ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the vicissitudes that made this form of writing possible in the human and social sciences, focuses on the development of ethnographic sensibility in anthropology and beyond. It deals with the nature of the involvement of the self in ethnographic work and with the growth of the authorial presence in ethnographic texts. The chapter provides to meet another anthropologist, a contemporary of B. Malinowski, whom the new reflexive sensibilities helped to rediscover. Ethnographic methods and their product—ethnographic writing—will be analyzed together, as they are so deeply connected that ethnography can also be defined as “the textual rendering of social worlds”. A crucial practice in ethnography vis-a-vis self-observation is that of field notes, that is, the diary that constitutes the ethnographer’s data. The chapter also deals with the development of the first of these problems, as it relates more directly to the topic of self-observation.
