What Will We Have Ethnography Do?

In this essay, we engage current discussions about refunctioning ethnography along lines that are meant to reimagine larger trajectories of ethnographic theory and practice. While these discussions are complicated and involved, much attention has been focused on refunctioning the mythological residue of Malinowksian modes of fieldwork from which springs trends for apprenticing graduate students to do and write up fieldwork. What has received less attention in these discussions are two other related tendencies on which we focus here: the first concerns connecting current leanings toward collaborative ethnographic activisms, in particular, with those contemporary performances of ethnography that surface from Boasian-situated histories; the second concerns connecting these contemporary performances as they articulate in practice, with not only graduate, doctoral-level training in ethnography but also emerging impulses for teaching and learning ethnography at all levels, including undergraduate instruction.