Field Work In Ethnography: Being there and writing here

Abstract

The writing process of an ethnographic text is still a challenge for educational research. Clifford
Geertz, in “Works and lives: the anthropologist as author”, leads us to reflect on the authorship´s processes based on modern anthropology, relating multiple dimensions of fieldwork. This article aims to reflect on dense description and ethnographic interviews as ways of emerging the theories we produce from empirics. We start from the work of Three ethnographic research, at different times, at doctoral level in the Education field. They deal with subjects who are often not heard: young elementary and high school students from public schools and women deprived of their freedom. The questions proposed are: What is ethnographic fieldwork? What reflexivity emerges from ethnographic writing? Is the field the setting for ethnographic writing in Education? In ethnography the researcher uses two means of collecting data: observing and asking. What people’s actions mean to them may be apparent from observation, however, it is necessary to ask, seeking to establish a non-hierarchical relationship that respects the other’s speech. It is important to emphasize that the analyzes are permeated by perspectives´ myriad, voices, and meanings to produce knowledge. We opted for attentive listening to people in situations of exclusion who have been denied the right to speak, as research, public policy, and education cannot be carried out without the subject to whom these actions are directed.