narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

The Ethnographic:
Most commonly ethnography is understood as the study of people in naturally occurring
settings or ‘fields’ by methods of data collection which attempts to capture their social
meanings and ordinary activities, involving the researcher participating directly in the
setting, if not also the activities, in order to collect data in a systematic manner (Brewer,
2000: 6) but without meaning being imposed on them externally (Denzin & Lincoln,
2000). Such a definition is premised on an implicit ontological position based on a
naturalistic world view where people are considered as ‘meaning endowing’ in their
naturally occurring settings, whose motivated actions arise from and reflect back on
these meaning laden actions and experiences. Its associated epistemological
assumption is that social life should be studied without any external imposition from the
outside or a scientific manipulation on it.
Ethnography in this context aims at grasping the meanings people give to their actions
and this is done by what Geertz (1973) would call ‘thick description’ of phenomenon
from natives’ point of view or as Fetterman (1998: 20) calls ‘the emic perspective’.
‘Thick description’ invokes emotionality, self-feelings and webs of social relationships. In
it, the voices, feelings, actions, and meanings of interacting individuals are heard. I
employ this interactionist ‘interpretive ethnography’ (Denzin, 1997) in undertaking my
research. In this context, I link the ‘cultural turn’ executed through this ‘interpretive
ethnography’ to the ‘narrative turn’ executed through ‘thick description’ of the ‘emic
perspective’. These are in turn linked to the interpretivist and interactionist turns or
traditions in sociology that focuses on the micro-processes of everyday interaction and
on how subjects interpret or make meaning of their actions. However, I distance my
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