ABSTRACT
This chapter combines the important realis mood with another, less typically scientific mood: the irrealis mood. The irrealis mood indicates that something may not be the case, or that it may not have happened, or that it may not happen at all. This chapter has been a reflexive exercise on the rhetorical characteristics of writing and the characteristics that hopefully lend it a more than simply mimetic and descriptive nature. The potentiality of ethnographic knowledge is best expressed through the use of the potential mood. The irrealis mood is crucial for the development of non-representational ethnographic writing, yet it cannot stand on its own as it must develop in parallel with the realis mood and the deontic mood, because ethnographic writing is never truly non-representational but instead always more than representational. Utilizing the conditional mood is an important deviation from the traditional realist mood as it takes attention away from established fact, previously unfolded events, and current state of affairs.
