Review Symposium / Linguistics and Education 21 (2010) 314–321 319 of some of the issues discussed in the book by scholars from continental Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, among other national contexts than I have seen from scholars from the United States and England. Additionally, at a time when methodological writing is increasingly global in scope, and when there is a new interest in indigenous methods, a narrow Anglo-American focus was perhaps not the wisest decision. doi:10.1016/j.linged.2010.08.009 On becoming an ethnographer: Joining an ongoing and dynamic community of social scientists Maria Lucia Castanheira, Judith Green Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil and University of California, Santa Barbara, United States Shirley Brice Heath and Brian Street, in On Ethnography: Approaches to Language and Literacy Research, accom- plish what few other authors of books and articles on ethnography have been able to do—bring readers into a dialogic and multi-faceted intertextual web of texts that engage readers in the authors’ ongoing conversations, while simul- taneously engaging readers in novice social scientist’s (Molly) journey to learning how to be an ethnographer. This dialogic approach invites the reader to take a reflexive stance with the authors and Molly by engaging in interactive reading of the arguments proposed by the authors of the text(s). By embedding different kinds of texts (e.g., field notes or dialogue) within the expected theoretical or explanatory narratives about concepts underlying an ethnographic perspective, Heath and Street, or rather Shirley and Brian as they state in the book, interrupt the flow of text to provide an interactive space, not only for their own exploration of ideas using texts from the field, but also for readers. Additionally, by using their own and the novice social scientist’s first names the authors close the distance between themselves and readers by enabling the reader to “see” ethnography as a series of grounded decisions by actual social scientists, which shapes what can be known, first by the ethnographer and then by those reading the representations of this work. This approach makes visible how actions are guided by the ethnographer’s perceptions, thinking, and theoretical understandings. Their approach also makes visible how ethnography is a dynamic and often non-linear process of examining the ways members of social groups create symbolic structures (Chapter 1) in and through their local and situated talk, actions, and multimodal texts. In taking this personal and reflexive stance to their writing, Shirley and Brian show how their work, like the work of the people they are studying, itself comprises acts of symbolic structuring. Thus, by using hybrid texts and ways of inscribing the local actions, thoughts, and explanations of the ethnographer(s) and those within the social worlds being studied, Shirley and Brian create local moments in the history of their conversation and in the work of people in the local worlds (e.g., learning to be a juggler) in which readers are invited to explore the ideas, issues, and experiences of the ethnographer. At such moments, readers also have an opportunity to explore the outcomes and consequences of the ethnographer’s actions for what can be known or learned about language and literacy through self-reflexive analyses of the situated work of actual people working in the field. Through this situated approach the authors demonstrate a range of decisions necessary to construct theories about the language and literacy practices of members of a social group, and how such decisions depend on “a constant comparative perspective that cuts to the past and to the future of the topic or area under study” (p. 32). By juxtaposing, embedding, and narrating different forms of written texts, Shirley and Brian invite readers to join the dialogue and engage with the texts in ways that move beyond mere illustration, description, and explanation of processes involved in ethnographic work. By purposefully moving among different forms of text (e.g., theoretical narratives, narratives grounded in the field, explanatory texts, illustrative texts, and analytic texts), they create new possibilities for reflexive dialogues that enable readers to examine Brian, Shirley, and Molly’s logics of inquiry (e.g., Birdwhistell, 1977; Green, Dixon & Zaharlick, 2003) while (re)examining the reader’s own logic of inquiry. In the interactive spaces in their text, therefore, Shirley and Brian demonstrate Gregory Bateson’s argument (cited in Birdwhistell, 1977) that theory is method and method is theory, as well as how theory is constructed through and grounded in the everyday work of both those being studied and the ethnographer him or herself. They also make visible the importance of intertextual reflexivity, which “refers primarily to historical accounts that locate the data not in a supposedly overarching ‘ethnographic present’ but instead in a developing and moving past” (p. 124). The authors also make visible how ethnographers as cultural workers, like learners, are seeking expertise about the symbolic structures that constitute their domains of inquiry, the ways members seek and construct local identities, and how the tools of