Philosophical Ethnography: or, How Philosophy and Ethnography Can Live Together in the World of Educational Research

This essay explores a disciplinary hybrid, called here, philosophical ethnography. Philosophical ethnography is a philosophy of the everyday and ethnography in the context of intercultural discourse about coordinating meaning, evaluation, norms and action. Its basic assumption is that in the affairs of human beings truth, justice and beauty are not ultimate and fixed ends but, as Dewey would have it, guideposts hopefully to more refined considerations and more adequate appreciation and decisions. Philosophical ethnography takes its cue from practice in the post-modern world where intermingling of traditions, fragility of identities, a surplus of critiques and a loss of confidence characterize that world in foundational rationality and traditional liberal institutions. It offers to these traditions and identities a sense of exploration and a possibility for expansion and development. It offers to rationality greater texture, and to liberalism, a more expansive range of acceptable ways of life.