Leaving the field: Methodological insights from ethnographic exits

By Sara Delamont

Leaving the field gathers various accounts of ethnographers leaving their field sites. In doing so, the book offers original insights into an often-overlooked aspect of the research process; the ethnographic exit. The chapters variously consider situations in which the researcher must extricate themselves from field relations, deal with unexpected or imperfect ends to projects, or manage situations in which ‘the field’ becomes hard to leave. Whilst the chapters are firmly focussed on ethnographic exits, they also provide more general methodological insights into the conduct of fieldwork and the writing of ethnography, as well as questioning established notions of ‘the field’ as a bounded setting the researcher straightforwardly visits and then leaves. The book highlights the importance of recognising ethnographic exits as an essential part of the research process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526157645

Book preview

Leaving the field

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Leaving the field

Methodological insights from ethnographic exits

Edited by Robin James Smith and Sara Delamont

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5765 2 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover photo: Robin James Smith

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Contents

List of contributors

Leaving the field: an editors’ introduction

Sara Delamont and Robin James Smith

Part IEntanglements and im/perfect exits

1 Finishing fieldwork in less than perfect circumstances: lessons learned in ‘labyrinth’ exiting

Alexandra Allan and Sarah Cole

2 Exeunt omnes!! The case for bad exits in ethnography

Sally Campbell Galman

3 Reflections on care and attachment in the ‘departure lounge’ of ethnography

Alex McInch and Harry C.R. Bowles

4 Unfinished business: a reflection on leaving the field

Gareth M. Thomas

5 Materia erotica: making-love among glassblowers

Erin O’Connor

Part IITroubling the field

6 Those who never leave us

Jessica Nina Lester and Allison Daniel Anders

7 Déjà vu et jamais vu: what happens when the field expands in ways that mean there is no exit?

Dawn Mannay

8 Student voices ‘echo’ from the ethnographic field

Janean Robinson, Barry Down and John Smyth

9 Public space and visible poverty: research fields without exit

Andrew P. Carlin

10 ‘The martial will never leave your bones’: embodying the field of the Kung Fu family

George Jennings

Part IIIIntermissions and returns

11 Between open and closed: recursive exits and returns to the fuzzy field of a community library across a decade of austerity

Alice Corble

12 On the importance of intermissions in ethnographic fieldwork: lessons from leaving New York

Joe Williams

13 Can you remember? Leaving and returning to the field in longitudinal research with people living with dementia

Andrew Clark and Sarah Campbell

14 A constant apprenticeship in martial arts: the messy longitudinal dynamics of never leaving the field

David Calvey

Part IVReturns, responsibilities and representations after ‘leaving’

15 A cautionary tale about ‘respondent validation’: the dissonant meeting of ‘field self’ and ‘author self’

Daniel Burrows

16 Commenting on legal practice: research relationships and the impact of criticism

Daniel Newman

17 Emotional honesty and reflections on problematic positionalities when conducting research in another country

Ashley Rogers

Index

List of contributors

Robin James Smith is Reader in Sociology at Cardiff University. His research is concerned with talk, embodied action, and categorisation practices. He has studied interaction in public space, traffic order, outreach with the street homeless, and the organisation of mountain rescue work. His most recent project is a study of the use of visual technology in police accountability, oversight, and training. He is the editor of On Sacks (Routledge, 2021), The Lost Ethnographies (Emerald, 2019), and Urban Rhythms (SAGE, 2013).

Sara Delamont is Reader Emerita in Sociology at Cardiff University. She currently conducts fieldwork on capoeira, the Brazilian dance-fight game, and savate, the French kick-boxing martial art. Her previous books include The Lost Ethnographies (Emerald, 2019), Embodying Brazil: An Ethnography of Diasporic Capoeira (Routledge, 2017), Key Themes in the Ethnography of Education (SAGE, 2014), Feminist Sociology (SAGE, 2003), and Fieldwork in Education Settings (3rd ed., Routledge, 2016). Together with Paul Atkinson, she was the founding editor of the journal Qualitative Research (SAGE) and the SAGE Research Methods Foundations resource. She was one of the editors of the SAGE Handbook of Ethnography (SAGE, 2001). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. She is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Awards from the British Sociological Association and the British Research Education.

Alexandra Allan is currently the Head of the School of Education at the University of Exeter. Her research interests reside in the field of the Sociology of Education. Alexandra's research has primarily focused on issues relating to educational inequalities. She has a particular interest in gender and academic achievement, sexualities, and social class. This research has been published in a number of journals, including Gender and Education, Discourse: Cultural Studies in the Politics of Education, Feminist Theory and Qualitative Research. Much of this work will be drawn together in a forthcoming book, due to be published with Routledge in 2023.

Allison Daniel Anders, PhD, is an associate professor in the educational foundations and inquiry programme and the qualitative research certificate programme at the University of South Carolina. She teaches foundations of education, critical race theory, social theory, and introductory and advanced qualitative research methodologies. Dr Anders studies critical and postcritical qualitative research methodologies, contexts of education, and the everyday experiences of targeted youth. Her research includes work with children and families with refugee status, LGBTQ+ students and educators, and youth who experience incarceration.

Harry Bowles is a Lecturer in the Department for Health at the University of Bath and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is a member of the Centre for Equality in Sport, Physical Activity and Health, contributing to research that aims to increase understanding of the individual, socio-cultural and structural factors that influence opportunities and experiences in sport and physical activity across the life course. Harry's research focuses on the sociology of youth and physical culture and has examined topics related to gambling, physical education, and young people's transitions into employment in and through sport.

Dan Burrows is a former social worker and now senior lecturer in social work at Cardiff University. He undertook ethnographic research with a hospital social work team for his professional doctorate, which formed the basis for his first book, Critical Hospital Social Work, which was published in 2020. His teaching and research interests include unpaid carers, social work with older people and rights-based practice.

David Calvey is a senior lecturer in sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). Prior to working at MMU he held teaching, visiting, and research positions at the University of Manchester, Liverpool John Moores University, the Open University, and the University of Queensland, Australia. His publications and expertise range across covert research, situated ethics, humour studies, sensory ethnography, martial arts, deviance, ethnomethodology, bouncers, and organisational creativity. He is a member of the British Sociological Association (BSA) and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He won the Emerald Literati award for outstanding paper in 2022. His latest book is Covert Research: The Art, Politics and Ethics of Undercover Fieldwork (Sage, 2017).

Sarah Campbell is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University within Integrated Health and Social Care. Her research interests are in ageing, dementia, gender, long-term care, sensory and embodied experiences, and social inequalities. She works with participatory qualitative and creative methods and ethnography. Her most recent work includes Uncertain Futures, a participatory arts-led research study exploring inequalities around both paid and unpaid work for older women in Manchester.

Andrew P. Carlin, PhD, is a research consultant who teaches bibliometrics and information work at Ulster University. He has published in various peer-reviewed journals, focusing particularly on ethnomethodology, information, and textual work. His research interests include interdisciplinarity, the praxeology of information, and the problem of data as a phenomenon of order. His interests in public space and studies of urban environments take into account such diverse topics as libraries and information agencies, liminal spaces, security and terror, and street ethnography.

Andrew Clark is a Professor in the School of Health and Society at the University of Salford. His research explores everyday experiences of neighbourhoods and communities of place using innovative and participatory approaches. He is currently investigating the development of age-friendly neighbourhoods since the Covid-19 pandemic, how people living with dementia experience local places, and the development of training and support for the care-home workforce.

Sarah Cole is currently a lecturer in education at the School of Education at the University of Exeter. She teaches and researches the broad area of social justice in education with a specific interest in gender and gender-based violence in education. This work has been published in the edited collection International Perspectives on Exclusionary Pressures in Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and in the Journal of Gender-Based Violence.

Alice Corble is an interdisciplinary library and archival scholar, educator, librarian, and activist. Her scholarship and practice explores the hidden infrastructures and power dynamics of library spaces, collections, and intersectional social relations. She is currently based at the University of Sussex Library where she teaches critical information literacy alongside an AHRC-RLUK fellowship researching the integral role of the library and archives in understanding the university's institutional origins, development, and contemporary calls to decolonise.

Barry Down is Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion (CRESI) at the University of South Australia and Emeritus Professor, Murdoch University. He has been Chief Investigator on a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) grants investigating student engagement, school-to-work transitions, early career teacher resilience and performance arts. His current research involves a critical policy analysis of school exclusion policies.

Sally Campbell Galman

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George Jennings is Senior Lecturer in Sport Sociology at Cardiff Metropolitan University, where he leads the MA Sport, Ethics in Society course. An avid practitioner, George has been researching the martial arts through ethnography and other qualitative research designs since his undergraduate dissertation (2004–05), including studies of Wing Chun, Taijiquan, Xilam and historical European martial arts (HEMA). George is founder of the Wales Martial Arts Practitioner–Researcher Network and co-convenor of the Documents Research Network (DRN). He is currently learning the Chinese-American art of Cheng Hsin through a private apprenticeship.

Jessica Nina Lester, PhD, is a Professor of Qualitative Methodology in the School of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. At Indiana University, she serves as the Program Coordinator of the Qualitative and Quantitative Methodology PhD program and oversees the Certificate in Qualitative Research and Inquiry Methodology. Jessica is a qualitative methodologist and interdisciplinary researcher who has published extensively in the field of qualitative inquiry and more specifically ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA). In her methodological scholarship, she focuses on the study and development of EMCA, the integration of digital tools and spaces in qualitative research, and the place of disability in critical qualitative inquiry. In much of her substantive research, she has sought to examine clinical and educational interactions that involve children and youth. At Indiana University, she teaches qualitative methods courses and mentors graduate students in qualitative inquiry from a range of disciplines.

Dawn Mannay is a Reader (Associate Professor) in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, with interests in education, inequalities and children and young people. Dawn's recent books include Children and young people ‘looked after’? Education, intervention and the everyday culture of care in Wales (University of Wales Press, 2019) co-edited with Louise Roberts and Alyson Rees, The Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods (SAGE, 2020) co-edited with Luc Pauwels, and Creative Research Methods in Education (Policy Press, 2021) co-authored with Helen Kara, Narelle Lemon and Megan McPherson. Dawn is committed to working creatively with communities to produce data and disseminate the messages from research findings in innovative ways to increase the potential for social, educational and policy change and support informed practice.

Alex McInch is the Professional Doctorate Coordinator in the Cardiff School of Sport and Health Sciences at Cardiff Metropolitan University in Wales, UK. He is a social policy researcher with a specific interest in social inequality. His work focusses predominantly on the sport and education policy spaces and alongside research activity, he is a keen Doctoral supervisor, examiner, and chair of examination boards. Alex's current projects have been commissioned by several local authorities in Wales and have looked at inequalities in both health and education.

Daniel Newman is Reader in law at Cardiff University with research expertise on access to justice. His books include Legal Aid Lawyers and the Quest for Justice (Hart, 2013), Justice in a Time of Austerity (Bristol University Press, 2021) with Jon Robins, Experiences of Criminal Justice (Bristol University Press, 2022) with Roxanna Dehaghani, and Legal Aid and the Future of Access to Justice (Hart, 2023) with Jacqueline Kinghan, Jess Mant and Catrina Denvir. He edited Leading Works in Law and Social Justice (Routledge, 2021) and Access to Justice in Rural Communities (Hart, 2023) with Faith Gordon, and Leading Works on the Legal Profession (Routledge, 2023).

Erin O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair in the Department of Politics and Human Rights, as well as Affiliated Faculty of Environmental Studies in the Department of Natural Sciences. Her research specialises in work and labour, art and craft, knowledge and culture, the body and environment and is guided by material feminism, critical indigenous theory, phenomenology, critical ecological theory, and post-humanism. Her book manuscript, Firework: Art, self, and world among glassblowers, draws from four years of ethnographic research in a glassblowing studio to analyse contemporary craft in industrial and knowledge economies. Dr O’Connor is a 2023 recipient of the Rakow Grant for Glass Research at the Corning Museum of Glass. She has published in multiple leading journals and international monographs. Dr O’Connor enjoys the outdoors, creating, and sharing her interests with her children (while learning a lot about superheroes and Legos along the way).

Janean Robinson is an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion (CRESI) at the University of South Australia as well as Murdoch University. A former high school teacher for 30 years, Janean's research focuses on the changing nature of teachers’ work and student behaviour management regimes in neoliberal times. She has co-authored Rethinking school-to-work transitions in Australia: Young people have something to say and is currently working on a new book, The ‘trouble’ with school behaviour discipline policies in neoliberal times.

Ashley Rogers is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Stirling. She currently conducts research on issues surrounding rights, forced migration, indigenous knowledges and extreme weather events in Scotland, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. She is also an Associate Director of the Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences supporting postgraduate student engagement. Ashley's teaching focuses on critical criminology and in particular, crimes of the powerful. She delivers methods training on doing ethnography and is rather nostalgic about the gift of time offered by the PhD to conduct such immersive research. She completed her PhD in 2017 and immediately entered a lectureship at Abertay University where she remained until 2022.

John Smyth is Emeritus Research Professor, Federation University Australia. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar, and the recipient of several awards from the American Educational Research Association for his critical ethnographic work. He has been a university academic for 51 years and is the author/editor of over 40 books and more than 300 scholarly papers. He is a sociologist who has worked on a variety of aspects of critical sociology and social justice. His most recent book is The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars, and Neoliberal Ideology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). John is also the founder and current series editor of the Palgrave Critical University Studies series.

Gareth Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. He is a sociologist interested in disability, medicine, health/illness, reproduction, and stigma. His latest project – funded by the British Academy as part of its Mid-Career Fellowship scheme – explores how learning-disabled people craft alternative and affirmative accounts of their lives, which depart from popular (and problematic) narratives of deficit, tragedy, and dependence.

Joe Williams is an early career researcher at Cardiff University. He recently completed a PhD in sociology, an ethnography of homeless outreach teams in Manhattan, spending a year as part of an outreach team. His research is concerned with how understandings of urban homelessness are established and operationalised via the ‘doing of’ outreach work, and the implications this has for street-based care work, and for clients/service-users traversing systems of provision. He is currently a research associate at Y-lab, Cardiff University.

Leaving the field: an editors’ introduction

Sara Delamont and Robin James Smith

Introduction

The literature concerning the fieldworker's position within the field and their positionality in relation to their informants has proliferated. The traditional ‘don't ask, don't tell’ approach to the production of field observations has given way to a far more reflexive mode of operating; a more sociable, less extractive and more roundly ethical engagement with the lifeworlds of those engaged with through ethnographic research (Sinha and Back 2014). Indeed, almost every stage of fieldwork has been used as the basis for autobiographical accounts of projects. These are sometimes called ‘confessionals’, which we regard as a somewhat pejorative term following Atkinson's (1996; 2017) analysis and do not use here. As this genre has grown, nearly all the stages of fieldwork and many other aspects of ethnography have been explored. Examples abound of such autobiographical, revelatory and sometimes comical accounts of early days in the field: establishing rapport with informants, ethical dilemmas, data collection, data analysis and writing. Yet, despite the growth of autobiographical accounts of fieldwork, two common ethnographic experiences remain relatively neglected. We have taken it upon ourselves to gather writings that attend to these overlooked areas in two separate but related collections.

The first of these overlooked experiences concerns what we called ‘lost’ projects; insights from fieldwork that had ended abruptly or had never even properly begun or had not been written up had been largely ignored. In 2017, when we commenced that project, we had been unable to discover any coherent collection of papers on failures or analyses of the causes of the loss and of the methodological consequences of ethnographies that never took place. And so we edited a collection examining stories of ‘lost’ projects in order to explore the methodological insights that could be gained from recovering and re-examining fieldwork ‘disasters’ (Smith and Delamont 2019). By examining apparent ‘failures’ in field research, we hoped not only to provide encouragement to novice researchers, who might be experiencing difficulties with their own research, that even failures can provide material for publication, but to trouble some of the assumptions as to what a ‘good’ piece of field research might look like. The second overlooked experience, which is, for obvious reasons, more common than research ‘failing’ is leaving the field. This aspect of fieldwork, at once central and peripheral, and the lessons that can be learned from ways in which ethnographers have conducted, or have been forced to negotiate, their ethnographic exits is the focus of this collection.

The contrasting experiences of leaving the field have been emphasised by Amanda Coffey (1999: 55), who wrote:

While for some the ending of fieldwork is a welcome respite, for others the leaving of the place, and more often the people, can cause sadness, anguish and pain.

Coffey (1999) draws on the accounts of Cannon (1992) and Blackwood (1995) to illustrate her statement. Cannon had studied women with breast cancer and felt she could not ethically and emotionally simply terminate her relationships with them. Blackwood had been in Indonesia and, as well as the usual feelings of loss, had a very personal exit narrative. She had fallen in love with a woman and could not in that era bring her lover legally to the US because lesbian relationships were treated differently from heterosexual ones.

Good researchers think about their exits, just as they think about their first days. Unlike accessing the field, however, the ‘culture’ of ethnography has not mandated routinely writing about leaving, or the thinking associated with it, in publications. Many authors do not discuss how they left their field sites in their published work at all. Most textbooks say little or nothing about doing ethnographic exits, let alone what might be learned from them. Indeed, Coffey (1999: 106) criticises textbook authors Lofland and Lofland (1995) for reducing the exit to a procedural matter, noting that ‘From this advice it would appear that ending fieldwork is a necessity to be skilfully managed, rather than an experience to be lived through.’ Coffey (1999: 106) goes on to rehearse several other aspects of exiting, because: ‘The ending of fieldwork and leaving the field usually represents the end of a particular phase of an ethnographer's life and career’, and ‘fieldwork becomes, and is part of, who we are and will always be’. (Coffey 2018: 74)

The very act of leaving, we argue, enables ethnographers to recall and reflect upon the places, the people, the time and the particular and often peculiar sense of self encountered during fieldwork. Leaving and returning can also mean getting to know the field in a new way in addition to reading through, revisiting and analysing our fieldnotes and transcripts, as well as in our writing practices. While we might recognise in that process the analytic insights yielded by leaving the field, readers are frequently denied access to the moments that generate those insights. Some exceptions have been published (discussed below), but we remain convinced that there is more ground to cover in terms of how many aspects of the whole ethnographic experience can be illuminated by a closer attention to leaving the field. Put another way, we are convinced that ethnographic exits provide intellectually valuable data allowing for meaningful inquiry into often taken-for-granted aspects of the ethnographic enterprise, including ‘field relations’, ‘research ethics’ and ‘the field’ itself. Following some initial discussion with colleagues (who all responded positively), this collection was planned and authors were recruited. There was a deliberate decision not to include chapters about our own field exits, although we do reflect below on our own experiences of (not quite) leaving. It is also worth noting that the collection was planned and in progress before COVID-19 swept across the world and, as such, there are no chapters on its disruptive effects on fieldwork, despite this being a globally repeated phenomenon (although see Smith et al. 2020 for a reflection on the impact of COVID-19 on fieldwork and research ethics). The remainder of this introduction is in four parts: we establish the neglect of exits in the ethnographic literature and review what literature there is; we argue our case for analysing exits as rigorously as every other phase of fieldwork; then we draw out what insights we can from some of our own exits; and finally, we very briefly outline the structure and contents of the book.

Exit stage, left?

The literature on the topic of exits is sparse, and what does exist is little cited, so the highlights are briefly summarised before our self-explorations. We do not rehearse what textbooks such as Delamont (2016a), Coffey (1999) or Lofland and Lofland (1995) advise novices to do but, instead, endorse Coffey's (1999: 105) verdict that such books offer practical advice rather than reflection. We aim for the latter.

Coffey (1999; 2018) and Delamont (2016a) both emphasise the relative lack of material on exits, based on their impressions of the literature; but a systematic review in a paper based in, and written for, scholars in management, business and organisational studies by Michailova, Piekkari, Plakoyiannaki, Ritvala, Mihailova and Salmi (2014) provides confirmation of the topic's scarcity. These authors conducted a systematic review of the literature from the 1970s to 2010. Their review covered (a) encyclopaedias of research methods; (b) ten social science textbooks written for management and organisation researchers; (c) special issues on research methods in seven core journals in management and organisation published between 1979 and 2010; (d) all the issues of six journals focused on qualitative methods (such as Qualitative Market Research) from 1995 to 2010; (e) the ‘editorial notes’ on writing up qualitative research from the Academy of Management Journal; and (f) ‘statements of ethical practices’. This last category is not explained, but presumably the authors examined the ethical codes produced by learned societies such as the British Psychological Society.

Michailova and co-authors conclude that: ‘knowledge of what constitutes exit from fieldwork is missing’ (p 142). When it is mentioned, the coverage is ‘simplistic’ and it is treated ‘largely a physical process’. They judge that:

The underlying view is that exiting is a rational, instrumental process, and the emphasis is on how exit should be ‘executed’ and ‘managed’ … Such an approach, besides being overly simplistic, focuses solely on the researcher – it is geared toward her/his self-interest and short-term personal gains. (pp 142–143)

Their conclusions favour Coffey's emphasis on thinking more broadly, and deeply, about leaving the field. We regard the conclusions drawn from this systematic review as vindicating our decision to curate this collection. Our thoughts on the key literature now follow, mentioning a few insightful contributions, and we return to Michailova et al. at the end of this section.

An early attention to leaving the field was offered by Snow (1980), who also argued for more analytic attention to be paid to exits. Few scholars took Snow's advice, until Iversen (2009) focused on leaving the field. Her account of ‘Getting out’ of an ethnographic project on poverty is a landmark study. Following that article, Iversen (2019) wrote the entry for the Sage Research Foundations encyclopaedia. That entry is a clearly written overview of the sparse literature available, and we do not recapitulate it here. Rather, we focus on chapters in two largely forgotten collections from 1980 and 1991 focusing on aspects of the literature which explore issues also raised in the chapters in this collection or offer useful advice for inexperienced ethnographers so that they can think about their own exits. The topic was a designated section comprising four chapters in Shaffir, Stebbins and Turowetz's (1980) collection Fieldwork Experience, and there is a parallel section with five chapters in Shaffir and Stebbins’ Experiencing Fieldwork (1991). Few collections on ethnographic methods contain such sections, perhaps for good reason. Ethnographic research monographs which show every sign of thoughtful and self-critical investigations by their authors are often silent about the end of the work. Bosse (2015), Davis (2015) and Vannini (2012), for example do not describe respectively the terminations of their studies of ballroom dancing in Illinois, tango in Argentina and The Netherlands or the everyday lives of people who live on islands off the west coast of Canada and depend on the ferries for their education, shopping, travel to work and social lives. Boellstorff (2008) says little about leaving the online field site of Second Life. A handful of ethnographers have, however, explored the ‘reverse’ culture shock of their homecomings: Barley (1983), for example, writes humorously of his return from fieldwork in West Africa and, more recently, Alice Goffman (2014) described something of her return to ‘white middle-class society’ as revealing aspects her embodied experience of being in the field on 6th Street (although the account itself is not without its representational troubles …).

The Shaffir and Stebbins (1991) collection contains five papers on leaving and keeping in touch by Wolf (1991), Gallmeier (1991), Kaplan (1991), Taylor (1991) and Stebbins himself (1991) which complement the four chapters in Shaffir, Stebbins and Turowetz (1980). In that earlier collection Roadburg (1980), Letkemann (1980) and Altheide (1980) have individual papers and Maines, Shaffir, Haas and Turowetz (1980) report on their own experiences and summarise a correspondence about exits which they conducted with senior ethnographic experts of that era: Rosalie Wax, Prudence Rains, Anselm Strauss, Donald Roy, Howard Becker and Herbert Gans. The ideas of the leading scholars of 1946–79 might now seem rather old fashioned, and some of the experts may even have been forgotten, but the problems they faced are not irrelevant today. That is why some of their work is revisited in Atkinson, Coffey and Delamont (2003). Rosalie Wax told Maines and his colleagues the story of two very different exits: one happy and centred on a ceremony, the other a clandestine escape at night because of a government edict issued to the organiser of the programme Wax was supposed to be researching that demanded her expulsion. There are some parallels here with the two contrasting exits discussed by Allan and Cole in Chapter 1. Altheide's (1980) essay is particularly useful for a novice, because it focuses on productive use of the end days of the research period. He argues that the fieldwork period immediately prior to leaving can be very fruitful. He had been studying television newsrooms in California and argues that once his exit date was known, he was able to capitalise on that certainty to get data that had previously been hard to obtain. Deadlines can, indeed, focus the mind. Some informants agreed to be interviewed in his last weeks, and he was able collect material by stressing it was his last chance to obtain it.

Other endings are occasioned by the ‘field’ leaving the ethnographer. Maines et al. (1980) reports an ‘exit’ of that type. He had been doing a study of postdoctoral fellows in an American university and he writes insightfully about how, precisely because the ‘post doc’ is a transitory status, his informants routinely moved on to new jobs in other cities leaving him ‘behind’. In other words, his ‘field’ left him. A similar phenomenon, the ‘field’ being populated by actors who leave, and the effects that has on the ethnographer, is reported by Ilane Kaplan (1991) who did fieldwork among fishermen, as did Carolyn Ellis (1986). Kaplan points out that ‘Comings and goings fit the life-style of fishermen who are regularly out at sea’ (Kaplan 1991: 234), and so her departures were unremarkable to her informants. Robin (Smith) imagines that when he, eventually, leaves the mountain rescue team, his departure will be treated similarly; people leave for all sort of reasons, and he'll be just one more.

The chapters in Shaffir and Stebbins (1991) are slighter than those in Shaffir, Stebbins and Turowetz (1980), but address exits from field sites that exemplify the variety of settings in which ethnographers work. Two of them explore male sporting activities and have some parallels with the

Chapters 10 and

14 in this collection. Gallmeier (1991) and Stebbins (1991) both include fieldwork on male professional sportsmen: Stebbins on a Canadian football team and Gallmeier an ice hockey team. In both cases the rhythm of the sports season provided a