From how to why

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 facilitating resources for detecting and appreciating especially compelling descriptions. Recognitions of luminous data often implicitly light the path to causal inference. In this, the first of a two-part article, three 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 ■ to come Over the last 25 years, ethnographic writing has become a major focus in a debunking critical perspective. Literary devices traditionally used for representing social life have been rendered deeply suspect by analyses that reveal how they implicitly construct social realities and subtly claim rhetorical authority. (Noted early contributions include Gusfield, 1976; Clifford, 1983; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Van Maanen, 1988.) Although useful for opening new lines of inquiry, this reflexive turn continues a long-standing graphy Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 2(4): 443–473[1466–1381(200112)2:4;443–473;020413] A R T I C L E 01 katz (jk/d) 25/9/01 1:35 pm Page 443