ABSTRACT
I have spent a good part of my life looking for the “essence” of ethnography, so that my students and I would have a standard against which we could assess efforts of our own, as well as judge the efforts of others in determining the critical categories that we expected to see covered in any report that claims to be ethnographic. That search informed my lecturing and writing about ethnography and has occupied much of my professional thought. I never found a ready made list that precisely spelled out the requirements, because, of course, there is no magic list, but I think I have come close enough to a workable list to get my work done.
