From How to Why

Abstract

Ethnographers often start fieldwork by focusing on descriptive tasks that will enable them to answer questions about how social life proceeds, and then they work toward explaining more formally why patterns appear in their data. Making the transition from `how?' to `why?' can be a dilemma, but the ethnographer's folk culture provides especially useful clues. By dwelling on their appreciation of especially luminous data, ethnographers can light the path to causal inference. In this, the second of a two-part article, four of seven forms for characterizing the rhetorical effectiveness of ethnographic data are illustrated and the distinctive resources they offer for causal explanation are analyzed.