ABSTRACT
This chapter offers theoretical and methodological (re)considerations on ethnographic imagination, based on reflections on a life history interview project with twelve first-generation Vietnamese women who had arrived in the United States as refugees or immigrants after the war that ended in Vietnam in 1975. The women were Buddhist, Catholic, and Evangelical, and the researcher a Mainline Protestant theological/religious educator. Pondering the significance of flesh becoming word in ethnographic encounters, the essay invites consideration of such concepts as vulnerable listening, mimetic learning, and proximal diction. Methodological deepening includes reflections on ethnography as embodied, incarnational research; ethnographic storying as a tinkering with ontological (re)emplotment; and the possibility of ethnography inducing relational conversions.
