A note on the awkwardness of the ethnographer

Honing the craft skill of ethnography, pursuing its disposition, is enough to put one on edge in any social situation--the ethnographer is always at an angle to those they study. Indeed, the ethnographer's craft is precisely to hold a social world, a social fact, at an awkward angle, to look at it with a squint, in order to see it differently. Here, Gidley uses Abdelmalek Sayad's "awkward" posture in two of Pierre Bourdie's photographs of Algeria to explore the notion of ethnography as a craft and as a disposition, relating this to the insider/outsider position of ethnographers like Bourdieu, Sayad and Maloud Mammeri.