Standing outside the story:

1. Standing outside the story: A discussion of ethnography and ethnographic method

2. Overview • Claims about ethnographic difference • Standing outside the story • Case studies • Place of ethnography in the professions • Discussion

5. “I have studied culture in Norway, not Norwegian culture.” - Marianne Gullestad, 2007

6. Standing outside the story

7. “Repeaters”

8. “The story of my life”

9. I have seen the same phenomenon in my HIV clinic: A newly diagnosed man feels his world has ended. Reluctantly, he joins a support group, all of whose members have the same diagnosis. It is at first reassuring, then uplifting, and enables him to shed his secrets, to be honest and open with himself and his family. And two years later, despite falling CD4 counts and the virus gaining ground, he tells me with some amazement that he had never felt more whole, more alive, never felt happier. As if it were his pre-HIV world that had been the fatal illness, now cured. - Abraham Verghese, The Tennis Partner

10. Autobiographical occasions • Disclosing to Howie • Talking to high school students as part of the clinic’s educational and outreach efforts • Participating in research interviews for this study

11. C: … But later on, I realized that it helped me. It helped me a lot more than I thought. L: Did it? C: To be able to speak about things. After I talked about it, it was like I felt a big relief, like, like a whole new beginning. L: Did you? C: Yeah. It was a week after I got married. So it was like I started a whole new life now. I felt like I could do it again, over and over the story of my life.

12. Promise / Challenges