REFLECTIONS ON ORDERLY AND DISORDERLY ETHNOGRAPHY

Abstract

This paper discusses the eroding conceptual and geographic distance between research and daily life, between the home and the field. I focus in particular on the important role played by new tools and devices for recording, transforming, keeping and communicating an ever-growing corpus of information, references, images, sounds and ideas. In the process of changing the way we imagine the process of doing ethnography, and the technologies we use to manufacture ethnographies, we have inadvertently become much more like journalists, expatriates and even tourists, which requires us to engage in new kinds of boundary maintenance.