Required:

1. The sociology/anthropology of science as applied to "ethnographic practice" (Lave 2011: 157)
2. Kaplan, one of the precursor (along with Thomas Kuhn), is attempting to do two things:
   1. debunk the mystique of "methodology" in science (p. 3, 24);
      1. the paradoxical place of training in methodology in such a framework (are methods courses necessary?)
   2. argue for a particular view of science that stresses the independence of the activity while recognizing its intimately human, that is social, aspects (p. 4).
      1. Science is not beyond humanity; it is an intimately human, though special, form of activity. It is controlled by people, not by (reconstructed) rules, with a particular (-in-use) ways of looking at the world.
         1. Note that, in the late 20th century, in the intellectual literature on postmodernism, and in the political critique of elitism and Euro-centrism and such, this same argument has led to a kind of methodological nihilism. Kaplan, on the contrary, celebrates the humanity of research as a wonderful cultural construction that allows us to do more than used to be possible. This note is particularly important for anthropology where postmodernism was most developed.
         2. Note further that this nihilistic trend may be changing among many of those inspired by Actor-Network-Theory (Latour 2005)
      2. The centrality of investigation (p. 15): The segmentation of "truth" and the tools applied may be "human" (cultural), the truth (i.e. the world) is not human.
      3. A scientist investigates that for which she has been made responsible and she uses whatever she discovers can be finds useful in making an argument.
      4. As a human activity science is necessarily a social activity, that is, it takes place within a "community" ( p.4).

         Note that Kaplan takes "community" for granted. He writes within a long tradition in "community study." In many ways Kaplan prefigures much that has come to surround Jean Lave's work on "communities of practice", for example her work with his interests in apprentices, rites of passage, movement from peripheral to full membership, etc. But there is also a large body of work criticizing the concept of "community" in anthropology and sociology that would have to be brought to bear. In my recent work I use the word "polity." One can also use words like "team," "group," "society," though each carry with them the burden of earlier uses

         1. This is true of all scientific research. In the behavioral sciences it true of ethnography and all "qualitative" methods as well as of experimental research.
         2. What is different about ethnography is the stance one takes in relation to this fact. One can attempt to "deal" the sociological aspects through various tricks, from creating "white rooms" where to conduct experiments, though the independent scoring of test results, through the use of third person singular syntactic forms in the final reporting ("the researcher, he or she ..."). From our point of view, all these techniques are means to blind oneself and one's audience to the condition of the research. It is a way to deceive, lie, bury one's consciousness of one's situation and of that of the human beings one is studying. Ethnography wants to raise our consciousness of our situation.
      5. As a human activity science is also a cultural activity that requires segmenting experience in (hopefully) new ways--or rather ways that make us see more than we already knew. In that sense science is:
         1. relative,
         2. about making differences,
         3. arbitrary.

      (e.g. the "sound" of the Big Bang according to the New York Times (9/16/2003) "Astronomers say they have heard the sound of a black hole singing. And what it is singing, and perhaps has been singing for more than two billion years, they say, is B flat — a B flat 57 octaves lower than middle C.")

      6. But science not, strictly speaking, a construction of reality but a construction of the means to see hitherto hidden to a certain population, aspects of reality: trees fall in forest even when human beings are not there to listen to the sounds they make when they fall. The task of science is to take human beings into the forest and give them the tools to hear the sound waves it made.
3. Note that while Kaplan wrote this in 1964, and it was relatively new at the time, his analysis has become somewhat commonsense following the more popular book by T. Kuhn (The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1970 [1962]) and much writing in the "critical" mode. What distinguishes Kaplan from these critics is that he does not take his affirmation of the fundamentally social reality of science to imply a radical critique of science. It is only if one clings to unreconstructed positivism that the affirmation that science is a product of culture can lead to radical skepticism. That science is cultural does not make it less scientific but specify better the processes that participate in anyone getting the kind of knowledge about the world that might be useful for particular purposes.
   1. A note on 'discipline' from both the original common sense of the word and the usual sense in academia.
      1. Discipline as the reconstructive activity of a person in authority faced by the deconstructive activity of another person for whom the first has responsibility
      2. Discipline as the ensemble of authoritative practices that demonstrate that some personal activity belongs to a particular conversation (tradition, culture).

      For the dark version of all this see Foucault ([1975] 1978).

   2. Note that, in anthropology, one powerful development on the sense that science is a communal (and thus social and cultural) enterprise was Geertz's pessimism (1972) that blossomed into what came to be known as "postmodernism." In sociology, one powerful voice, that of P. Bourdieu, rose against the development of a sociology of science on the grounds that it undermined its legitimacy () . Latour has responded (), but the debate has not been settled.
      1. Though attacking Latour, Bourdieu accepted the post-modern interpretation of the cultural grounding of all human activity and thus the "fiction" that science is ... scientific.  And then he fought against this interpretation.  But Latour (Garfinkel, etc.) are not post-modern but, practical.
4. Practically, for a student considering ethnography, several things are implied by Kaplan's epistemology as it can be applied to ethnography (and of course to any other methnodology):
   1. The research is not conducted by an abstract human being. It is conducted by an "I," who has many "ME's" and who is a YOU to various persons
      1. Thus I is not doing the research by herself but in concert with various others (each in very different positions relative to yours):
         1. THEY who read YOUR proposal
         2. THEY whom YOU study
         3. THEY who read YOUR final report before the defense
         4. THEY who read YOUR final report when you publish
            1. as you will hopefully discover, the requirements of a dissertation committee are quite different from those of a publisher...
   2. In each case the nature of the interaction determines what gets done (a complex of what you do and what others do to you and with you. The difficulty is in linking the various acts (proposals, field study, report)
      1. The relationship between proposal and field research is difficult for you.
      2. The relationship between the field and the report is difficult for your audience. The difficulties ethnographers have had in making the link is what has given ethnography its reputation for softness. It is always hard for someone reading an ethnographic report to know exactly what you experienced. (This is something on which we will spend a lot of time in this course.)
5. must think in terms of a project where you will encounter some human beings in their particularity. Given the "nature" of human beings, this project can take many forms:
   1. Field observation (with more or less participation)
   2. Conversational or discourse analysis (based on audio or video recordings)
   3. Interviewing and other quasi-experimental procedures (dangerous in the current context).
   4. Content or aiscourse analysis of text or artifact.
   5. etc.
6. Each type of project is possible, and useful to the tradition--more or less so depending on earlier research. Under most circumstances it is essentially impossible to do several of these things within one project for technical reasons which will become abundantly clear. Basically all of them are time-consuming, take one in different directions, and cannot easily be reconciled within a final report.

A note on proposal writing.