Method, theory, epistemology

Although a certain degree of debate exists amongst anthropologists on a precise definition, ethnography is at its core a field-based research practice rooted in the researcher's embedded and active presence amongst a group of interlocutors for a prolonged period of time, time during which the ethnographer shares in the community's everyday life, from daily routines to special events and celebrations. Notwithstanding the fact that researchers never see through their interlocutors’ eyes, nor become a substitute for their interlocutors’ voices and experiences, participant observation facilitates ethnographers’ shift from an initial external, etic position to a more emic one, which may help them attain a more intimate and accurate perspective on their interlocutors’ experiences and point of view. One of the foundations of ethnography is in fact estrangement: researchers working in unfamiliar settings become acquainted with their interlocutors and surroundings by ‘being there’ and, in the process, they become slowly exposed to, and familiar with, a sometimes radically different way to understand the world (Shah 2017). It is important to note that this estrangement is methodological, and that a degree of defamiliarisation (rather than ‘objective’ detachment) is also assumed to be beneficial for researchers who are familiar with their fieldsites. Reflexivity, empathy and awareness of one's own positionality are fundamental skills in the ethnographer's toolbox even, and perhaps even more, as calls grow for anthropologists to engage more, and more meaningfully, in collaborative work with their interlocutors as a pathway to decolonising the method (Bruiton et al. 2021; Bejarano et al. 2019).

Ethnographic research is also more complex than the seemingly self-evident term ‘participant observation’ may suggest. While ‘participant observation’ emphasises sight, other senses are equally mobilised: much of the time spent in the field involves practicing actively listening as we engage interlocutors in conversation as they go about their daily activities (Forsey 2010; Hockney and Forsey 2012). Abdellah Hammoudi and John Borneman (2009: 259) argue in fact that ethnographic fieldwork relies on ‘interlocution’, an ‘intense listening cultivated in conversations’ with research participants. Active listening is likewise foundational to conducting semi-structured or unstructured interviews; though they can be standalone methods, they are also part of usual ethnographic practice, often organically folded within it. Furthermore, ethnography is an embodied research method where the practitioner's own body is directly involved and solicited (Olivier de Sardan 2015; see also Okely 1992 and Piasere 1997). Being in the field is thus also a sensorial and emotive experience (Beatty 2005; Hage 2009; Okely 2007, Pink 2011; Yousfi and Abdallah 2020). As Vered Amit (2000: 12) observes, ‘the strength of participant observation is the access it provides to lived experiences which incorporate but transcend language’, an observation that echoes Unni Wikan (1992)’s notion of resonance, which points to people's ability to ‘go beyond words’ to understand one another.

‘Participant observation’ is thus rather an umbrella term encompassing a plethora of practices that are often complementary, overlapping and enmeshed with one another. Analysing the different constitutive elements of ethnography is useful on the conceptual level to assess what we do in the field and think reflexively about it. However, classifying different ‘types’ of ethnographic practice by weighing up different coefficients of participation and observation (Seim 2021; Wacquant 2010) is inadequate to capture the variability and messiness of fieldwork. Different fieldsites will in fact present different requirements: ‘being there’ might mean mainly observing one day and intensely participating the next, while participation itself might be altogether inappropriate in certain circumstances, such as religious spaces or medical settings. The shifting nature of participant observation is also one reason why fieldwork can never be fully planned in advance and the use of medical models of ethical approval is at odds with ethnographic research (Bourgois 1990; Dilger et al. 2015; Du Toit 1980).

Despite being commonly categorised as a research method, ethnography should be regarded as more than a mere tool of data collection. Paul Atkinson and Martyn Hammersley (1994: 248) argue that, in principle, this practice can be considered a simple research method as much as a ‘philosophical paradigm’ to which one must make a ‘total commitment’. Anthropologists have tended to follow the second approach. Tim Ingold (2014) distinguishes between two different understandings of method. The first and perhaps most common understanding is method as the collection of ‘protocols of normal science, where to implement a method is to follow through a sequence of prespecified and regulated steps towards the realization of a determinate goal’ within the context of a research project (Ingold 2014: 390). The second, following C. Wright Mills (1959), is instead based on an understanding of intellectual work as craftmanship, where ‘there can be no distinction between the theory of a discipline and its method [as both are] indissoluble aspects of the practice of a craft’ (Ingold 2014). Only this second definition, according to Ingold, applies to ethnography, as ethnography is more than a set of procedures to generate data which will be analysed later and elsewhere.

This traditional conceptual separation between the ‘field’, where data is collected, and ‘home’, where analysis and writing take place, has been thoroughly criticised (Amit 2000; Caputo 2000; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). On the one hand, this dichotomy risks implicitly reproducing the flawed assumption that our interlocutors do not themselves theorise in their everyday life and that, in addition, theory and analysis are the prerogative of the Global North. In these approaches, ‘home’ is in fact frequently shorthand for the Western institutions where researchers are based, ignoring the existence of scholars based in the Global South. On the other hand, the dichotomy denies the epistemological implications of doing ethnography, since the separation between ethnography and analysis/theory is primarily discursive. Alpa Shah (2017) illustrates the interwoven nature of ethnographic practice and anthropological theory clearly when she argues that long-term fieldwork drives researchers to challenge their preconceived views of the world, allowing them to formulate new understandings which may in turn spark a theoretical revolution. This iconoclastic approach to knowledge production follows a Malinowskian approach to research where fieldwork is expected to be transformative and lead the researcher to question existing frameworks and exceed available theory, creating new theoretical approaches in the process (Candea 2018). As such, ethnography is more than a simple tool of data collection and is itself epistemology.

The limits of ‘learning-by-doing’

The complex nature of participant observation presents serious challenges when it comes to designing effective teaching strategies. How can we convey the intricacies of a practice that not only requires keen observation skills, reflexivity and a certain sensibility, but that also varies so greatly between projects, fieldsites and interlocutors? From the beginning, anthropologists’ answer has been to encourage learning-by-doing, following the principle that ‘a good way to learn ethnographic methods is to practice them […] experiencing from start to finish what it means to enquire as an ethnographic researcher’ (Janesick 1983: 198).

This approach often entails transferring the classroom – and the learning – to the field. Once students have been appropriately exposed to the theory and ethics of participant observation, ethnography is often taught in a hands-on manner through practical workshops, day trips and more extended field schools, in locations as diverse as local communities and oversees countries (Bielenin-Lenczowska and Kaliszewska 2021; Gardner 2020; Goswami 2022; Myers 1969; Tragaki 2020), in person and, more recently, online (Cheuk 2021). This hands-on approach can also include ethnography in the framework of applied research projects for industry or community partners (Cerinsek et al. 2021; Dumond Portnoff 1981; Miller 2021). While the small scale of these enterprises precludes the possibility of protracted engagement, these activities provide students with a glimpse of the multidimensional, embodied, deeply personal and relational nature of doing fieldwork – from the feeling of estrangement to the challenges of taking fieldnotes effectively. An alternative and complementary approach to fieldwork-based methods teaching is to carry ‘one world into the other’ (Gugganig and Schor 2020: 59) by bringing the field into the classroom. Initiatives of this type are creative and interactive: scholars have suggested using audio-visual resources, from film to postcards (Gugganig and Schor 2020), as well as ethnographic exercises where students are encouraged to imagine they are somewhere else (Feder 2018; McGranahan 2014). All such exercises are designed with the aim of helping students feel as if they were in the field and are instrumental to developing in students an ethnographic sensibility based on questioning their pre-existing assumptions.

Practical ethnographic training, inside and outside the classroom, is effective in providing students with a taste of fieldwork, but it is not in itself sufficient to prepare them for the challenges presented by protracted ethnographic research, required particularly for postgraduate degrees. The issue remains that while researchers at all stages can think ethnography through some general principles and can refer to the now abundant literature on the subject, there remains no ‘fool proof’ guide or list of instructions researchers can follow to ensure that they conduct fieldwork appropriately and safely. This is because there is no ‘generic’ ethnographic project or ethnographer and, as fieldwork unfolds, research questions and focus might change. It is partly for these reasons that ethnographic fieldwork can only be rooted in a situated, embodied and emplaced learning-by-doing, rather than a step-by-step application of theoretical, procedural knowledge. Ethnography remains situated and situational: contextual, emergent, rarely prescriptive and often unpredictable.

This unpredictability creates significant challenges for first-time fieldworkers embarking on long-term ethnographic fieldwork: as students conduct their research, they are likely to be met with unforeseen circumstances that require them to make important decisions not only on the direction of their research and participants’ safety but also on their own physical and mental health. Unfortunately, first-time fieldworkers do not always find themselves prepared for such eventualities. Amy Pollard's (2009) examination of the difficulties encountered in the field by British PhD students provides an interesting critique of pre-fieldwork training though, interestingly, the emphasis in Pollard's piece is not placed on the lack of methods teaching per se. Rather, the study highlights that, prior to leaving for the field, students’ projects were often discussed in abstract rather than practical terms, so that when students encountered difficult or unexpected circumstances in the field, they were unprepared to tackle them. Significantly, Pollard remarks that a masculinist style of fieldwork was often expected by supervisors and even students themselves, so that the latter felt compelled to push through difficult circumstances in pursuit of ‘authentic’ fieldwork, regardless of the risks that such a choice might entail. The result was that many of Pollard's interlocutors found themselves in dangerous situations, such as seriously neglecting their mental and physical health, or disregarding their personal safety, either believing these hurdles to be necessary to do fieldwork ‘right’ or because they were simply caught by surprise.

In truth, the issue is not new. The discrepancy between training and actual experiences in the field was already highlighted in the mid-1990s by Journeys through Ethnography, an edited volume on fieldwork practice tellingly subtitled ‘Realistic accounts of fieldwork’. In the introduction, Annette Lareau and Jeffrey Schultz (1996: 2) observe that manuals are ‘overly general’ and ‘filled with platitudes’ about ethnography. This approach, the editors argue, is insufficient as it glosses over the concrete practice and challenges of fieldwork:

Ethnographic research necessarily brings the researcher into varied and unpredictable situations (…) There is always a gap between instruction and implementation, but this pattern of success and regret has been traditionally private. Though often acknowledging briefly that there were some aspects of the project that did not proceed as anticipated, researchers (…) often skimmed across and minimized the inevitable difficulties in the field. (Lareau and Schultz 1996: 2)

What is missing in these scenarios is a solid research design that, in Kim Fortun's (2009: 170) words, is ‘preparatory without being deterministic’. In Britain, this rather abstract approach to pre-fieldwork preparation partly depends on the traditional understanding of fieldwork rooted in the intellectual landscape of the nineteenth century. As Henrika Kuklick has argued, the Victorian mind-set postulated that ‘personal growth (of an implicitly masculine sort) was effected through pilgrimages to unfamiliar places, where the European traveller would endure physical discomfort and (genuine or imagined) danger’ (2011: 12–13). Fieldwork was interpreted as a ‘purifying ordeal’ meant to test and develop the ethnographer's professional and personal character. The first generation of British anthropologists – scholars such as Alfred C. Haddon, William Halse Rivers and Charles Gabriel Seligman – endorsed this heroic imaginary and trained their students in the same Victorian sensibility. For instance, George Stocking reports that Seligman once told Malinowski that ‘field research in anthropology is what the blood of martyrs is to the Church’ (Stocking 1995: 115 in Kulkick 2011: 13).

Although the interest in the use of fieldwork in anthropology evidently did not begin with Malinowski (Delgado Rosa and Vermeulen 2022; Firth 1985; Stocking 1983), the LSE scholar is broadly credited as the father of participant observation. Generation after generation of students are thus likely to encounter the introduction to his famous Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) in their introductory courses. When reading this classic tale of arrival, where Malinowski encourages the reader to imagine themselves on an exotic shore, far from their (assumed) fellow white men, and surrounded only by the local (‘native’) society, students are immediately exposed to the idea that true ethnography is conducted alone, in a secluded location, for long and uninterrupted periods of time and in a somewhat heroic fashion, through the stoic rejection of all that is familiar and immediately intelligible (Nader 2011; Okely 2009). Though today anthropology ‘at home’ (wherever ‘home’ may be) is more commonplace and its legitimacy is widely accepted, Malinowskian fieldwork – exotic, machoistic, and steeped in Victorian colonial attitudes – persists as the discipline's ‘archetype’ (Stocking 1992) of ‘normal anthropological practice’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 11).

On the one hand, the stubborn persistence of the Malinowskian archetype delegitimises other types of ethnographic research, based on collaborative (Bejarano et al. 2019; Buitron 2021) or ‘patchwork’ arrangements, and the – often marginalised – researchers who employ them (Günel et al. 2020). On the other hand, this approach generates a mysticism around fieldwork which produces ethnography as a craft that cannot be explained nor transmitted, an experience for which one cannot prepare (McGranahan 2014; Rabinow 2007; Segal 1990; Van Maanen 1988). The overall message is that, rather than being taught, ethnography can only be learnt by ‘being there’, often by way of enduring (see also Hage 2005). Anthropologists’ widespread reticence to talking openly about the personal challenges and, importantly, concrete arrangements of being in the field compounds this issue by creating what Christine Barry (2009: 1) calls a ‘hidden discourse’ around what really happens during fieldwork.

Pollard's proposal to fill this training gap pivots not on methods teaching per se but rather on providing students with more mentorship and guidance from supervisors, in addition to opportunities for peer-to-peer exchange. Importantly, pre-fieldwork preparation should hinge on encouraging students to think concretely about what fieldwork might look like in practice, including ‘best’ and ‘worst’ case scenarios (see also Faria 2021 and Mills 2009). Maria Concetta Lo Bosco (2021) reaches similar conclusions when she argues that while one can never be fully prepared for all eventualities of fieldwork, PhD students should be given more opportunities to openly discuss the practical aspects of doing ethnography and seek guidance from mentors before as well as during fieldwork. In other words, before fieldwork begins, students need to develop an ‘ethnographic imagination’, or the ability to envisage fieldwork as an actual practice with its concrete arrangements, quotidian adjustments, and unexpected challenges and changes of course. Mentorship, as we have seen, plays a fundamental role in this process, but what role may classroom training contribute? Can traditional methods courses contribute to preparing students for the challenges and unpredictability of ethnography? The next section will consider this question with particular reference to reading ethnography.

Reading ethnography

Much of the inspiration for this article comes from four years’ experience teaching ethnographic research methods at postgraduate level to a diverse cohort of master's and PhD students, most of whom are new to participant observation. The module, now called Advanced Ethnographic Research (AER) and which I originally inherited in a similar form from colleagues in 2018, is practice-oriented, and over the course of one term students design and conduct a small-scale pilot project using methods covered in the course. The final assignment is a reflexive project report where students consider their own research practice, from ethical considerations of access and power to an assessment of their interviewing skills. The actual teaching of the module, however, is largely classroom-based and reading and discussing ethnographic writings assigned for seminars – monograph chapters or journal articles – is central to our learning activities.

The scrutiny of ethnographic texts is far from a novelty in socio-cultural anthropology, first thanks to the ‘literary turn’ (Geertz 1973) and later as written ethnographies became the object of intense critique during the so-called crisis of representation (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). These critiques focused on issues of representation, textuality and ethnographic authority and worked to destabilise widespread assumptions of objectivity in ethnographic writing. Reading ethnographies was, in several ways, an exercise in textual criticism, following Geertz's (1973: 19) famous statement that ethnographer's main activity is writing (Piasere 2002). Existing literature on reading ethnography is accordingly more about textuality than method and focuses on examining how authors, operating within different theoretical paradigms, present and evidence their arguments, and build their ethnographic authority (Jacobson 1991; Van Maanen 1988). This literature encourages ethnographers to write ethnographic texts in more conscious and self-aware ways and to reflect on the ethics of representation, which is important since the teaching of ethnographic writing is often neglected (Chattaraj 2020). However, reading ethnography as a teaching tool at once encompasses and stretches beyond this practice, particularly when the reading is collective, guided and participative.

In AER, reading collectively means analysing individual ethnographies and reflecting together on what we can learn from them about conducting ethnographic research. Texts are assigned ahead of each session and complemented with a list of guiding questions designed to draw students’ attention to specific methodological issues such as access, positionality, power and ethics, or the nature of ethnographic ‘data’. This set up affords students the opportunity to read material at their own pace and provides them with essential time for reflection. Texts are later discussed together in the classroom, including in small peer learning groups and in conversation with teaching assistants. I often propose that we concentrate on a particular quote or section of the material, and students are similarly encouraged to refer directly to the text when contributing. This close examination of the ethnography, however, is not focused on analysing the process of writing, à la Geertz, but rather on examining the process of doing ethnographic research. The practice of reading ethnography that I propose here is thus an exercise in thinking with ethnographies, as text, about ethnography, as craft, with the aim of stimulating and developing students’ ethnographic imagination, meaning their ability to envisage what doing fieldwork might entail in practical terms.

Firstly, reading ethnographies allows students to understand more concretely what fieldworkers do in the field. Whether in the form of articles or monographs, ethnographic writing is a helpful window on other researchers’ fieldwork, a gateway to a multitude of projects to be explored and by which to be inspired. Reading written accounts of a plurality of studies enables students to familiarise themselves with ethnography as a concrete practice as it unfolds in different fieldsites and in conversation with different groups of interlocutors.

Since ethnographies are based on the unpacking of events, conversations and encounters that took place during fieldwork, reading these texts provides a sense of what ethnographers ‘really do’ in the field. Where the literature may describe participant observation in generic terms, an ethnography translates this ‘flat’ notion into an array of multidimensional activities, real-life exchanges and personal relationships. Analysing ethnographic vignettes (Demetriou 2023) provides students with a glimpse of the kinds of situations in which researchers might participate and later analyse. While students might be able to envisage taking part in ritual and exceptional events (civic and religious rituals, festivals, elections), it can be more difficult to imagine how fieldwork is built on mundane interactions (conversations, daily tasks, leisure activities) and how these may be analytically meaningful.

In AER we routinely read and analyse passages from Lara Deeb's exquisitely ethnographic monograph An Enchanted Modern (2006). Deeb employs a variety of types of vignettes to examine notions and practices of modernity and piety amongst Shiʿa women in al-Dahiyya, South Beirut. At times, Deeb unpacks formal and semi-formal events such as celebrations of ʿAshoura rituals and sessions dedicated to discussing doctrine, which students readily associate with a study of religiosity. However, Deeb also draws from rather more mundane and casual interactions. In Chapter 3, Deeb introduces her discussion of the visibility of piety in daily life by unpacking a conversation amongst friends centred on joking about clothing, discussing the issue of drinking during Ramadan, and the experiences of common acquaintances. After reading the early part of the chapter, I ask students to examine not only what message the ethnographer means to convey but also how she constructs it using ethnographic material. The exercise can be used to teach students how to write ethnographically, but also, more to my point, as a window on participant observation itself. Especially in the early stages of research design, reading ethnographies gives students access to a vast repository of concrete examples for ethnographic fieldwork that can inspire, be borrowed and adapted. Being exposed to different types of ethnographic situations, in turn enables students to understand what ethnographic material is, or what ‘counts as data’ in participant observation, as students have put it to me. This is particularly helpful to clarify the difference between anecdotes originated from superficial interactions – à la consultant, as Günel et al. (2020) put it – and ethnographic encounters embedded in long-term engagement with interlocutors, something especially valuable when teaching cohorts with heterogeneous disciplinary and professional backgrounds.

Secondly, ethnographies offer insight on the negotiation of access and the researcher's positionality, including issues of power that are still often glossed over. One of the outcomes of the 1980s ‘crisis of representation’ is that the ethnographer, their positionality, and the latter's role in the production of knowledge is now made more visible in the text that previously, when researchers easily hid behind the fiction of distanced objectivity (Okley and Callaway 1992). Take, for instance, Yael Navaro-Yashin's (2002: 13) critique of the notion of the ‘native’ ethnographer which, as a Turkish researcher working in Turkey, she is supposed to embody. In the introduction to Faces of the State, she writes as follows:

The notion of the native is not an innocent concept and neither is a native positionality. As a person of ‘minority’ status in Turkey, I was not perceived as a ‘proper native’ by many of my informants (…) Immediately, people expressed surprise to hear Turkish spoken as a native language by someone with a non-Turkish name (…) In all cases, upon meeting me, people would ask, ‘Where are you from?’ (…) My positionality as ‘native’ was ambiguous, from my informants’ nativist points of view. (Navaro-Yashin 2002: 13)

The foregoing passage highlights once more the importance of deconstructing problematic dichotomic categories that have defined the way anthropology conceive of ethnography, such as ‘home’ and ‘away’, the ‘us’ of anthropologists and the ‘Other’ of the ‘native’. Even more importantly, however, Navaro's reflections warn first-time fieldworkers to not take their own positionality for granted and that their own perceived identity might be challenged in the field. By discovering that, depending on the interlocutor, a Turkish anthropologist might not be seen – nor treated – as ‘native’, students learn that their identity as researchers in the field is contextual and will be shaped in the interaction with specific participants, discourses and circumstances.

Another excellent example is Lara Deeb's (2006: 10) discussion of herself as an Arab-American researcher working in al-Dahiyya:

The hyphen in ‘Arab-American’ represents a negation of both identities, an impossible oxymoronic combination. Over time, the hyphenation collapsed and people accepted that I was both. As with any identity, this presented both advantages and disadvantages for research. As Abu-Lughod describes (1986), there were aspects of my life that I felt especially unable to share in al-Dahiyya because of my Lebanese identity. On the other hand, my extended family in Beirut provided me with a level of respectability that I doubt would have existed otherwise. I also faced situations where people expected me to know more than I did, especially about local politics. In this regard my family's Christian background proved helpful, as people took care to explain religious matters without assuming that I had any prior knowledge.

On the one hand, Deeb positions herself reflexively in relation to her interlocutors; on the other hand, she traces how her positionality influenced her fieldwork and the knowledge that she produced through it. Analysing this passage in class affords students an opportunity to examine concretely the relationship between positionality and access, epistemology and method.

Thirdly, reading ethnographies can concretely help students to consider issues of feasibility and risk assessment, essential to research design. Reading Ghassan Hage's (2021) The Diasporic Condition, students may learn the workings of long-term multi-sited fieldwork, building a more pragmatic perspective on this research arrangement than George Marcus’ (1995) seminal and primarily theoretical essay on the subject might afford. Initially, Hage had envisioned working with members of three diasporic Lebanese families hailing from three distinct villages and settled in different parts of the world. However, after a promising start, he was forced to review his plans:

I could have felt that it was possible to engage in a multi-sited ethnography – except for a simple problem. I was constantly suffering from jet lag as well as health problems associated with too much flying and too much eating and drinking on the run. (…) The body of the anthropologist, even a postmodern one, simply can't cope with such fast and intensive traveling for long. (Hage 2021: 14)

Hage's considerations warn first-time fieldworkers against a machoistic approach to ethnography which trades depth for volume of interactions (2021: 16) while also disregarding the ethnographer's own limits and well-being. For students intending to conduct multi-sited fieldwork, reading Hage also provokes more specific debates over the ideal number of fieldsites required for an ethnographic study and the most appropriate manner to choose them.

Lastly, reading ethnographic accounts can tackle the often glossed over topic of ethnographic failure. Katharina Schramm's (2005) piece on being rejected on the grounds of being a white researcher at a Homecoming event in Ghana, for instance, pinpoints the possibility of failing to secure access to the field and one's desired interlocutors. To make sense of Schramm's experience, students debate different facets of her research design, access strategies and acceptance of failure as narrated in the article. Students thus become aware of the fact that they might have to change their plans during fieldwork, perhaps considerably so: what would they do if they were unable to secure interlocutors? Even more importantly, following Schramm's own reflections, students are forced to problematise the colonial expectation that researchers should be allowed by default to conduct research anywhere, at any time, with any group of people (Mogstad and Tse 2018). In the aftermath of this discussion, I invite students to rethink some potentially problematic elements of their own plans; thinking with ethnography is necessarily also an exercise in reflecting about power and ethics.

When students and I discuss this type of material in class, we thus think with Deeb, Schramm, Hage and Navaro to reflect on the practice of ethnography in general and students’ own projects in particular. The switch from textual analysis to research design happens organically during seminars: as we unpack authors’ positionality, fieldwork experience and their relationship with interlocutors, we begin asking ourselves what we can learn from their experiences and how we may apply these lessons to our own projects. Students are usually paired up or split into small groups to review their research design, so that they can think across projects and learn from each other and from the graduate teaching assistants, before we return to a plenary discussion. These exercises are valuable as fieldwork preparation because they invite students to question their assumptions about who they are as researchers, review their expectations of access to the field, and reconsider the ethical dimension of their projects. They also encourage first-time fieldworkers to anticipate some of the issues that they might encounter in the field and find potential solutions to them, or an alternative course of action. While guiding questions are designed to scaffold the conversation, students’ observations and queries, particularly around their own research design, are the real engine of these sessions, which become practical without being ‘hands on’. Issues that emerge in seminar discussion do not remain confined to the classroom, and students continue the discussion with their supervisors, transitioning into the realm of mentorship. Seen from this perspective, interrogating ethnographic writing is a productive exercise in collective reflection and reflexivity that can inform research design and stimulate and stretch students’ ethnographic imagination, strengthening their project's ethical dimensions and contributing to ensuring the researcher's and participants’ safety in the field.

Conclusion

First-time ethnographers have for some time denounced the shortcomings of methods training, pointing to the inability of current teaching models to prepare students for the concrete reality of doing long-term fieldwork. The nurturing of their ethnographic imagination in the context of research design, particularly at postgraduate level, is in fact often neglected. While early-stage researchers have called for more mentorship and peer-to-peer exchange, this article offers a complementary, classroom-based strategy rooted in the collective, participative and critical reading of ethnographies. As I have shown, this critical and dialogic practice helps students ‘glimpse’ fieldwork as it is done concretely, helping first-time fieldworkers to imagine how ethnography might enfold in their own projects and plan ahead, as much as possible, for different scenarios. Students are also encouraged to be reflexive in designing their projects, paying particular attention to issues of power, positionality and the ethical challenges posed by the colonial roots of ethnographic methods. Using ethnographies to examine positionality and access is particularly useful to address diversity in the classroom. It is in fact necessary to reflect on who the ethnographic ‘us’ is: who are we talking about when we talk about the ‘ethnographer’ going into ‘the field’? Much of the classic reflections on access and positioning are focused on Western, white ethnographers doing fieldwork in distant, non-Western locations, which elides other positionalities (Rajan 2021). However, with a diverse cohort of students in the classroom, our teaching must cater to a wider variety of individual backgrounds: discussing a range of situations drawn from different ethnographies can complement – and widen – the limited selection of personal experiences that teaching teams are able to offer. Of course, not all ethnographic writing is as explicit as Deeb and Navaro, or even interested in detailing the ethnographer's journey in the field. In this sense, not all ethnographies are equal in research methods teaching, and it is important that teachers choose texts that respond to the specific issues they want to interrogate with students, of which the selection discussed here is but a small sample.

Students themselves have reacted well to the reading element of the course and have requested more space to read and discuss ethnographies in module evaluations. Two years ago, a separate module devoted solely to reading ethnographies was created at the department but, given students’ enthusiasm, I chose to retain collective reading practices in my methods teaching. Postgraduate students are generally eager to learn about ethnography and I rarely struggle with poor preparation, so that seminars are usually lively and filled with discussions of general principles as well as individual projects. Students are allowed to reflect on their project for AER's final assignment as much as on their dissertation projects, and usually students whose dissertations are ethnographic in nature choose to focus on them. Tellingly, this choice is particularly frequent amongst PhD students, whose extended and more complex doctoral research requires more of the kind of considerations that the module encourages. Reading might not be usually conceived as a practical learning technique, yet the experience of AER shows that it can be a participative and active learning endeavour and, above all, a valuable component of fieldwork training for first-time researchers.