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Original Article

What good are interviews for thinkingabout culture? Demystifying interpretiveanalysis

Allison J. Pugha,b

aDepartment of Sociology, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400766, Charlottesville,Virginia 22904-4766, USA.

bUnited States Study Centre, Institute Building H03, City Road, University of

Sydney, NSW 2006 Australia.

Abstract This article evaluates the claims of a small but active group of culturescholars who have used theoretical models of bifurcated consciousness to allege importantmethodological implications for research in culture. These scholars, whom I dub ‘cognitiveculturalists’, have dismissed the utility of in-depth interviewing to access the visceral,causally powerful level of ‘practical consciousness’. I argue these scholars are misguided intheir diagnosis of a problem (interviews can only access people’s after-the-fact rationali-zations), and their vision of a solution (culture scholars need to access the ‘snap judgments’that map onto the subterranean level of practical consciousness). I contend these flaws aretied to a limited understanding of the kind of information available in interviews, parti-cularly the in-depth interview subjected to interpretive analysis. Using data from a recent

book project on commitment, I elaborate on four kinds of information harbored in inter-views: the honorable, the schematic, the visceral and meta-feelings. I rely on these formsof data to argue for scholars to expect, and to use analytically – rather than strive to ‘solve’theoretically – the contradictory cultural accounts that our research subjects evince.Furthermore, I demonstrate how interpretive interviewing allows researchers access to anemotional landscape that brings a broader, social dimension to individual motivation.American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2013) 1, 42–68. doi:10.1057/ajcs.2012.4;published online 27 November 2012

Keywords: culture; emotions; theory; methods; interviews

Introduction

Culture scholarship is feverish nowadays with insights from such fields as

cognitive science, neurology, linguistics and psychology, mostly about how

much culture someone can store (not very much) and how coherent it is

(hardly at all) (DiMaggio, 1997; Martin, 2010). This research finds that

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there is a disjuncture between the cultural ideas or beliefs that people can usually

talk about, and the culture that drives action, or what people actually do (Ignatow,

2007; Vaisey, 2009). The field had already traveled a long way

from a Parsonsian view of culture as a unified system of values, but these new

insights challenge even more contemporary visions of culture as a toolkit of available ideas and practices from which people frame their action (Swidler, 1986).

A small but active group of young scholars, whom I dub ‘cognitive culturalists’,

has used theoretical models of bifurcated consciousness to allege important

methodological implications as well, in particular to dismiss the utility of in-depth

interviewing to access the visceral, causally powerful level of ‘practical

consciousness’ (for example, Vaisey, 2009; Martin, 2010).

In this article, I sketch some of the contours of this burgeoning area in

cultural theory, pointing out where their insights have proved useful,

particularly in using their nimble interdisciplinarity to expand the hori-

zon of cultural theorizing. Nonetheless, I argue, these scholars are mis-guided in their diagnosis of a problem (interviews can only access people’s

after-the-fact rationalizations), and their vision of a solution (culture

scholars need to access the ‘snap judgments’ that map onto the subterranean

level of practical consciousness, the ‘real’ culture that matters). I contend

that these flaws are tied to a limited understanding of the kind of information

available in interviews, particularly the in-depth interview subjected to

interpretive analysis.

Using data from a recent book project on commitment, I elaborate on four

kinds of information harbored in interviews: the honorable, the schematic, the

visceral and meta-feelings. I rely on these forms of data to argue for scholars to

expect, and to use analytically – rather than strive to ‘solve’ theoretically – the

contradictory cultural accounts that our research subjects evince. Furthermore,

and equally important, I demonstrate how interpretive interviewing allows

researchers access to an emotional landscape that brings a broader, social

dimension to individual motivation.

The cognitive culturalists are not the first to criticize the information from

interviews as superficial, as at best reflecting people’s wishes about themselves

rather than their actual motivations, although it is unusual for these criticisms to

emerge from a comparison to survey research (for example, see, Ortner, 2003,

p. 16 for an ethnographer’s discussion of interviews as ‘the production of highly

individualized, socially decontextualized talk’). Because these scholars groundtheir methodological argument in a theoretical position, I offer a partial the-

oretical critique that carries the seeds of a more sophisticated approach to meet

the needs of a more complex society than the cognitive culturalists acknowl-

edge, one that will require scholars to use in-depth interviews to capture the

emotional environment that individuals inhabit. My goal here is neither to

outline a full alternative model of culture in action nor to argue that interviews

are perfect, or indeed, superior at all tasks. Rather, in this article, I contend

Using interviews to think about culture

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that the in-depth interview subjected to interpretive analysis is but one useful

albeit flawed lens from among the set available to social scientists. One

feature of interviews particularly helpful to culture scholars, however, is their

capacity to excavate and interpret emotions, which serve to animate, situate

and connect the levels of consciousness that these scholars currently portrayas barreling down two unrelated tracks (but see Lizardo, 2007 for an

exception).

A New History of Cultural Sociology

Cognitive culturalists tell a certain kind of intellectual history about the sociology

of culture. Once upon a time, they recount, scholars viewed culture as a system of

beliefs that existed ‘out there’ in ‘the ether’, that individuals then internalized,

through appropriate socialization (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003; cf. Parsons

and Shils, 1951). Empirical discoveries dislodged this happy consensus, however,

when researchers found that people’s hold on culture was tenuous and frag-

mented. In particular, scholars were puzzled when people could not explain their

actions by pointing to particular beliefs or motivations, or most particularly, when

they maintained contradictory views at the same time (Vaisey, 2009). Because

people espouse opposing ideas when they reach for explanations for what they do

and think, such ideas cannot drive action; otherwise, how would individuals use

one, versus another, among these conflicting ideas that would dictate their

behavior (Swidler, 2001)? Instead, scholars began to argue, people’s reasoning

must be ex post facto justifications for what they have already done, thought or

acted (Vaisey, 2008). Cognitive culturalists contend that this is a primary insightand appeal of Ann Swidler’s (1986) profoundly influential ‘toolkit’ theory

(Kaufman, 2004; Vaisey, 2008).1

Having portrayed the toolkit as that which people reach for after they break

something (or take action of some other kind), the cognitive culturalists seek to

1 I am not sure this is an accurate historiography of the toolkit model, through which Swidler resolved

several theoretical conundrums that had led to scholarly impasse (not just the problem of

contradictory motives). She argued that culture shapes action most often not through ‘end-values’,but instead through ‘strategies of action’, which include the core competencies that make certain

kinds of action more plausible, regardless of the values to which people attest. Ideologies become

important in unsettled times, when they rise above common sense and become contested and more

vigorously held by fewer people. Her theory thus (1) broadened the scope of the cultural subject

beyond values to take greater account of practices, in keeping with the zeitgeist of the time, during

which Bourdieu (1984), de Certeau (1984), Ortner (1984) and others were writing; (2) bridged the

opposition between the structural determinism of economic interests and the voluntarist vision of

human agency; and (3) offered a variegated, fragmented model of culture that opened the way forresearchers to bring in history, to ask when culture is more or less contested, how new strategies of

action are created, and to trace the origins and uses of particular tools, or pieces of culture. It also

seems too simple to argue that this model relegates culture to justification only, when the notion of

‘strategies of action’ seemed to suggest culture also acts like chutes channeling particular practices,

and constraining the capacity of actors to freely ‘choose’ how to put their cultural beliefs into action.

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resurrect a model of cultural causality, in which beliefs, or values, ‘matter’

(Lizardo and Strand, 2010). They do so by turning to the insights of cognitive

psychology, linguistics and neurology, particularly the work of Jonathan Haidt

(2001) and others (for example Gallese and Lakoff, 2005). Their reading is far-

ranging and their work is novel, although their prose can be a bit jarring for thesociologist who might not be used to running across phrases like ‘the basal

ganglia’ (Martin, 2010, p. 233), ‘sensorimotor systems’ (Ignatow, 2007, p. 121)

or ‘area f5 of the ventral pre-frontal cortex’ (Lizardo, 2007, p. 10). But these

scholars seek to destabilize what they view as the loose consensus that had

prevailed for decades around variants of toolkit theory, and so their goals are

more than stylistic. Most important, they contend that (1) cognitive scholars

working in other fields are having a busy interdisciplinary conversation, (2)

theories of culture are deeply implicated in their empirical findings (DiMaggio,

2002), and (3) culture scholars are contributing but a deafening silence to these

wider debates (Ignatow, 2007).The cognitive culturalists mine these other fields for empirical findings about

what Giddens (1984) once described as two levels of consciousness: a discursive,

surface level easily accessible through talk, and a deeper, more visceral level, less

obvious but, these scholars argue, more powerful in animating action (Lizardo,

2004, 2007). The psychologist Haidt (2005) offers – and Vaisey (2009) borrows –

the metaphor of the ‘rider and the elephant’, in which the rider (in this case, the

discursive, superficial level of consciousness) thinks s/he is in charge of the action,

but the elephant (the deep, visceral consciousness) ultimately can go where it

wants regardless of what the rider decides.

Vaisey’s (2009) article, in which he articulated a ‘dual-process’ model of

culture as opposed to the toolkit or the Parsonsian ‘seamless web’ approaches,

rested on this core distinction. In his article, which has been influential (for

example, Chaves, 2010; Chan, 2012), Vaisey argues that core moral beliefs held

at the most primeval level – and, he contends, best accessed through the snap

judgment of a forced-choice survey – do indeed cause action. He reports the

findings of longitudinal research on adolescents and their drug use to argue that

how they answered a quick survey question on morality predicts their later

decisions of drug use better than other established correlations, such as peer

networks, SES, and most important for my argument here, their longer, more

deliberative responses in early in-depth interviews. For the cognitive culturalists,

then, the reflective commentary interviewees offer to explain their action ismerely the stuff of this discursive surface-level consciousness, and thus they

dismiss it as any evidence of actual motivation. But cultural causality lives on,

they contend, in the deep, intuitive level, in the elephant.

In addition, these scholars have been influenced by new understandings of

the amount of culture people can realistically recall – for example a few

schemas remembered more for their connection to other schemas than for their

independent content (Martin, 2010). This finding finally puts to rest the early



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grandiose versions of people’s internalization of an entire fabric of cultural

ideologies. Still, the question of which connections matter and why remains

elusive.

In many ways, the cognitive culturalists contribute mightily. They reinvigo-

rate cultural theorizing with a lively debate fed by voracious reading spanningseveral disciplines. They usher in a new emphasis on the body, the senses and

emotions, critiquing toolkit theory for the oddly rational, cerebral actor at its

center (Ignatow, 2007; Vaisey, 2010), but they do so while seeking to preserve

and resurrect the importance of culture, not to displace it with other drivers of

action (Lizardo and Strand, 2010). They usefully point to the interdisciplinary

conversation about human cognition, and how cultural sociology has been too

silent in that conversation so far (Ignatow, 2007).

Their work raises some important questions, however. First, if ‘practical

consciousness’ drives action, what is it and where does it come from? Cognitive

culturalists appear to have been less interested in the origins of ‘practical con-sciousness’, or even much of its content, which they tend to describe in an

almost offhand manner as ‘moral intuitions’ or ‘cultural likes and dislikes’ (for

example Vaisey, 2009, p. 1684fn; Lizardo and Strand, 2010, p. 213; but see

Ignatow, 2009a, b). As Swidler noted (2008, pp. 616–617): ‘The cognitive or

neurological fact that people have strong intuitive responses that actually guide

their action (more than does their conscious cognition) leaves one longing for

some description of how those intuitions or “blink” responses are shaped, and

what role the things we normally think of as “culture” play in shaping them’.

Vaisey (2009, p. 1684) suggests that the dual-process model unpacks the ‘black

box’ of Bourdieu’s habitus, but it is unclear whether we have just substituted

another black box in its stead.

In a related vein, the cognitive culturalists borrow from cognitive psychology

a sense of two realms operating in parallel to each other, but leaves largely

undertheorized the question of how they might be related (but see Lizardo and

Strand, 2010 for an exception). Given that they reside in the same person, who

has had the same experiences, upbringing and resources, it is not inconceivable

that the two levels might be linked in some way. By relying on an image of two

unlinked processes, however, cognitive culturalists strike an almost gleeful

note as they chronicle the distance between them, portraying with vivid fervor

our very alienation from ourselves. The image of a rider and elephant is a dyadic

model that emphasizes their ironic estrangement, that mocks, howevergently, the rider’s misguided sense of self-efficacy, and ultimately does not ask

where the elephant comes from. Instead of the rider and elephant, then, we need

other working metaphors that propose how consciousness is related and

produced.

Second, the cognitive culturalists burrow deeply into what they consider real

motivations for action, but pay less attention to the broadly social contexts in

which such action takes place. In her response to one of Vaisey’s theoretical

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sorties, Swidler (2008) urged a course correction. ‘What we need instead is to

get beyond the fundamental individualism of such models’, she argued (2008, p.

617). ‘Cultural meanings are organized and brought to bear at the collective and

social, not the individual, level’. I agree, and argue below, perhaps counter-

intuitively, that interpretive in-depth interviewing allows us to think aboutthe cultural context of these meanings, to situate the feelings people feel

in an emotional landscape they themselves sometimes ascertain, and always

convey.

Lastly, cognitive culturalists share with toolkit theorists their unease about

the incoherence of culture in action, a certain distaste for the contradictory,

overlapping schemas that appear to animate people’s behavior (Vaisey, 2010).

The bifurcated consciousness they propose thus solves the ‘problem’ of such

incoherence; they essentially move the incoherence to the surface, suggesting

people are not incoherent where it ‘counts’ at the visceral level, only when they

try to explain themselves by picking and choosing from cultural schemasopportunistically. In his 2009 article, for example, Vaisey contrasted the

‘inarticulacy’ of teenagers’ interview responses with ‘strong effects of moral

schemas (measured by respondents’ choice of moral script) on a wide variety of

behaviors nearly three years later’ (2009, p. 1703). Similarly, Lizardo and

Strand (2010, p. 219) call ‘strong practice theoryy a much better predictor of

actual behavior than toolkit theory, which can only predict the disconnect

between action and the cultural justification of behavior, but would be

powerless to shed light on the practical logic generative of choices and in the

relatively stable “global” patterns generated by these seemingly “spontaneous”

lines of action’.

Practice theory predicts that agents will produce (globally) coherent

patterns of thought and action even when institutional prescriptions and

contextual effects are weak and thus they cannot rely on externalized

cultural scaffoldingy . In the absence of this external cultural scaffolding,

agents will rely on the coherence and ‘regulated improvisation’ made

possible by their internalized practical dispositions, especially those that

produce fast, ‘hot’ cognitive-emotive judgments of right/wrong, like/

dislike, propriety/impropriety ‘online’ and ‘on the fly’ as suggested by dual

process models of cognition in social psychology.

Dual-process cognition models, they argue, can see past the contradictions on

the surface to the clarity and coherence of the culture-action link in ‘internalized

practical dispositions’, in practical consciousness.

But is it such a problem that people report contradictory motivations? People

are contradictory: they have multiple and sometimes conflicting loyalties, goals

and commitments, and their (sometimes playful) use of culture amounts to

what Sherry Ortner called ‘serious games’ (Ortner 1996). Indeed, as Ortner



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(1984, 1989), Sahlins (1981), de Certeau (1984) and others suggest, it is the

amalgam of different ‘bits of culture’, the bricolage that blends together existing

schemas and practices from disparate sources in new ways, that serves as the

source of social innovation, of cultural change. If people did not have the

capacity to hold contradictory ideas at one time, if they toed a simplerconceptual line, they would arguably not be able to braid together heretofore

paradoxical notions to resolve problems, from how to get around the taboo

system (Sahlins, 1981) to how to achieve the status of holiness normally denied

second sons (Ortner, 1989). These works then beg the question: if the viscera of

practical consciousness drive action as unerringly as a caboose down the track,

then how might this process incorporate change, however rare or unlikely?2

Here we would do well to differentiate, as does Isaac Reed (2011, p. 115) in

his careful, evocative treatise, Interpretation and Social Knowledge, between a

‘radical incoherence’ and a sort of multivocal explanation of social life, what he

dubs a ‘maximal interpretation’ that uses multiple theories to render a casecomprehensible.3 Within these limits, however, rather than seek to resolve

incoherence, perhaps we should instead expect it, and try to figure out the

conditions more likely to produce more or less contradiction, or the patterned

ways in which one versus another contradictory schema is deployed. By embracing

the paradoxes of cultural life, we can get at the contradictions in people’s accounts.

Contradictions and paradoxes are powerful tools for highlighting the emotionally

charged – what is emotionally difficult to claim, where anxiety lies, and what sort

of cultural problems people face for which they need to reach for such

contradictory explanations (see below for further detail on this process).

Enter Emotions

When we think about the ‘problem’ of cultural incoherence, for example the

fact that people know and use multiple and contradictory bits of culture to

animate and explain their action, we might turn to emotion as a missing vector,

the entity that animates particular connections, and thus that which makes

particular cultural schemas salient at any one time. As Eva Illouz (2008, p. 11)

maintains, ‘far from being presocial or precultural’, ‘emotions are cultural

2 Lizardo and Strand (2010, p. 222) suggest that in unsettled times, or as they prefer contexts of

‘unstable or non-existent socio-cognitive scaffolding’, after ‘old, practical strategies of action’ nolonger work to appropriately frame a situation, and ‘the person records a series of violations of expectations for the future’, then people look for new ‘explicit cultural systems – to guide their

action’.3 Reed contends (p. 116) that ‘confronted with contradictory deep meaningsy [the researcher] looks

to her evidence for an indication of how the actors under study manage such a contradiction or the

way the contradiction is merely apparent and in fact masks a deeper unity or whether there are, in

fact, different sets of actors in her case, with different meanings operating for each of them’. Thus the

contradiction is always worth studying, and sometimes in need of tidying up, but not always in need

of obliteration.

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meanings and social relationships that are closely and inextricably compressed

together. We hold different contradictory schemas in place at any one time, to be

sure; perhaps the emotional energy – generated by their interaction with the

social relationships that surround us (Collins, 2004) – cause one or another of

these schemas to activate, and thus to motivate action. We can think of theemotional connections between cultural schemas as motion-sensor streetlamps,

activated under certain circumstances, showing a meaningful path from one

schema to another, only to subside into darkness.

Thus I offer the notion that (always culturally situated) emotions are worth

investigating for their impact on the cultural schemas people deploy, for

example, in their reasoning, and vice versa. Informants tell us not just what they

think and feel, but how it feels to feel that way – for example the emotional

environment that they inhabit and the particular pressures that this cultural

world puts on them. Reed (2011, p. 109) argues that ‘what interpretive analysis

does is reconstruct landscapes of meaning’, landscapes that include differentsources and kinds of meaning. Below, I propose some specific ideas about the

relationship of culture, emotion and action, after first outlining the four kinds of

information provided in the in-depth interview, in a modest rehabilitation of

method.

Methodological Implications: What is an In-depth Interview Worth?

Cognitive culturalists are not just developing a new model of how culture

works, they also see significant methodological implications in their ideas.If culture resides in people on two parallel tracks, but the track that is accessible

to reasoning ultimately has very little influence on action, they argue, then

in-depth interviewing, which in their accounts captures this reasoning very well

but not much else, is less than useful for ascertaining cultural models that mat-

ter. They have taken up this flag with a certain triumphalism, their fervor perhaps

surprising in an era when a studied methodological neutrality (‘different questions

require different methods’) tends to prevail. Vaisey (2009, p. 1689) maintained:

If talking about our mental processes with an interviewer is like describing

a criminal suspect to a sketch artist, then answering survey questions is

like picking the suspect out of a lineup. The latter is much less cognitively

demanding and potentially much more accurate, provided the right

choices are in the lineup.

Similarly, John Levi Martin (2010, p. 240) wrote: ‘If we want to learn about

culture, the last thing we should do is to conduct in-depth interviews with a

selection of informants, any more than we would expect to strike gold by asking

them for whatever change is in their pockets.’



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This is provocative stuff, as much work in culture consists of doing exactly

that. But the scholars in this conversation, I would argue, are misguided in their

diagnosis of the problem (in-depth interviews can access only people’s elabora-

ted rationalizations); and their prescribed solution (survey methods are best

because they manage to tap into some sort of pre-reflective ‘practical consciou-sness’). In particular, I argue these scholars misrecognize a fundamental

characteristic of in-depth interviews: they can access different levels of informa-

tion about people’s motivation, beliefs, meanings, feelings and practices – in

other words, the culture they use – often in the same sitting.

We might say in-depth interviews give access to four different kinds of infor-

mation, which require a concurrently different kind of analysis. In the first kind,

which we might call the honorable, interviewees frame their answers to present

themselves in the most admirable light, actively conducting a form of display

work as they put forward a sense of what counts as honorable behavior.4 These

may include simple answers to factual questions, belief statements about whatthey think or folk theories about causal explanations.

In the second kind, which we might dub the schematic, interviewees use

language and non-verbal cues such as metaphors, jokes, turns of phrase and

discursive innovations to convey the frameworks through which they view the

world. These frameworks may or may not be honorable ones that put them in

the best light, such as when an interviewee attests to the worldview that people

are fundamentally selfish or mercenary. Researchers can ascertain these frame-

works not by simply receiving the answers people give, but by analyzing the way

people give them, particularly how they bend existing language to more

accurately capture what they are trying to say – the interstices between where

existing culture lies and where they want to go. These uses can operate on a semi-

conscious level, and they also can contradict an interviewee’s explicitly elaborated

stance. Thus the best interview data often come from getting respondents to offer

specific examples, not as evidence for their stated claims, but rather because such

examples serve to ‘ethnographize’ (Ortner, 2003) the interview, acting like self-

constructed windows into ethnographic details that the interviewer can then

analyze for deeper layers of meaning. These details are interesting as much for

what they show us about the windows – the particular frames through which

respondents view the world – as about the ‘facts’ of the case.

In the third kind, which we might consider the visceral , interviewees inhabit

an emotional landscape of desire, morality and expectations that shapes theiractions and reactions, a landscape that researchers must somehow be able

to divine and portray. Researchers looking to access these data adopt a variety

4 These answers are akin to those found by survey researchers to exhibit ‘social desirability bias’;

thanks to a reviewer for pointing this out. I would argue that even those interviewees who share

moments of which they are ostensibly not proud are sometimes providing this level of information;

they might be presenting values of ‘authenticity’ or ‘honesty’ as opposed to hypocrisy, for example.

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of strategies more familiar in a clinical situation: they watch out for verbal

missteps, and they pay attention to non-verbal cues such as facial expressions,

sighs, pauses or laughter, as well as logical contradictions that elude resolution,

potent silences, or when an interviewee’s normally clear and concise language

devolves into convoluted or halting syntax. Respondents do not just tell uswhere they went to school, they ‘tell’ us what kind of things are uncomfortable,

horrifying, emboldening, joyful, and they do so through non-verbal means that

communicate their emotional frameworks.5

The fourth kind of information is what I term meta-feelings, or how we feel

about how we feel. These kind of data offer a powerful account of the

individual embedded in culture, for it is often a measure of the distance between

how someone feels and how they feel they ought to feel (Hochschild, 1983,

2012). In emphasizing these kind of data, I do not imply that there is some sort

of pre-cultural emotion residing deep within that then conflicts with what

Hochschild (1983) termed ‘feeling rules’; rather, meta-feelings capture thefelt collision between two levels of culturally shaped emotions – a deep,

primal level forged in our earliest experiences, and another, generated by the

cultural frameworks of the social contexts in which we find ourselves today.

Meta-feelings, then, are the emotional expression of our relative ease with

the prevalent worldviews that surround us; they are like the expansion joints

that show whether bridges are expanding or contracting with the prevailing

weather.

All four kinds of interviewing ‘data’ involve culture – first, the sense of what

counts as honorable; second, the schemas that infuse the way people talk about

their worldviews; third, their fundamental moral understandings; and fourth,

the cultural frames rendering some emotions more acceptable, expected or

celebrated than others. All four kinds also involve emotion – the anxieties

fueling the presentation of self; the schematic shaping of what is funny, ironic,

righteous or outrageous; the profoundly visceral feelings such as disgust, passion

or inchoate notions of right and wrong; the secret shame, the defiant pride or

the resigned acceptance of what people notice that they feel. They differ in their

5 In-depth interviewing also involves the researcher attending to her own emotional reactions to therespondent’s narrative, using these feelings as signposts for other subterranean meanings (Briggs,

1999; Chodorow, 1999). This tactic is perhaps the most controversial among those I itemize here, as

it is the most challenging to rational, positivist social science, wherein the interviewer’s own social

location is not supposed to impinge upon replicable, objective findings. Critical, interpretive

sociologists will often acknowledge their own social location – with a reference to their class origins,

for example – but tend to shy away from the notion that their own feelings might be a relevant part

of the research process. For auto-ethnographers, on the other hand, their own experience is as central

to the study as that of their informants (for example Ellis, 2004). I adopt a middle ground, in whichresearcher emotions are relevant but only to the degree that they might generate better access to the

‘landscapes of meaning’ informants inhabit; thus they serve only to suggest ideas about what might

be going on – underlying guilt, say, or as Briggs (1999) found, anxiety – that the researcher then

confirms by other means. Feelings are clues, and surely, as detectives, interpretive interviewers should

welcome clues from all sources.



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level of self-consciousness, their accessibility to the interviewee without further

reflection and analysis, as well as the ways in which a researcher can recognize

them and, further, come to understand them. They are also worth differentiat-

ing, I would argue, because they illustrate different points in the processes of

how culture shapes action, and because they highlight the under-elaboratedemotional component of dual-process models.

Culture, Emotion and Action

Without offering a full-fledged model, we can posit ways in which the four

components help us to see how culture, emotion and action relate to each other.

If the visceral generates some inner feelings in response to a problem that might

then dictate some action, as the cognitive culturalists maintain, the schematic

demonstrates the multiple cultural frames that are available to the individual intheir approach to the problem, some of which may or may not dovetail with

their visceral response. The honorable is a statement of which sort of schemas

benefit from cultural sanction in their social contexts, which may further propel

a different course of action than that promulgated viscerally. Meta-feelings,

meanwhile, tell us about how easy or difficult the person found the process of

straining the visceral, through the schematic, to get to the honorable.

Culture enters into this model in multiple moments, then. Culture helps to

shape the meanings of the early emotional experiences, those that seed the

visceral (chronicled so aptly, for example, in Briggs, 1999). Culture also popu-

lates the schematic with the various frameworks and dispositions from which

people cobble together their tendencies and habits, their responses to particular

situations, their strategies of action. Culture also impinges upon us with the

sense of the honorable in our social world. Most of all, we can feel culture in the

emotional reckoning of the distance between our visceral and honorable selves.

These ideas have implications beyond charting how culture shapes feeling;

however, they also suggest something about how feeling shapes action, beyond

the visceral level of practical consciousness. Meta-feelings situate emotions

culturally, giving a sense for how safe or free or proud (or ashamed or horrified)

someone might be to claim a particular feeling, and thus to act upon it. We can

hypothesize that meta-feelings might constrain the particular actions that

someone can take in response to a problem. If someone was sheepish or embar-rassed about feeling betrayed by layoffs at work, for example, because such

feelings violate a pervasive cultural precept that the dearth of employer loyalty

is inevitable, it is not too much of a stretch to believe that the person would be

less likely to act on that sense of betrayal, to channel that anger towards protest

or unionization or other collective action. This, then, becomes an argument for

the power of narrative and the importance of context: we need a cultural hinge

that allows meta-feelings to open the possibilities of strategies of action.

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Interpretive Interviewing and Analysis

If emotions are as central to social meaning and action as some scholars suggest,

then we must find a way to divine the meaning and origin of those emotions.

I argue that the in-depth interview, when accompanied by trained interpretiveanalysis, can reach emotional connections that are not as accessible to those

involving forced-choice survey questions asked over the telephone. The four

kinds of information I outlined above highlight the different skills involved

in the craft of interviewing, and render it a complex enterprise relying on

competence borne of experience, some possibly more innate traits such as

empathy, and continued, careful guidance involving observation, reflection and

feedback, much like other clinical practices such as teaching, nursing or therapy.

Vaisey’s opposing models for cultural research – describing the suspect to a

sketch artist (in-depth interviewing) versus picking one out of a lineup (survey

research) – suggest rather different role options for the researcher: one wholistens and imperfectly renders, versus one who supplies the choices and then

simply observes. But I would offer yet a third choice: instead of drawing the

suspect, or even producing a lineup from which the respondent chooses,

interpretive interviewing involves getting the actor to describe the experience (or

the ‘crime’), and then analyzing that story. I suggest, then, that the researcher is

less like a sketch artist, or even someone who silently works in the background

to produce the most appropriate lineup, but rather a thinking, reflecting person

whose own experience and skills matter: perhaps, in keeping with the police-

work metaphor, a detective.

The new cognitive culturalists seem to be arguing that interviews tap into

only the honorable level of information well, the kind that include (often

self-serving) accounts that justify their existing behavior. For example,

Lizardo (forthcoming, p. 5) argued that ‘the entire apparatus of attitude and

opinion research and the clinical interview method relies on the implicit

assumption that the content recorded in the interview setting is the culture

that has been incorporated by the laity’. Yet when Lizardo lumps opinion

polling and the ‘clinical interview method’ together, he is assuming that

both involve interviewers asking (and settling for) people’s ideas about what

they think.

The version of in-depth interviewing that Vaisey deploys in his 2009 article,

from which he derives the notion that such data failed to predict later action aswell as had the data from just one survey question asked 2 years before, seems

similarly conducted. Vaisey describes a situation in which he asks interviewees if

they ‘had ever been in a situation where you were unsure about what was right

or wrong’, and if so, how they decided what to do. In addition, most were

asked: ‘How do you normally decide or know what is good or bad, right or

wrong to do?’ It should be apparent now that the latter question is designed in

such as a way that it elicits moral pronouncements that are entirely within the



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first kind of information – the broad statements of honorable ideals that could

be as much wishful thinking as anything else. But the former question does

indeed ask for specific situations in which interviewees can narrate their

experiences – the very data that the interpretive interviewer prizes.

The problem here seems to be the kind of analysis to which these data wereput, which (Vaisey tells us) involved allotting them to a three-part typology

of decision-making pathways. We are not given a lot of detail about the process

of finding these patterns, which he says he ‘detected over time and by reading

(and conducting) hundreds of interviews’ (2009, p. 1690), ‘inductively derived

from reading’ (2009, p. 1693) and coding. I have no quarrel with the simplicity

of the typology, or its fit to the data, which Vaisey spends some time esta-

blishing. Rather, I would argue that in-depth interviewing (and its analysis) is

most powerful when analysts go beyond what people say to how they say it.

Thus I would argue that cognitive culturalists are like the fishermen who

throw out the ‘bycatch’, or the animals their nets catch accidentally, after decid-ing they are not useful for their purposes – they discard the three other kinds of

information because they disparage the first kind (while all four – even the

honorable – actually offer something of value). I think most interviewers are

familiar with the problem of the presentation of self, the work interviewees do

to present themselves in the most honorable light, even that which involves

coherence. Robert Weiss (1994, p. 181), in his pervasive guide to in-depth inter-

viewing, reviewed ways to get beyond the belief statements of the honorable

kind of data: ‘people tend not to be fully aware of their emotions and their

motivations. This does not mean that their self-reports have to be disregarded.

Rather, they should be treated as likely incomplete’.

Good interviewers use time-honored strategies to get beyond this display

work, including in bypassing the reasoning or lecturing of the cognitive thinker

(Williams, 1995; Hansen, 2005). Researchers ask for specific examples to get

past the belief statements, interpret the cultural meanings from the particular

discursive choices of language and metaphor participants use to access the

schematic, read for the emotional meanings behind the narrative to attempt to

glean fragments of the visceral and meta-feelings. Interviewers are not steno-

graphers, but analysts, who use particular methods to get beyond the text of the

interview, to what a person’s story means to that person, as embodied and

enacted and not just announced. Few other methods provide access to either the

second, third or fourth layer of meaning as outlined here; for these kinds of projects, then, I think Churchill’s words about democracy might fruitfully be

applied to interpretive interviewing: ‘it is the worst form of research except all

the others that have been tried’.

Instead of fighting the incoherence of culture, then, and resolving it – at last! –

in a two-pronged model of consciousness, we can thus embrace and expect such

contradictions. Indeed, as I have argued we assume at our peril that people

might have coherent, non-contradictory, unified beliefs at the ‘practical

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consciousness’ level that they cannot find at the discursive level. In contrast, I

suggest that all four kinds of interview data outlined above involve culture, that

all four can and do contradict each other, and that all four nonetheless also help

to drive action, in part because all four feed into each other, rather than running

on parallel tracks. I offer my own data from a recent research project intocommitment and flexibility to demonstrate some of these assertions.

Research Design and Sample

In 2008–2011, I conducted a study of the emotional cultures through which

people interpret insecurity at work and at home, and the processes by which

they come to make meaning of their actions and relationships at work and at

home (Pugh, forthcoming). Using what Luker (2008) calls the ‘logic of dis-

covery’, I relied upon in-depth interviewing with a sample of wide variation toexplore the ways in which women and men of various social locations, and with

different commitment histories, experience and interpret insecurity culture,

constructing different emotional roadmaps for traversing the challenges of

contemporary cultural trends.

In this study, a graduate student researcher and I interviewed 80 mothers and

fathers in four areas: Washington DC and environs, two large coastal cities and

a smaller central city in Virginia. These parents form three groups: 31 who

experienced layoffs; 28 who are employed in putatively stable positions, such as

police, firefighting or public school teaching; and 20 who had been relocated for

the job, sometimes for their spouse’s job and sometimes for their own. Inaddition, we interviewed 13 informants who moved to get work they did not

have already, who were thus on the more desperate end of economic insecurity.

Twelve informants overlapped these groups. Thus I use this purposive sampling

to vary the experience my informants have had in the labor market – whether as

people with firsthand knowledge of the newly precarious position of many

workers, those who have experienced a long-term stable career with the same

employer, or those who, in moving for the job, have largely chosen to prioritize

their job commitments over other kinds of commitment, such as to comm-

unities, families or friends. Of the 80, 63 (79 per cent) are women, and 10 (12.5

per cent) are non-white, including eight African-Americans and two Latinos.6

Interviews lasted from 1 to 3 hours, averaging about 2.5 hours, and tookplace in cafe ´s, offices, homes and libraries. They involved the taking of what we

might call a ‘commitment history’, including their narratives of change and

stability at home and at work. I explored how informants interpret change,

what counts as betrayal at work or in intimate relationships, how their experi-

ences align with or confound their expectations, and what sort of cultural work

6 See (Pugh, forthcoming) for further details about the sample design and methods.



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they do to resolve any contradictions. I asked for specific examples to illustrate

their notions of what we owe each other, for moments when they had decided it

was time to no longer see someone or when someone left them, for recollections

of when they tried to get their child to quit or stay with some person or activity,

and for memories of troubled times in their important relationships and howthey handled them.

Interpretive Analysis

Qualitative research refers to more than just the way in which the data are

collected; in addition, a crucial component is the analysis to which it is treated.

Data analysis, like other components of qualitative methods, can span radically

different versions, from a surface-level gleaning of ‘answers’ to ‘questions’ to a

profound excavation of semi-conscious meaning. What I call interpretive analy-

sis involves strategies to unearth what Luker dubbed the ‘mental maps’ of ‘some

aspect of social life’ (Luker, 2008, p. 167). These mental maps involve how

people explain themselves and their worldview, and include the aforementioned

four kinds of information. Strategies to excavate these mental maps include

using emotional antennae, soliciting the recall of particularly fraught examples

that Hochschild (2003, p. 16) dubbed ‘magnified moments’, and treating the

data to repeated analysis. I also stayed attuned to rich language use, such as

metaphors, jokes and turns of phrase whose innovation demonstrates the ‘gaps

within and between institutional orders’ (Lizardo and Strand, 2010, p. 218)

when social trends outpace our ability to describe them with our existing words.

The analytic process involves several steps, in which the researcher turns tothe informants’ words again and again, coding them for persistent ideas, glean-

ing relevant themes from these data, repeatedly returning to the texts to check and

recheck themes, and linking codes and themes into analytic memos. The resultant

patterns then lead to the emergence of a larger argument that both summarizes

the processes at work in the data and links these findings to debates in the

literature (Emerson et al , 1995). In analyzing the interviews for this project, for

example, I kept several different logs simultaneously while reading my interviews

again and again, including lists of jokes, turns of phrase and metaphors about

issues of persistence and adaptability. In what follows, I demonstrate some of the

insights generated from the interpretive analysis of in-depth interviewing,discussing, in turn, contradictions between the honorable and other information;

shifting cultural meanings and codes; and the emotional tenor of cultural action.

Mining contradictions

Sometimes, in-depth analysis of interviews brings out contradictions between

explicit pronouncements. One kind of contradiction is in the juxtaposition of

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two honorable statements, of the kind Vaisey (2010, p. 9) points out (for

example, ‘look before you leap’ versus ‘he who hesitates is lost’). These can be

analyzed for different schematic frameworks and offer a glimpse into people’s

available culture at the discursive level. Another kind of contradiction is more

powerful, however, because it seems to stem from what cognitive culturalistsmight consider different levels of consciousness fighting each other for domin-

ance, where one notion seems to bubble forth despite the efforts of the reasonable,

honorable self to suppress it. This kind of bubbling-forth moment happens all the

time in in-depth interviews, and it is, I would argue, interpretive gold. What

makes these contradictions particularly valuable is their vertical character – that

they animate different levels of feeling – as opposed to the more horizontal

contradiction of two competing cultural schemas held in equally light esteem,

called upon merely to explain action that has already been taken, driven by what

the cognitive culturalists argue are more fundamental moral underpinnings.

Rather than throw up our hands at the ‘problem’ of cultural incoherence (likethe toolkit theorists), and instead of ‘solving’ this problem by separating out the

messy, contradictory, discursive consciousness as meaningless frippery (or mere

rationalizations) from the consistency of practical consciousness (like the

cognitive culturalists), interpretive interviewers take both testimonies seriously.

The honorable level often acts, I think, as a kind of cultural barometer, a reading

of what is admirable behavior for the interviewee in his/her social setting, parti-

cularly useful for understanding social pressures and the cultural ascendancy of

particular ideas and practices. That which bubbles forth, on the other hand, is

rarely trotted out simply to solve a new problem – rather, it can often be an

admission of contrary, yet powerfully held emotional conviction. That these

admissions are often painful is testimony to the arduousness, and the pro-

foundly personal nature, of the reconciliation work interviewees must under-

take to resolve the cultural contradictions that they straddle.

Sean Dunning7 had a mental illness that interfered with his former job,

leading him to get laid off and ultimately, for his wife to ask him to leave,

although he had recently moved back in to present a united front when her

family visited for Thanksgiving. He had a variety of cultural frameworks

available to him that explained what marriage is, and what we owe each other.

Sean repeatedly reached for financial metaphors to describe commitment, for

example, claiming that ‘marriage is probably my ultimate commitment, it’s like

signing a mortgage’, and joking that they unfortunately moved away from hishome in Denver for his wife, because he ‘didn’t prenup a move to the East

Coast’. In analyzing the schematic content of these financial metaphors, we can

see Sean imposing a contractual framework on his commitment, which both

solidifies it with institutionalized economic meanings but strips it of more

7 All names of informants, and some of their identifying details (but none of their words), have been

changed to protect their confidentiality.



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transcendent moral content. The jokes show that he does so wittingly, winking

and nodding as he draws these slightly profane analogies to what is ‘supposed to

be’ the more sacred family sphere.

Sean’s move out from, and back into, the house he shared with his wife and

son involved a series of crises for him and the family, and he spent a lot of energy recounting how well he understood his wife’s position, however chilling

it may seem, as he had made her life very difficult. A lot of this discourse, I

would argue, is of the honorable kind.

And I told her my family didn’t understand why – how she could kick me

out kind of thing, but I understood, I mean, all along, I said, I always

kidded around it – withdrawingy seeking some ‘health clause’ [out of the

‘in sickness and health’ part of the marital contract] because if I had to live

with the kind of crap that she’s had, I wouldn’t blame her, so – that’s why it

was an easy decision for me to move out, even though it was devastatingand difficult with Michael.

Of course, by prefacing this statement with his birth family’s perspective –

referring to another cultural audience, in essence a second opinion rendering her

actions reprehensible – Sean was already casting aspersions on his wife’s

request. He jokes about a ‘health clause’, meaning a way out of the ‘in sickness

and in health’ segment of the marital contract, and his feelings of betrayal seep

in, as when he refers to the moment as ‘devastating and difficult’. Still, he

maintains that because of ‘the kind of crap that’s she had’, he ‘wouldn’t blame

her’ for kicking him out and it was ‘an easy decision’.

Later on in the interview, however, a plaintive query escapes. He asks: ‘If I

had cancer would you do the same – would you kick my ass out if I had cancer?’

Note how his position in the question changes as well, so he is no longer

narrating what he told ‘her’, but instead asking ‘you’ directly, painfully, and

giving the lie to his compliant stance. As an example of the visceral kind of

information, Sean’s distraught sense of abandonment bubbles up through (and

despite) his attempt to reason his way towards a cool acceptance.

We get two crucial benefits from the in-depth interviewing data here. First,

even if we could design a survey research question that would get Sean to reveal

his core understanding of what we owe each other, we would miss the extensive

cultural work he does. Sean works hard to manage the distance between whathe feels we owe our spouses – not to abandon each other in mental illness – and

what he thinks he is supposed to feel – that marriage, perhaps like a financial

commitment, can only sustain so much, and that it is unreasonable to expect

that a spouse can withstand such an onslaught on her own happiness and

fulfillment. Second, through the interviewing data we get an understanding not

just of the visceral, the core foundations of Sean’s deepest morality, but also the

larger context for that morality – the meta-feeling, that is, what it feels like to

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feel these feelings, to hold these ideas dear (for Sean, as for others I interviewed,

it is very painful). In doing so, we manage to bring the larger social environment

into the conversation about morality and motivation, the cultural context that

Swidler (2008) argued was missing in these debates.

Another example is perhaps less fraught. Theresa, a practical, married whitewoman who had her own business, asserted that she rejected ‘enabling

behavior’. ‘I’m a big fan of ending relationships when they are too much work’,

she said flatly, describing a friend’s husband with a drinking problem. In this

way, she mimicked most of the informants in my study, invoking an itinerant,

tough love, ‘cut ‘em off’ ideology that prevailed widely at the honorable level of

discourse.

Yet much of Theresa’s life made her an exception to the culture of flexibility,

including her pragmatic approach to her low-key, relaxed marriage of separate

friends and vacations (‘Well, you can’t change people. If they don’t like it [for

example, share the same interests], they’re not going to like it regardless. And itdoesn’t mean they don’t love you, they just don’t [want to do that] and that’s

just the way it is’.), and her long-term commitment to her employees, even when

their job disappeared, as it did for her nanny when her children grew up (‘I’m

like ‘What am I going to do with her [the nanny] when Gillian starts driving?’

She’ll be 14 in October so like I’ve got to find a job for [the nanny]. Yeah,

bringing her right in’).

The ‘problem’ of the nanny is a paradigmatic example of Theresa’s approach

to relationships, the very fact that is bubbling forth through her pronouncement

about ending relationships. I asked Theresa why she did not just let her go,

which would have been perfectly explicable as the children were now teenagers.

‘I would’, Theresa replied. ‘I mean I would if I had to but if I can use her here

and I love her and she’s like my oldest child and she’s also kind of like my wife’.

Theresa has to invent new language use here, to braid together two different

words to capture the emotional significance of the nanny – who is both as dear

to her as a child in her care, and as profoundly important, for years as useful

and dependable to her, as the iconic wife. Theresa may claim to engage in

flexible relationships, then, ending them when they ‘are too much work’, she

may even invoke a ‘cooling strategy’ of using anti-‘enabling’ language when

making pronouncements about what she believes, but the details of her

narrative paint another picture. Her language use – including jokes, stories, and

as we can see, metaphors that invoke family relationships to justify cherishingher employee – buttress our understanding of her as someone who despite her

protestations to the contrary also embodies a culture of commitment, one in

opposition to the ethos of ‘flexibility’ that she invokes. What we get from the

interviewing data, then, is a sense not just of her visceral morality, but also how

they contrast with what counts as honorable – in itself a fairly contradictory set

of ideas for her. That conflict is worth documenting for what it says about her

efforts to navigate the emotional landscape, one that – despite her own needs



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and predilections – apparently values loose, lightly held relationships with

minimal expectations governed by self-interest.

I offer a third example to further demonstrate what is useful about

honorable data, even that which is contradicted. Felicia, who worked for

the same company for 16 years before she was laid off, said the job wasgreat until the owner’s son took over. At that point ‘it became more of

a lump-more-jobs-onto-fewer-people kind of a place’, she said, describing

a process by which the work was rationalized, sped-up and deskilled.

Ultimately, she ended up getting replaced by ‘cheaper labor’. She was angry

when it first happened, but then realized she didn’t want to work there

anyway, she said.

Well, I knew at that point it kind of sucked, because there were several

other people there who had worked for the company for that long and

made good money and they were out, so it’s not like it was only me. And itwas wearing on my soul working there at that point too.

It was time to move on because – [Laughs.] yes, I was angry. [Laughs.]

I hate to say no. Yeah, but at the same time, you know, sometimes it’s best

to know when things are done. You know what I mean? And nobody was

happy there anymore, so, and a huge part of my life was trying to be

happy.

In this passage, Felicia refuses to accept the stigma of the layoff – ‘It’s not like it

was only me’ – and calls upon ‘new opportunity’ language, as well as invoking

some defiance about not wanting to work there anyway. But the emotional story

breaks in to her narrative, as she admits to being angry right in the middle of her

reasoning about it being ‘time to move on’. Yet she comes to some resolution

about ‘being happy’, and the emotional labor involved in being so: ‘a huge part

of my life was trying to be happy’.

How do we evaluate Felicia’s account? Do we say that her narrative does not

matter, because it is (1) contradictory, (2) does not lead to action, and (3) does

not speak to the automatic realm, the elephant? I think a wiser strategy is to

watch it all: the discursive choices she has at her discretion (see how much

culture she knows), her ability to deploy these schemas in service to one idea – it

was time to move on – but most of all, the emotional work she undertakes here(and in which direction). She may have felt angry, but she is forcibly, almost

consciously putting that aside as not helpful to her capacity to function, to train

for another job, to look for work. I am not saying we accept that she is now

‘happy’ – indeed, she is clearly even now a little angry – but we must take note

of how she is marshalling her cultural resources to turn down the intensity of

her feelings so that she can function in the way she wants, or perhaps, the way

she must.

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Thus in Felicia’s contradictory account, we access, at the same time, the

honorable – for example, the ‘new opportunity’ language – and the schematic –

for example, the notion that functional workers, functional people, must try to

move on, to be happy, the idea that underlies her efforts to reshape her feelings –

and the visceral – for example, the depths of her anger, which refuses, for amoment, that very reshaping – and the meta-feelings – for example, the defiance

she shows about the anger she is not supposed to feel. In doing so, we can see

the structural vise that grips those who are thrown aside in the postindustrial

economy, and the emotional culture that prevails, making some cultural

schemas more available for activation, the streetlamp shining. Felicia embodies

their need to move on, to be upbeat and positive for their own mental health as

well as their employability, juxtaposed with the betrayal, the rupture of

relationships and self-worth at work, that comes with an involuntary departure

from a job (see also Lane, 2011).

Moving cultural meanings

Informants often invented new language to describe situations to which old

understandings did not apply; attending closely to their discourse captures the

disjuncture between social trends and the means we have to describe them, and

gives useful access to the second kind of information, the schematic. When

Manny Trigeros used the term ‘live-in family’, for example, to describe his plans

for his second wife, now pregnant, he sought to distinguish between those plans

and his first child, who now lived in New York. He also illustrated the need for

a new phrase, one whose mediating adjective ‘live-in’ demonstrated that in

his world, the assumption that families cohabit together had been dismantled;

how else could he convey that this family would be different, closer, than his

first family living 300 miles away?

Similarly, interviewees used the term ‘heart family’ to cordon off the idea of

emotionally close fictive kin from uncaring mothers and brothers; ‘orphan

families’ to signify people far from their extended kin who came together to

celebrate holidays rather than traveling ‘back home’; ‘bar friends’ to distinguish

from ‘real friends’. Informants said ‘[a project] was circled’ to signify a halfway

commitment by venture capitalists; described a ‘real “I go to work every day”

job’ to distinguish it from university research; called themselves ‘lifers’ to

describe themselves as one of the few who stay at their jobs until they retire.Every time they found themselves needing to coin these phrases, they demon-

strated how much cultural meaning was changing, how much the words had

strayed from their conventional meanings, and the strength of the need to

resolve those cultural contradictions that render invisible contemporary experi-

ence. Attending to the creative uses of language unearthed the ways they

signaled new kinds of relationships to work and to love, as they sought to

mark off what was unusual, what was worth noting about a particular



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situation. This creative language use is of course not accessible to us when we

are writing the answers ourselves in forced-choice surveys, and it offers to us yet

another glimpse of the wider cultural landscape, its constraints in capturing our

experience and the power it wields in spurring discursive innovation.

The emotional tenor of cultural action

As Luker (2008) writes: ‘By and large, we are not so much interested in the

veracity of the interviews, in some cosmic sense of the word, as we are in the

deep truth of them’ (p. 167). Much of that deep truth is emotional. In looking

for the third kind of visceral information, we listen for emotional signposts,

attend to non-verbal cues, ask for specific examples and then analyze them for

evidence of an emotional backstory, stay alert to contradictions and metaphoric

language, and stay attuned to one’s own emotional reactions as an interviewer.

Here, the magnified moment often reveals more, and more powerfully, thanbelief statements.

Thus, for example, I came to understand that the emotional tenor of commit-

ment, as most of my informants experienced it, resembled more of a slog

through duty, rather than a joyful leap of choice. Marin, a remarried white

woman, recounted the humiliation of staying committed to a wayward hus-

band: ‘I was not in a good place, obviously, and you know, I’ll just be the really

good wife and I’ll iron his shirts before he goes on dates with her. And, you

know – which I look back on: “Oh my God,” you know? Somebody needed to

wring my neck’. In contrast, the call of duty was not shameful in Melissa’s

stories, but it was still resigned, the feeling of the yoked. A white parapro-

fessional, she has been married to the same man and employed at the same job

for about two decades each. She told a story in which she was horrified by a

sister-in-law who allowed her daughter to boycott a recent Christmas holiday

dinner. ‘I don’t give a shit about you and boyfriend, you do this for your family’,

Melissa said, her voice scornful as it acted out what she felt her niece should

have been told. ‘This isn’t about you and your boyfriend. This is about your

grandmother and your aunt’. Melissa was horrified that the niece was shunning

duty, even a duty she did not want to do; commitment did not care how you felt

about it, according to Melissa, whose vision of loyalty included a palpable sense

of submission.

In contrast, interviewees who talked about leaving others behind invokedthrough their magnified moments a sense of power, albeit sometimes inflected

with fear and anger as well. Becca recalled leaving her abusive husband all of a

sudden, grabbing the children out of school, getting them in the car and driving

down the highway: ‘The kids had to leave their TVs, their beds, their toys. They

just basically had clothes and I knew they were really upset so I tried to make it

fun. Let’s bash Wyatt. “Here, Blake, here’s my ring, throw it out the window”.

So he throws my engagement ring out the window’. A single mother now,

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Becca could have used that engagement ring to subsidize her efforts to help her

little family survive, she ruefully admits later. Yet as she recounts her story as if

it was happening today, we can hear at once the headiness, the drama, the terror

and the joy of getting out.

Leaving in the car, defiant, proud – these were also hallmarks in Fiona’s story.A white, working class woman with a fierce independence, Fiona described the

way one serious relationship ended. He had been a co-worker who earned a

decent salary, had a son by a previous marriage and lived in a nice house – all

points in his favor, Fiona said. But 2 months after having moved in with him,

things went downhill. For her, the story of the relationship’s denouement is a

priceless example of her son Jimmy’s resilience:

I found an email, like, to another girl that he was planning to go some-

where with. We were supposed to be going to this party and I was looking

up a recipe and I saw the email. And I was, like, ‘I’m out of here. See youlater.’ Get Jimmy, get in the car. And [the boyfriend’s] like, you know,

probably yelling for me not to leave and we need to talk about it or some-

thing. And I’m like, ‘whatever.’ So we get in the car, Jimmy’s with me, and

we start driving away. And it’s June, but you know that Rudolf song?

[Sings] ‘Put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’ll be walking out

y ’ . He just started singing that in the back of the car. He’s like four years

old. I mean how perfect is that? [Laughs.]

What counts as ‘perfect’ in such a scenario, one could imagine, might vary

considerably. For Fiona, ‘perfect’ is when her son Jimmy is not afraid or angry

that they are leaving, but instead evinces a sunny independence with a cheeky

humor that suggests he is unbowed by the adult drama.

What ‘kind’ of information are we getting here? Although some of it is at

the level of the honorable – perhaps the good mother recalling ‘I tried to make

it fun’ – some of it is more passionately felt, more inchoate – particularly,

Melissa’s snarling fury about the necessity of submitting to commitment,

or Becca’s wildly celebratory departure, throwing out a ring she later could

have used – suggesting a more visceral level. Furthermore, staying attuned to an

emotional backstory allows us access to the interplay of individual feeling

and culture. For Fiona, ‘how perfect is that?’ tells us something about her

meta-feeling – she is proud, even exultant, about their independence fromfaithless others, and feels little discrepancy between how she feels – ‘I’m out of

here’ – and how, according to her ambient culture, she is supposed to feel – the

hardened ‘whatever’.

Cognitive culturalists might argue that my goals in this research project

extended beyond the search for predictive ‘motivation’, for ever tighter links

between culture and action, that have animated their flurry of theoretical papers

in the past 5 years, and in this charge they would be right. Yet I would also



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contend that in documenting the expectations of others that people carry – and

how these expectations do not originate directly and rationally from actual

experience – we are able to document a wider cultural terrain than simply

that which animates action. Instead, we can tap into the interactive edge

where embodied culture and external pressures to feel or think a certain waycollide.

In this project, people made adaptations to what they perceived as a wide-

spread culture of insecurity. Their discursive innovations pointed to their efforts

to move that culture, as existing language could not capture what they meant to

emphasize – either because it signified too much (‘bar friends’ versus friends) or

too little (‘live-in’ family versus family). According to my informants, insecurity

culture expected them to act and feel a certain way – independent, invulner-

able, with minimal mutual expectations. When they felt otherwise – when

they expected too much, were too hurt by others, or found themselves

wanting to provide more than the pervading cultural ethos would suggest iswarranted – their language in an in-depth interpretive interview gave them

away, through contradictions, emotional signposts or the other signal flares of

cultural work.

Conclusion

New cognitive theories of culture argue that interviewing is a particularly weak

method of divining how culture influences action, because people’s reasoning

offers a too coherent model of what are actually contradictory, messy and scant

internal webs of cultural schemas, and when most action actually originates in

snap judgments made by a more automatic internal system. Although these

scholars have injected new dynamism into cultural theorizing, their vision of how

culture works leaves untapped notions of what comprises the more automatic

system, its relationship to the discursive realm and the relatively unelaborated role

of emotions, including the wider context of an emotional landscape.

In contrast, I argue interpretive, in-depth interviewing enables access to four

kinds of information – the honorable, the schematic, the visceral and meta-

feelings. These are important contributions because they allow for an embed-

dedness of the individual actor, and enable us to start thinking about how

culture and emotions interact to produce different kinds of feeling. Althoughpeople surely evince different cultural schemas to explain away particular

problems, they have a sense for what counts as honorable behavior in their

cultural world, which may or may not mesh with their innermost predilections.

Their meta-feelings are a demonstration of the degree to which they are cultural

migrants, a measure of the distances they have traveled from their early social

contexts shaping the meanings of their early experiences, to the strictures of the

cultural milieu in which they find themselves today.

Pugh


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We can envision that sometimes people take action because of their ‘gut’

feelings, and other times, they are led by their sense of what is honorable in their

social world – a variation that dual-process models make difficult to explain

(although Lizardo and Strand (2010) do their best). Under circumstances in

which these notions conflict, how can we know which worldview will takeprecedence when? This is a crucial question, one too broad to take up here, yet I

wonder if the answer lies in part in the power of culture-in-interaction, as

Eliasoph and Lichterman explored in their influential (2003) article. Their

concept of ‘group styles’, and the ‘group feeling rules’ that these imply, include a

collective shaping of action through emotion. ‘A group’s style asks for certain

ways of expressing emotion in the group’, as they note (2003, p. 775). These

group styles might have a more or less powerful effect in shaping the emotional

resonance of certain practices or ideas, in generating the ability of people to act

on how they feel inside, and in igniting their inner conflict through their meta-

feelings (Pugh, 2009).In light of this research, it is important to remember that interview data have

their limitations. Most important for cultural sociologists, although interviews

give us a glimpse of the cultural pressures individuals perceive, they are not the

best means to excavate the cultural milieu in which people are embedded.

Ethnographic work yields observations that capture the feeling rules of these

‘tiny publics’ (Fine and Harrington, 2004; Pugh, 2011), while survey research

can help us better grasp the prevalence of an honorable schema, for example.

Outlining the strategies for accessing different kinds of information in

interviews, I have contended that interviewers are less like stenographers than

detectives, whose skill and best practices matter for the utility and resonance of

the findings they uncover. Further, my evidence suggests that when we analyze

people’s talk for the feelings that embed their narratives, and the management of

their feelings that their schematic commitments require – a form of data only

available from in-depth, interpretive, conversational interviewing – we can

access the emotional schemas that impinge upon them, and that potentially

shape what action seems possible.

I thus agree with the cognitive culturalists that (1) people’s cultural know-

ledge is multiple, fragmentary and frequently contradictory, and (2) deliberative

talk of the kind that features the merely honorable sort of data does not give

much insight into some sort of practical consciousness. I find that even

honorable data can be useful, however, in acting as a sort of windsock for thesort of socially sanctioned ideas and behaviors impinging upon informants.

In addition, rather than decrying the incoherence of culture in action, I welcome

it as one might a poker player’s tell, a powerful hint that all is not as smooth as

the interviewee (or the social scientist) might like. Cultural contradictions point

to the gaps between institutionalized cultural scaffolding, the areas in which

what we feel and think is silenced, or disallowed, or shunned. I would thus

argue that culture scholars should be as or more interested in charting those



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gaps, as the cognitive culturalists have been in tightening the links between

culture and action.

Acknowledgement

This article has gone through many iterations since its inception as a talk at the

Boston University sociology department. In addition to that kind audience, I

thank the people who helped to improve it along the way: Marianne Cooper,

Sarah Corse, Cameron MacDonald, Jeffrey Olick, Jennifer Petersen, Jennifer

Cyd Rubenstein, Denise Walsh, Christine Williams and the students in my Fall

2012 Qualitative Methods seminar at the University of Virginia, as well as

Philip Smith as AJCS editor and two anonymous reviewers. Thanks to Roscoe

Scarborough for excellent research assistance. This article discusses research

funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of the Sloan Work-FamilyEarly Career Development Grant; and was written with support from the United

States Study Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia and the Bankard Fund

for Political Economy.

About the Author

Allison J. Pugh is an Assistant Professor of sociology at the University of

Virginia. Her first book, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and

Consumer Culture (California, 2009) won an honorable mention for the Mary

Douglas Prize for the best book in the sociology of culture. Her forthcoming

book The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity

(Oxford) is about the culture of insecurity at work and in intimate life. She is

also editing a volume for Oxford on the broader impacts of new ways of

organizing work, currently entitled Beyond the Cubicle: Postindustrial Culture

and the Flexible Self.

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