In the 1970s, a number of calls were made for a new kind of interpretive social science that would have ethnography at its center (e.g., Bernstein, 1976; Dallmayr & McCarthy, 1977; Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979). In this chapter I will examine three of these calls: Charles Taylor’s proposal for an interpretive approach to political science, Anthony Giddens’s hermeneutically informed sociology, and Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology. In each case, interpretation – hermeneutics – was regarded as an important, even central, element. In each case, immersion in the social practices of a community – that is to say, ethnographic fieldwork – was considered crucial (though at the same time, as we shall see later, ethnography itself was in crisis). In each case – in sociology, political science, and anthropology – it was claimed that the new approach would resolve core dualisms that had plagued the discipline. And, in each case, it was said that this would be because we would study the key relationship of constitution between humans and the world. This chapter begins our exploration of this notion of constitution, a notion that will lead us to a new way of practicing fieldwork. Once again, it will turn out to be important to get the ontology right.