Introduction

In the last three decades, more or less, ethnography, that was long thought to be simple, turned into a complicated concept. At least for anthropologists, as is clearly demonstrated by the dense reflection and the vivid discussion that emerged about ethnography inside the anthropological academic community. Ethnographic practice, ethnographic theory, and ethnographic writing are not at all an easy and epistemologically plain activity. The Introduction aims to underline the common line of this edited volume that ethnography is strongly connected with a sophisticated theoretical reflection and strongly linked with cultural and social anthropology. Outside this frame, ethnography is nothing, and worthless are also the forms of knowledge one may expect to obtain by a naive use of a so-called “ethnographic method.”