Standing our middle ground. (response to articles by Robert Dingwall and Norman K. Denzin in this issue, p. 399-415)

The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography has called on critics with rather divergent perspectives to review our book The New Language of Qualitative Method. It is pleasantly ironic to realize that we are comfortable in the space that the two reviewers, taken together, inadvertently have allotted us: an analytic catbird seat on the reflexive middle ground of qualitative inquiry. While neither critic has the space quite right, when they are read against one another, their comments offer a fair take on where we stand in the methodological landscape.

Norman K. Denzin and Robert Dingwall express contrasting methodological and political sentiments about the enterprise we share in common. Both are in character; no mufti here. Denzin comes to the book with a long-standing and emotionally charged poststructuralist concern for the dire prospects of a resurrected naturalism, especially one whose bearing in "science" stands to foreclose the epistemologicai self-consciousness that has expanded the enterprise's frontiers. Dingwall is concerned with upholding sociology's good standing as a science; he is evidently impatient with some of the research consequences of representational experimentation. He is especially irritated by what he sees as the unbridled standpoint approaches that politicize and ostensibly marginalize qualitative inquiry.

Before commenting on their characterizations, let us clarify our thesis. We believe that a new language of qualitative inquiry has been emerging for years. It reflects an increasing self-consciousness about the analytic project located at what we call "the lived border of reality and representation." While this awareness raises important epistemological and empirical issues for research, it now risks qualitative inquiry's self-destruction. We are not the first to point this out. Some flatly reject the postmodern impulse in favor of quasi-positivistic retrenchment. Others accept the challenges by trying to reflexively deal with the always-already representational status of the real. But any enterprise founded on an interest in the representational status of social life invariably opens itself to self-reflection, which may ultimately lead to hyperreality, among other antirealisms. (Dingwall is …