Meaning is better than structure

[ailiathena]

In trying to write my National Science Foundation grant proposal, I am struggling to formulate my goals in the form of hypotheses that can be disproved. Obviously, this is important to some science-y people. But  Geertz is a social scientist obsessed with interpreting meaning, and he really shaped my approach to anthropology. Interpretation, it turns out, is pretty friggin' difficult to disprove. But it is, unfortunately, what I want to do. Ethnography, as Wikipedia so helpfully asserts, "links what people say to what they actually do."

It boggles my mind why anyone would think this is less important than creating/assigning generalizing structures that ALSO can't predict the future.