ABSTRACT
The ethnographer’s mission, following the Malinowskian tradition of studying an alien people, may be explained to newcomers as follows: Approach the alien people’s home; establish yourself there for a while; engage with the locals; participate in their everyday life; learn their language, practices and rituals; and try to assume little by little their cultural patterns of interpretation. Along the way, write down in great detail whatever you see and hear, and ask questions whenever you do not understand what you perceive. After a while, you will start to arrange your notes and prioritize your observations and impressions, in order to relate them to theoretical concepts and to generate new theoretical outcomes. The ethnographer fulfills his mission if he relates observations with theoretical concepts in a verisimilar way and manages to ‘translate’ the foreign culture into a text that is intelligible for the scientific community at home.
