ABSTRACT
Ethnographic research practices are increasingly favoured in the humanities and social sciences. They may be proposed as essential to research design or even the only legitimate means for making claims about the social world. Claims for legitimacy focus on the privileging of an ‘emic’ perspective of first-hand observation or what Geertz (1973) refers to as ‘first order constructs of reality’. However, what constitutes legitimate ethnographic practice is contentious. In recent decades ethnographic research has fractured into a proliferation of ‘ethnographies’ – traditional, realist, critical, contemporary, institutional, classroom, visual, walking, micro, auto-, etc. – with further sub-categorizations, such as evocative auto-, analytic auto-, criticalmicro-, sound-walking-, etc. Bases of legitimation vary; in some cases they appear to be field oriented (institution, classroom, self ) but most frequently suggest variations in means and/or gaze. In this chapter I consider what is at stake in this ongoing segmentation of ‘ethnography’ by exploring a common and privileged component of written accounts of ethnographic research: stories. The research draws on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to interpret storytelling as knowledge practices that vary with the nature of the intellectual field that shapes and is shaped by them. Detailed analyses of the discourse of stories draw on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as a ‘translation device’ (Chapter 2, this volume) or means of relating LCT concepts and data. The chapter concludes with reflections on directions of change in ethnographic research and the role of storytelling in the humanities.
