ABSTRACT
Years ago, when I first became interested in ethnography, a colleague of mine who was flirting with similar ideas confessed he had realized that “[he] was not good enough of a writer to be doing ethnography”. I rejected this notion out of hand as both elitist and defeatist, and went on to write a piece on “The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations” (2008). I was only in the second year of my Ph.D. and incredibly flattered to have made such a precocious intervention in the discipline. In the years that followed I wrote a couple of additional pieces clarifying my original position (2010, 2011). Before I knew it, I became an “ethnography person”, somewhat of a trusted authority on the subject, although up to this point none of my own ethnographic research has appeared in print (2012). I want to use this opportunity to talk about some of the surprises and challenges I encountered during fieldwork, and explain how my view of ethnography has changed since the publication of the 2008 Millennium piece.
