The investment of theory in ethnography in social anthropology

Abstract

In this article I analyze how theory operates in ethnographic research in social and/or cultural anthropology. I argue that ethnography involves the deployment of certain analytical procedures that lead to the relativization of theory —and, eventually, to its reformulation— through its confrontation with ethnographic materials: the dynamic integration of the native perspectives in the analysis; the combination of holism, the restriction of the preselection of ethnographic materials, and their strict contextualization; and various uses of comparison. Next, I illustrate this statement by showing how my ethnographies of the conflicts between the members of a fishermen’s cooperative and of the Peronist concept of ‘loyalty’ gave rise to some theoretical developments around the analysis of the moral dimension of social life. Finally, I suggest that these procedures are the correlate at the level of methodology of the ‘ethnographic perspective’ —a very general theory about the nature of social life that has been developed throughout the history of the discipline.