The Aversion to Theory

Abstract

Tackling aversions to theory in the social sciences and humanities, this piece unpacks the bad faiths and myopic commentary directed at non-positivist and conceptually driven texts. Drawing on critiques and defenses mounted in the 1980s, 1990s, and the present—alongside exchanges inside and outside the classroom—it mounts an unapologetic defense of theory centering the skillful labors that allow us to compare, argue, distill, critique, abandon, rework, and interpret phenomena. Zeroing in on the empirical and theoretical moves always at play in ethnography, it argues on behalf of the value of allowing lines of thought to carry us obliquely along as much as explicate things. Some closing injunctions around foregrounding what is exciting and nourishing about theory and the pleasures and possibilities of adopting an experimental ethos toward it are put forward.