ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors discuss “ethnography in theory” versus “ethnography in practice”. They introduce a genre of ethnography that asks for deep immersion. The authors offer confessional anecdotes and speak on some of the practical challenges that they have experienced. The history of ethnography features many pioneering and contemporary versions of immersive or enmeshed ethnography. The authors can best relate to two precursors to our ideal of conducting fieldwork, which were first formulated in the 1990s without knowing of each other. The first is Anne Honer’s “life-world- analytical ethnography”, which is in the theoretical tradition of Alfred Schütz’ mundane phenomenology of the social world. The second is Jeff Ferrell’s agenda of “criminological verstehen”, which is in the tradition of Max Weber’s interpretive theory of social action. Ethnographers must seriously cast themselves for their future fieldwork roles in regard of extant knowledge about the field, and even more so as personalities or social identities.
