Full Description
Approaches to Ethnography illustrates the various modes of representation and analysis that typify participant observation research. In contrast to the multitude of ethnographic textbooks, handbooks, and readers on the market, this book is neither a "how-to" guide nor a catalogue of substantive themes such as race, community, or space; it also avoids re-hashing epistemological debates, such as grounded theory versus the extended case method. Instead, this volume concisely lays out the predominant analytic lenses that ethnographers use to explain social action--for instance, whether they privilege micro-interaction or social structure, people and places or social processes, internal dispositions or situational contingencies. Each chapter features a prominent ethnographer delineating a distinct approach to the study of everyday life and reflecting on how their approach shapes the way they analyze and represent the field. Taken together, the collection is a practical guide that spells out how different styles of ethnography illuminate different dimensions of everyday social life. As such, Approaches to Ethnography complements and augments--but not duplicate--existing ethnographic methods and logic of inquiry texts for undergraduate and graduate courses on qualitative research methods.
Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction: An Analytic Approach to Ethnography
Colin Jerolmack and Shamus Khan
1. Microsociology: Beneath the Surface
Jooyoung Lee
2. Capturing Organizations as Actors
Katherine Chen
3. Macro Analysis: Power in the Field
Leslie Salzinger and Teresa Gowan
4. People and Places
Douglas Harper
5. Mechanisms
Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans
6. Embodiment: A Dispositional Approach to Racial and Cultural Analysis
Black Hawk Hancock
7. Situations
Monica McDermott
8. Reflexivity: Introspection, Positionality, and the Self as Research Instrument-Toward a Model of Abductive Reflexivity
Forrest Stuart
