How 'at home' is an ethnographer at home? Territories of knowledge and the making of ethnographic understanding

This article proposes to consider “at home ethnography” and “abroad ethnography” not as labels standing for different kinds of fieldwork "out there" but rather as the poles of a continuum identifying the ethnographer’s situated, relative and ever changing epistemic status. Building on data from a recent fieldwork in an Intensive Care Unit, the author identifies the different epistemic circumstances that originate from the entanglement of the multiple territories of knowledge at stake in any ethnography of complex organizations. The analysis shows how the participants’ relative access to knowledge and rights to claim it vary according to the circumstances and the unfolding of the interaction. The discussion advances that the ethnographer oscillates between “being abroad” and “being at home” as if he was constantly moving between the two classical positions of ethnographic work: making the familiar strange as it is typical of ethnographies focusing on the “very ‘ordinariness’ of normality” (Ybema et al. 2009, p. 2), and making the strange familiar as it is typical of anthropologists studying exotic communities. The article contributes to the still ongoing debate on “at home” organizational ethnography, by addressing the limits of the “insider doctrine” (Merton, 1972) that still pervades contemporary ethnography and proposes cognitive oscillation as the challenging mind-set of any ethnographer-in-the-field.