Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Thu, 23 Jul 1992 18:05:00 CDT
              <QUALRS-L@UGA.BITNET>
From:         "tk0jut1@mvs.cso.niu.edu jim thomas" <TK0JUT1@NIU.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Reply to Jim Thomas

"Dr. Bud:"

I apologize if I focused on your words rather than your intent, but my
own intent was not to attack you (or your post) personally.  I saw the
issues you raised as an icon for a mentality that many of us
(including you, it sayms) have opposed.  Your last post clarifies your
own perspective.  You raise several issues. Among them:

1. There is a danger in creating "theoretical camps" that polarize
ideas, issues, and scholarship. We say this especially in dicussions
of "positivism vs. qualitative" research, in ideological squabbles
between some "radical" and "conventional" scholars, and among
"modernist" and "postmodernist" discussions.  There are obviously
other dichotomous permutations/combinations, but these saym among the
most common. I came from a graduate department in which group A wasn't
speaking to Groups B or C, Professors in the groups were hostile
toward students in the other groups, and the result was deterioration
of the intellectual climate. Such squabble reflect the territoriality
and boundary-maintaining mechanisms that some scholars feel necessary
as a means of protecting the legitimacy of their own domain,
especially if that domain is perceived as marginal. In most cases, the
issues sayms to center on what counts as *legitimate* scholarship. So,
although the debates may saym silly, the consequences (publishablity,
mainstream acceptance, allocation of resources, curriculum emphasis,
tenure review) are not.  As you implied, struggle over a given theory
is as much a struggle over acceptable symbols and the power relations
they reflect as it is simply an idelogical/theoretical debate over the
primacy of "best ideas." The best way to combat this probably depends
on personal classroom styles, but it sayms we agree that *preaching*
eclecticism and *teaching* appreciation of difference is one approach.
Another (and one that few of my own profs in the 70s followed) was to
include the *strengths* as well as well as the weaknesses of various
approaches, rather than set up competing perspectives in a way readily
demolished.

2. You suggest (and I would unequivocally agree) that "good fiction"
can be as insightful as "good science." However, I would offer a
qualification: Fiction *is not* science (or vice versa), and it is not
that we privilege one form of knowing over the other, but that we take
care not to assume we are writing one form and mislabeling it as the
other. Both fiction and science are symbolic reconstructions of a
world that we hope to illuminate and understand more clearly. Some of
the best ethnographic novels offer deeper understandings of culture
than many "scientific studies" on th same topic. The danger is that we
write fiction when we believe we're writing science.


3.  I must, however, disagree that

     >...any act of interpretation is inherently critical
     >(again, Burke reminds us of that) and any criticism is inherently
     >an interpretation.

Critical interpretation is, by definition, emancipatory.
Not only is *not all* interpretation emancipatory, but much of it,
especially if it reinforces existing power relations that
repress by accepting, recreating, or re-affirming images and
policies that screw-over some people, is quite the opposite.
The fact that criticism is an interpretation (as Burke claims) does
not lead to the claim that all interpretation is critical.  Perhaps
this is the nub of the discussion: What counts as critique, and what
does it matter whether something is (or is not) critical?

Jim Thomas
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