A social ecological approach for ethnography: Flexibilizing roles and remembering social embeddedness

The different ways in which ethnography is conducted, or its topologies, effectively, are bound up in conceptualizations of roles that a researcher might play in any given field or setting. Whether one turns to the fourfold classic articulations – complete-participant, participant-as-observer, observer-as-participant, complete observer – by Gold (1958) or more recent innovations with relabeled roles – such as complete-member-researcher, active-member-researcher, and peripheral-member-researcher (Adler and Adler 1994) –, the recourse to roles is deeply impressed into the canonical praxis of ethnography.