In praise of “thick construction”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56247/qua.513Keywords:
Ethnography, theory, epistemology, thick description, BourdieuAbstract
Based on my book The Poverty of the Ethnography of
Poverty ([2023] 2025), I present a defense in favor of “thick
construction” as a rationalist approach that serves to frame
and carry out ethnography. Impregnated by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological epistemology, I argue that dense construction is a “squared elevated construction”. That is, a scientific (analytical) construction of an ordinary (popular) construction.
Anchored in the concept of social space, dense construction aims to avoid the danger of ethnography: the tendency to want to describe, interpret and explain a phenomenon based solely on the elements discerned through field work. This allows us to avoid committing one or another of the five organic fallacies of participating observation: interactionism, inductivism, populism, presentism, and hermeneutic drift. In the article
I outline how dense description, substantiated theory,
extended case method, abductive theorization and dense
construction form a duet of theory and observation. Rejecting the false opposition between concept and perception, dense construction aims to build heuristics to manufacture new objects. From this approach, contrary to conventional visions, theory is not the altive teacher, but the humble servant of empirical research, as an approach to reality.
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