I don't want a blank page

For the past three weeks I have been exploring ethnography as it relates to my research. I'm not doing an ethnography in the anthropological sense, of trying to immerse myself in a community for a couple of months/years in the hope of understanding and documenting their cultural practices. I am however trying to use ethnographic principles to inform my research methodology. Over these past three weeks I've been trying to establish to what extent I want to embrace this notion of ethnographic. I've discovered it's a rather complex thing, because, ethnographic, if you are really serious about it, implies taking a very specific ontological and epistemological position about the nature of the world and how we construct understandings about it. And forgive me here because I do struggle with what exactly ontological means - I can use it in a sentence, but don't ask me to explain it.
The major issue of course is that ethnographic, particularly in contemporary anthropological and sociological terms, requires the researcher to abandon the notion of objective research and embrace a subjective, interpretative realm of knowledge construction, along considering the researcher as integral part of research. In many respects such interpretative views embrace a post modern epistemological positioning, clearly distancing itself from its methodological roots in naturalism and positivism that sought to accurately capture true 'reality' through observation. Anyway all of this philosophical posturing has done my head in, and even though I'm not completely confident about my ability to articulate the strengths and weakness of the approach, I'm fairly confident now in making a decision about how much of the ethnographic I want to embrace. Careful of course not to see my methodological standpoint (flirting seriously in realivist territory ) clash with my theoretical frameworks i.e. my structuralists leanings -  via Bernstein (suggesting a post realist inclination). My supervisor in her infinite wisdom said to me last week when I was rambling on about this - 'Don't worry Lynn, your'e not doing an ethnography, wont be expected to account for all this philosophical distinctions, so don't have to concern yourself about this too much.'

But, but, but...I don't want to start with a blank page, so I've been trying to capture at this time and place (i.e. context) my understandings of the ethnographic perspective I want to use in my research.  I have about 1700 words and as I typed it up over the past two days I realised its a bit crap, needing some serious reworking. But at least its not a blank page - its a spring board to a more coherent, thoughtful, considered understanding of how I hope to incorporate the ethnographic into my research methodology. An understanding that will only be enhanced once I get my hands dirty in the field. This is my plan, anyway.