Hi Jeffrey, this seems to overlap with Arthur Frank using a narrative or his ‘Illness is an occasion for autobiography’. The self that is claimed is dialogical, and the tension of this dialogue is to include the voices of others without assimilating these voices to one’s own. Physician memoirs, a spiritual autobiography, and a web site are presented as examples of dialogical autobiographical work occasioned by illness.
“All else is means; dialogue is the end. A single voice ends nothing and resolves nothing. Two voices is the minimum for life.”
(Mikhail Bakhtin)

regarding ethnographies, there is an excellent article I recently read:
Agar, Michael. (2006). An ethnography by any other name… [Electronic Version]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 7. Retrieved 3 March 2009 from http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/177/395.