Ethnography (and Social Research) between Deeds and Words

Discrepancies between doings and sayings (DSDs) have noteworthy methodological and epistemological implications, which constitute an underlying theme of Lubet’s "Interrogating Ethnography" and "Approaches to Ethnography" by Khan and Jerolmack. With these two books in mind, I try to make four points about DSDs, arguing that they (a) require, like certain other social phenomena, sociological interpretations someway at odds with people’s intentional self-understandings; (b) convey insightful information that might not have been expressed at all otherwise; (c) are perfectly (though not exclusively) recognizable through ethnography; (d) impose a combination of empirical research and theoretical knowledge.