What Good Are Interviews For Thinking About Culture? Demystifying Interpretive Analysis

Original Article
What good are interviews for thinking

about culture? Demystifying interpretive
analysis
Allison J. Pugha,b
a
Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400766, Charlottesville,

Virginia 22904-4766, USA.
United 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 culture
scholars who have used theoretical models of bifurcated consciousness to allege important
methodological implications for research in culture. These scholars, whom I dub cognitive
culturalists, have dismissed the utility of in-depth interviewing to access the visceral,
causally powerful level of practical consciousness. I argue these scholars are misguided in
their diagnosis of a problem (interviews can only access peoples 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). I contend 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, I demonstrate how interpretive interviewing allows researchers access to an
emotional landscape that brings a broader, social dimension to individual motivation.
American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2013) 1, 4268. 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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www.palgrave-journals.com/ajcs/
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Using interviews to think about culture
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 horizon of cultural theorizing. Nonetheless, I argue, these scholars are misguided in their diagnosis of a problem (interviews can only access peoples
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 peoples 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 ethnographers discussion of interviews as the production of highly
individualized, socially decontextualized talk). Because these scholars ground
their methodological argument in a theoretical position, I offer a partial theoretical critique that carries the seeds of a more sophisticated approach to meet
the needs of a more complex society than the cognitive culturalists acknowledge, 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
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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 portray
as 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 peoples hold on culture was tenuous and fragmented. 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, peoples 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 insight
and appeal of Ann Swidlers (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
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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 for
researchers 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 farranging and their work is novel, although their prose can be a bit jarring for the
sociologist 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.
Vaiseys (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 is
merely 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 peoples 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 reinvigorate cultural theorizing with a lively debate fed by voracious reading spanning
several 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 consciousness, 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. 616617): 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 Bourdieus 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, however
gently, the riders 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 Vaiseys 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 counterintuitively, that interpretive in-depth interviewing allows us to think about
the 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 peoples 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 schemas
opportunistically. 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 theory y 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 scaffolding y . 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 simpler
conceptual 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 case
comprehensible.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 peoples 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
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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 no
longer 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.
Reed contends (p. 116) that confronted with contradictory deep meanings y [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 the
emotional 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 different
sources 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 matter. 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 peoples elaborated rationalizations); and their prescribed solution (survey methods are best
because they manage to tap into some sort of pre-reflective practical consciousness). In particular, I argue these scholars misrecognize a fundamental
characteristic of in-depth interviews: they can access different levels of information about peoples 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 information, 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 what
they 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 frameworks 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 semiconscious level, and they also can contradict an interviewees 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 selfconstructed 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 their
actions and reactions, a landscape that researchers must somehow be able
to divine and portray. Researchers looking to access these data adopt a variety
4
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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 interviewees normally clear and concise language
devolves into convoluted or halting syntax. Respondents do not just tell us
where 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 the
felt 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 the
respondents 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 interviewers 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 which
researcher 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 differentiating, I would argue, because they illustrate different points in the processes of
how culture shapes action, and because they highlight the under-elaborated
emotional 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 in
their 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 populates 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 embarrassed 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 interpretive
analysis, 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.
Vaiseys 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 who
listens 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 policework 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) peoples 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 as
well 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 were
put, 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 establishing. 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 deciding 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 interviewing, 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 stenographers, but analysts, who use particular methods to get beyond the text of the
interview, to what a persons 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 Churchills 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 into
commitment and flexibility to demonstrate some of these assertions.
Research Design and Sample

In 20082011, 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 discovery, I relied upon in-depth interviewing with a sample of wide variation to
explore 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 spouses job and sometimes for their own. In
addition, 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 communities, 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 took
place in cafes, 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 experiences 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 how
they 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 analysis 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 to
the informants words again and again, coding them for persistent ideas, gleaning 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 peoples
available culture at the discursive level. Another kind of contradiction is more
powerful, however, because it seems to stem from what cognitive culturalists
might consider different levels of consciousness fighting each other for dominance, 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 (like
the 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, particularly 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 profoundly personal nature, of the reconciliation work interviewees must undertake 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, its like
signing a mortgage, and joking that they unfortunately moved away from his
home in Denver for his wife, because he didnt 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.
Seans 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 wifes 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 didnt 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 withdrawing y 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 shes had, I wouldnt blame her, so thats why it
was an easy decision for me to move out, even though it was devastating
and difficult with Michael.
Of course, by prefacing this statement with his birth familys perspective
referring to another cultural audience, in essence a second opinion rendering her
actions reprehensible Sean was already casting aspersions on his wifes
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 thats she had, he wouldnt 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, Seans 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 what
he 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 Seans 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 white
woman who had her own business, asserted that she rejected enabling
behavior. Im a big fan of ending relationships when they are too much work,
she said flatly, describing a friends 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 Theresas 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 cant change people. If they dont like it [for
example, share the same interests], theyre not going to like it regardless. And it
doesnt mean they dont love you, they just dont [want to do that] and thats
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 (Im
like What am I going to do with her [the nanny] when Gillian starts driving?
Shell be 14 in October so like Ive got to find a job for [the nanny]. Yeah,
bringing her right in).
The problem of the nanny is a paradigmatic example of Theresas 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 shes like my oldest child and shes 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 cherishing
her 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 was
great until the owners 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 didnt 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 its not like it was only me. And it
was 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 its 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 Its 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 Felicias 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 Felicias 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 a
moment, 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 demonstrated 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 experience. 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 ones own emotional reactions as an interviewer.
Here, the magnified moment often reveals more, and more powerfully, than
belief statements.
Thus, for example, I came to understand that the emotional tenor of commitment, 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 husband: I was not in a good place, obviously, and you know, Ill just be the really
good wife and Ill 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 Melissas
stories, but it was still resigned, the feeling of the yoked. A white paraprofessional, 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 dont 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 isnt 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 invoked
through 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. Lets bash Wyatt. Here, Blake, heres 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 Fionas 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 relationships denouement is a
priceless example of her son Jimmys resilience:
I found an email, like, to another girl that he was planning to go somewhere 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, Im out of here. See you
later. Get Jimmy, get in the car. And [the boyfriends] like, you know,
probably yelling for me not to leave and we need to talk about it or something. And Im like, whatever. So we get in the car, Jimmys with me, and
we start driving away. And its June, but you know that Rudolf song?
[Sings] Put one foot in front of the other, and soon youll be walking out
y . He just started singing that in the back of the car. Hes 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,
Melissas snarling fury about the necessity of submitting to commitment,
or Beccas 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 from
faithless others, and feels little discrepancy between how she feels Im 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 way
collide.
In this project, people made adaptations to what they perceived as a widespread 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, invulnerable, 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 is
warranted 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 peoples 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 metafeelings. These are important contributions because they allow for an embeddedness of the individual actor, and enable us to start thinking about how
culture and emotions interact to produce different kinds of feeling. Although
people 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.
64
Vol. 1, 1, 4268
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 take
precedence 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 groups 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 metafeelings (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
peoples 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) peoples cultural knowledge 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 the
sort 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 players 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
Vol. 1, 1, 4268
65
Pugh
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-Family
Early 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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What Good Are Interviews For Thinking About Culture? Demystifying Interpretive Analysis

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Original Article

What good are interviews for thinking

Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400766, Charlottesville,

r 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

A New History of Cultural Sociology

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American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

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

grandiose versions of peoples internalization of an entire fabric of cultural

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American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

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

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American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

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

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

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American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

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

Culture, Emotion and Action

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American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

Interpretive Interviewing and Analysis

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American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

Research Design and Sample

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

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American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

r 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

and predilections apparently values loose, lightly held relationships with

r 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

Thus in Felicias contradictory account, we access, at the same time, the

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

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American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

r 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

About the Author

r 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Using interviews to think about culture

r 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

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