Required:
Bowen, Elenore Return to laughter. New York: Doubleday. 1964 [1954]
recommended:
Before this is quite possible (i.e. because one has not had yet the opportunity to conduct an ethnographic research, and because one will only have done a few at most), it is enlightening to look at other discussions of the experience of ethnographing.
In brief, ethnography is a social act, and interactional process between the ethnographer and the ethnos.Above all the loss of personal authority as the informants incorporate one into their everyday lives:
"I had often wondered how to get at a subject anthropologically advisable for me to record but, except in physiological theory, remarkably the same the world over ['the facts of life, death and birth']]. ... it would have been thought foolish of me to ask what every child knew. However, I had also discovered that almost everyone is glad to find someone more foolish and more ignorant than himself." (Bowen 1954: 126)
Writing (compare her account to formal ethnographies by Paul Bohannan 1989, 2000)