We can now return to those calls in the 1970s for a new approach to research in the social sciences, one that would escape dualism by adopting an ethnographic mode of investigation through “immersion” in a foreign form of life. We can see now that this approach has promise to the extent that it recognizes that practical activity operates prior to the separation of subject and object, of subjectivity and objectivity. The logic seems clear: if embodied practical activity is the locus of a constitution of both social order and the knowing subject, we need to study this activity in specific settings. The researcher ought to acquire a practical familiarity with the people and way of life being studied, and this can come only from participating in this way of life. Ethnographic fieldwork ought to be the way to go.

But over the past 20 years, cultural anthropologists have been debating and rethinking the character of ethnography, and right now there is little consensus about ethnographic investigation. The basic premise of anthropological ethnography has been that one lives among the people one wants to know, participates in their practices, observes what they do, and writes a summary report. But there are significant problems with this conception of ethnography, and these problems have led to a reexamination in cultural anthropology of the character of ethnographic fieldwork. In this chapter I will review this debate and see what conclusions we can draw about how ethnographic fieldwork should be conducted if it is to help us study constitution in a program of relevant qualitative research.