ABSTRACT
Novelists, dramatists, filmmakers and songwriters, amongst others, share an interest in human relationships. Of course, Western society as a whole is obsessed by ‘relationships’ as a quick glance at any glossy magazine will show. An essential premise of ethnography is that social life is relational, then. Ethnographic analysis of relationships typically works in tandem with the exploration of key ideas, images and symbols used by members of the group in question to capture the meaning of their own situation. Ethnography is inevitably selective about the kinds of relationship and key metaphors or ideas it distinguishes as relevant. As Malinowski remind: ‘In the field one has to face a chaos of facts’ which can only be ordered ‘by grasping what is essential in them and fixing this’. It is the judgement of the ethnographer that counts and their use of theoretical tools to grasp, foreground, simplify and abstract.
