ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the theoretical perspective—interpretivism—emerged in contradistinction to positivism in attempts to understand and explain human and social reality. It also considers symbolic interactionism and phenomenology. These contrast with each other quite sharply in their attitude towards culture as inherited meaning system. Symbolic interactionism explores the understandings abroad in culture as the meaningful matrix that guides lives. Symbolic interactionism offers what is very much an American perspective on life, society and the world. For ethnography as for the symbolic interactionism that commonly forms its matrix, the notion of taking the place of the other is central. Ethnography undertaken from an interactionist perspective has been framed schematically in many ways.
