Ethnography

Anthropologists do fieldwork, write ethnographic texts, and make contributions to a body of theoretical knowledge; in this lecture, we explore these distinctive styles of research and representation. In fieldwork, anthropologists gather information about people and places, creating diverse forms of data: interview transcripts, life histories, village diagrams, maps, kinship genealogies, grammars and dictionaries, photos, videos of rituals or political protests, recordings of myths and songs, material artifacts, and much more. The data anthropologists collect in fieldwork is made intelligible through its relationship to a set of questions within anthropological theory. So when writing 'ethnography,' anthropologists weave interpretations of these data into detailed descriptive analyses of social and cultural life, often hoping to yield theoretical insight. Through a close reading of one such ethnography, and through the completion of small project in ethnographic observation, in this module we hope to understand the 'ethnographer's magic': the unique sensibility guiding anthropological ways of creating new knowledge about the world.