ABSTRACT
In this Postscript I want to try to summarise the implications of the essays collected in this volume. In the Introduction I outlined what I see as the crisis facing ethnography and the main issues that must be dealt with if that crisis is to be resolved. The essays have covered many of those issues. The positions I have taken are, I hope, consistent with one another, and thereby point to a general conception of the purpose and nature of social research. That conception probably does not fall into any conventional category. At the same time, it does not pretend to be a radical new approach. It retains much of the current conceptualisation and practice of ethnography, while abandoning some of what are currently regarded as its central features.
