ABSTRACT
Ethnography began, simply, as an attempt to study, mostly through careful observation, various people and the cultures they inhabit, and “write up” an “objective” account of the ethnographer's observations. 1 But over time, early anthropological field workers began to realize that constructing “realistic” or “scientific” research reports, grounded in researcher “objectivity”—and thus separating the researcher's personal impressions, reactions, emotions, and responses from “data” collected—was harder than it seemed. Indeed, perhaps it was impossible. They were, after all, human, and thus became involved in the human communities they studied. As time went on and researchers became entrenched in communities, it became more and more difficult—and less and less desirable—to separate self and personal experience from the “data” drawn out of the lifeworld under study (Crawford, 1996; Denzin, 1997; Geertz, 1973; Goodall, 1994, 2000; Philipsen, 1992; Van Maanen, 1988).
