田野调查:经验与误区--一个现象学社会学的视角

Fieldwork:Experience and Misunderstandings-A Perspective from Phenomenological Sociology

田野调查是现在人类学和社会学普遍采用的一种调研方法。以深度访谈和观察作为主要调研手段的社会学的田野调查,从认知角度看,其实无论是在其概念内涵还是实际操作层面,都还有一些需要澄清的地方。通常我们将马克斯•韦伯的“社会行动者”赋予其社会行动一种主观意义且我们可以理解这种意义并给出解释作为田野调查的方法论进路。所以,“意义”和“意义探究”在社会学的田野调查中就有至关重要的作用。这就是现象学社会学的研究方式。因此,从认知层面看,社会学的田野调查秉承的是从胡塞尔到舒茨所开创的现象学和现象学社会学之传统。它将舒茨笔下的“生活世界”看作一个“意义的世界”。它的任务是对此在意义上给出理解与诠释。它与人类学的民族志方法之不同是因为社会学的田野调查关注的是社会整体。即使在田野调查的现场,它也强调对现象的考察必须要有一个社会整体的视野。

Fieldwork is a research tool commonly used in anthropology and sociology today.From a cognitive perspective,sociological fieldwork,which uses in-depth interviews and observations as its main research methods,still needs to be clarified on some points,both in terms of its conceptual connotations and its practical operation.We usually attribute to the social actions of Max Weber’s“social actor”a subjective meaning,one that we can understand and can explain as a methodological approach to fieldwork.“Meaning”and“exploration of meaning”thus play a vital role in sociological fieldwork as the research method of phenomenological sociology.From a cognitive perspective,therefore,sociological fieldwork inherits the tradition of phenomenology and phenomenological sociology developed by Husserl and Schutz.Schutz’s Lebenswelt can be seen as the“world of meaning;”it is charged with understanding and interpreting meaning in the sense of Dasein.It differs from the ethnographic method of anthropology because sociological fieldwork focuses on the whole society.Even in the field,it emphasizes that a vision of society as a whole is needed to investigate phenomena.