Abstract
To describe is also to represent and interpret. All three concepts may stand one for the other. The object of this book is therefore to single out each of these moments of research, without providing any other meaning than a didactic one. Indeed, behind those three concepts (description, representation, and interpretation) are research practices that, however different they may be, are complementary and raise specific questions and difficulties. This chapter explores them and serves as an introduction to a careful research. The favorite approach is both empirical and inductive: it starts with fieldwork and then seeks to find a general logic. It strives to solve a specific puzzle without losing track of the matter of general interest it raises. The scientific debate is open to discussion and may hence go forth.
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- 1.
Jessie Martin, Décrire le film de cinéma. Au départ de l’analyse (Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2011), pp. 13–16.
- 2.
Émile Zola: “I would define description as an environment that determines and completes man,” and on Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), one of the supporters of the Parnassian “art for art’s sake” doctrine introduced in the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835): “there is nothing here but things, no voice, no human thrill arises from this dead land,” “De la description,” quoted in Philippe Hamon, La Description littéraire (Paris, Macula, 1991), pp. 157–158.
- 3.
A trend in historical research started by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch in the 1920s around the creation of a review destined for a long life: Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. It had a pragmatic orientation “not through articles about methods or theoretical dissertation [but] through examples and facts,” quoted in Christian Delacroix, François Dosse and Patrick Garcia, Les Courants historiques en France, XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris, Gallimard, 2007), p. 221.
- 4.
Delacroix, Dosse and Garcia, Les Courants historiques en France, XIXe–XXe, p. 312.
- 5.
Howard S. Becker was a student of Everett C. Hughes, who was a student of Robert Park, a student of Georg Simmel.
- 6.
Nicolas Herpin and Nicolas Jonas, La Sociologie américaine. Controverses et innovations (Paris, La Découverte, 2011), pp. 21–33.
- 7.
Pierre Tripier, “Une sociologie pragmatique,” preface to W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, Le Paysan polonais en Europe et en Amérique (Paris, Nathan, 1998), p. 27.
- 8.
Howard S. Becker, Tricks of the Trade, How to Think about Your Research While You’re Doing It (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 79.
- 9.
The expression is from Erwin Panofsky who believed there is a practical impossibility to do formal descriptions , strictly speaking. Indeed, for him description departs from a purely formal sphere to reach a region of senses. Erwin Panofsky nonetheless grants that among stratas of subject matter or meaning, some are less interpretative than others. Furthermore, we may assume that, contrary to the social conduct that is our focus here, describing a work of art (which is Panofsky’s aim) enters more directly into interpretation relative to the history of forms. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York, Zone Books, 1975).
- 10.
Donatella della Porta and Michael Keating (eds), Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences. A Pluralistic Perspective (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008), in particular Chap. 11 (Donatella della Porta, “Comparative Analysis: Case-Oriented versus Variable-Oriented Research,” pp. 198–222) and Chap. 12 (Pascal Venesson, “Case Studies and Process Tracing: Theories and Practices,” pp. 223–239).
- 11.
Howard S. Becker, What about Mozart? What about Murder? Reasoning from Cases (Chicago (Ill.), Chicago University Press, 2014).
- 12.
Description involves freeing oneself from opinions, seen here as “epistemological obstacles,” Gaston Bachelard, La Formation de l’esprit scientifique (Paris, Vrin, 1972 [1934]), pp. 13–22.
- 13.
We will follow Howard S. Becker’s recommendation “to let the case define the concept,” concepts being “empirical generalizations,” Tricks of the Trade, pp. 123 and 128.
- 14.
Becker , Tricks of the Trade, p. 83. Work similar to Clifford Ge ertz’s “thick description ,” which opens up a wide variety of meanings and reminds us that the description-representation-interpretation sequence is neither compartmentalized nor mechanical.
- 15.
A way of illustrating the “serendipity” analyzed by Robert K. Merton, Éléments de méthode sociologique (Paris, Plon, 1953), pp. 43–49: an unexpected discovery triggers the researcher’s curiosity and leads to a new hypothesis through an unforeseen shortcut.
- 16.
Karl Weick, “The Generative Properties of Richness,” Academy of Management Journal, 50(1) (2007): 14–19, quoted by Hervé Dumez, “La description: point aveugle de la recherche qualitative,” Le Libellio d’Aegis, 6 (2) (2010): 41.
- 17.
Becker , Tricks of the Trade, p. 44.
- 18.
Dumez, “La description”: 86.
- 19.
During the annual meeting of the American Sociological Society in Chicago, a sp eech reproduced in Joseph D. Lohman, “The Participant Observer in Community Studies,” American Sociological Review, 2 (6) (1937): 890–897.
- 20.
William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society. The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago (Ill.), University of Chicago Press, 1943).
- 21.
Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1984); Alain Coulon, L’Ethnométhodologie (Paris, PUF, 1987).
- 22.
Jeffrey T. Checkel, “Process Tracing,” in Audie Klotz and Deepa Prakash (eds), Qualitative Methods in International Relations. A Pluralist Guide (New York (N. Y.), Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 114–127; Vincent Pouillot, “Practice Tracing,” in Andrew Bennet and Jeffrey T. Checkel (eds), Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 237–259.
- 23.
See Chap. 12 of this book.
- 24.
See in particular the work of Émile Durkheim , Jean Piaget, Michel Foucault, Georges Duby, Serge Moscovici and Denise Jodelet.
- 25.
Christian Delacroix, François Dosse and Patrick Garcia (eds.), Historicités (Paris, La Découverte, 2009).
- 26.
Marie-Claire Robic, Jean-Louis Tissier and Philippe Pinchemel, Deux siècles de géographie française. Une anthologie (Paris, CTHS Géographie, 2011).
- 27.
Jacques Lévy (ed.), L’Invention du monde. Une géographie de la mondialisation (Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2008).
- 28.
- 29.
A particular illustration of a more general observation formulated by Durkheim : “the whole does not equal the sum of its parts; it is something different whose properties differ from those displayed by the parts from which it is formed,” in Émile Durkheim , The Rules of Sociological Method (New York: The Free Press, 1982), p. 128.
- 30.
Sylvie Mesure, “Dilthey Wilhelm (1833–1911),” Encyclopædia Universalis (Available at www-universalis-edu-com.acces-distant.sciences-po.fr/).
- 31.
Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought (Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1967), p. 191.
- 32.
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Harper, 2013), p. xxix.
- 33.
Clark, The Sleepwalkers, p. xxx.
- 34.
Pierre Fédida, “Interprétation,” Encyclopædia Universalis (Available at www.universalis-edu.com/).
- 35.
See also, Paul Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy, An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1970), p. 22.
- 36.
Within the range of theories available, constructivism occupies a special place since it is both a theory and a method for analyzing knowledge. See Alexandre MacLeod, Évelyne Dufault and Frédérick-Guillaume Dufour (eds.), Relations internationales. Théories et concepts (Montreal, Athéna Éditions, 2008). For a critical viewpoint on the excesses of the constructivist approach in the social sciences, see Ian Hacking, Entre science et réalité. La construction sociale de quoi? (Paris, La Découverte, 2001).
- 37.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (New York (N.Y.), Basic Books, 1973). This brings to mind the famous distinction proposed by Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) between a “raw fact” (contracting eyelid) and a wink, which involves the existence of a code or convention for the contraction to be identified as a sign. See also Paul Costey, “Description et interprétation chez Clifford Geertz. La thick description chez Clifford Geertz,” Tracés. Revue de sciences humaines, 4 (2003) (Available at http://traces.revues.org/).
- 38.
Gary Goertz, Contexts of International Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994).
- 39.
“In other words that there is agreement on the questions that are worth asking,” to quote Pierre Bourdieu; see in particular “Public opinion does not exist,” in Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question (London: Sage Publications, 1995), p. 149.
- 40.
Aron , Main Currents in Sociological Thought, p. 194.
- 41.
The expression is from Paul Ricœur, Philosophie de la volonté, tome 2: Finitude et Culpabilité (Paris, Aubier, 1960), p. 486.
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Devin, G., Durand, MF. (2018). Describing, Representing, Interpreting. In: Devin, G. (eds) Resources and Applied Methods in International Relations. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61979-8_1
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