Manifesto for Ethnography

a grand, systematic, waterproof, &dquo;ready-made&dquo; theory/methodology counterposed to other scholastic &dquo;ready-mades.&dquo; Instead, we hope that this manifesto will be read as enabling and &dquo;sensitizing,&dquo; theoretically and methodologically, approaches to lived culture, worldly experiences, and practical sense making. That is, we hope this manifesto is &dquo;put to work&dquo; in helping to produce a wide range of ethnographies, thereby being developed, refined, and criticized without ever being locked up as a given system of thought. What is ethnography for us? Most important, it is a family of methods involving direct and sustained social contact with agents and of richly writing up the encounter, respecting, recording, representing at least partly in its own terms the irreducibility of human experience. Ethnography is the disciplined and deliberate witness-cum-recording of human events. As arguably the first ethnographer Herodotus (1987) said in arguably the first ethnography, The History, &dquo;so far it is my eyes, my judgement, and my searching that speaks these words to you&dquo; (p. 171). &dquo;This-ness&dquo; and &dquo;lived-out-ness&dquo; are essential to the ethnographic account: a unique sense of embodied existence and conscious-