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In Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others, Charlotte Aull Davies calls continually for reflexivity; she also reacts against the extreme relativism of postmodernism, while incorporating some of its insights, such as the value of multivocality and the rejection of metanarratives. She embraces a "critical realism" grounded in philosopher R. Bhaskar's The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (2nd edition, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989). Such critical realism holds that "society exists independently of our conceptions of it, in its causal properties, its ability to exert deterministic forces on individuals; yet it is dependent on our actions, human activity, for its reproduction. It is both real and transcendent" (p. 19). Reflexivity, awareness of how self and the process of research affect knowledge collection is central to the process of ethnographic fieldwork and writing. The self of the ethnographer will be altered when doing fieldwork in another society, because, following George Herbert Mead, the self is constantly under construction. Davies considers that such an altering of self under the pressure of cultural expectations while participating in the community allows the ethnographer to access the selves of others no matter how different their cultural background.
Davies insists that anthropological/sociological research is a political act, and it is so in multiple ways. Selecting a topic rests on individual concerns (usually also politically informed) but also on academic trends and the preferences of funding organizations. There is a personal politics involved in...