Educational Ethnography as Cultural and Religious Mirror What Do Researchers Really Learn?

Scholarly work is not infrequently imbued with emotional content. While not often revealed, there is passionate thought in scholars ’ research and creative endeavors (Neumann, 2006). Passion motivates creative work and springs from the whole being of the researcher. Work and life become intertwined; career and biography inform one another. One method of study in which this world of researchers ’ personal experience, beliefs and values may be more fully revealed is ethnography. The reason for this is that in order to arrive at a valid analytic description of participants ’ culture, the researcher’s own beliefs must be externalized, examined and separated from the culture under study. In this vein Norman Denzin has argued that “self-reflexivity in ethnography is no longer a luxury. ” Ethnography does not present “an objective, noncontested account of the other’s experiences ” (Denzin, 1997, xiii), and must give clear voice to participants ’ own understandings. Rich ethnographic description and analysis should include both the voices of the researched and the undisguised voice of the researcher, who reveals herself and her subjectivity in the interpretive ethnographic account that she writes. This necessary process of externalizing the researcher’s own beliefs can lead to considerabl