The Ethnographer as Detective: Indiciary Paradigm and Abduction

The paper reflects on the use of the indiciary paradigm in ethnographic research. Ethnography, and social research more broadly, must address the invisibility of action’s meaning and the definitions of situation. For accessing these “internal states” — beliefs, meanings, values — a semiotic orientation toward reading traces, signs, clues, and minor details is essential. The specificity of this reading practice emerges through comparison with medical diagnosis, revealing a critical difference: unlike patients who collaborate in diagnosis, research participants deploy dissimulation and simulation as self-protection. Drawing on Becker’s insight that participants orient performances toward more consequential audiences (superiors, peers) rather than ethnographers, and Anteby’s analysis of resistance strategies, the paper illustrates how the indiciary paradigm addresses this opacity through attention to “expressions given off” and unwitting testimonies. The paper subsumes the indiciary paradigm under abductive logic, thereby addressing Ginzburg’s ostensible resistance to this framing. Ethnographic fieldwork becomes the theatre where indiciary paradigm and abductive inference operate together. Following Peirce’s classical definition, enriched by Walton and Eco’s contributions, the paper adopts Eco’s distinction of three abductive types: overcoded, undercoded, and creative. Each type is illustrated through Sherlock Holmes’ adventures — Ginzburg’s exemplar of the indiciary paradigm — and through the author’s ethnographic studies on nature sacralization in Italian communities and childhood vaccine hesitancy across seven European countries. The paper concludes that the indiciary paradigm guides the ethnographer’s gaze toward marginal details and unwitting testimonies that trigger abductive reasoning — the core engine of ethnographic practice.