Abstract
Fieldnotes are inescapable tools in ethnographic practice; in publications resulting from qualitative research that include ethnography, not often it’s clear how it was used. To know in depth fieldnotes’ potentialities will contribute to a better defence of the method by ethnography practitioners, without falling prey to common criticisms of its subjectivity. In this paper I argue that clarifying the conditions of field diary use in ethnography’s results strengthens ethnography as a methodological practice. This practice, although a rule in anthropology, became to be used more and more by sociology and by other social sciences. Fieldnotes, here, emerge as having a central role in ethnographic data accumulation, a common-sense idea in anthropology but, one century after Malinowski, continues to lack epistemological confidence.
Keywords
Fieldnotes; ethnography; participant observation; ethnographic data; methodology