Epilogue EXTRAORDINARY ENCOUNTER? THE INTERVIEW AS AN IRONICAL MOMENT Nigel Rapport The argument of this book has been that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter. It is less to be distinguished from participant observation than appreciated as a site of a very particular and important kind of knowing. The contributions to this volume, in their distinct settings, speak alike to the added value that might be gained from incorporating the interview into the process of gathering ethnographic data. ‘Specially productive?’ It has been argued that the interview embodies a particular kind of interactional and experiential context. Contributors have been concerned to show how the interview is a kind of space within which personal, biographic and social cues and norms might be explored and interrogated. There is an ‘extraordinariness’ to the interview insofar as perspective may be gained on the ordinary flow of experience and immersion within it; information derived from the interview may be non-structural or anti-structural, non-conventional and counter-intuitive, something not open for discussion, not discernible, in ‘ordinary’, everyday, social interaction. The ordinary as against the extraordinary is thus an important conceptual distinction for the volume. And there are others. The interview, we have urged, should be appreciated both as an analytical category, a significant component in the methodological toolbox of human science, and as a way of being in the world: a modality of human experience, a kind of consciousness and a kind of relationality.