ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses what seems to be one of the central ambiguities in ethnography: between a commitment to a methodology based on naive realism and a theoretical approach founded on constructivism that is often taken to imply relativism. It looks at each of the two most obvious solutions to this problem: the adoption of a consistent (naive) realism or a consistent relativism. The first involves unacceptable assumptions about the asymmetry of explanations of true and false beliefs and of actions based upon them. The second leads to all those problems that usually follow from the adoption of a relativist epistemology, notably internal inconsistency. The chapter argues that satisfactory resolution of the problem requires people to recognise that they are not faced with a stark choice between naive realism and relativism, that there are more subtle forms of realism that avoid the problems of these two positions.
