The Presentation of Everyday Life

Abstract

Extending a recent emerging interest in ethnographies as written texts, this article explores some practices employed by classical sociological ethnographers to establish the adequacy of their written descriptive accounts. These practices rely on a number of different strategies for telling how the ethnographer has adequately addressed a set of recurrent problems, including (1) the problem of presence (the ways in which an ethnographer's presence in a domain of investigation is potentially tainting of its natural state); (2) the problem of ethnocentricism (imposing a perspective on a domain rather than surfacing the perspective native to it); (3) the problem of methodogenesis (using techniques of data gathering that may create that data); and (4) the problem of informants (establishing that one's native sources of data are “well informed” and knowledgeable about the local culture).