Fiction and Ethnography: A Conversation

This is Part 2 of a paper presented at the Couch-Stone conference in Houston, Texas, in February 1998. It is a conversation between Lockridge, a novelist, and Richardson, an ethnographer. The conversation considers: (a) the profound importance of initial and last encounters (for people, including ethnographers), and ways to represent those encoun ters ; (b) the understanding that an (inter)action has multiple symbolic meanings and ways to represent that understanding; (c) attention to the seemingly minor and marginal as mirrors of what we view as major and central; (d) the potential to envision a study in both its specificity and its generality; and (e) mystery as it appears in everyday interactions.