idiographic inquiry

is aimed at documenting the particular facts of past and present lives. It contrasts with nomothetic inquiry aims to arrive at general propositions or theoretical statements.

He did so in terms of a contrast, much debated then but little heard of today, between idiographic and nomothetic inquiry. An idiographic inquiry, Radcliffe-Brown explained, aims to document the particular facts of past and present lives, whereas th aim of nomothetic inquiry is to arrive at general propositions or theoretical statements. Ethnography, then, is specifically a mode of idiographic inquiry, differing from history and archaeology in that it is based on the direct observation of living people rather than on written records or material remains attesting to the activities of people in the past. Anthropology, to the contrary, is a field of nomothetic science. As Radcliffe-Brown declared in his introduction to Structure and Function in Primitive Society in a famous sentence that, as an undergraduate beginning my anthropological studies at Cambridge in the late 1960s, I was expected to learn by heart 'comparative sociology, of which social anthropology is a branch, is . . . a theoretical or nomothetic study of which the aim is to provide acceptable generalisations.' (Ingold 2007 :21)

idiographic inquiry, n.All

idiographic inquiry