Using urban and rural community settings, this review article focuses on ethical issues associated with ethnographer-participant interaction and draws from the ethnographic accounts of Bronislaw Malinowski and Susan Krieger. As such, the following sections intend to illuminate the issue of ethics in ethnography research. As case studies, the argumentations of these two ethnographers are interesting for three key reasons. First, Malinowski's study belonged to what is arguably the early era, or formative years, of ethnography as a method for studying cultures. This era is markedly different from an increasingly interconnected contemporary society--in which Krieger's study was situated. Second, it seems the mixed gender of these authors implicitly influenced their ethical orientations. Third, it is reasonable to argue that both authors' explanations point to the inescapable fact that ethical ethnography is not always linear, and will probably remain so in the foreseeable future. Invariably, the hypothesis pursued is that although the arguments of these authors are methodically enriching, they also suffer the challenging dilemmas of ethical ethnography and, conceptually, the others and subaltern concept nexus. Undoubtedly, a key challenge of cultural analytics is the development of narrative tools that may assist in resolving or raising into higher relief the subtleties of power, interests, desires, access, subjectivity, and objectivity which characterises the ethnographer-subject relationship.