ABSTRACT
The chapter that I am about to deconstruct was originally written in the period 1968–1972, so its story is hardly newsworthy. In its final version this chapter originally appeared in 1974 and proved to be a great success. It remained in print for years. I have taken this opportunity to share the lessons I learned with other beginning ethnographers. I have written about this material before (Wolcott 2003c), but in that writing I erroneously laid my problem to a problem with writing, rather than to my lack of understanding about ethnography.
