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Dancing Lessons from God
This young woman’s story, like that of her older sister, was the story
of the pressures to “pass” as Japanese and of the continuing discrim-
ination against resident Koreans in Japan. Their desire to “pass” was
so strong that the two women, older and younger sister, would hide
in public their Koreanness, their language ability, and even their re-
lationship to each other. The story seemed to have no place in my re-
search, from the viewpoint of ethnography as objective experimental
science. The story did make sense from the vantage point of ethnog-
raphy as experience in the field, and the viewpoint that ethnography
is an interpretive engagement in search of meaning. It could be seen
to fit in with Malinowski’s idea of the “complete ethnographer” (Wol-
cott 1999 , 28 ) or with Mead’s espoused belief in “grasping as much of
the whole as possible” (quoted in Sanjek 1990 , 225 ). These concepts,
Wolcott points out, are best understood as advice to “study and report
in context” (Wolcott 1999 , 28 , his emphasis). Although most of the
“data” from this unanticipated second part of the interview with this
young woman was not written about in publications on work cultures,
consumerism, and department stores, it has served to inform my un-
derstandings of what it means to be a member of a minority in a self-
proclaimed homogeneous society. The insights were incorporated into
later publications dealing with issues of minorities (Creighton 1997 b,
1998 ). As Radcliffe-Brown advised: “Get a large notebook, and start in
the middle because you never know which ways things will develop.”
Bring extra notebooks—just in case, I would add.
Story # 2 Flexibility in the Research Plan or
“Get on the Bus” Advice
While telling these stories from the field, which intersect with my own
autobiographical experiences of “being there” (Bradburd 1998 ), I am
not rejecting the importance of set research methods, techniques, or
tools, questions, and objectives. We should have them built into the
research plan. We should also be prepared, in the name of larger un-
derstandings, to abandon them when in the field, according to chang-
ing circumstances. One of the characteristics attributed to human in-
telligence to recognize its potentially profound nature is the quality of
