Who made the soup? Socializing the researcher and shaping her data

Ethnographers, their ethnographic subjects, and their ethnographic data are all forged through specific, power-inflected, dialogic exchanges. This paper examines in discursive detail the speech acts and metapragmatic cues by which an American ethnographer was socialized to understand a series of interactions while dining with her French subjects, to entextualize these with the transcribing aid of her French hosts, and to represent the analytic findings in reaction to the feedback of her French colleague. The resulting data, while fixed in this article as an appended text-artifact, are recognized as intrinsically open to ongoing investigation as is the socialization of the ethnographer.