ABSTRACT
This chapter is premised on the “epistemological break” coined by Alfred Schutz, which disconnects two realms: the “world of consociates,” where social reality is directly experienced face-to-face in the vivid present, and the “world of contemporaries,” where the other is interpreted in terms of “types.” It is argued that this break is a suggestive vehicle for conducting a meta-exposition of major claims which problematize the traditional authority of ethnography. In light of the break, the postmodernist attempts to attain or retain the here-and-now understanding of subjective meaning, or “voice,” in ethnographies are but epistemological impossibilities. It is concluded that the postmodernist privileging of a “naive ethnography”‘ that emphasizes “experiential,” “interpretive,” “dialogical,” and “polyphonic” processes is neither able to deliver on its promise at the methodic level, nor amendable to Schutz’s epistemological break at the theoretical level.
