Page 182 - Decoding Culture

THE RISE F THE READER 175
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incorporated within the research (d. Ang, 1996). The underlying
threads here are relativism and constructivism: the relativism of
knowledge claims and the consequent risk of an endless spiral of
irreconcilable accounts, constructed from the various points of
view of participants and observers, and undermining the possibil­
ity of any meaningful intervention in, or generalized understanding
of, culture in society.
Conventionalist epistemologies always risk this paralysis in
which the impossibility of certainty leads to a contextualist and
reflexive retreat from making any claims at all. The solution, if
solution it be, is to recognize that the partiality of truth claims,
and the potential multiplicity of accounts of social process, do not
necessitate our discarding all forms of epistemological realism. By
this I do not mean that we should return to a version of simple
ethnographic realism in which the ethnographer unproblemati­
cally represents the real world of the researched. Rather, with
Hammersley (1992: 50) we should accept that [ wle can maintain
'
belief in the existence of phenomena independent of our claims
about them, and in their knowability, without assuming that we
can have unmediated contact with them and therefore that we can
know with certainty whether our knowledge of them is valid or
invalid'. Hammersley writes of this approach as 'subtle realism',
arguing that it offers an alternative to the simple polarization
between naive forms of relativism and realism in modern discus­
sions of ethnography.
The philosophy of social science literature of recent years
offers him some support, at least in as much as defences of real­
ism have proliferated. My own preference is for a development of
the kinds of arguments advanced by Bhaskar (1979, 1987), who is
not only concerned to establish a realist epistemology but also
focuses upon ways of conceptualizing relations between social
structure and agency. Broadly speaking, I would want to argue for

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