This past semester, I was asked to give a lecture at Stanford University, a lecture based on my current research project, an ethnographic examination of global black Hebrewism, and it was advertised months ahead of time on the school’s Web site. A few weeks before my trip from Philadelphia to Northern California, I received a call from one of my research subjects wishing me luck on my West Coast swing and asking for more information about what I was planning to say about them in Palo Alto. The “them” in question is a transnational community of African-Americans who consider themselves descendents of ancient Hebrew Israelites, which means that some of my research subjects presently reside in Israel. The Israel community, about 3,000 in all, has resided in the Negev region of that country for the past 40 years. After leaving the United States in 1967 and enduring a stint in Liberia until 1969, 100 African American émigrés eventually made their way to Israel, which the community has re-geographized (and re-racialized) as northeastern Africa.

Such geographic distance hardly means that “saints,” as community members are called, would have had any difficulty finding out about my Stanford talk. Even a fairly uninspired Google search of my name would have pulled it up. In fact, the community I am studying is quite media savvy, adept at using new technology in more than just pedestrian ways. Also, after such talks are completed, they are sometimes streamed online long afterwards, so presentations of such works-in-progress continue to be accessible via the Web longer afterwards. So, even if community members did not catch wind of the talk ahead of time, they could possible find the video at some point in the future — months (or maybe even years) after it was originally delivered.

Part of what this demands, I want to claim, is a renewed appreciation of what I’m calling “ethnographic sincerity” and its analytical importance. By ethnographic sincerity, I mean all the ways in which we negotiate the uncertainties of ethnographic exchanges, the attempt to reconcile, say, face-to-face performances in the ethnographic field with recourse to other pre-obtained data culled from previously backstage renditions of an ethnographer’s subjectivity.

One explanation for the very need for ethnography is predicated on the fact that interviewees might purposefully misrepresent themselves under direct questioning (along with the fact that they might not always be fully self-aware and cognizant of discrepancies between what they say and what they do). Ethnography is supposed to provide the researcher with access to the research subject’s backstage region, and this allows us to compare such backstage worlds to those cultural and social and psychological presentations purposefully rendered on more formal ethnographic stages.

In many ways, ethnographers want to make sure that the “data” they get in the field is what they would see if they weren’t even there to look. We want access to what is sincerely performed, not self-consciously enacted for our own benefit. But that is a two-way street.

An ethnographic attempt to “build rapport” is about more than just learning a foreign language. It entails getting people to trust you enough to escort you to their backstage. Part of what this demands is that ethnographers find ways of presenting themselves in the field that greases the wheel of comfortable connectedness — as opposed to giving informants pause, cause for suspicion. Even something like the facially conspicuous “calculated dimness” of the ethnographic interviewer is about performing a kind of ignorance aimed at prodding interviewees into divulging more information. Of course, the ethnographer may claim scientific authority and expertise back at his or her home institution, but conspicuous ignorance might be a more effective role in certain ethnographic instances. These kinds of “two-faced” performances are more common than ethnographers might like to discuss in mixed company. And they become that much more difficult to pull off (and maybe that’s all for the better, ethically speaking) in the current moment.

Erving Goffman’s backstage/onstage distinction is at least partially about sincerity as an interpersonal analytic, and it recommends that we take seriously the centrality of ethnography’s interpersonal dynamics as intrinsically tied up with questions of mutual sincerities and possible insincerities between researchers and research subjects.

Given the way we mirror our social and professional lives on the Internet, it is becoming increasingly easy for research subject to “study back” and follow the ethnographer’s movements in the backstage region outside of the specifically “ethnographic” context. In fact, it might just be an example of how “the ethnographic” is expanding to include spaces that would have once been described as beyond its purview. With respect to that aforementioned lecture at Stanford and its potential postlife online, we have one small example of the increasingly easy access to ethnographic back regions that the contemporary moment affords. And it emerges with new questions about the practice of ethnography itself.