Ethnography is grounded in the belief that we can produce sensible knowledge about a social collectivity by carefully textualizing its members’ lived experience, which is inextricably linked to our own. Yet how can we teach students the skills necessary to inscribe everyday life without instilling in them an obsession with writing that propels them out of the very life they’re trying to investigate? In this article, we reflect critically on this often unquestioned, but crucial, question and draw on our own teaching experiences to propose a two-step strategy that can help graduate students and faculty cope with the “textualization fever” inherent in the ethnographic enterprise.
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