ABSTRACT
There is a key difference between these holistic and scholarly perspectives that demand ‘reasoned reasons’ (Question: But when you said ‘it just happened, what do you mean by that’? Answer: ‘I suppose it was stupid’) and a phenomenological approach that seeks to understand ‘first order’ forms of articulation that often have no justification other than a confirmatory statement of what has been done (Statement: ‘It just happened’). Scholarly demands for ‘reasoned reasons’ perforce necessitate a satisfactory ‘confession’ (Foucault 1979) that encouraged my respondents to assume culpability for the ‘stupidity’ that defined actions that were now located ‘in their past’. The disjuncture between the respondents’ present perception (‘I was stupid’) and the historical activity to which they refer (drug use) was based on the imputation of the spatial and temporal distance of the scholarly relation to practice into the agents’ relation to their practice, thereby assigning a level of reflexivity (which is that of the scientific observer) to respondents that are the object of social scientific observation.
