The Professional Stranger - Michael H. Agar

Agar, Michael H. The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. 2 ed. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, 2008.

Based on ethnographic research experience in India, among street junkies in the US, and a team ethnography in Switzerland, Agar demonstrates that ethnographic traditions are currently relevant and the idea of fieldwork more complicated by recent theories such as network theory.  He proposes that the ethnographer should be moving from description to analysis to interpretation.  The ethnographer must account for context and meaning while keeping an eye also on power.

Positivism is not appropriate, but systematic methodology is important.  In this sense, he recommends an informal-to-formal funnel sequence and moving from a child-apprentice role to a more detached scientific view that can give an account of how locals interpret their own lives.  He sees ethnography as a dialectic process and cross-culture perspective in which researchers' attitudes toward culture "color" the evaluative tone. 

In addition, nearly all ethnography will include both aspects of emic and etic observations by analogy from linguistics where "phonetic represents the set of possible distinctions that might be used in the characterization of human speech, while phonemic is the subset of those distinctions useful in describing the sound differences that are perceived as significant by speakers of a particular language" (238).  The ethnographer should search for patterns, rather than enter with pre-planned hypotheses.  Searching for patterns that are significant to give an account of a local culture are the main premise of ethnography.

Some key ideas/tools/methodologies he suggests are listed below:

definition by contrast
indexicality
rich contraditions
selective funneling
conclusions over time in collaboration
participant observation, rich-points, coherence
frame: validate & modify
teaching device more than research
local in relation to distant

authority = responsibility
clarify narrative
abductive & grounded theory

low-level analysis = "giving account" (paraphrase as practice of decoding & re-encoding)
high-level analysis = relationship between different conflicting accounts
language = object & metalanguage (own question: practice & metapractice?)