‘Whatever you Say Say Nothing’: An Ethnographic Encounter in Northern Ireland and its Sequel

When strangers in Northern Ireland meet, they draw upon a variety of cues in an attempt to ascertain each other's religio-political identity and, depending on the outcome, enter into what Burton (1978) terms ‘systematically distorted’ or ‘pseudo-communication’. After Burton, the process has come to be known as Telling. The article discusses how Telling manifested itself in an interview which the author conducted nearly 15 years ago. This experience is used to suggest that Telling raises issues for ethnographic and interview-based research that go well beyond the familiar problem of ‘reactive effects’, to stress the importance of reflexivity as a means of dealing with these issues, and to discuss the difficulties of reflexivity in the context of a cultural reticence which has developed as a way of managing the sectarian alienation arising from a national conflict. The article discusses various forms of reflexivity, and concludes that ‘analytical reflexivity’, based on a politics of location or practice of positioning, offers a potential way forward.