Scholarly theoretical lenses can actively conceal social reality rather than reveal it

Evidence

Several factors seem to account for this difference between the historians and the social scientists. The latter tended to view the region through conceptual lenses - modernization, empathy, the rise of the new middle class - which, while affirming important new insights, served to conceal part of the social and political reality. Some social scientists, working through questionnaires and research assistants, lost or failed to acquire contact with that reality. They were influenced in part by the apparent decline of the ethnic factor in the 1950s. They may also have been influenced by the manifest reluctance of Middle Easterners, particularly intellectuals, to admit the lingering importance of traditional (not to say archaic) loyalties that modernity should have swept aside. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3491

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the social construction of knowledge critique in Communication as Culture — how theoretical frames determine what counts as observable fact. — connects to: Critical Theory held that researchers are part of the social object they study — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 299; A writer’s formal method determines which social realities remain inaccessible to him — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 784; Empirical-analytic sciences secretly carry a technical cognitive interest masked as value-freedom. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2423 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Could the same mechanism — questionnaire methods plus modernization assumptions — be masking ethnic salience in other regions or eras right now? Worth chasing which current academic orthodoxies are doing this.