摘要：Imagine an anthropologist from the Starship Enterprise. To him, of course, sociologists would be one of the groups whose business it was to construct belief systems about their culture. In Weberian fashion, one of the interesting questions about us would be how we go about legitimising these beliefs. We do it by recourse to certain artefacts, by the production and display of ‘THE DATA.’ We interact with our fellows in various ways; we take notes, make counts, examine documents, ride in police cars, make films and tapes, hang around and ‘keep our eyes open,’ ————. We take the products of these actions and organise them, tabulate them, punch cards, tear off print out, graph, summarise, transcribe, code, symbolise, ————. Finally, THE DATA appears in (usually) written form, in standardised notation systems as special parts of a text with its own unique formatting labels and explanations. Various kinds of such artefacts are brought to mind with titles like ‘tables,’ ‘path diagrams,’ ‘regression graphs,’ ‘transcripts,’ ‘vignettes,’ ‘exemplary stories,’ ‘pictures,’ ‘excerpts,’ and so on. Such objects, in such texts, as read and understood by sociologists, are capable of partially legitimating beliefs. These objects constitute highly stylised descriptions of the particulars of our social world—of who voted for who, what was seen, what was said, how many were born, how much money was made, ————. Such particulars, as depicted, serve as example, proof, evidence, case, origin, inspiration for, warrant of, ————, beliefs about the nature of social life in our society. As praxis data represents a mode of being in, and displaying, the world while you are doing your job; as artefacts they represent procedures of justification—examples, proofs, evidence, cases, origins, inspirations for, warrants of, ————, beliefs and belief systems
