ABSTRACT
The introductory chapter mainly addresses two fundamental, yet largely unsettled, theoretical questions that concern students and academics who practice ethnographic inquiries with the ultimate goal to obtain qualitative, experience-near, and shareable accounts of human living. The first question is the epistemology of ethnography. To this question, the author posits a rather provocative answer as to argue that writing – the textualization of lived experience of the others in form of ethnography – is epistemologically prior to the researcher’s fieldwork experience in the production of ethnographic knowledge. Based on this epistemological premise, this book endeavors to argue for a strain of realism that has the potential to resolve the immanent tension between relativism and science in contention over the epistemological status of ethnographic knowledge. The second fundamental question is: what is the putative object that the ethnographer writes about? The author suggests that “lived experience” (Erlebnis) offers such an ethnographic object. Since the lived experience that an ethnographer experiences during fieldwork cannot be studied directly, further theorizations of lived experience are necessary. But, unlike current theorizations, the present endeavor underscores both the non-discursivity and transcendence of lived experience in the lifeworld, and the way power is clandestinely imbued in the everyday life in shaping subjectivity and practice.
