ABSTRACT
The process of analysis is intrinsic to all stages of ethnographic research, and not something that begins once data collection is complete. Thus, discussions of methods in preceding chapters include much material on analysis. However, virtually all research projects eventually reach a stage of withdrawal from the field when analysis becomes more formalized. This chapter considers some of the implications of this withdrawal and the directions analysis may subsequently take. Withdrawal from the field is not simply a matter of physical distancing; it also involves a degree of intellectual distancing from the minutiae of ethnographic observations in order to discern structures and develop theories. However, too great an intellectual distance carries the danger of producing theoretical structures that are irrelevant to the lived experiences of people on the ground and neither grounded in nor answerable to ethnographic data. One commentator on Bhaskar’s critical realism sees this dilemma as an intrinsic part of the nature of the human sciences, specifically their ‘concrete-boundness’:
We can only directly study concrete entities, not the diverse mechanisms and tendencies which make them what they are. We can study the latter only through the former, not by isolating them in closed systems. The further our theory gets away from the concrete towards the abstract (which it must nevertheless do) the more prone to error it is.
