Chapter 5 explores the role of text in ethnography. First, ethnographers encounter a myriad of various written documents, formal and informal, private and public, and hardcopies and digital. All of them inform our research. Not only does the content of the text matter, but also how they function in everyday life and how they perform and shape reality. The chapter presents diverse approaches to text analysis and invites readers to look at texts from multiple perspectives. Moreover, ethnographers gather other stories during fieldwork that give access to local understandings of culture - those stories researchers use to write up their ethnographies, thick descriptions. Readers believe ethnography because of the way ethnography is written. The dense and interwoven text makes us believe that the ethnographer was there. Finally, the authors share and discuss examples of some popular stylistic conventions and techniques.
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
