ABSTRACT
In June 1996, I had the extraordinary experience of sitting around a conference table and sharing stories with colleagues about the ways we had succeeded or failed in meeting our social commitments as educational ethnographers. The occasion was the Sixth Annual Interamerican Symposium on Ethnographic Educational Research. Students and teachers of educational ethnography from the US, Mexico, and other Latin American nations had gathered in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (just across the border from El Paso, Texas) to learn from one another. After a day of formal presentations, symposium participants, representing a variety of social science and education disciplines, split up into workshops to discuss several themes of interest. I had been asked by the symposium organizer, Beatriz Calvo, to help moderate a discussion about the ‘social commitment of the ethnographer’.1 Over the next two days, and for several hours each day, participants worked earnestly to examine their own assumptions about ethnographic ‘commitments’, to elucidate the kinds of ‘commitments’ encouraged or discouraged by their own disciplinary frameworks and institutional arrangements, and to expose their own checkered experiences with ethnographic ‘commitment’. The discussion was both emotionally cathartic and intellectually edifying. We crossed and expanded conceptual boundaries just as many of us had crossed and expanded geopolitical boundaries in arriving at the conference.
