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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) ;

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.

In recent decades, organizational scholars have set out to explore the processual character of organizations. They have investigated both the overtly ephemeral and sometimes dramatically unstable aspects of contemporary organizing and the social flux and flow of everyday organizing hiding beneath organizations' stable surface appearances. These studies manifest a range of different approaches and methods. In this chapter, we evaluate the use and usefulness of one of these – ethnography – for studying organizational processes. As ethnographers draw close enough to observe the precariousness of such processes, stay long enough to see change occurring, and are contextually sensitive enough to understand the twists and turns that are part of organizational life, ethnography is well suited for such study. Ethnographers are commonly aware that '… incremental shifts and repositioning are the rule, not the exception, in organizational life' (Morrill and Fine, 1997: 434). 'By virtue of its situated, unfolding, and temporal nature', then, as Jarzabkowski et al. (2014: 282) put it, ethnography 'is revelatory of processual dynamics'. Ethnography or, to emphasize the processual nature of doing ethnography itself, ethnographying (Tota, 2004; de Jong, Kamsteeg, and Ybema, 2013), typically means three things: (i) doing research (fieldwork), (ii) understanding the world with an orientation towards sensemaking (sensework), and (iii) articulating and presenting those understandings (textwork). The first of these refers to research done through prolonged and intensive engagement with the research setting and its actors, combining different fieldwork methods (observing, with whatever degree of participating; talking to people, including interviewing; and/or the close reading of researchrelevant documents). Second, ethnography embraces a sensibility towards meaning and meaning-making processes, and this shapes the ways its observations and interpretations are carried out. Third, ethnographic analyses are commonly presented through a written text presenting data that give voice to the minutiae of everyday life, in their social, political, and historical contexts, thereby conveying to readers a sense of 'being there'. This fieldwork, sensework, textwork trio may remind one of other treatments of field research methods (e.g., fieldwork, headwork, and textwork in Van Maanen, 1988; 2011; fieldwork, deskwork, and textwork in Yanow, 2000), which Wilkinson (2014) supplements with preparatory legwork. We replace the middle term with 'sensework' to encompass a broader range of analytic activity that is sensitive towards organizational actors' meaning making, the complexities of the everyday, and the tacitly known and/or concealed dimensions of organizational life. More is involved, in our view, than just the 'headwork' of theory-informed interpretation and distanced analysis. Although previous work has typically not made a process focus explicit, the history of organizational studies shows ethnographic research being sensitive to a key feature of organizing processes unfolding over time: the intersubjective processes of 'social reality' construction. Ethnography has commonly required a prolonged period of researcher immersion in the research setting in which fieldwork is being carried out. This has inspired many influential organizational studies, both in the discipline's early days and in more recent years (Fine, Morrill and Surianarain, 2009; Ybema, Yanow, et al., 2009; Yanow, 2013). Earlier studies delved into the dynamics of, for instance, bureaucratic control and resistance (e.g., Selznick, 1949; Blau, 1955; Kaufman, 1960; Roy, 1960; Crozier, 1964; Kunda, 1992), organizational performances and dramatics (Goffman, 1959), and the unofficial workarounds brought into play through processes of power struggles and local meaning making of labour relations (Dalton, 1959). Some of these studies also covered longer-term developments, such as Gouldner's follow-up account of worker–management relationships in a gypsum mine (Gouldner, 1954). Although these studies show that an ethnographic approach is well equipped for doing process analyses, processes themselves were not often their explicit concern. More recent ethnographic studies, however, have taken a more explicit 'process turn', focusing on the instability and dynamics of organizational life on the ground (e.g., Feldman, 2000; Jay, 2013; Lok and de Rond, 2013). We begin this chapter with a sketch of studying organizational processes which provides the conceptual footing to argue for the relevance of ethnographying for this kind of study. To bring the processual qualities of ethnographic work into sharp focus, ethnography can be seen as 'following' actors, interactions, and artefacts over time and space. Ethnographers go along with actors, interactions, and artefacts on the move or stay in one place observing things that move around them. Next, we explain in more detail what ethnographic fieldwork, sensework, and textwork entail, and how these relate to process. We discuss two different foci in process analysis – long-term developments and microdynamics – and present two recent examples of ethnographic work which illustrate what ethnography can do for the study of process. We conclude with a few suggestions as to how ethnographers could become more processsensitive in their field-, sense-, and textwork. That is, although ethnography has something to contribute to process studies, ethnographers could themselves learn from taking the issues engaged in this handbook into consideration.

Joan Littlewood (1914‐2002) was a pioneer of theatre directing in the United Kingdom, most famous for her production of Oh What a Lovely War!. This article performs an ethnographic study of Miss Littlewood , a 2018 musical by Sam Kenyon, which documents Littlewood's life and work using the style of the earlier show. Miss Littlewood 's plot reveals details of Littlewood's life and work, while its form mirrors the montage techniques that she pioneered in Britain. The article uses interviews and rehearsal observations to document aspects of the process by which Miss Littlewood was developed. It reflects on the tensions that are revealed between that relatively luxurious process and Littlewood's political and financial realities. Ethnography was an ideal method for documenting this process because it facilitated observation of relationships between the various works and demonstrated the fluidity and creativity of academic writing.

A review of Frank Gurrmanamana, Les Hiatt and Kim McKenzie with Betty Ngurraban-Gurraba, Betty Meehan and Rhys Jones's People of the Rivermouth: The Joborr Texts of Frank Gurrmanamana (National Museum of Australia and Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2002).The concept of postcolonialism, and an Australian postcolonial literature specifically, is fraught with problems. The least of these is the reality of this country not yet being fully free from its British colonial inheritance, let alone from ongoing internal colonialism. Even so, postcolonialism is still a useful term to define a body of (particularly Indigenous) literature produced over the last thirty years. Keeping the irony in mind, Australia's virtual postcolonial literature has been gaining increasing prominence, providing fertile ground for the political promise that one day may be realised as a state of actual Australian postcoloniality of sorts. In the meantime, the postcolonial movement desired and reinforced by the literature continues to gather momentum. People of the Rivermouth, a recent addition to the Australian anthropological corpus, initiates what looks like a promising future for postcolonial ethnographies; yet it too has some problems. While the book claims that it is 'arguably the most comprehensive work ever produced on a single Australian Aboriginal group', in effect presenting itself as an ethnography of the highest order, the main component of the work—the Joborr texts—are, I believe, somewhat more aligned to what Eric Michaels once described as 'para-ethnography': a story that transcends itself into a kind of incidental ethnography.

Climate change is commonly understood to be an intractable political problem. It is also widely assumed that the solution to the problem is a rather straightforward reconfiguration of humanity's interactions with "carbon." If global warming is so clearly fixable, and so much work has long been underway to accomplish this fix (carbon offsets, international negotiations, localized climate initiatives, etc.), then why does the quagmire continue? This dissertation explores the stagnant "progress" of climate politics by using "carbon" as the locus of its mixed-methodological approach. The dissertation creates a new nomenclature, presented as a glossary at the beginning of the text, to represent the diverging meanings and underlying assumptions conveyed by different "carbon" invocations. This terminology facilitates the dissertation's material-semiotic analysis of climate politics, which combines discourse analysis, multi-sited ethnography, and object tracking of "carbon." The analysis finds that the dominant, carbon-based discourse of climate politics reinforces modernist assumptions that inspire a perpetual faith in the ability of humans to solve the climate problem through carbon management, regardless of evidence to the contrary. This discourse, ironically, enables a widespread estrangement of carbon the signifier from carbon the signified in global climate governance. This lack of fidelity between material "carbon" and representations thereof is also encouraged by the ubiquity and invisibility of elemental carbon; when apprehended largely with a reductive emphasis on quantifiability, and put in combination with market incentives, "carbon" is a fungible and easily co-opted entity. Therefore, despite "carbon's" appeal as a policy mechanism (thanks again to its perceived quantifiability), it is a misguided foundation for climate policy. The likelihood of failure according to the carbonized terms by which the problem has been defined is the "elephant in the room" of climate activism. The liberal capitalist global order that has summoned anthropogenic climate change may find itself challenged by the monster it has created. The dominant, carbon-centric discourse through which the problem is (not) addressed, amounts to an attempt of that order to control its monster without significantly changing itself.

Reflecting on the World Health Organization's (WHO) account of obesity and recent developments in ethnography, I advocate for a collaborative, multiauthor approach to studying obesity and, more broadly, chronic disease. To illustrate this, I show how recent ethnographies of obesity and metabolism have convincingly challenged and reframed the WHO's account of obesity. I further suggest that future ethnographic studies of obesity (and chronic disease) could expand their analytical scope – without sacrificing a critical and people-centred approach – through coordination and collaboration. A multiauthor approach to obesity research would increase the capacity of ethnography to demonstrate the many conditions that must be fulfilled for a person to become 'obese', productively foregrounding how 'obesity' emerges out of a web of social, economic, political, chemical, and historical connections. This would enable a more comprehensive understanding of the uneven emergence of obesity (and other chronic diseases) worldwide.

This chapter addresses the use of ethnographic methods in critical social theory, and the assumption that such methods prove to be useful because they allow the researcher to be closer to 'matter itself'. Instead, I argue for ethnography from within a framework of historical materialism and social critique, marking the difference between such 'materialism without matter', based on Marx's 'fetishism of the commodity', and some strategies of New Materialism. My goal is to situate the uses of ethnography for a transformed consideration of the relation between theory and practice. ; Marianna Poyares, 'Theory's Method?: Ethnography and Critical Theory', in Materialism and Politics , ed. by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva, Cultural Inquiry, 20 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 345–63

"The Mafia? What is the Mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don't know the Mafia. I've never seen it." Mafiosi have often reacted this way to questions from journalists and law enforcement. Social scientists who study the Mafia usually try to pin down what it "really is," thus fusing their work with their object. In Mafiacraft, Deborah Puccio-Den undertakes a new form of ethnographic inquiry that focuses not on answering "What is the Mafia?" but on the ontological, moral, and political effects of posing the question itself. Her starting point is that Mafia is not a readily nameable social fact but a problem of thought produced by the absence of words. Puccio-Den approaches covert activities using a model of "Mafiacraft," which inverts the logic of witchcraft. If witchcraft revolves on the lethal power of speech, Mafiacraft depends on the deadly strength of silence. How do we write an ethnography of phenomena that cannot be named? Puccio-Den approaches this task with a fascinating anthropology of silence, breaking new ground for the study of the world's most famous criminal organization.

This paper draws upon several transnational theories from Glick Schiller, Wimmer, Faist, and Sassen and analyses the major theoretical and methodological shifts in migration studies. In response to such changes, multi-sited ethnography has been introduced as a main research method; it differs from the traditional way of doing migration research, where spatially-defined ethnic minority communities serve as the primary fieldwork sites; instead, moving between different sites allows researchers to follow individual migrants, whose social networks have become the main focus. Moreover, such a research method also redefines the traditional notion of "field", which is now believed to be with blurred and softening boundaries. Through my research project, I have analysed how translocal communities constitute global diasporic networks; I have also come to the conclusion that transnational migrants themselves are involved in very fluid patterns and complex processes of identification and affiliation; their social networks, which consist of multiple relationships such as familial, economic, social, organisational, and political, are not geographically bounded, but these networks cross over and connect different types of social spaces in a wide variety of cultural, institutional, professional, and other kinds of context.

Feminist political ecologists have transformed mainstream political ecology since its inception. The foundational and current work of feminist political ecologists indicate that their field is attentive to the epistemological foundations of power, inequities, and inequalities that cut across intersectional identities and hierarchies of difference and at the sites of environmental conflict and governance. Feminist political ecologists have made important theoretical interventions in the interdisciplinary community of political ecologists, but the use of feminist methodologies and 'team-based environmental science' can be expanded. We argue that revisiting feminist methodological commitments is critical for furthering how feminist political ecology examines how, and in what way, power and privilege operate in the contexts where environmental knowledge is produced. We make our argument by drawing upon a multi-year, multi-sited project to describe how collaborative event ethnography (CEE) offers many possibilities to reassess feminist political ecology research designs. We show how the recognition of diverse and plural epistemologies are foundational preconditions to integrating feminist principles in feminist political ecology research. We find that integrating reflexivity, responsibility, and co-production in research designs create opportunities for, and challenges to, carrying out feminist political ecological practice. In so doing, the integration of feminist methodologies are critical to disrupting knowledge hegemonies and providing new modes of practicing feminist political ecologies.Keywords: Collaborative event ethnography, feminist political ecology, feminist methodologies, global environmental governance

As a number of recent methodological guides and review ar-ticles suggest, scholars are increasingly turning to ethnogra-phy as a tool for understanding the complexities of political life.1 Yet even as ethnography becomes more commonplace, scholars often see it as a set of techniques best suited to producing in-depth knowledge about particular cases.2 There are good practical and epistemological reasons for ethnogra-phers to conduct research on singular cases. However, this article argues that some of the techniques of qualitative com-parative methods might prove to be useful tools for ethnogra-phers seeking to make generalizable causal claims and that ethnographers should seriously consider when and where comparative methods might make valuable contributions to our analyses.

Purpose This article explores the analytical gains of what we refer to as "awkward ethnography." How might our understanding of organizational phenomena benefit from those unexpected moments when our observations are laughed at, when our questions cause discomfort, or when we feel like a failure? While such instances seem to be an inherent aspect of organizational ethnography, they are often silenced or camouflaged by claims of intentionality. This article takes the opposite approach, arguing for the analytical value of awkwardness. Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on their respective ethnographic fieldwork in the Danish and Swedish armed forces. Based on observations, participation and interviews in two military units, the analysis focuses on situations that rarely find their way into final research publications. These will be explored as analytically productive material that can provide crucial insights into the organizational context studied. Findings The authors' analysis demonstrates that awkward situations that arise during ethnographic work not only bring about unforeseen insights; they also enable vital analytical opportunities for discovering silent knowledge in the organization which researchers might otherwise not have considered to inquire about or understood the gravity of. Research limitations/implications Implied in the suggested methodological approach for ethnographers is an acceptance of awkward situations as productive encounters. This means doing away with ideals for (ethnographic) knowledge production steered by notions of objectivity, instead embracing the affective dimensions of fieldwork. Originality/value This research addresses a key, and often silenced, aspect of ethnographic fieldwork, and stresses the unique value of the unintended and unexpected when doing ethnography. ; Funding agencies: The ethnographic work described in this article has been carried out during our respective PhD studies at the University of Copenhagen (SlOk-Andersen) and Linkoping University (Persson); both positions funded by the host university. While writing and publishing this article, the authors' work has been funded by NordForsk (grant no. 88041).

Many projects based on field research or "site-intensive methods" in political science incorporate sensitive components that can hinder the researcher's capacity to gain and maintain access to sources and informants. But doing field research arguably presents particularly acute challenges in deeply divided societies, where religious, ethnic, regional, or other types of cleavages are highly politicized and may even constitute the ostensible basis of political violence. I encountered these challenges firsthand while carrying out field research on the relationship between faith-based social service provision and the formation of sectarian identities in Lebanon. A textbook case of a deeply divided society, Lebanon has eighteen officially recognized religious groups, and the political system institutionalizes divisions within and across the Muslim and Christian communities by allocating top leadership posts (and even civil service positions) according to sect.

Given that millions of traditional Maya live today, it is surprising how little ethnography has figured into reconstructions of their ancient societies. Early Mayanists pointed out many continuities between the present and the past. For example, de Borhegyi (i956) argued that a conservative Maya folk culture had adapted to state institutions on its own terms in the course of being dominated for successive soo-600-year intervals by its own elite (the Classic period), aMexicanized elite (the Postclassic), and a European elite (the colonial period to the present). While the living Maya of Chiapas and Guatemala provided homologies for interpreting the Classic Maya during the ig6os, the continuity approach has had relatively little impact on mainstream archaeology. What cultural lens is appropriate for interpreting the residue of Maya civilization? Certainly epigraphy and ethnohistory written by the Maya themselves temper modernist Western perceptions, but it is recent uses of ethnography that have resulted in breakthroughs such as the discoveries that Classic rulers called forth their ancestors (Schele and Freidel i990) in shamanic rituals like those enacted by lineage heads on hilltop altars in Guatemala today, that basic iconographic elements and cosmological principles have endured since the Classic period (Freidel, Schele, and Parker I993, Fox i996), and that ancestor veneration like that of today is expressed in the design of Classic-period ceremonial centers (McAnany i995). We examine the continuity between the present-day emic social organization of local communities (Carmack i966, Vogt i969) and the earlier principles of lineage alliance that allowed the construction of successively larger blocs of communities nested within the aboriginal segmentary state. The organizational formats are culled from colonial dictionaries, conquest-period native chronicles, present-day oral narratives, and ethnography. We suggest hat Classic Maya archaeology would benefit from the guidance of ethnography just as epigraphy has complemented and corrected some of the excesses in interpretation from the materialist theoretical perspective. In this study, segmentary lineages in highland Guatemala and Yucatan are traced from the Classic Postclassic transition (ca. A.D. late 800s-goos) to the present to show how they aggregated into egalitarian and hierarchical polities. Lineages split, migrated long distances to fuse with conquered peoples in new localities, and amalgamated with scattered fraternal lineages when threatened (on rebellions, dispersals, and shifting states, see Tambiah i985:322-26; Kelly i985:72). The Maya community was made up of intermarrying patrilineages that shared a patron deity and replicated this pattern within successively larger aggregations. Lineages competed for rank and special prerogatives; such political struggles constitute much of the dynamics expressed in Classic-period epigraphy and Postclassic ethnohistory. Accordingly, from ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology, and mythology we summarize lineage alliances for the Postclassic, ca. A.D. 900-I520S, political roles of lineages within land-sharing sodalities from the colonial period to the present, and evidence for status and wealth differentials between lineages.' Case studies of segmentary lineages in the Quiche municipality of Momostenango in the densely populated highlands of Guatemala and the Yucatec village of Ox Mul in the frontier rain forest of Belize delineate nearly opposite ends of the spectrum of community size and traditionalism and may speak to pan-Maya commonalities, past and present.2 Our survey begins in the highlands, where lineages are better documented. Alternative link here.