“I'M NOT READING YOU”: QUICK NOTES FROM AN AMBIGUOUS ACTOR

“I'm not reading you” is a collection of stories and anecdotes from my experience of living in Cherokee, North Carolina, from June 2005 to October 2006, as I conducted the ethnographic field research for my dissertation. The common thread running through all these stories is the experience of encountering Cherokee and non-Cherokee people in different social settings and having my racial status tested and probed. In this paper, I think reflexively about how I manipulated my presentation of self in the field and try to fit these new Cherokee stories into my life's collection of similar stories.