Readings in Methodology: African Perspectives

Introduction: Questions of Method

Introduction: Questions of Method Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo & Carlos Cardoso All truth is simple: isn’t this a double lie? Bringing something unknown to something known lightens and reassures, and, moreover, provides a feeling of power. First principle: any explanation is preferable to a lack of explanation. Given that it is only a matter of ridding oneself of anguishing representations, we do not look too closely to find the means to get there: the first representation by which the unknown is declared known makes us feel so good that we hold it to be true. Nietzsche From the beginning, the principal reason for the organization of a series of methodological workshops for young researchers was the fact that no body of knowledge can be established if the procedures on which its knowledge is founded are not clearly established and mastered. And given that CODESRIA, as a panAfrican institution, has as its main mission the promotion of a social science on Africa produced by Africans, such an objective is based on the certainty that progress in Africa can only be achieved by a rigorous intelligence of social realities on which it will thrive. This volume is, therefore, an assemblage of some texts produced out of those methodological workshops organized by CODESRIA since 2003. Naturally, the primary threat capable of compromising this mission could come from the approximate or erroneous exercises of collection procedures, theoretical treatment and presentation of social practices. Yet methodology is, unfortunately, often perceived as a tool box used in a fetishistic, mechanical and standardized way for which the researcher is thought to maintain a distant and deceptively instrumental relationship in the guise of intimacy. Moreover, this weak mastery of method – a dominant tendency today – seems to reduce the processes of scientific discovery to simple standardized procedures. Starting from such a limited methodological perspective, society becomes an extremely simplified reality, informed by effective prejudices imposed by a social order without which the xviii Readings in Methodology: African Perspectives action so sanctified by the prevailing pragmatism would have no real political and ethical foundation. We understand that such a fusion of the quest for knowledge and transformative action considerably compromises the success of the two related moments; it is clear that the suppression of the distance, indispensable to scientific objectivization, renders problematic any research which is instructed by reason of the secret truth of the social world. With respect to action, its effectiveness is limited by the urgency which commands its implementation. This confusion probably comes from an approximate knowledge of the founding principles and conditions of implementation of the two terms that are improperly and simultaneously confused: research and action. The imperative of this direct action becomes the credo of all thought on social life, subjected by interventionists to an immediate and required correction. The break with such a tendency proves indispensable to the theoretical and practical construction of a scientific rigor which should always be at the root of the progressive unmasking of hidden aspects of the social world. We should immediately note that this encouragement towards reflection on methods does not mean, in our view, an acceptance of methodologism and theoricism which is associated with it; these two existing tendencies in social research insidiously dominate and rigidify the approach of the researcher by giving methodological systems a status which keeps them distanced from specific problems that the construction of the subject poses. A technical sovereignty of method develops as a simple sophisticated manipulation of indices and empirical observations. It is also indispensible to keep one’s distance from “anarchistic,” poorly monitored methods in order to adopt a measured methodology, which considers both the theoretical construction of the subject and of the necessary adaptation of research techniques. However, the question of methodology would remain poorly posed if it was considered only with respect to its technical aspects, because this technicity itself cannot be understood except if it is within a definition that is given for science. The understanding of this exposition of science, such as it has been historically constituted, puts into perspective the role of the stages of the conquest of a certain knowledge of the social world and allows us access to legitimized knowledge as central social issues. Indeed, the preliminary of all use of methodologies is a clear delimitation of epistemological acts which have the goal of discovery, an objective which is always socially defined. But we should also remember that the execution of epistemological acts obeys a logic of organization, the omission of which...