From how to why On luminous description and causal inference in

descriptive tasks that will enable them to answer questions about how social life proceeds, and then they work toward explaining more formally why patterns appear in their data. Making the transition from ‘how?’ to ‘why?’ can be a dilemma, but the ethnographer’s folk culture provides especially useful clues. By dwelling on their appreciation of especially luminous data, ethnographers can light the path to causal inference. In this, the second of a two-part article, four of seven forms for characterizing the rhetorical effectiveness of ethnographic data are illustrated and the distinctive resources they offer for causal explanation are analyzed. K E Y W O R D S ■ ethnography, methodology, analytic induction, reading practices, science studies, history of social sciences, fieldwork, sociology of knowledge Ethnographers seem reluctant to frame their analytical objectives in the terms of causal explanation. The first task in a field project is commonly a preoccupation with getting an accurate account of how social life works, not a search for answers why. And some notable statements (Geertz, 1973; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Becker, 1994) suggest that the traditional search for causal explanation need never be taken up, that it is unnecessary, given graphy Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 3(1): 63–90[1466–1381(200203)3:1;63–90;021723] A R T I C L E 03 katz (jk/d) 11/2/02 4:23 pm Page 63