Meeting or mis-meeting? The dialogical challenge to Verstehen.

Some form of communicative understanding is central to all cross-cultural ethnographic research. A Verstehende approach typifies most English- language interpretive social science. At best this involves understanding-in- context, but at worst amounts to little more than an attempt to 'put oneself in the other's shoes'. Charges that this approach discards the informants' discourse in favour of the researcher's narrative are surveyed along with theoretical attempts within sociology to refute these critiques by modifying Verstehen. It is argued that Verstehende methods are unethical by contemporary standards of research ethics. Rather than privileging the understanding of one or another person, whereby one agent (an informant) possesses the truth and other (the researcher) does not, a focus on the interaction between researcher and informant is proposed. This 'dialogical' model, drawn from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, provides a theoretical basis for research on the social and shared nature of understanding. The 'truth' is between the interacting agents. Poetic though this may seem, this view is strongly theorized by ethicists and grounded in both the work of German neo-Kantianism and Hegel, where 'truth' is always aporetic and liminal. Untranslated work by Bakhtin is presented, including his commentaries on the problem of cross-cultural understanding. This paper argues that a 'dialogical verstehen' provides an equitable foundation for field research in the social sciences which avoids the problem of a research 'speaking as' and 'speaking for' discarded and potentially silenced respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]