As a process, ethnography seems to have become much like what has been described for our conference as a prototyping culture. In my presentation, I want to overlay key issues that have been raised for prototyping cultures(e.g., their viability as a space for promoting and sustaining the production of non-stable forms of ideas) onto certain predicaments and ambitions that characterize contemporary ethnography, and to see how this operation affects the virtues, authority, and viability of this venerable, and technologically simple hand-eye-ear and enclosed (as in the solitude of the “fieldnote”) craft of thinking.