ABSTRACT
Writing ethnography is a key part of the entire research process. It is now widely recognized that ‘the ethnography’ is produced as much by how we write as by the processes of data collection and analysis. Ethnography is inescapably a textual enterprise, even if it is more than that. Furthermore, written language is an analytical tool not a transparent medium of communication. We can never reduce writing to a simple set of skills or prescriptions. What is needed is an appreciation of texts as the products of reading and writing. This calls for a widening of the ethnographer’s traditional range of interests. One needs to think about more than ‘research methods’, as conventionally defined, or just the substantive focus of inquiry. The contemporary ethnographer must also take some account of contributions from literary theory, rhetoric, text linguistics, and related fields. We need to do so in order to inform our craft skills as producers of ethnographies, not in order to transform ethnography into a branch of literary studies. The principle of reflexivity that runs throughout this book implies a recognition of the extent to which researchers shape the phenomena that they study. In ethnography that principle is not confined to the practicalities of field work and data collection, it also applies to the writing we perform in order to transform our experience of a social world into a social science text.
