 Hello there, let's continue on our journey of understanding ethnography. In the last module, I shared my experience of painting with the Beel artist and how through this participation, I learned the importance of painting in their lives. During some of our conversations, my participants shared a very interesting story with me. This is a story that the Beels tell themselves about their relationship with painting. Over the Beels, painting is a way of praying to the gods, which may also bring down the rains. The story tells us about the centrality of making images in the Beel culture and it tells us something about their relationship with the natural environment. This story added a further layer of understanding to my conception of Beel art. I first heard it as a part of a conversation with my participant and later my collaborator Sher Singh Beel. I wanted to share this story with you to show you how we might learn multiple things about the same subject in different ways from different sources. And one of the most important ways of learning from our participants is by conversing with them or through interviews. This will be the subject of our discussion for this module. Simply put, an ethnographic interview is a conversation between the researcher and the participant. But it is a very particular kind of conversation where the researcher wants to learn something specific from the other. I have a question for you here. We have discussed observation in the previous module. Do you think observation and interview are interdependent on each other or are they independent of each other? Some of you may have said that interview and observation are different research tools and hence they are independent of each other. Others may be of the opinion that they are interdependent. This is the most appropriate answer. In an ethnographic research, learnings gathered from different sources through different means feed into each other. In fact, as you will see later in our discussion, observing is a key part of every interview. In this module, we will focus on understanding some of the fundamental characteristics of the ethnographic interview and the value of interviewing as a research tool. We will discuss how to do an ethnographic interview and how to record our learnings. Somewhere along the way, we will touch upon the importance of narratives and stories as ways of learning from our participants. We will deliberate on some of the ethical and practical concerns common in interviewing, such as the safety and privacy of our participants. Interviews in ethnography can take varied forms. Sometimes we happen to meet a participant accidentally. We strike up a brief conversation asking questions that arise then and there. Other times we engage in conversations as we accompany them in some activity and sometimes we sit down with them and have long conversations about a specific topic. By some definitions, these may all fall within the broad ambit of the ethnographic interview. On the other hand, some people would only apply this definition to in-depth exclusive conversations with one or two participants at a time focused on a few topics. Let's look at an example.