ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that recent and contemporary commentaries, often derived from feminist, poststructuralist and postmodernist tendencies, construct unnecessarily sharp distinctions between the past and the present in characterising ethnography, both as a method and as a genre. It suggests that sensitivity to the textual or rhetorical forms of ethnography is in direct line of descent from symbolic interactionism. The chapter shows that contemporary preoccupation with such forms is not a rupture but a continuation – perhaps even a completion – of a symbolic interationist ethnography. It outlines how considerations of textuality arise once one pays close attention to the forms of representation that characterise ethnographic reading and writing. The chapter suggests that form and content, style and substance, are linked inextricably in the construction and interpretation of ethnographic texts. It concentrates on work of sociologists working in urban settings. Many ethnographers, sociological and anthropological, have contributed to a particular genre by writing autobiographical accounts of their experiences 'in the field'.
