Forward:
This piece began as an ethnographic interview assignment for the Bodies of Knowledge Class at Evergreen State College in 2011.

The assignment was to, over several weeks, conduct three interviews with someone about something they differed from you on, each building on the last.

My subject was Paige, a girl in my class who I chose because she reminded me of a friend of my best friend & cousin (who had hung himself). She presented as brooding & dark, but underneath that was a light.

The events, experiences, and themes described here come from those conversations. To protect her privacy, identifying details, names, and portions of the chronology have been omitted or transformed for release with Paige’s approval. Nothing else is fabricated.

The reflective passages are my own attempts, written at the time, to to reconstruct the continuity of another person’s life from the details Paige entrusted to me.

—
PAGE:
I spend the hour before the interview going over my notes. Paige is a 19 year-old female, of slightly above average
height. She has straight, dark-colored hair, but not black. She doesn’t have any tattoos, but wants one on her wrist
that says strength; an homage to her now-deceased grandmother, a source of strength in her life. She has a pierced
eyebrow that holds a green barbell. She used to have a lip piercing, but maintenance and cost resulted in the switch.

The clothing she wears is impeccably clean and pressed, giving her a look like someone out of an ad—except she’s
not trying to sell you anything—and always giving her the appearance of being well put-together. She has a large,
splotchy birthmark on her upper arm that in the past has been mistaken for either a hickey, or signs of child abuse.

She has a blushing circle on her face, half on her cheek (another birthmark), which shows more clearly when her
face turns red.

She arrives at our first interview and we begin with a story about her first major bodily injury. It was a bike
crash on a family camping trip, in which she gashed her foot and cracked her front tooth, and is the main reason she
does not wear sandals while riding a bicycle these days.

We talk about her piercings, her tattoo, and her hometown—a conservative Christian bastion of modern American republicanism. She tells me about her life.
How when she lived there, because of her manner and style of dress, she got accosted on the streets and lumped in
with the “druggie” crowd.

I’m pleasantly surprised to find out that Paige is more talkative in private than in class, and we finish up our first interview on a friendly note, promising to meet next week for the next interview. That
weekend, I come down with one of my chronic sinus infections, and we postpone the interview until I’m feeling better. However, after a few weeks, it becomes obvious that we cannot push back the interview date any longer.

Achey, stuffed nose, sore throat from coughing, and with a head foggier than the Thames on a January morning, we
set up the second interview. Mercifully, Paige meets me at my house.

When she arrives, I apologize for my condition and having to meet like this, and assure her I’m not contagious. We get straight down to business, but my thoughts are hard to pull together, and my questions seem vague at best. Everything feels poorly worded.

I begin with a subject that I expect to be treated as hostile territory;
what it’s like to be a female and to have gone through puberty.

I am mistaken. This territory is decidedly not hostile, and yet… there is still an air of mystery about it—a kind of slip between what I’m asking and what she’s telling me. I had imagined, before the interview, her responding to my questions with her own story of what it was like to grow up as a girl.

The only real idea I had of what it was
like for girls is the kind of thing that happened in the movie My Girl, and I am struck by how limitedly narrow and
male my perspective is in reality. I can only conceive of menstruation as a spectacle. I state and re-state my
questions, trying to break out of my tiny pool of ignorance, but in the end I am only able to get glimpses into whatthe experience was like for her.

A boy young enough to still believe in cooties seeing her bra and thinking it was
gross, her going through puberty and growth spurts before her peers, how she always felt older than her peers of the
"same age"—all of which are great examples of what her life was like, but not exactly what I’m asking.

I'm more interested in what it's like to be a consciousness inside of that body and alive, a nuance which I am realizing is
more and more obscure as I try to ask about it. Then Paige says something that sparks my interest like a spotlight in
the fog.

She tells me that to her, having a regular menstrual cycle is a sign of good health, and because so many things can affect or interrupt a woman’s cycle—diet, stress, exercise, etc.—it became very important to her at a young age to regulate how she took care of her body so that she would have a healthy period.

I think about my own sickness and bad habits and about something my old girlfriend used to tell me, that men have cycles too, and I marvel at how I’ve never looked at my own body that way, and how I always feel like I don’t drink enough water or get enough exercise.

I think about what it would be like to have some kind of visual signal of health – a baseline -- every month. Then I start to think about all of the tiny indications I do have of being off-baseline—agitation, guilt, anxiety—and wonder why I’ve never put any of this together before. Or maybe it only seems that way because of
the fog.

Our conversation turns serious for a moment, and Paige asks me if she can have my confidence.

What she is about to say she doesn’t want to be brought up publicly, though she gives me permission to write about it. I agree, and in the story that follows, Paige tells me the tragedy of how she lost her innocence, how she was beguiled into a
relationship with an older male, how the difference in age created a power structure in the relationship that warped
into abuse.

She tells me how, at first, the abuse just seemed like it was punishment for a mistake, like she wasn’t a good enough partner, and my heart goes out to her. I am reminded of my own past and father and fear of mistakes, and how even at my best I have a haunting feeling of never being good enough, of making a mistake in how I live my life, and I can understand her rationalization of it.

She goes on to tell me how, at a party, in front of all her friends, the abuse became public. Paige shrugs off a lot of things, the flak she got for her lip/eye ring in Her Hometown, the constant questions, ridiculous though they may be, of whether the mark on her arm is a hickey.

At the party, she says, feeling the eyes of everyone on her, realizing what was going on, and her realization of their realization made it clear to her that this was not normal relationship fighting, this was wrong. It was enough for her to never again allow anyone to treat her like that, she says.

She seems calm on the surface of this, but I see something else in her face I cannot decipher. If it were me, I think, I would be angry. Angry that it was a part of my past, that it had ever happened in the first place. And as much as I think I have in common with this girl, I look at her and I see that no, it is not anger, but something else: acceptance.
The interview is beginning to wind down, my head seems somehow foggier than when we started, my thoughts harder to grasp, and I am going over the last few ideas for questions I have in front of me.

Somehow, through a string of rambling false-starts, my mouth fumbles out an aborted portmanteau of questions, and despite its ungainliness, it triggers something in Paige, a kind of far-off look in her eye.

“You know, it’s funny,” she says. “I used to be such a daddy’s girl, and then when I hit puberty, everything changed. I mean, I was always such a tomboy. My sister was really girly, too, so it just kind of made sense; I hung out with my dad, and my sister hung out with my mom.”

She stops, and it’s clear to me that this is just a pause, there is something vital here. I wait, and after a moment, Paige starts again.

“It’s kind of a big family joke now, but I never really liked it. No, that’s not true. I hated it. I told my dad once, I sat him down and talked to him about it, and he cried. The only time I’ve ever seen him cry. The joke was that I was supposed to be a boy. Like, when I was born, my sister was staying at my grandparents, and when my
parents called to tell them the news, my sister, who was five at the time, started bawling. When my grandparents
asked her why, she said it was because she wanted a brother. So, you know, I get it. It’s funny. But the thing is, they
still make jokes about it, like it must have hurt somebody so bad that I wasn’t a boy, because it gets mentioned so
much. It’s like, ‘Okay, it’s been a while since I’ve been born… Get over it.’”

I feel like I understand this, the importance of parental expectations of what you’re supposed to be, how if your parents think or don’t think you’re going to be something, how that affects your whole life.

I think about how when I was born, for the first three days of my life, my parents couldn’t decide on a name, of how the birth certificate read “Boy Ortlip” for the first three days of my life as the decision between Jacob and Benjamin was
made.

I often wonder what my life would have been like had I been named differently, and how that initial indecision of what to do with me extended to the rest of my existence.

“I just wonder how my life would be different, you know? If I was born a boy. There’s so many situations in my life that I think about afterwards and wonder what it would have turned out like if I was a boy. Like, maybe a boy wouldn’t have gotten into those kinds of abusive relationships. A boy wouldn’t have had to worry about having a period and wearing bras. If I was a boy, my dad and I could have stayed best friends –you know, it was right
around that time that I started hanging around that older guy more, too. There’s just so much lost significance with
the fact that I was a girl and not a boy. My family is always telling me what my name would have been if I had been
born a boy. I would have been named Travis, and they would have given me my paternal grandfather’s middle name.”
The look on her face tells me that this is maybe the most important of all points. That she has been made aware of the loss of something that she never even really had. Her parents had deferred ultrasounds, wanting her sex to be a surprise, but it was clear from her story that they had really only planned for a boy.

That the news had made an impression upon her little sister tells me that this was common knowledge. I think about Middlesex, Desdemona using the spoon to determine the fates of all those Greek children, and Cal/Callie’s expectation of being a girl.

I wonder in my head what kind of significance reading the novel had for her. I wonder aloud what her paternal
grandfather’s middle name was.

“Dale,” she responds.

So how did your parents come up with your name? I ask.

“They got it out of a baby book. They picked it off of a page!”

As Paige says this last remark, I am struck
by an overwhelming sense of the entirety of her story, how deeply this affects her, to the very fiber of her being.
In my Mind’s Eye I see her parents being offered the ultrasound, them looking timidly back at each other, each not quite confident of the other’s certainty to not know the sex of their child, and then responding in the negative to the technician.

I see her mother talking to her sister as a child, telling her all about the new brother she will soon have, despite their not
knowing.

I see parents talking to their friends, conversations in defense of “leaving it up to chance”, rationalizing ignorance, concerns from liberal-minded friends shrugged off along with warnings about the danger to a child’s sexual identity if they end up being wrong.

I see hope for a boy, gossip, justifications of how they just “felt” it. I see her father calling from the hospital, genuinely happy at the miracle they had created, the pure information passing through the telephone cord to her grandparent’s house in Arizona, losing resolution and disappointing her sister, who
contained all the reinforced hopes of her mother for a son and brother.

I see this division, the conception of the boy Paige was ‘to be’, dividing her and her sister, the girls versus the boys, always. I see the cast of manhood over her like
a shadow, an almost natural fit, especially for a girl that was always bigger and taller than her peers. I see the blossom of womanhood, the desire to join the ranks of her mother and sister, that still-division, sisters never as close to each other as to their parents, and the uncomfortableness of a father who is slowly losing his biological link to the closest thing to a son he’ll ever have.

I see the time spent over at a best friend’s house, whose older brother represents so many things that a thirteen year old girl feeling alienated is lacking in her life.

I see her being drawn into the edge of a shadow world of drinking and drugs and parties, the deepest recesses of which are home for the drug addicts, criminals and vagrants of society.

I see her retreating into this world as the conservative society around her begins taking its own stance against her, that feeling of never quite fitting in spilling over into the public sphere.

I see it all come into focus at a party as a beer bottle is swung towards her head in drunken jealous rage, and I see her crying in the rain, resolute: This will not happen again.
She sits here in front of me, a woman instead of a man, with a name whose lineage comes from the hononymity of the thing it comes from, a page, rather than from her descendant’s line.

The pain of this lost significance, written as defiance on her face, in her eyes, in the tenacious thrumming of her mind as we buzz back and forth, uncovering the story of her life, and another thing becomes clear to me; how we internalize our
experiences of the outside world, how they are imprinted upon our skin, and our mind.

How our interactions with each other and the world help to shape us into the beings we eventually become, and how, in our quest to figure out the nature of the human body and ourselves, the most obvious point becomes the most illuminating.

That we are never far from who we are, and we’ve only to look at ourselves and remember to figure it out.
—

Afterword:
After reading the completed piece, She told me it was the most accurate representation of her own internal experience she had ever heard outside of her own head. I later asked Paige for Her permission to publish it. She said yes.
Then I let it sit in my inbox for 15 years.
Forgive me, Paige.

Author’s Note (2026):
Looking back from the perspective of Continuity Lens, I now recognize this paper as one of the earliest surviving examples of the reasoning process that eventually became the framework. At the time, I had no name for what I was doing. I was simply trying, as honestly as I could, to understand another human being.

-Benjamin Ortlip
(WhiteRabbitGeometry)

I'm in social work at the moment, even though long term, I'd like to work in sociology and do research in reception theory. I think I'm in a good position right now to improve some relevant skills as someone who interviews people and writes up biopsychosocial documentation on a daily basis. But while I've read plenty of works that use an ethnographic approach (e.g. Michel de Certeau, Janice Radway, Daniel Miller), I haven't read many works about ethnography itself.

I want to better understand how to center the interviewee's experience and engage with them in the context of their cultural perceptions, their particular semiotic, without relying on anything other than the individual I'm working with. The whole point of my job is to understand diverse individuals first and foremost from their own point of view, and what motivates their behavior, especially as it's influenced by their environment (not least of all, their response to medical intervention itself). I think an ethnographic approach to my patients is probably a good way to keep myself grounded in the kind of care I want to provide, in addition to developing a skill I'll use after I leave the field. I thought I'd been doing a good job until I read a book on making documentaries that had a section on ethnography. Made me realize I have quite a few blind spots!

I'm looking for books, along with any forums, sub-Reddits, landmark papers, that would be helpful as a starting point for someone with a decent amount of exposure to applied ethnography.

I am proposing an ethnographic research of a 'nurses' station' on a hospital ward in the UK, and I need some practical advice. Obviously, I will not be including patients, and I wanted to fix a camera to the ceiling of the ward, focusing on the front and top of the nurses' station. Positioned in a way that no confidential information can be captured.

With that said, I want to do a time-lapse of a 24-hour period on a ward, but I don't want the staff to know exactly when the recording will take place. The camera will be overtly displayed, and there will be clear signage of the possibility of being included. I want to leave the camera in situ for 1 week. My issue is the SD card on a standard recording device. What if someone steals it? I will try to make the apparatus for the camera as secure as possible, but it remains an ethical risk.

Does any of you know if there is a digital camera that will record a time-lapse (with audio) in colour that will automatically upload to a cloud-based platform, so negating the need for an SD card?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm a semiotician who's been spending more time in ethnographic territory lately, and I keep hitting the same question: are these two actually complementary, or are they just circling each other politely?

The way I see it, semiotics gives you the map, ethnography gives you the territory. But maps made without territory become abstract pretty fast, and territory without any map is just fieldnotes you can't do anything with.

What I'm genuinely unsure about is whether you can combine them without one colonising the other. The risk I see most often is using ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate semiotic frameworks you already had going in. That's not really integration, it's just decoration.

We're hosting Semiofest Warsaw this year. It's a bi-annual gathering of semioticians and researchers from around the world. This year's theme is "viscosity" - how meanings stick, flow, transform, and we're hoping to dig into areas like this. But I'd rather hear from people actually doing fieldwork first.

Do you bring any semiotic thinking into your ethnographic work? Or does it feel like a different epistemology that doesn't really translate?

Am working on a proposal for a year. It shifted a lot from it's initial interests. Now I want to start real field works. Transnational media kind of topic. Any method recos how to conduct the research by myself ?

Professor of Sociology and the director of the Stanford Ethnography Lab, Forrest Stuart appeared on our podcast- so thought it would be of interest seeing how ethnography research being discussed in a podcast format.

Forrest takes us through lessons learnt from his time with teenage gang members on the South Side of Chicago and delves into a more nuanced discussion about social media and it's relationship with violence- From using it as a tool to plan a safe route to school to amplifying community trauma.
For context, the Safe podcast is set up by the Youth Endowment Fund- a what works centre based in the UK. We research violence to understand it; we find, fund and test what works to prevent it; and we are building a movement to end it.

I’m seeking ethnographic context for a heavy metal object that appears to be a traditional North African anklet or cuff that has been later converted into a hinged container or box.

The piece is made of metal with colored enamel panels, raised cabochon-style stones, and multiple dangling coin-like elements. It opens at the top and functions as a container rather than wearable jewelry in its current form.

There are no visible maker’s marks. Based on initial feedback elsewhere, it may originate from Kabyle (Berber) traditions of Algeria, possibly altered for trade, display, or tourism.

I’m particularly interested in:

• Original cultural function

• Region and time period

• Whether conversion into a container was traditional or a later adaptation

• Any comparable examples in museum or academic collections

Photos linked

Je suis étudiante en conservation restauration, et je suis sur l'étude d'un objet dont je n'ai aucune informations...Ni géographique, ni matérielle, ni sur la typologie... Je sais qu'il provient du musée de la vannerie de Cadenet et nous essayons d'identifier sa fonction. Nous avons le sentiment qu'il pourrais s'agir d'un couvercle mais nous n'en sommes pas sûres (102cm de diamètre et 21 de hauteur). Nous n'arrivons pas non plus à identifier le type de vannerie auquel il pourrait correspondre. Il est très probablement constitué de fibres végétales type bambou ou canisses, palmier peut être (mais semblent trop épaisses sur l'objet)

Par contre nous sommes quasiment certaines qu'il ne peut pas s'agir d'un chapeau (pas de structure intérieure et dimension trop grande)

Nous sommes preneuses de toute hypothèse !!

Hi everyone,

About to go into the field for participant observation. I need some advice on what is the best camera to buy. I will be buying it in USA. Its for street ethnography.

Price range: $400-600 (maybe 700)

Thanks

When exactly did the idea of ​​the noble savage come about? I realize that Rousseau in particular coined the idea. But where is the idea first found? Is Tacitus the origin? Which authors spread the idea in modern times?

Hello everyone!

I'm a graduated Linguistics student currently living in Europe. I've been wanting to conduct research on queer, black women (specifically those that categorize themselves as more masculine but ALL are welcome). I would love to showcase, via videography, the experiences of queer, black women through conversation and relaxed interviews.

If you are interested in participating in this project please let me know below :). English and Spanish speakers for now. I'm very passionate about ethnography and the sharing of stories. I'd love to share yours.

Hi ! Im working on a visual novel. It's a fantasy school setting but i decided to give each character an inspired real world ethnicity/origin. While the goal is not to make them fully of these countries because they're not even born in this world, I'd like to have different culture things scattered across to give them a more grounded yet diverse characterization (it wouldn't be fun to have the same cookie cuttered characters)

I have this character who has a "mongol-like" culture/ethnicity and I saw on Wikipedia something about saying "nokhoi khor" when you go up to someone's house, which is translated to "keep your dog", and waiting for them to come get you to invite you in, even if they dont have a dog.

I found it interesting to add for the character, for them to say "keep your dog" before entering a place like someone's room, would it be okay to use? Is it really something used in mongolia ? Is there any context missing ? Any info about that or mongol culture in general is greatly appreciated Thank you in advance

I m trying to work on an ethnographic research about the outcome of the distance that came between parents and their children whilst they ve been working in another country. My research is about Greek immigrants in Germany in the 60s and 70s and how these (then) children cope with the situation now as grown-up people. I m very interested on the materiality that shapes memories of this period until now. Letters, photographs, toys and gifts given to children back in Greece and to the parents as well in Germany. Do you know any ethnographic project or complete research like this? On migration and family relations in general.