Successful empirical research, quite obviously, depends on understanding your data. For the legal anthropologist in quest of the cultural understandings at work in people's most foundational beliefs about, for example, community and relationships, understanding one's “data” demands an unmistakable intimacy. There lie all the dangers that present in the real emotional lives of people. The ethical hazards reach their pinnacle in fully immersive ethnographic fieldwork: living among and befriending your research subjects. As shown by Carol Greenhouse's experience, learning about a community may mean navigating unfamiliar rules of social engagement as well as appreciating the ethical boundaries of managing the relationships formed in fieldwork. That Praying for Justice focuses on the added dimension of a community's deeply held religious convictions multiplies the potential problems she had to navigate.

Carol Greenhouse's reflections on the life of her project reveal a number of paradoxes inherent in ethnography. As she notes, the ethnographer is part of people's lives but also not – present but completely dispensable. Equally, the fruits of intimacy with one's data can sometimes not be secured without its opposite: distance. Though bearing the marks of the period in which the primary fieldwork was conducted, the book – published a decade later than the dissertation – represented an evolution of ideas, aided by a secondary phase of archival fieldwork. Just as ethnographers need to see their research subjects with the eyes of an outsider and yet be on the inside, intimacy with data and immersion in the field is partner to the ability to engage them through different frames and for different analytical purposes.