This article considers the way in which gender gains significance during ethnographic research to reveal situated social dynamics. As a female ethnographer in a male-dominated setting, I map my own movement and interaction through the field setting over time to show how my 'practice of ethnography' becomes, as it also reveals, a 'practice of intimacy'. I pay critical attention to the physical realities of the field setting as they structure patterns of interaction, such that three seemingly simple actions, 'hollering', 'kicking it', and 'walking', emerge as highly consequential practices through which people construct, experience, and protect intimacy in public space. Following the 'ethnography' into the 'discovery', this article pushes the potential of reflexivity to illuminate the way in which multiple gendering processes unfold and become interrelated.

Despite protracted political and legal battles, the United States is in the midst of implementing comprehensive health care reform. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law in 2010, aims to expand public and private health insurance programs for about 30 million Americans through mandates, subsidies, and insurance exchanges (Congressional Budget Office 2012). Providing insurance to a previously uninsured population is expected to benefit individual and population health, but the impact will likely go beyond health access proper. Because health is a prerequisite for participation in much of social life, the consequences of the growing proportion of people with health insurance may penetrate deep into a community's social fabric to influence its ability to attract employers, hire employees, keep schools functioning, fill pews in churches, and cultivate a community's common sense of purpose. We can anticipate some of these changes by examining how a large uninsured population affects institutions, such as religious organizations and schools, prior to health care reform. A study of the impact of a population lacking health insurance on institutions beyond health care is a query into a spillover effect. The notion of spillover or collateral effects emerged in neoclassical economics as a way to specify externalities, which refer to a cost or benefit that results from an activity or transaction and that affects an otherwise uninvolved party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit (Laffont 2008). 1 Economic spillover effects can be negative, such as when a new factory contributes to increased pollution, noise, or congestion, or they can be positive, such as a technological innovation resulting in increased trade, consumer choice, and income. In the health literature, the study of spillover effects has been concentrated in health service studies of changes in health markets (e.g.

This article argues that trust emerges as a key interactional mechanism through which vendors, artists, and performers that work in a public marketplace turn daily conditions of uncertainty into enduring stability. Drawing on four years of ethnographic data, I empirically illustrate a process of building, maintaining, and protecting trust. Following trust from the level of one-on-one interaction through to the level of a community, I expose the particular interactional work trust does for different people across different situations. In the end, the way a social psychological mechanism plays out over time has significant social and material consequences for people working under highly uncertain conditions.

No abstract