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Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
In this companion volume John van Maanen's Tales of the Field, three scholars reveal how the ethnographer turns direct experience and observation into written fieldnotes upon which an ethnography is based. Drawing on years of teaching and field research experience, the authors develop a series of guidelines, suggestions, and practical advice about how to write useful fieldnotes in a variety of settings, both cultural and institutional. Using actual unfinished, "working" notes as examples, they illustrate options for composing, reviewing, and working fieldnotes into finished texts. They discuss different organizational and descriptive strategies, including evocation of sensory detail, synthesis of complete scenes, the value of partial versus omniscient perspectives, and of first person versus third person accounts. Of particular interest is the author's discussion of notetaking as a mindset. They show how transforming direct observations into vivid descriptions results not simply from good memory but more crucially from learning to envision scenes as written. A good ethnographer, they demonstrate, must learn to remember dialogue and movement like an actor, to see colors and shapes like a painter, and to sense moods and rhythms like a poet. The authors also emphasize the ethnographer's core interest in presenting the perceptions and meanings which the people studied attach to their own actions. They demonstrate the subtle ways that writers can make the voices of people heard in the texts they produce. Finally, they analyze the "processing" of fieldnotes--the practice of coding notes to identify themes and methods for selecting and weaving together fieldnote excerpts to write a polished ethnography. This book, however, is more than a "how-to" manual. The authors examine writing fieldnotes as an interactive and interpretive process in which the researcher's own commitments and relationships with those in the field inevitably shape the character and content of those fieldnotes. They explore the conscious and unconscious writing choices that produce fieldnote accounts. And they show how the character and content of these fieldnotes inevitably influence the arguments and analyses the ethnographer can make in the final ethnographic tale. This book shows that note-taking is a craft that can be taught. Along with Tales of the Field and George Marcus and Michael Fisher's Anthropology as Cultural Criticism, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes is an essential tool for students and social scientists alike..
Price: $11.45
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Con Respeto: Bridging the Distances Between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools : An Ethnographic Portrait
This book presents a study of ten Mexican immigrant families, describing how such families go about the business of surviving and learning to succeed in a new world. Guadalupe Valdes examines what appears to be a disinterest in education by Mexican parents and shows, through extensive quotations from interview data, that these struggling families are both rich and strong in family values and bring with them clear views of what constitutes success and failure. The study's conclusion questions the merit of typical family intervention programs designed to promote school success and suggests that these interventions -- because they do not genuinely respect the values of diverse families -- may have long-term negative consequences for children..
Price: $17.00
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Seeing Anthropology: Cultural Anthropology Through Film (with Ethnographic Film Clips DVD) (4th Edition)
Seeing Anthropology continues to be the only cultural anthropology text available that allows for easy integration of ethnographic films into the introductory cultural anthropology course. This text truly incorporates films within the text by blending textbook content with sixteen ethnographic film clips that are put in the hands of students. One reviewer says, “The greatest strengths of this text are its unique and skillful use of film clips to enhance student learning…I can think of no better way to extend student learning in anthropology than the use of films.” .
Price: $74.41
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The Ethnographic Interview
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A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility
A Thrice-Told Tale
is one ethnographer's imaginative and powerful response to the methodological issues raised by feminist and postmodernist critics of traditional ethnography. The author, a feminist anthropologist, uses three texts developed out of her research in Taiwan—a piece of fiction, anthropological fieldnotes, and a social science article—to explore some of these criticisms.
Each text takes a different perspective, is written in a different style, and has different "outcomes," yet all three involve the same fascinating set of events. A young mother began to behave in a decidedly abherrant, perhaps suicidal manner, and opinion in her village was sharply divided over the reason. Was she becoming a shaman, posessed by a god? Was she deranged, in need of physical restraint, drugs, and hospitalization? Or was she being cynically manipulated by her ne'er-do-well husband to elicit sympathy and money from her neighbors? In the end, the woman was taken away from the area to her mother's house. For some villagers, this settled the matter; for others the debate over her behavior was probably never truly resolved.
The first text is a short story written shortly after the incident, which occurred almost thrity years ago; the second text is a copy of the fieldnotes collected about the events covered in the short story; the third text is an article published in 1990 in American Ethnologist that analyzes the incident from the author's current perspective. Following each text is a Commentary in which the author discusses such topics as experimental ethnography, polyvocality, authorial presence and control, reflexivity, and some of the differences between fiction and ethnography. The three texts are framed by two chapters in which the author discusses the genereal problems posed by feminist and postmodernist critics of ethnography and presents her personal exploration of these issues in an argument that is strongly self-reflexive and theoretically rigorous. She considers some feminist concerns over colonial research methods and takes issues with the insistence of some feminists tha the topics of ethnographic research be set by those who are studied. The book concludes with a plea for ethnographic responsibility based on a less academic and more practical perspective. .
Price: $12.88
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Essential Ethnographic Methods: Observations, Interviews, and Questionnaires: Observations, Interviews, and Questionnaires (Ethnographer's Toolkit)
Book Two of the Ethnographer's Toolkit series provides the reader with an introduction to participant and non-participant observation, interviewing, and ethnographically informed survey research, including systematically administered structured interviews and questionnaires. These essential methods are the basic building blocks of ethnographic data collection, providing researchers with tools to answer the principal ethnographic questions: "What's happening in this setting?"; "Who is engaging in what kind of activities?"; and "Why are they doing what they're doing?" The authors describe when and how to use these basic techniques and offer numerous examples of how these methods have worked in practice. Checklists, extended case studies, definitions, and cross-references aid the reader in understanding these methods..
Price: $23.71
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Ethnographic Eyes: A Teacher's Guide to Classroom Observation
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Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity)
This innovative volume is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this preeminent group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communities are transformed or displaced by free trade economics, terrorism, and war; how new information and medical technologies reshape the relation one has to oneself; and which forms of subjectivity and life possibilities are produced against a world in pieces. The transdisciplinary conversation includes anthropologists, historians of science, psychologists, a literary critic, a philosopher, physicians, and an economist. The authors touch on how we think and write about contingency, human agency, and ethics today..
Price: $23.35
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Analyzing and Interpreting Ethnographic Data (Ethnographer's Toolkit , Vol 5)
Book Five of the Ethnographer's Toolkit series provides the reader with a variety of methods for transforming piles of fieldnotes, observations, audio and videotapes, questionnaires, surveys, documents, maps, and other kinds of data into research results that help people understand their world more fully and facilitate problem solving. Addressing both narrative and qualitative as well as quantitative-or enumerated-data, this slim volume discusses methods for organizing, retrieving, rendering manageable, and interpreting the data collected in ethnographic research. Checklists, extended case studies, definitions, and cross-references aid the reader in understanding how ethnographic data is analyzed and synthesized..
Price: $27.25
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