DOI: 10.4324/b23216-9 111 7 ETHNOGRAPHIC COMPORTMENT A Performance-Based Framework for Research Design Anthony Kwame Harrison Introduction In this chapter, I advance the concept of ethnographic comportment as a performance-based framework for addressing issues surrounding research design in ethnography. 1 Research design in ethnography is particularly challenging due both to the naturalistic environment in which most research occurs— what Diana Forsythe referred to as the “uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) real life settings” (1999: 28) where ethnographic inquiries take place—and the iterative-inductive process (O’Reilly 2012) through which ethnographic understandings come into being. Indeed, the idea of something unanticipated, falling outside of the research design, significantly shifting the direction of an ethnographic project is a common feature of many ethnographies. To offer just a few examples: In the preface to War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam, a book that examines the wide- spread phenomenon of spirit possession in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Mai Lan Gustaffson writes, “[When] I went to the country in 1996 … I fully intended to ignore the war” (2009, p. x). She goes on to explain how the “on-the-ground reality of [being in] Vietnam packed a visceral punch” (p. xi), as she immediately realized there was no possible way to dismiss the effects of something that had impacted the lives of everyone she met. When Loïc Wacquant (2004) first walked into the Woodlawn boxing gym in Chicago, he envisioned it as a potential “window” through which to observe the social strategies of young men in the neighborhood. He had no idea that he would end up studying the craft of boxing and competing in the Chicago Golden Gloves as part of his immersive research. In the introduction to my own ethnography on underground hip hop (Harrison 2009), I mention how initially, on several occasions when people mistook me for an emcee writing rhymes, I would clarify that I was in fact an anthropologist writing fieldnotes. The point being that I had no intention to participate as a rapper. Yet within a matter of months, I was