Kondo and Anthro

Two notes:
First, it's great to see Simon on the blog.
Second, it's not my "official" turn to be the first blogger for this week, but I'm posting my rambling thoughts anyway:

Kondo’s work seems to directly come off of Foucault. With the constant emphasis on context, discourse, and power, she presents what she calls the relation between economics and the family. The book is rich in “thick description” throughout, and the early part read like a captivating novel to me. I think the book represents a commendable effort in anthropology and shows the connection between understanding and explaining. But something I’m still struggling with or am not entirely clear on is how such a position is achieved. As she so often admits, the researcher’s own personality, background, and “culture” enter into the research, so that what emerges is the product of the researcher and the researched, with neither entity being entirely separate from the other and both being constantly constructed through their interaction with each other. I very much appreciate this effort, and the constant emphasis on the interconnection between theory and practice, and but am unclear about what really makes it a social scientific inquiry and how one is to achieve it. In other words, what is it about this approach that makes it different from a purely subjective enterprise i.e. what makes it social science? From reading it, it feels like a well-researched project, but it's difficult to put your finger on exactly what makes it a science.