Murphy / AUDIENCE ETHNOGRAPHY Doing Audience Ethnography: A Narrative Account of Establishing Ethnographic Identity and Locating Interpretive Communities in Fieldwork

This article is an account of how ethnographic identity was constituted and how audi-ences were located during the early stages of an ethnography of television viewers in Mexico. The description takes a narrative form and details the field experience and acknowledges the visibility and self-interest of the ethnographer. Writing about the field experience in such a fashion is motivated by the fact that few studies of media reception provide discussion about the events that shaped the direction of the inquiry, the produc-tive discomfort of the field encounter, selection and movements within the interpretive communities represented in studies, or relationships with various members of those communities. Moreover, a narrative account is helpful in demonstrating how the meth-odology that was developed evolved as a result of emerging relationships and contextual processes, not as a systematic design for finding a research “sample.” Traditionally, ethnographers ’ presence in the field and their absence in their own monographs were accepted conventions through which ethno-graphic authority was articulated. However, discomfort with the traditional practice mushroomed in the 1980s, and a minor industry of “crisis ” scholar