The Ethnographic Encounter

When reading this book you are embarking on an ethnographic journey, granting you access into the field of ethnography, its methods, knowledge claims and aims. The journey takes you to the indigenous people of Japan, a warrior Nation in Canada and Wall Street financial actors. The book reaches beyond fragmentary knowledge of the studied people and opens up for illustrating not only ethnography in practice, but the analytical dimensions of the ethnographic craft as well. The point of departure lies in the fact that knowledge about a people never is obtained in third person. On par with this, circumstances and situations that influence the researchers perceptions and understandings are discussed. In this spirit, the author addresses such issues as getting access to the studied group of people, the role of informants, and cultural clashes, to name but a selected few. These issues are interwoven in the research context in which they appear.