatical and ultimately semantic. The existence or non-existence of
> semantic variation is the key issue which divided Hasan and Labov, and
> without it we cannot really make sense of the debate over "deficit
> linguistics" which appears briefly in the lchc polyphonic autobiography.
> 
> But I am happy to discuss what you find interesting instead. In fact, I too
> find it interesting (and I even find that it is the same issue, because my
> wife's inability to understand the data and my own ability to understand it
> is a much more measurable and much more operational way of talking about
> "point of view"). I just disagree. To me (and to Vygotsky, because I am a
> linguist and a translator), it's very important to make an analysis
> replicable; it's what makes analysis understandable, teachable, scientific,
> and ultimately democratic. I don't think that you can do that by
> approaching interview data as a literary critic, whose task is to interpret
> the text for the (non-)layman; I think you can do it by uncovering the
> regularities that make the data comprehensible to the participants
> themselves. I don't think you can do it by trying to identify "tropes".
> 
> For example: what I said about Wacquant dismissing class refers to
> Wacquant's own text: see p. 494. He may have written otherwise elsewhere
> (very likely, as the position he takes on p. 494 is utterly incoherent).
> But we also disagree on what a working class job is: I don't think that a
> security guard or a rent-a-cop or a night watchman is a working class job,
> and in the context of South Chicago I see it is as being a lot closer to
> gang life than the participants seem to.
> 
> David Kellogg
> 
> Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
> Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
> Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
> 
> Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
> 
> http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 12:24 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
> 
>> Well, David!  I am once again puzzled. I suppose you might say that that’s
>> just my “subjective reaction” to what you have written. But even subjective
>> reactions are aspects of the interpretation of a text, are they not? So let
>> me try to explain my confusion. It arises afresh from each of the 4
>> paragraphs in your message:
>> 
>> #1. Yes, Goldmann identifies some differences between Heidegger and
>> Lukacs. That would not be difficult for anyone to do, would it!? The main
>> point of his book, however, is that there are fundamental similarities
>> between existentialism and marxism, and between Heidegger and Lukacs in
>> particular. (Heidegger rejected the label ‘existentialist,’ but let’s leave
>> that to the side.)
>> 
>> Let’s stick close to Goldmann’s actual language. His principal thesis is
>> that "between 1910 and 1925 a true philosophical turning-point occurred,
>> which resulted in the creation of existentialism and contemporary
>> dialectical materialism.”
>> 
>> As a consequence, one can find several “fundamental bond[s] between Lukacs
>> and Heidegger.”  Central among these is "the rejection of the
>> transcendental subject, the conception of man as inseparable from the world
>> which he is a part of, the definition of his place in the universe as
>> historicity.”
>> 
>> Yes, there are "differences which put the two philosophies in opposition
>> to each other, but on this common foundation.” What is the common
>> foundation, again? It is the recognition that "Man is not opposite the
>> world which he tries to understand and upon which he acts, but within this
>> world which he is a part of, and there is no radical break between the
>> meaning he is trying to find or introduce into the universe and that which
>> he is trying' to find or introduce into his own existence. This meaning,
>> common to both individual and collective human life, common as much to
>> humanity as, ultimately, to the universe, is called history.”
>> 
>> This is indeed the rejection of dualism that you have noted. It is also,
>> as I have noted, key to Wacquant’s project, which begins with the
>> assumption that a boxer is not ‘opposite’ the world of boxing, upon which
>> he acts; he is a part of this world; there is ‘ontological complicity’
>> between person and world. And it’s worth noting, I think, that this
>> rejection of dualism must call into question the seemingly self-evident
>> distinction between ‘subjective reaction’ and ‘objective analysis.’
>> 
>> 
>> #2. Yes, Goldmann proposes that "for Heidegger the historical subject is
>> the individual where­as Lukacs... conceives of history as the action of the
>> transindi­vidual subject and, in particular, of social classes.”  But in my
>> opinion this is based on a questionable reading of Heidegger (but that
>> doesn’t make it nothing more than a ‘subjective reaction,’ does it?).
>> Heidegger’s concept of Dasein - “being there” - is a general term for human
>> being, whether an individual or a group. Division 2 of Being and Time (with
>> “living-unto-death”) is about *individualization*: how one can *become* an
>> active individual agent of history. But Vygotsky was also interested in
>> individualization, wasn’t he? This seems a difference in emphasis, not
>> unimportant but possible only on the background of a shared foundation.
>> (Note that this is in no way intended as a defense of Heidegger, whose
>> personal life was deplorable and whose philosophy is fundamentally flawed.)
>> 
>> 
>> #3. You write that "I don't accept that an anthropologist who codes
>> interviews in terms of "tropes" is doing anything more than coding his or
>> her own subjective reactions to the data.”
>> 
>> First, Wacquant doesn’t “code” his data at all. What he does do is
>> identify and then interpret the tropes that the boxers use when talking
>> about their occupation. You’ll find an argument against the common
>> assumption that qualitative analysis involves coding in chapter 3 of my
>> book. Second, you seem to be suggesting that paying attention to tropes -
>> metaphors and other figures of speech - is somehow merely a subjective
>> reaction. I assume then, that you don’t have much sympathy for George
>> Lakoff’s analysis of the recurrent metaphors in everyday talk, in Metaphors
>> We Live By? Or for Hayden White’s massive analysis - what he calls
>> “tropology” - of grand historical narratives - those of Marx, Hegel,
>> Nietzsche and others - in his book Metahistory?
>> 
>> 
>> #4. You suggest that social class and employment are not of interest to
>> Wacquant. But Wacquant has written widely - and I mean *widely* - on the
>> mechanisms of reproduction of social class, on the intersections of class
>> and race, and on the way class is handled in sociology (he’s a sociologist,
>> not an anthropologist).
>> 
>> In this article, for example, he points out “That boxing is a
>> working-class occupation is reflected not only in the physical nature of
>> the activity but also in the social recruitment of its practitioners and in
>> their continuing dependence on blue-collar or un-skilled service jobs to
>> support their career in the ring” (p. 502).
>> 
>> In addition, he insists that his analysis of what the boxers say is
>> necessarily informed by his knowledge, as a researcher, of various aspects
>> of the form of life of boxing that they boxers themselves cannot grasp:
>> "(i) the objective shape of that structure [of the social ‘field' of
>> boxing] and the set of constraints and facilitations it harbors; (ii) its
>> location in the wider social spaces of the ghetto and the city; and (iii)
>> the social trajectories and dispositions of those who enter and compete in
>> it” (p. 491). This approach seems to me hardly to ignore class, its
>> inequities, or its economic necessities.
>> 
>> I guess we simply have different 'subjective reactions' to this article!
>> :)
>> 
>> Or, in a more serious tone: when you ask me to "Compare:
>> 
>> a) "Phonology is variable but semantics is invariant."
>> b) "Phonology is variable but semantics invariant."
>> c) "Phonology variable, but semantics is invariant."
>> 
>> What is the difference between a) and b)?”  are you not asking for my
>> “subjective reactions”? Or are there “objective reactions”? Aren’t we
>> talking about consciousness, always an aspect of our being-in-the-world,
>> mediated by material representations?
>> 
>> cheers
>> 
>> Martin
>> 
>>> On Jan 7, 2018, at 3:07 AM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I read it, Martin. What Goldmann says is that Lukacs accepts
>> subject-object
>>> dualism in a way that Heidegger would find unacceptable. He even
>> speculates
>>> that Goldmann does this because he is writing for worker autodidacts and
>>> not other professors. He also notes that they supported different sides
>> in
>>> World War II, and to his credit considers this a difference and not a
>>> similarity.
>>> 
>>> But the chiefest difference Goldmann notes is that Heidegger is
>> essentially
>>> interested in the fate of the individual and not the social; Dasein is
>>> really an individuation of Sein, and "living-for-death" is clearly
>>> individualistic. Lukacs is the other way around: he's interested in the
>>> individual job only in so far as it is a token of the mass and the class.
>>> 
>>> Let us get back in the ring. I agree that there is very little analysis
>> of
>>> the actual language, which to me means that there is very little analysis
>>> of the actual data. I don't accept that an anthropologist who codes
>>> interviews in terms of "tropes" is doing anything more than coding his or
>>> her own subjective reactions to the data. This is why Vygotsky rejects
>> the
>>> "objectivist" accounts of development (e.g. that of his friend Blonsky,
>>> based on teething, or accounts based on sexual maturation) as being
>>> essentially subjectivist: he says that the choice of this trope or that
>> one
>>> is subjectivist.
>>> 
>>> For example. Wacquant doesn't even bother to notice that a huge
>> proportion
>>> of his informants are night watchmen or security guards or rent-a-cops.
>> He
>>> even says at the outset that out-of-the-boxing-ring jobs in particular
>> and
>>> the class status in general are not factors in his study. But I think you
>>> can see that boxing is not exactly irrelevant to professions which
>> involve
>>> the use of violence in defence of private property. Isn't it subjectivist
>>> to simply write this off?
>>> 
>>> David Kellogg
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> 
>> 
>>