Description
Note: I would prefer someone who has an extensive knowledge of Wicca/Wiccan studies and/or anthropology. If you are not comfortable with either, you should not take this task.I am conducting research on a Wiccan coven as a discourse community. If you can, please find a Wiccan coven to research and generate fieldnotes about the meeting. If you are not able to access one, please pretend that you are researching a Wiccan coven’s meeting and write your fieldnotes.Be very descriptive. Every little detail matters.I have attached resources to help you learn how to create fieldnotes.I am looking for about 3-4 pages worth of fieldnotes, but it can be longer.
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Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes – Robert M. Emerson
University of Chicago Press
Published 1995
Chapter 1: Fieldnotes in Ethnographic Research
Ethnographic field research involves the study of groups and people as they go about their everyday lives. Carrying
out such research involves two distinct activities. First, the ethnographer enters into a social setting and gets to
know the people involved in it; usually, the setting is not previously known in an intimate way. The ethnographer
participates in the daily routines of this setting, develops ongoing relations with the people in it, and observes all the
while what is going on. Indeed, the term “participant-observation” is often used to characterize this basic research
approach. But, second, the ethnographer writes down in regular, systematic ways what she observes and learns
while participating in the daily rounds of life of others. Thus the researcher creates an accumulating written record of
these observations and experiences. These two interconnected activities comprise the core of ethnographic
research: Firsthand participation in some initially unfamiliar social world and the production of written accounts of
that world by drawing upon such participation. In the following sections we examine in detail each of these activities
and then trace out their implications for writing fieldnotes.
ETHNOGRAPHIC PARTICIPATION
Ethnographers are committed to going out and getting close to the activities and everyday experiences of other
people. “Getting close” minimally requires physical and social proximity to the daily rounds of people’s lives and
activities; the field researcher must be able to take up positions in the midst of the key sites and scenes of other’s
lives in order to observe and understand them. But getting close has another, far more significant component: The
ethnographer seeks a deeper immersion in others’ worlds in order to grasp what they experience as meaningful and
important. With immersion, the field researcher sees from the inside how people lead their lives, how they carry out
their daily rounds of activities, what they find meaningful, and how they do so. In this way immersion gives the
fieldworker access to the fluidity of others’ lives and enhances his sensitivity to interaction and process.
Furthermore, immersion enables the fieldworker to directly and forcibly experience for herself both the ordinary
routines and conditions under which people conduct their lives, and the constraints and pressures to which such
living is subject. Goflman (1989:125) in particular insists that field research involves “subjecting yourself, your own
body and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of
individuals, so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation, or
their work situation, or their ethnic situation.” Immersion in ethnographic research, then, involves both being with
other people to see how they respond to events as they happen and experiencing for oneself these events and the
circumstances that give rise to them.
Clearly, ethnographic immersion precludes conducting field research as a detached, passive observer; the field
researcher can only get close to the lives of those studied by actively participating in their day-to-day affairs. Such
participation, moreover, inevitably entails some degree of resocialization. Sharing everyday life with a group of
people, the field researcher comes “to enter into the matrix of meanings of the researched, to participate in their
system of organized activities, and to feel subject to their code of moral regulation” (Wax 1980:272-73). In
participating as fully and humanly as possible in another way of life, the ethnographer learns what is required to
become a member of that world, to experience events and meanings in ways that approximate members’
experiences. Indeed, some ethnographers seek to do field research by doing and becoming-to the extent possiblewhatever it is they are interested in learning about. Ethnographers, for example, have become skilled at work
activities they are seeking to understand (Diamond 1993; Lynch 1985) or in good faith have joined churches or
religious groups (Jules-Rosette 1975; Rochford 1985) on the grounds that by becoming members they gain fuller
insight and understanding into these groups and their activities. Or villagers may assign an ethnographer a role,
such as sister or mother in an extended family, which obligates her to participate and resocialize herself to meet
local expectations (Fretz n.d.).
In learning about others through active participation in their lives and activities, the fieldworker cannot and should
not attempt to be a fly on the Wall. No field researcher can be a completely neutral, detached observer, outside and
independent of the observed phenomena (Pollner and Emerson 1988). Rather, as the ethnographer engages in the
lives and concerns of those studied, his perspective “is intertwined with the phenomenon which does not have
objective characteristics independent of the observer’s perspective and methods” (Mishler 1979: 10). The
ethnographer cannot take in everything; rather, he will, in conjunction with those in the setting, develop certain
perspectives by engaging in some activities and relationships rather than others. Moreover, it will often be the case
that relationships with those under study follow political fault lines in the setting, exposing the ethnographer
selectively to varying priorities and points of view. As a result, the task of the ethnographer is not to determine “the
truth” but to reveal the multiple truths apparent in others’ lives.
Furthermore, the ethnographer’s presence in a setting inevitably has implications and consequences for what is
taking place, since the fieldworker must necessarily interact with and hence have some impact on those studied.
“Consequential presence:’ often linked to reactive effects (that is, the effects of the ethnographer’s participation on
how members may talk and behave), should not be seen as “contaminating” what is observed and learned. Rather,
these effects are the very source of that learning and observation (Clarke 1975:99). Relationships between the field
researcher and people in the setting do not so much disrupt or alter ongoing patterns of social interaction as reveal
the terms and bases on which people form social ties in the first place. For example, in a village based on kinship
ties, people may adopt a fieldworker into a family and assign her a kinship term which then designates her rights
and responsibilities toward others. Rather than detracting from what the fieldworker can learn, first-hand relations
with those studied may provide clues to understanding the more subtle, implicit underlying assumptions that are
often not readily accessible through observation or interview methods alone. Consequently, rather than viewing
reactivity as a defect to be carefully controlled or eliminated in entirety, the ethnographer needs to become sensitive
to and perceptive of how she is seen and treated by others.
To appreciate the unavoidable consequences of one’s own presence strips any special merit from the highly
detached, “unobtrusive,” and marginal observer roles that have long held sway as the implicit ideal in field research.
Many contemporary ethnographers advocate highly participatory roles (Adler, Adler, and Rochford 1986) in which
the researcher actually performs the activities that are central to the lives of those studied. In this view, assuming
real responsibility for actually carrying out core functions and tasks, as in service learning internships, provides
special opportunities to get close to, participate in, and experience life in previously unknown settings. The intern
with real work responsibilities or the researcher participating in village life actively engage in local activities and are
socialized to and acquire empathy for local ways of acting and feeling.
Finally, close, continuing participation in the lives of others encourages appreciation of social life as constituted by
ongoing, fluid processes. Through participation, the field researcher sees first-hand and up close how people
grapple with uncertainty and confusion, how meanings emerge through talk and collective action, how
understandings and interpretations change over time. In all these ways, the fieldworker’s closeness to others’ daily
lives and activities heightens sensitivity to social life as process.
INSCRIBING EXPERIENCED/OBSERVED REALITIES
Even with intensive resocialization, the ethnographer never becomes a member in the same sense that those
“naturally” in the setting are members. The fieldworker plans on leaving the setting after a relatively brief stay, and
his experience of local life is colored by this transience. As a result “the participation that the fieldworker gives is
neither as committed nor as constrained as the native’s” (Karp and Kendall 1982:257). Furthermore, the fieldworker
orients to many local events not as “real life” but as objects of possible research interest, as events that he may
choose to write down and preserve in fieldnotes. In these ways, research and writing commitments qualify
ethnographic immersion, making the field researcher at least something of an outsider and, at an extreme, a cultural
alien .
Fieldnotes are accounts describing experiences and observations the researcher has made while participating in an
intense and involved manner. But writing descriptive accounts of experiences and observations is not as
straightforward and transparent a process as it might initially appear. For writing description is not merely a matter
of accurately capturing as closely as possible observed reality, of “putting into words” overheard talk and witnessed
activities. To view the writing of descriptions simply as a matter of producing texts that correspond accurately to
what has been observed is to assume that there is but one “best” description of any particular event. But in fact,
there is no one “natural” or “correct” way to write about what one observes. Rather, because descriptions involve
issues of perception and interpretation, different descriptions of “the same” situations and events are possible.
Consider, for example, the following descriptions of moving through express checkout lines in three different Los
Angeles supermarkets, written by three student researchers. These descriptions share a number of common
features: all describe events from the point of view of shoppers/observers moving through express checkout lines;
all provide physical descriptions of the other major players in the lines – the checker, other shoppers – and of at least
some of the items they are purchasing; and all attend closely to some minute details of behavior in express lines.
Yet each of these fieldnote accounts takes a different tack in describing a supermarket express line. Each selects
and emphasizes certain features and actions, ignoring and marginalizing others. Furthermore, these descriptions
are written from different points of view, and they shape and present what happened on the express lines in
different ways – in part because the researchers observe different people and occasions, but also in part because
they make different writing choices:
Mayfair Market Express Line
There were four people in line with their purchases separated by an approx. 18″ rectangular black rubber bar. I put my
frozen bags down on the “lazy susan linoleum conveyor belt” and I reached on top of the cash register to retrieve one of the
black bars to separate my items. The cashier was in her mid thirties, approx., about 5’2″ dark skinned woman with curly dark
brown hair. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but recognized some accent to her speech. She was in a white blouse, short
sleeved, with a maroon shoulder to mid thigh apron. She had a loose maroon bow tie, not like a man’s bow tie, more hangie and
fluffy. Her name tag on her left chest side had red writing that said “Candy” on it.
[Describes the first two men at the front of the line.] The woman behind him was dark skinned with straight dark brown hair cut in
a page boy. She was wearing a teal blue v-neck knit sweater with black leggings. In her section was juice, a can of pineapple
juice, and a six-pack of V-8 tomato juice. The guy in front of me had a pink polo shirt on and tan shorts. He was about 6’2″,
slender, tan with blond short hair with a gold 18 gauge hoop in his left ear (I thought he was gay). In his triangle of space he had
packaged carrots, a gallon of whole milk, and a package of porkchops.
Candy spent very little time with each person, she gave all a hello, and then told them the amount, money was offered,
and change was handed back onto a shelf that was in front of the customer whose turn it was. Before Candy had given the darkhaired woman her change back, I noticed that the man in the pink shirt had moved into her spatial “customer” territory, probably
within a foot of her, and in the position that the others had taken when it was their turn, in front of the “check writing” shelf. (I
thought it was interesting that the people seemed more concerned about the proper separation of their food from one another’s
than they did about body location.) …
As I walk up to the shelf (where it all seems to happen), I say “Hi”, and Candy says “Hi” back as she scans my groceries
with the price scanner…
This observer describes the line spatially in terms of individual people (particularly physical appearance and
apparel) and their groceries as laid out before being rung up (“in his triangle of space he had . . . “). Indeed, this
account notes as an aside the contrast between the care taken to separate grocery items and the seeming
disregard of physical space that occurs at the “check writing shelf’ as one shopper is about to move on and the
next-in-line to move in.
Ralph’s Express Line, Easter Morning
I headed east to the checkout stands with my romaine lettuce, to garnish the rice salad I was bringing to brunch, and
my bottle of Gewurtztraminer, my new favorite wine, which I had to chill in the next half hour. As I approached the stands, I
realized that the 10-items-or-less-cash-only line would be my best choice. I noticed that Boland was behind the counter at the
register-he’s always very friendly to me – “Hey, how you doing?”
I got behind the woman who was already there. She had left one of the rubber separator bars behind the things she
was going to buy, one of the few personal friendly moves one can make in this highly routinized queue. I appreciated this, and
would have thanked her (by smiling, probably), but she was already looking ahead, I suppose in anticipation of checking out. I
put my wine and lettuce down. There was already someone behind me. I wanted to show them the courtesy of putting down a
rubber separator bar for them too. I waited until the food in front of mine was moved up enough for me to take the bar, which was
at the front of the place where the bars are (is there a word for that? bar bin?), so that I wouldn’t have to make a large, expansive
move across the items that were’nt mine, drawing attention to myself I waited, and then, finally, the bar was in sight. I took it, and
then put it behind my items, looking at the woman behind me and smiling at her as I did so. She looked pleased, and a bit
surprised, and I was glad to have been able to do this small favor. She was a pretty blonde woman, and was buying a bottle of
champagne (maybe also for Easter brunch?). She was wearing what looked like an Easter dress – it was cotton, and pretty and
flowery. She looked youngish. Maybe about my age. She was quite tall for a woman, maybe 5’10” or so.
The woman in front of me didn’t take long at all. I’ve learned quite well how to wait in queues and not be too impatient.
Boland, the checker, saw me, and said, “Hi! How’s it going?” or something like that….
This observer describes moving through the line as she experienced the process on a moment by moment basis,
framing her accounts of others’ behaviors as she received, understood, and reacted to them. This style of
description gives the reader unique access to the observer’s thoughts and emotions; for example, while space is an
issue, it is framed in terms not of distance but of its implications for self and feelings (e.g., avoiding “a large
expansive move across the items that were’nt mine”).
In the next excerpt, the writer shifts his focus from self to others:
Boy’s Market Express Line
… I picked a long line. Even though the store was quiet, the express line was long. A lot of people had made small
purchases today. I was behind a man with just a loaf of bread. There was a cart to the side of him, just sitting there, and I thought
someone abandoned it (it had a few items in it). A minute later a man came up and “claimed” it by taking hold of it. He didn’t
really try to assert that he was back in line-apparently he’d stepped away to get something he’d forgotten-but he wasn’t getting
behind me either. I felt the need to ask him if he was on line, so I wouldn’t cut him off. He said yes, and I tried to move behind
him – we were sort of side by side – and he said, “That’s okay. I know where you are.”
An old woman was behind me now. She had her groceries in one of those carts that old people tend to use to wheel
their groceries home. She was thumbing through the National Enquirer, and was clutching a coupon in her hand. She scanned a
few pages of the paper, and then put it back in the rack. I looked ahead at the person whose groceries were being checked outshe was staring at the price for each item as it came up on the register.
At this point the guy who I’d spoken to earlier, the guy who was right in front of me, showed a look of surprise and
moved past me, over to an abandoned cart at the end of the aisle. He was looking at what was in it, picking up the few items with
interest, and then put them back. I thought he’d seen something else he wanted or had forgotten. He came back over to his cart,
but then a supermarket employee walked by, and he called out to the man, walking over to the cart and pointing at it, “Do you get
many items like this left behind;,” The employee hesitated, not seeming to understand the question, and said no. The guy on line
said, “See what’s here? This is formula [cans of baby formula]. That’s poor people’s food. And see this [a copper pot scrubber]?
They use that to smoke crack.” The employee looked surprised. The guy says, “I was just wondering. That’s very indicative of
this area.” The employee: “I live here and I didn’t know that.” The guy: “Didn’t you watch Channel 28 last night?” Employee: “No.”
Guy: “They had a report about inner city problems.” Employee, walking away as he talks: “I only watch National Geographic, the
MacNeil-Lehrer Hour, and NPR.” He continues away…
Meanwhile the man with the bread has paid. As he waits momentarily for his change, the “guy” says, “Long wait for a
loaf of bread:’ Man says, “Yeah:’ and then adds, jokingly (and looking at the cashier as he says it, as if to gauge his reaction),
“these cashiers are slow.” The cashier does not appear to hear this. Man with bread leaves, guy in front of me is being checked
out now. He says to the cashier, “What’s the matter, end of your shift? No sense of humor left?” Cashier says, “No. I’m tired:’
Guy: “I hear you.” Guy then says to the bagger: “Can I have paper and plastic please, Jacob” (he emphasizes the use of the
baggees name)? Jacob complies, but shows no other sign that he’s heard the man. Guy is waiting for transaction to be
completed. He’s sitting on the railing, and he is singing
the words to the Muzak tune that’s playing. Something by Peabo Bryson. Guy’s transaction is done. He says thank you to the
bagger, and the bagger tells him to have a good day.
Cashier says, “How are you doing?” to me….
In these notes the observer initially writes himself into a prominent role in the line, but then he moves himself
offstage by spotlighting another character who says and does a number of flamboyant things as he waits and then
gets checked out. This express line becomes a mini-community, first marked by ongoing exchanges between those
in line, then drawing in a passing store employee, and culminating in interactions between this character and the
checker and bagger.
Writing fieldnote descriptions, then, is not so much a matter of passively copying down “facts” about “what
happened Rather, such writing involves active processes of interpretation and sense-making: noting and writing
down some things as “significant:’ noting but ignoring others as “not significant and even missing other possibly
significant things altogether. As a result, similar (even the “same”) events can be described for different purposes,
with different sensitivities and concerns.
In this respect, it is important to recognize that fieldnotes involve inscriptions of social life and social discourse.
Such inscriptions inevitably reduce the welter and confusion of the social world to written words that can be
reviewed, studied, and thought about time and time again. As Geertz (1973:19) has characterized this core
ethnographic process: “The ethnographer ‘inscribes’ social discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from
a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscription
and can be reconsulted.”
As inscriptions, fieldnotes are products of and reflect conventions for transforming witnessed events, persons, and
places into words on paper. In part, this transformation involves inevitable processes of selection; the ethnographer
writes about certain things and thereby necessarily “leaves out” others. But more significantly, descriptive fieldnotes
also inevitably present or frame objects in particular ways, “missing” other ways that events might have been
presented or framed. And these presentations reflect and incorporate sensitivities, meanings, and understandings
the field researcher has gleaned from having been close to and participated in the described events.
There are other ways of reducing social discourse to written form. Survey questionnaires, for example, record
“responses” to pre-fixed questions, sometimes reducing these answers to numbers, sometimes preserving
something of the respondents’ own words. Audio and video recordings, which seemingly catch and preserve almost
everything occurring within an interaction, actually capture but a slice of ongoing social life. What is recorded in the
first place depends upon when, where, and how the equipment is positioned and activated, what it can pick up
mechanically, and how those who are recorded react to its presence. Further reduction occurs with the
representation of a recorded slice of embodied discourse as sequential lines of text in a “transcript, ” For while talk
in social settings is a “multichanneled event,” writing “is linear in nature, and can handle only one channel at a time,
so must pick and choose among the cues available for representation” (Walker 1986:211). A transcript thus selects
particular dimensions and contents of discourse for inclusion while ignoring others, for example, nonverbal cues to
local meanings such as eye gaze, gesture, and posture. Researchers studying oral performances spend
considerable effort in developing a notational system to document the verbal and at least some of the nonverbal
communication; the quality of the transcribed “folklore text” is critical as it “represents the performance in another
medium” (Fine 1984:3). The transcript is never a “verbatim” rendering of discourse, because it “represents
… an analytic interpretation and selection” (Psathas and Anderson 1990:75) of speech and action. That is, a
transcript is the product of a transcriber’s ongoing interpretive and analytic decisions about a variety of problematic
matters: how to transform naturally occurring speech into specific words (in the face of natural speech elisions); how
to determine when to punctuate to indicate a completed phrase or sentence (given the common lack of clear-cut
endings in ordinary speech); deciding whether or not to try to represent such matters as spaces and silences,
overlapped speech and sounds, pace stresses and volume, and inaudible or incomprehensible sounds or words.’ In
sum, even those means of recording that researchers claim come the closest to realizing an “objective mirroring”
necessarily make reductions in the lived complexity of social life similar in principle to those made in writing
fieldnotes.
Given the reductionism of any method of inscription, choice of method reflects researchers’ deeper assumptions
about social life and how to understand it. Fieldwork and ultimately the fieldnote are predicated on a view of social
life as continuously created through people’s efforts to find and confer meaning on their own and others’ actions.
Within this perspective, the interview and the recording have their uses. To the extent that participants are willing
and able to describe these features of social life, an interview may prove a valuable tool. Similarly, a video recording
provides a valuable record of words actually uttered and gestures actually made. But the ethos of fieldwork holds
that in order to fully understand and appreciate action from the perspective of participants, one must get close to
and participate in a wide cross-section of their everyday activities over an extended period of time. Ethnography, as
Van Maanen (1988:ix) insists, is “the peculiar practice of representing the social reality of others through the
analysis of one’s own experience in the world of these others.” Fieldnotes are distinctively a method for capturing
and preserving the insights and understandings stimulated by these close and long-term experiences. Thus
fieldnotes inscribe the sometimes inchoate understandings and insights the fieldworker acquires by intimately
immersing herself in another world, by observing in the midst of mundane activities and jarring crises, by directly
running up against the contingencies and constraints of the everyday life of another people. Indeed, it is exactly this
deep immersion – and the sense of place that such immersion assumes and strengthens-that enables the
ethnographer to inscribe the detailed, context-sensitive, and locally informed fieldnotes that Geertz (1973) terms
“thick description.”
This experiential character of fieldnotes is also reflected in changes in their content and concerns over time.
Fieldnotes grow through gradual accretion, adding one day’s writing to the next’s. The ethnographer writes
particular fieldnotes in ways that are not pre-determined or pre-specified; hence fieldnotes are not collections or
samples in the way that audio recordings can be, i.e., decided in advance according to set criteria. Choosing what
to write down is not a process of sampling according to some fixed-in-advance principle. Rather it is both intuitive,
reflecting the ethnographer’s changing sense of what might possibly be made interesting or important to future
readers, and empathetic, reflecting the ethnographer’s sense of what is interesting or important to the people he is
observing.
IMPLICATIONS FOR WRITING FIELDNOTES
We draw four implications from our understanding of ethnography as the inscription of participatory experience: (1)
What is observed and ultimately treated as “data” or “findings” is inseparable from the observational process. (2) In
writing fieldnotes, the field researcher should give special attention to the indigenous meanings and concerns of the
people studied. (3) Contemporaneously written fieldnotes are an essential grounding and resource for writing
broader, more coherent accounts of others’ lives and concerns. (4) Such fieldnotes should detail the social and
interactional processes that make up people’s everyday lives and activities.
Inseparability of “Methods” and “Findings”
Modes of participating in and finding out about the daily lives of others make up key parts of ethnographic methods.
These “methods” determine what the field researcher sees, experiences, and learns. But if substance (“data”,
“findings”, “facts”) are products of the methods used, substance cannot be considered independently of method;
what the ethnographer finds out is inherently connected with how she finds it out. As a result, these methods should
not be ignored. Rather, they should comprise an important part of written fieldnotes. It thus becomes critical for the
ethnographer to document her own activities, circumstances, and emotional responses as these factors shape the
process of observing and recording, others’ lives.”
From this point of view, the very distinction between fieldnote “data” and “personal reactions”, between “fieldnote
records” and “diaries” or “journals” (Sanjek 1990c), is deeply misleading. Of course, the ethnographer can separate
what he says and does from what he observes others saying and doing, treating the latter as if it were unaffected by
the former. But such a separation distorts processes of inquiry and the meaning of field “data” in several significant
ways. First, this separation treats data as “objective information” that has a fixed meaning independent of how that
information was elicited or established and by whom. In this way the ethnographer’s own actions, including his
“personal” feelings and reactions, are viewed as independent of and unrelated to the events and happenings
involving others that constitute “findings” or “observations” when written down in fieldnotes. Second, this separation
assumes that “subjective” reactions and perceptions can and should be controlled by being segregated from
“objective”, impersonal records. And finally, such control is thought to be essential because personal and emotional
experiences are devalued, comprising “contaminants” of objective data rather than avenues of insight into
significant processes in the setting.
Linking method and substance in fieldnotes has a number of advantages: it encourages recognizing “findings” not
as absolute and invariant but as contingent upon the circumstances of their “discovery” by the ethnographer.
Moreover, the ethnographer is prevented, or at least discouraged, from too readily taking, one person’s version of
what happened or what is important as the “complete” or “correct” version of these matters. Rather, “what
happened” is one account, made by a particular person to a specific other at a particular time and place for
particular purposes. In all these ways, linking method and substance builds sensitivity to the multiple, situational
realities of those studied into the core of fieldwork practice.
The Pursuit of Indigenous Meanings
In contrast to styles of field research which focus on others’ behavior without systematic regard for what such
behavior means to those engaged in it, we see ethnography as committed to uncovering and depicting indigenous
meanings. The object of participation is ultimately to get close to those studied as a way of understanding what their
experiences and activities mean to them.
Ethnographers should attempt to write fieldnotes in ways that capture and preserve indigenous meanings. To do so,
they must learn to recognize and limit reliance upon preconceptions about members’ lives and activities. They must
become responsive to what others are concerned about, in their own terms. But while fieldnotes are about others,
their concerns and doings gleaned through empathetic immersion, they necessarily reflect and convey the
ethnographer’s understanding of these concerns and doings. Thus, fieldnotes are written accounts that filter
members’ experiences and concerns through the person and perspectives of the ethnographer; fieldnotes provide
the ethnographer’s, not the members’, accounts of the latter’s experiences, meanings, and concerns.
It might initially appear that forms of ethnography concerned with “polyvocality” (Clifford and Marcus 1986:15), or
oral histories and feminist ethnographies (Stacey 1991) which seek to let members “speak in their own voices,” can
avoid researcher mediation in its entirety. But even in these instances, researchers continue to select what to
observe, to pose questions, or to frame the nature and purpose of the interview more generally, in ways which
cannot avoid mediating effects (see Mills 1990).
Writing Fieldnotes Contemporaneously
In contrast to views holding that fieldnotes are crutches at best and blinders at worst, we see fieldnotes as providing
the primary mea
