Writing the Ethnographic Story: Constructing Narratives out of Narratives

In this article, I analyse the ways in which ethnographers are sampling and constructing stories, how they listen, what they are hearing, and how they do stories. In short, it is asking how the fieldwork process of listening is turned into read ethnography. It retraces the various steps that are taken to transform fieldwork- infused narratives into refined ethnographic storytelling for academic audiences. I argue that, by neglecting continuously to review this space, anthropology and its related disciplines will continue to struggle to define their place in the canon of the social sciences and humanities. The ethnographer as author and as storyteller is very much at the heart of crafting the act of storytelling. The everevolving refinement of our methods towards narrative ethnography is in constant tension with our need and desire to be taken seriously as a social science; hencethe production of ethnography is still overshadowed by the demand - imagined or real - to adhere to approved methods of production defined by methodologies of accountability.