Ethnography introduces readers to traditions of ethnographic research and writing through detailed discussions of their histories, exploratory designs, representational conventions, and standards of evaluation. While situating ethnography within its original, anthropological context, the book simultaneously introduces new frameworks for grasping its rich and ever expanding practices.
Embracing the trope of ethnography as narrative, this chapter uses the mythic story of Bronislaw Malinowski's early career and fieldwork as a vehicle through which to explore key aspects of ethnography's history and development into a distinct form of qualitative research. The reputed "founding father" of the ethnographic approach, Malinowski was a brilliant social scientist, dynamic writer, conceited colonialist, and, above all else, pathetically human. Through a series of intervallic steps -- in and out of Malinowski's path from Poland to the "Cambridge School" and eventually to the western Pacific -- I trace the legacy of ethnography to its current position as a critical, historically informed, and unfailingly evolving research endeavor. As a research methodology that has continually reflected on and revised its practices and modes of presentation, ethnography is boundless. Yet minus its political, ethical, and historical moorings, I argue, the complexities of twenty-first-century society render its future uncertain. ; Published (Publication status) ;
"In turn creative thinker and street flaneur, careful planner and adventurer, empathic listener and distant voyeur, recluse writer and active participant: the ethnographer is a multifaceted researcher of social worlds and social life. In this book, sociologists Sarah Daynes and Terry Williams team up to explore the art of ethnographic research and the many complex decisions it requires. Using their extensive fieldwork experience in the United States and Europe, and hours spent in the classroom training new ethnographers, they illustrate, discuss, and reflect on the key skills and tools required for successful research, including research design, entry and exit, participant observation, fieldnotes, ethics, and writing up. Covering both the theoretical foundations and practical realities of ethnography, this highly readable and entertaining book will be invaluable to students in sociology and other disciplines in which ethnography has become a core qualitative research method"--
Many qualitative studies in journalism and mass communication research draw on ethnographic methods that originated in anthropology and sociology. These methods involve studying people within their own cultural environment through intensive fieldwork; they emphasize the subjects' frames of reference and understandings of the world. This article uses a comparison between journalism and ethnographic research as a framework for highlighting common problems with manuscripts using this method. It offers veteran ethnographers' tips about what they look for in a manuscript and identifies three ethnographies that are examples of successful application of the method to topics of interest to journal readers.
"This volume provides readers with a comprehensive guide to understanding, conceptualizing, and critically assessing ethnographic research reporting in qualitative research"--
Sensory ethnography offers an important intervention into the dominance of the conventional 'watching and listening' dynamic often presumed to be at the heart of ethnographic research. This chapter provides an account of sensory ethnography that positions it broadly within the field of qualitative research, locating it as an approach that intersects with a variety of interrelated methodologies. Developing a 'sensory sensibility' means utilizing the role of the senses in conducting research, and demands attention to researchers' own emplacement and reflexivity to the field in their aim of elucidating complex meaning from cultural life. As such, this method offers an expanded approach to embodiment and expression that is inherent to the process of interpretation and negotiation in the ethnographic encounter. Sensory ethnography is then broken down into specific methods that can be incorporated into each of the research phases—design, data collection, analysis, and writing—while being mindful of any artificial distinctions or boundaries between them within the overall research project, as well as presenting some of the ethical and political complexities to be managed while conducting sensory ethnography. The authors then provide case studies of their own research that utilized sensory ethnographic techniques to provide the reader with a more concrete grounding for the application of concepts presented. This chapter concludes with an entreaty for sensory ethnographers to develop practices of exploratory openness and attentiveness to the senses, not solely as resources to be mined for data but as a fundamental product of the ethnographic process.
As Alan Klima writes in Ethnography #9, "there are other possible starting places than the earnest realism of anthropological discourse as a method of critical thought." In this experimental ethnography of capitalism, ghosts, and numbers in mid- and late-twentieth-century Thailand, Klima uses this provocation to deconstruct naive faith in the "real" and in the material in academic discourse that does not recognize that it is, itself, writing. Klima also twists the common narrative that increasing financial abstractions in economic culture are a kind of real horror story, entangling it with other modes of abstraction commonly seen as less "real," such as spirit consultations, ghost stories, and haunted gambling. His unconventional, distinctive, and literary form of storytelling uses multiple voices, from ethnographic modes to a first-person narrative in which he channels Northern Thai ghostly tales and the story of a young Thai spirit. This genre alchemy creates strange yet compelling new relations between being and not being, presence and absence, fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and reality. In embracing the speculative as a writing form, Klima summons unorthodox possibilities for truth in contemporary anthropology.
Taking readers through the practical history of ethnography from its anthropological origins through to its use in a ever-widening variety of organizational, academic and business contexts, this book covers the whole research project process, starting with research design, and dealing with such practical issues as gaining access, note-taking, project management, analysing one s data and negotiating an exit strategy. It is highly practical and incorporates a range of case studies, illustrating organisational ethnography at work. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to plan and