Abstract
This article is part of an ethnographic study that aims to describe and understand health as a phenomenon of the Sami culture. It discusses the preparation for and practices of fieldwork in the Sami region of Finnish Lapland. The article focuses on the relationships between the researcher and the experts, the researcher's personal qualities and adaptation to the field as well as the development of cultural understanding and the collection of data. The basic ideas in the preparation and fieldwork practices were related to ethical questions on the one hand. On the other hand, the purpose of this process was to guarantee the credibility of the study. The preparation for fieldwork included gathering background information about the context and the cultural group and analysing the majority-minority aspects concerning Finns and Sami. In addition, it included an assessment of the researcher's personal qualities and experiential background. The cultural understanding of health was constructed gradually in repeated meetings of the researcher with the participants, and data collection was situationally flexible. The process of analysis described in this article was a long-term cultural learning process that included multi-staged reflection.