ABSTRACT
It is a distinctive feature of social research that the ‘objects’ studied are in fact ‘subjects’, in the sense that they have consciousness and agency. Moreover, unlike physical objects or animals, they produce accounts of themselves and their worlds. Recognition of the significance of this has always been central to ethnographic thinking, though it has been interpreted in somewhat different ways over time and across different fields. Generally speaking, there has been a tension between treating the accounts of the people being studied as sources of information about themselves and the world in which they live, and treating those accounts as social products whose analysis can tell us something about the socio-cultural processes that generated them.
