11.8: Conclusions and (In)Conclusions

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I hope you’ve learned enough about ethnography’s problems and possibilities to understand why we ask you to do it. It’s connecting events with how you understand them; with how your understanding connects to your participants’ understandings; how all of those understandings interrelate, conflict with, and affirm each other; how you expect your readers to make sense of all that in a way that’s meaningful for them; and how all that contributes to the lives of your participants and yourself.

Those are lofty goals. You may have noticed that I said little about writing any of my own ethnographic texts; that’s partially because this collection limits texts to a certain length, but more importantly because you can only sort through these problems of representation and authority, and of collaboration and mutual respect, by writing your own way through them. Your writing, the feedback you get, and your revision processes will all make you see these problems as connected and complicated; keep writing, and you’ll find your way.