Estranged Familiars: A Deweyan Approach to Philosophy and Qualitative Research

• In Event: Philosophical Inquiry and Empirical Research

Abstract

This paper focuses on a philosophical-ethnographic study of children’s understandings of the ethical ideals of solidarity of justice. To carry out the research, I combined the ethnographic methods of participant-observation with philosophical inquiry. Over the course of one spring, I observed and participated in children’s construction of a miniature village, through a civic-education program called “Village”. Because children invest the construction of their towns with intense significance, the political questions and answers that arise at “Village” are a pragmatic expression of their ideals. My understanding of children’s politics, and the dissertation that resulted from this research, invokes especially Dewey’s notion that any observed form or object is but a challenge. The case is not otherwise with ideals of justice or peace or human brotherhood, or equality, or order. They too are not things self-enclosed to be known by introspection, as objects were once supposed to be known by rational insight. Like thunderbolts and tubercular disease and the rainbow they can be known only by extensive and minute observation of consequences incurred in action (Dewey, 1922, 56-7). My paper for this symposium explains how I carried out this project and why I believe it falls squarely into the traditions of American Pragmatism. It draws on Dewey, and on contemporary readings of Dewey’s work, especially commentary on Dewey’s naturalism.

Ethnographers often claim to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange”; this paper argues that philosophy does the same. A look at the history and purposes of these fields, my paper concludes, suggests that they are better understood as estranged familiars than as radically divergent approaches. Philosophy and ethnography, as disciplines, both engage deeply with the premise that meaning is constructed, through language and interaction, by human beings in everyday life. Ethnographers are often thought of as venturing out into the far-flung territories of the actual world and bringing descriptive accounts back to their home audiences, but this account of their work is incomplete. In these ventures, they travel also into the domain of alternative explanations, into myth and witchcraft, into the plurality of meaning constructions. They remind readers that there are alternatives to the world they think they know. So do philosophers. One of the most important projects of political and ethical philosophy has always been to remind readers that our social and political landscape could be otherwise. Insofar as both qualitative research and philosophy explore the plurality of human meaning constructions, they are tugged at all stages of the process of research and writing by both actuality and imagination. Their methods and their insights, with a common history and shared concerns, can be brought together to illuminate each other. Philosophy, I would conjecture, is pulled more towards the imaginary, qualitative research towards the actual, but it is a mistake to overemphasize their differences.

Author

• Amy B. Shuffelton, Loyola University Chicago