ABSTRACT
Empiricism and ethnography are often spoken of as though they were just some sort of naive, theory-less, bumbling. Pragmatism is often described as though it were nothing more than unprincipled opportunism. The most prominent among the modern philosophical schools that have denied the observability of purpose and rationality is positivism. The most basic difference between Malinowski's method and the methods derived from positivism concerns the relation between what is considered analysis and what is considered data. In the positivistic frame of reference, by contrast, data and data collection is one thing, analysis quite another, something done after the fact and quite out of the reach of those one claims to be explaining. Ethnographers generally regard physical structures as non-problematic. While positivists and to some extent Marxist and other anti-empirical perspectives have been predominant in general ethnology since about the 1930s, pragmatic approaches have continued to predominate in the ethnography of law.
