Ethnographic Practice in the Present

Marit Melhuus, Jon P. Mitchell, Helena Wulff, Marit Melhuus, Jon P. Mitchell, Helena Wulff

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780857451590
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857455437
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In its assessment of the current "state of play" of ethnographic practice in social anthropology, this volume explores the challenges that changing social forms and changing understandings of "the field" pose to contemporary ethnographic methods. These challenges include the implications of the remarkable impact social anthropology is having on neighboring disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography and linguistics, as well as the potential 'costs' of this success for the discipline. Contributors also discuss how the ethnographic method is influenced by current institutional contexts and historical "traditions" across a range of settings. Here ethnography is featured less as a methodological "tool-box" or technique but rather as a subject on which to reflect.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Ethnography and Memory
• Chapter 2. Fieldwork as Free Association and Free Passage
• Chapter 3. Bringing Ethnography Home? Costs and Benefits of Methodological Traffic across Disciplines
• Chapter 4. Ethnography at the Interface: ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ as an Anthropological Field of Enquiry
• Chapter 5. Notes From within a Laboratory for the Reinvention of Anthropological Method
• Chapter 6. Making Ethics
• Chapter 7. Ethnographic Practices and Methods: Some Predicaments of Russian Anthropology
• Chapter 8. Getting the Ethnography ‘Right’: On Female Circumcision in Exile
• Chapter 9. An Ethnography of Associations? Translocal Research in the Cross River Region
• Chapter 10. Tracking Global Flows and Still Moving: The Ethnography of Responses to AIDS
• Chapter 11. Ethnography in Motion: Shifting Fields on Airport Grounds
• Epilogue 1. Re-presenting Anthropology
• Epilogue 2. Prelude to a Re-functioned Ethnography
• Index