Ethnography and Cognitive Psychology: Shared Dilemmas of the Local and Unlocatable

Is there a productive intersection between ethnographic knowledge practices and the search for perduring structures of cognition within psychological inquiry? This article employs a brief ethnography of cognitive psychological experimentation to reveal that like ethnographers, experimental psychologists engage in a complex relationship between local particulars and generalized processes. In particular, I focus on the relationship between notions of “local” space and time and “unlocatable,” abstract cognitive processes to explore how psychological inquiry, like critical ethnography, is at once concerned with identifying abstract processes and intimately tied to the particulars of the research context. [ethnography; cognition; experimentation]