Qualitative Analysis in the Making by Daniella Kuzmanovic Andreas Bandak

Author:Daniella Kuzmanovic, Andreas Bandak [Daniella Kuzmanovic, Andreas Bandak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367600112
Google: ZQuTzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-06-30T05:58:09+00:00

Final Comment: The Analysis’s Analysis of the Analysis of an Analysis

While the infinite regress of this heading may be too much for some readers, it is actually meant to be taken seriously and to convey one more aspect of the way in which things tend to mirror themselves and scale a particular world in their own image. I have already stressed how one is inspired by intellectual traditions, ethnography, other analyses, etc., but in order to take this point to its conclusion, and to be serious about the point that nothing is really outside analysis, I will also have to reflect on the fact that what is constructed as ethnography in this particular analysis—namely a particular analysis of religious objects and socialist modernity—itself scales the analysis of the analysis. It is therefore appropriate towards the end, I believe, to make a few comments on the difficulties of writing this chapter.

One of the first questions to arise, and probably the least relevant for this section, was one of honesty and transparency. There was no way, I thought, that I was going to try to convince myself and the reader that ‘making an analysis of an analysis’ was more transparent or earnest than any other academic endeavor. Establishing an absolute vantage point—objectifying objectification (Bourdieu 1979)—should not be my aim. In asking people to be open and honest (Bourdieu [1992] 1996: 199), Bourdieu reproduces the very distinction he criticizes by implying that an analysis masks its own conditions for production, thereby presuming that such conditions can be made apparent. If we could only be more honest.… My point is that while this—an analysis of analysis—may be a different endeavor to that of other academic texts, it should not be mistaken for sincerity. It is just as composed as the analyses that I am analyzing.

Having made that clear, a second difficulty relates to the material itself. In the previous analysis, this ‘material’ is caught up in a constructed remembering of how the analysis came into being by the one who carried out the analysis in the first place, and, as such, the ethnographic material itself is rather immaterial. It is a creation of its creator. The original, conceived of as that which is originally outside the copy, is lost from the very start. The collapse of such barriers between analyst and analyzed, perceiver and perceived, makes it all a mess from the outset. Who is analyzing? Who is being analyzed? What is the material/the analysis analyzed? What is the analytical perspective, when a similar perspective may be expected to be found in the material and in the perspective analyzing the material? The creator of the material is now recreating his own creation, as it were. Where is the distance—where is the resistance—in this kind of self-analysis? As an initial response, my answer would be that this distance is being created by the experiment that the editors of this book have asked us to carry out. In other words, ‘I’, ‘the author’, is not the

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