ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how argument acts to give coherence and solidity to ethnography. It also explores the tensions that exist between the need to framework of argument and the requirement to do justice to lived experience. In order to persuade, ethnographic material has to be reshaped as evidence for the argument in hand. Establishing a convincing balance between integration and diversity is crucial to the conceptual persuasiveness of ethnography as argument. Christine Hugh-Jones’ ethnography, From the Milk River, reminds of the difficulties of providing a core set of propositions about social reality when the basic material of ethnography – what people say and do – is so intractable as evidence. Ethnography is a curiously double-edged sword: the difficulty of doing justice to lived social experience is ever present, but the need to organise ethnographic material convincingly is also pressing.
