ABSTRACT

How to Read Ethnography is an essential guide to approaching anthropological texts. It helps students to cultivate the skills they need to critically examine and understand how ethnographies are built up, as well as to think anthropologically and develop an anthropological imagination of their own. The authors reveal how ethnographically-informed anthropology plays a distinctive and valuable role in comprehending the complexity of the world we live in.

This fully revised second edition includes fresh excerpts from key texts for analysis and comparison along with lucid explanations. In addition to concerns with argument, authority, and the relationship between theory and data, the book engages with the purpose, value, and accountability of ethnographic texts, as well as with their reception and usage. A brand new chapter looks at the kinds of collaboration between informants/consultants and anthropologists that go into the making of ethnographic writing.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction

1The concerns and distinctiveness of ethnography

chapter 1|22 pages

Comparison

The ethnographic outlook

chapter 2|22 pages

People in context

chapter 3|21 pages

Relationships and meanings

chapter 4|20 pages

Narrating the immediate

chapter 5|25 pages

Ethnography as argument

chapter 6|24 pages

Authors and authority

chapter 7|22 pages

Taking a stance

Theories for a changing world

chapter 8|24 pages

Informants, interlocutors, collaborators

chapter |12 pages

Conclusion

Ethnography in the human conversation: a final remark