An Antipodean history of interpretation

Elsewhere, especially in Europe and North America, the interpretive approach to political research has emerged as a counter identity. Key figures like Dvora Yanow and Frank Fischer have typically defined and defended interpretivism in opposition to the positivist paradigm they see as dominant in the North American and European contexts. In this paper, we explore the connections between intepretivism’s core and its peripheries in both geographical and epistemological terms, by tracing the relationship between interpretivism and Australian political scholarship. In this task, we draw on some of the most celebrated and influential work on Australian politics—by political scientists but before them historians and anthropologists—to show how the approach typically undertaken by these researchers echoes key tenets of interpretivism, especially through an interest in subjective beliefs and experiences, a desire to uncover and bring to life richly contextualised detail, and a commitment to the abductive linking of theory and practice. As such, we suggest that the spread of this counter identity to interpretive researchers in Australia risks manufacturing a sense of methodological antipathy, marginalising the work of interpretivists from mainstream political scholarshi