This question in turn raises lots more questions which anyone doing ethnography has to ask. Should we be trying to generalise at all? What is the value of generalisation? Can we generalise about some levels of understanding but not about others? As students go about collecting their data and starting to analyse it, these questions should be rumbling around in the back of their minds.

Generalising about a particular culture is, of course, the basis of stereotyping and often negative stereotyping. Helping students to think about the problems of generalising is a way of helping them to challenge their preconceptions and stereotypes. Most students feel that, if they cannot generalise, then what they have learnt is merely local and fleeting. Ethnography aims to help them see significance in the local. Indeed, it may also encourage them to question the value of generalisations of people and their behaviour. We live our lives locally, not at the level of generality, and the reflexive, questioning orientation towards their informants and towards the writing process that students are developing should help them to question the generalisations that so easily come to mind.

This is not to argue that there should be no generalisation in their ethnographic projects. Cultural learning is about linking the local and immediate to the general principles and concepts that underlie social action. The task of the ethnographic writer is to ask how far any specific example of action or reflection links to these more general concepts. One way of doing that is to place the individual in his or her context as completely as possible, describing all the conditions under which, for example, they have taken a particular stance on a subject in order to understand where they are coming from. So, if the student looking at the pétanque club found that the young members let older members play before them, she would need to look at all the circumstances that surrounded that decision and relate the patterns of behaviour she found (however discrepant they turned out to be) to more general concepts such as 'respect', club rituals, notions of exchange and so on. The concepts are generalisable but the particular and local practices are not.