In accounts of ethnographic fieldwork and textbooks on ethnography we often find the notion of
rapport used to describe social relationships in the field. Frequently rapport between
researcher and researched is invoked as a prerequisite to be achieved before fieldwork can
start or used as evidence to judge the value and robustness of an ethnography. With few
exceptions and despite regular pleas to do so ethnographers continue to avoid presenting any
discursive evidence of what rapport might look like from an interactional perspective. In a
sense the uncritical acceptance of rapport as a fieldwork goal and measure has helped hide the
discursive work that goes on in the field. In turn this has privileged ideas about identity as
portable rather than portable and emergent and reports of social life as more important than
how such reports emerge. Written for all those who engage or plan to engage in ethnographic
fieldwork this collection examines how social relationships dialogically emerge in fieldwork
settings.
