ABSTRACT
Jack had first experienced symptoms related to narcolepsy in his late thirties. Ryan had been diagnosed with almost all the conditions that a disordered sleeper could be diagnosed with narcolepsy. For both Jack and Ryan, the consequences of their disclosures endanger their status as employees and, by extension, their ability to meet their family obligations and other social commitments. Although ethnographers are exposed to the vulnerabilities of storytelling, they have means discursive and methodological to allay disbelief. Leaving aside the relationship between Christianity and contemporary social science, the struggle for verisimilitude on the part of ethnographic writing is intended to both convince the reader of the authors experience, as well as those experiences of others that the author is representing to the reader. Physicians often use vagueness and opacity in the scientific and medical literature to manipulate data to provide alternative explanations for empirical realities; doubt allows for the re-diagnosis of a patients case, possibly with better therapeutic results.
