‘Introduction: Reason and Passion: The Parallel Worlds of Ethnography and Biography’

The Introduction sets the frame for the issue, and draws out the interconnections between the essays through a discussion of our three core themes: biography, its transmission, and associated moral resonances and implications. We show how this collection differs from earlier reflexive and gendered approaches in arguing for a more integrated vision of ethnography and biography. We highlight how the biographical and the ethnographic are thoroughly entangled in relation to the conditions of possibility that we share and in which we act, as well as in the open-ended process of attending to the here and now, the hidden and the embedded, from multiple perspectives. Accordingly, we recuperate biography for the ethnographic project, not as a tangential exercise but by placing it, as a morally-inflected exercise of transmission, at the centre of our issue.