ABSTRACT
Ethnographic fieldwork is guided, but not necessarily determined, by the anthropologist's theoretical approach. A situational analysis pays more attention to the integration of case material in order to facilitate the description of social processes. A related problem of sociological significance where situational analysis would appear to be relevant concerns the discrepancy between people's beliefs and professed acceptance of certain norms on the one hand and their actual behaviour on the other. There has been an increasing interest in the problem of conflicting norms, including norm conflicts resulting from foreign cultural influences. As a method of integrating variations, exceptions, and accidents into descriptions of regularities, situational analysis, with its emphasis on process, might therefore be particularly suitable for the study of unstable and non-homogeneous societies. The use of extended-case material of the kind that Middleton employs is aimed then at illuminating certain regularities of social process, not at highlighting personal idiosyncracies.
