In reply to Stan Klein.

I think you may have inadvertantly made my point. You say in the top paragraph "no discipline-sanctioned approach" and then in the second "this may be kosher in ethnography". That's my central point, that we need more clarity about the context that a person is working in and an ability to test and critique that.

I would point out that in most modern DNA sequencing, astronomy, particle physics all of the original data is thrown away. Indeed in almost any work that involves an instrument of any sort we throw away the original signal. Increasingly data on DNA sequences is not being kept in favour of keeping the samples.

Even further there are examples where data has been thrown away for privacy reasons in the sciences. Perhaps the most illustrative example is the fact that we no longer know who the samples for the human genome project were taken from. That connection was very carefully destroyed to protect privacy. That seems rather similar to the Goffman case in some ways.

But overall my point is that the question of trust is a bit of a red herring. The question is one of trustworthiness and that requires context and community views. As the context gets broken (monograph becomes a trade non-fiction book) the responsibility to (try to) carry that context becomes greater. And it is necessary to consider the risks differently as context changes.

So I think there probably was a responsibility in shifting from monograph to trade non-fiction to be clear about the nature of the narrative. I'm not comfortable with the destruction of the notebook but I can understand the argument. The question of "what is the data" is really for the community of enthnographers to decide tho, not a natural scientist who has only ever dealt with molecules.