ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the authors ethnographic experiences which, since the mid-nineties, have focused on drug use, policing, the underground economy, detention centres for youth offenders, and youth centres in deprived areas of Portugal. Ethnography, a profoundly immersive method, requires a good deal of impression management (IM) in order to enable the ethnographers involvement near or within the phenomenon so as to detect how and why agents on the scene act think and feel the way they do. A goal of IM is producing at least an appearance of reciprocity, which is usually regarded as a mutually contingent exchange scheme that, to a large extent, regulates social interactions. A few years ago, Malafaia conducted research on training in intercultural skills. The training program was sponsored by a State agency and was aimed at higher education students. The process of self-instrumentalisation also poses a range of interrelated dilemmas for ethnographic practice.
