Required Reading:

Bowen, Elenore Return to laughter. New York: Doubleday. 1964 [1954]

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Given the epistemological issues discussed by Kaplan, and his healthy skepticism regarding "reconstructed-logics," it makes sense to say that the best way to learn about ethnography is to "use" it critically, that is through an examination of one's personal "logic-in-use."

1. There is an expanding body of research by ethnographers examining in detail how "science" is made. There is very little of this that is focused on ethnography as such (no "ethnography of ethnography"). We will discuss one approach to the ethnography of scientific practice when reviewing Garfinkel.

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.

Thus:

Everything that we have learned (mostly ethnographically) about human interaction applies to ethnography. Ethnography is thus a scientific method (in Kaplan's sense of 'method') that builds upon the constraints of interaction rather than try to mitigate them by attempting to decontextualize the situation of observation (as is attempted in lab based investigations).

Interaction (participation) is both the strength of ethnography and what it has to struggle with.

Elizabeth Bowen (Laura Bohannan) among the Tiv and the difficulties of participation: ethnography as a personal journey in a particular space with particular people who proceed with their life around you. 

Above all the loss of personal authority as the informants incorporate one into their everyday lives:

1. the need to accept this: relinquishing control of the ethnographic interaction is fundamental to its justification. We must allow the participants to tell us that which we do not kow we should ask them to tell us (otherwise surveys and structured interviews would be sufficient)
2. the need to resist this: relinquishing all control allows for the informants to coopt the observer into their own social webs (this is what used to be called "going native"). The informants must challenged, even perhaps irritated, into revealing what they might not otherwise reveal to the kind of person that they have initially made the observer to be. Observers must (constantly) analyze their sense of what is being made of them, and attempt to replace themselves.

Some specific issues from Bowen's work:

1. entry (dangers of ignorance) (Bowen 1954: 114)
2. learning (need to suspend one's beliefs)
   

   "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)

3. participation (dangers of participation) (Bowen 1954: 236)
4. challenges

Writing (compare her account to formal ethnographies by Paul Bohannan 1989, 2000)

Implications for ethics and informed consent.

• the professional statement of ethics guiding anthropologists.