Ethnography

Ethnography (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω grapho "I write") is the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. An ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group. The word can thus be said to have a double meaning, which partly depends on whether it is used as a count noun or uncountable. The resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a c ...more

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio
Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
Righteous Dopefiend
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States
Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (updated with a new preface)
Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
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The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache
Argonauts of the Western Pacific
Sidewalk
The Forest People
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries)

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Thomas Hylland Eriksen
In Samoa, ... children were given love and encouragement, and they were subjected to few prohibitions. They therefore grew up to be more harmonious and happy than the cowed, disciplined and sexually frustrated American adolescents.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

Tim Ingold
Indeed ethnography and theory resemble nothing so much as the two arcs of a hyperbola, which cast their beams in opposite directions, lighting up the surfaces, respectively, of mind and world. They are back to back, and darkness reigns between them. But what if each arc were to reverse its orientation, so as to embrace the other in an encompassing, brightly illuminated ellipse? We would then have neither ethnography nor theory, nor even a compound of both. What we would have is an undivided, int ...more
Tim Ingold

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