I have been reading the journals/notebooks of Camus and Simenon and it is striking, as so often with major literary figures, that they felt they ‘had to write’; they had no option but to translate an urge to commit pen to paper (in those faraway days) into publications. In one respect I am at one… Read More »
‘World-systems analysts are not against quantification per se (they would quantify what can usefully be quantified), but (as the old joke about the drunk teaches us) they feel that one should not look for the lost key only under the street lamp just because the light is better (where there are more quantifiable data). One… Read More »
It is important not to be beholden to philosophers, social theorists, or indeed to anyone. Fidelity only matters in exegesis, otherwise the outputs of others are there to be used, that is, adapted, revised or applied. Winch tarred the later Wittgenstein with the brush of anthropological relativism, and there is indeed ambiguity in Philosophical Investigations… Read More »
In a blog on autoethnography I set some parameters. It should (a) be informed by theory (or at least be ‘theory-literate’); (b) be consonant with substantive research findings; (c) not merely report personal experience; and (d) focus on innovation, theoretical or conceptual. But what about another possible offspring of ethnography which might be called fictional… Read More »
Browsing in a Cambridge bookshop I have come across the first published volume of Camus’ notebooks or journals (1942-1951). It comprises a collection of ‘thoughts’ as and when they occurred to him. I have since retirement taken to blogging, a form of ‘thinking aloud’, but I wonder now if I might help myself also by… Read More »