The Ethnographic Hunch

Abstract

The Ethnographic Hunch 31 proj ects, which are usually collaborative, are designed to address a set of research questions, which are explored ethnographically, sometimes in combination with other methods. Here, the research questions and the specific things we think we need to find out are one ele ment of the research. We should not, however, assume that we can be confident that we are already aware of every thing we need to know before starting to explore the worlds from which we expect such knowledge to emerge. Themes and questions we did not realize we needed to investigate tend to emerge along the way, often through ethnographic hunches. The idea of the ethnographic hunch also helps explain how the research anthropologists do-while often with relatively small samples in contrast to quantitative studies-is systematic and in-depth, and achieves rigorous and deep analyses. It does not just find things out; it also follows these things through, often in collaboration with research participants and co-researchers, interrogating them across the experiences of participants and having an unfailing ability to detect patterns in how the same or similar things manifest across groups of participants. In what follows I first discuss the question of analy sis in anthropologi-cal ethnography. Then I explore the significance of thinking anthropologi-cally through the ethnographic hunch by using three themes: serendipity and the hunch as it emerges in fieldwork and analy sis; how the hunch is related to comparative analy sis; and how it enables us to create wider shared concepts. In doing so, however, I take a step away from the way the hunch would be used in traditional anthropology and call for an interdisciplin-ary anthropology that engages the hunch for team-based interventional proj ects.