A must-read classic for anyone—academic ethnographers to market researchers—involved with data collection from individual human beings. The Ethnographic Interview is a practical, self-teaching handbook that guides readers step-by-step through interview techniques commonly used to research ethnography and culture. The text also shows how to analyze collected data and how to write an ethnography. Appendices include research questions and writing tasks.
What are new interview methods and practices in our new 'interview society' and how do they relate to traditional social science research? This volume interrogates the interview as understood, used - and under-used - by anthropologists. It puts the interview itself in the hotseat by exploring the nature of the interview, interview techniques, and illustrative cases of interview use. What is a successful and representative interview? How are interviews best transcribed and integrated into our writing? Is interview knowledge production safe, ethical and representative? And how are interviews used by anthropologists in their ethnographic practice? This important volume leads the reader from an initial scrutiny of the interview to interview techniques and illustrative case studies. It is experimental, innovative, and covers in detail matters such as awkwardness, silence and censorship in interviews that do not feature in general interview textbooks. It will appeal to social scientists engaged in qualitative research methods in general, and anthropology and sociology students using interviews in their research and writing in particular.
Spradley should be read by anyone who wants to gain a true understanding of the process of participant observation. This text is a follow-up to his ethnographic research handbook, The Ethnographic Interview, and guides readers through the technique of participant observation to research ethnography and culture. Spradley shows how to analyze collected data and to write an ethnography. The appendices include research questions and writing tasks.
This work is a handbook which guides students step by step through interview techniques commonly used to research ethnography and culture. The text also teaches students how to analyze the data they collect, and how to write an ethnography.
The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography provides an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive overview of this growing body of research, combining ethnographic approaches with close attention to language use. This handbook illustrates the richness and potential of linguistic ethnography to provide detailed understandings of situated patterns of language use while connecting these patterns clearly to broader social structures. Including a general introduction to linguistic ethnography and 25 state-of-the-art chapters from expert international scholars, the handbook is divided into three sections. Chapters cover historical, empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions to the field, and new approaches and developments. This handbook is key reading for those studying linguistic ethnography, qualitative research methods, sociolinguistics and educational linguistics within English Language, Applied Linguistics, Education and Anthropology.
This bold agenda-setting title continues to spearhead interdisciplinary, multisensory research into experience, knowledge and practice. Drawing on an explosion of new, cutting edge research Sarah Pink uses real world examples to bring this innovative area of study to life. She encourages us to challenge, revise and rethink core components of ethnography including interviews, participant observation and doing research in a digital world. The book provides an important framework for thinking about sensory ethnography stressing the numerous ways that smell, taste, touch and vision can be interconnected and interrelated within research. Bursting with practical advice on how to effectively conduct and share sensory ethnography this is an important, original book, relevant to all branches of social sciences and humanities.
This book argues that ‘ethnographic thinking’—the thought processes and patterns ethnographers develop through their practice—offers companies and organizations the cultural insights they need to develop fully-informed strategies. Using real world examples, Hasbrouck demonstrates how shifting the value of ethnography from simply identifying consumer needs to driving a more holistic understanding of a company or organization can help it benefit from a deeper understanding of the dynamic and interactive cultural contexts of its offerings. In doing so, he argues that such an approach can also enhance the strategic value of their work by helping them increase appreciation for openness and exploration, hone interpretive skills, and cultivate holistic thinking, in order to broaden perspectives, challenge assumptions, and cross-pollinate ideas between differing viewpoints. Ethnographic Thinking is key reading for managers and strategists specifically wishing to tap-into the potential that ethnography offers, as well as those searching more broadly for new ways to innovate practice. It is essential reading for students of applied ethnography, and recommended for scholars too.
This best-selling book, designed for researchers embarking on their first ethnographic project, has been substantially revised and updated, with lots of exercises and advice to guide the embodied and creative ‘practice’ of ethnography. New additions include cyber-ethnography, sensual, visual and mobile ethnographies, and ‘field walking’.
Designed to give students a hands-on taste of what it is like to do ethnographic research, this concise manual offers a related set of three enriching yet manageable research projects with clear, workable instructions and guidelines. Through them, Professor Angrosino demonstrates for students at all levels that ethnography is an exciting and challenging form of social research. Solid, encouraging, and readable, the guide provides a basic format so that students can learn the fundamental ethnographic data collection techniques of observation, interviewing, and analyzing archives while conducting their own mini-projects in local settings. Projects in Ethnographic Research also includes many well-chosen, concrete, and illuminating examples drawn from the research of the authors own students and from the published works of other ethnographers. Projects in Ethnographic Research is most useful to those who teach introductory cultural anthropology and who want to introduce their students to some important field techniques but cannot justify assigning a longer, more comprehensive methods book. Brief and reasonably priced, the Angrosino text is sure to become an important component in introductory classrooms because it enhances some of the key concepts in cultural anthropology. It will also ignite the interest of future ethnographers.
Across the globe, an expanding circle of care is encompassing a growing number of species through efforts targeting biodiversity, profoundly revising the line between humans and nonhumans. Care of the Species examines infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists grapple with the complexities of evolution and domestication. John Hartigan Jr. uses ethnography to access the expertise of botanists and others engaged with cultivating biodiversity, providing various entry points for understanding plants in the world around us. He begins by tracing the historical emergence of race through practices of care on nonhumans, showing how this history informs current thinking about conservation. With geneticists working on maize, Hartigan deploys Foucault’s concept of care of the self to analyze how domesticated species are augmented by an afterlife of data. In the botanical gardens of Spain, Care of the Species explores seed banks, herbariums, and living collections, depicting the range of ways people interact with botanical knowledge. This culminates in Hartigan’s effort to engage plants as ethnographic subjects through a series of imaginative “interview” techniques. Care of the Species contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, developing a cultural perspective on evolutionary dynamics while using ethnography to theorize species. In tackling the racial dimension of efforts to go “beyond the human,” this book reveals a far greater stratum of sameness than commonly assumed.
