ABSTRACT
We can use a variety of tenses when we write ethnography, and we choose one rather than another by conventions which are generally available to ordinary writers of English (and, so far as I am aware, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, Spanish). We sometimes describe ourselves as using ‘the ethnographic present’; but in my view that is misleading. Anthropologists do not use the present in ways which are exclusive to them, nor even in ways which they invented and which are now more widely diffused. And in any case, they use the present tenses so variously, with such different implications, that to refer to them as the ethnographic present conveys a wrong impression.
