Comparing Cultures

Comparing Cultures

Author: Michael Schnegg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-28

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1108487289

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Shows how comparative ethnographic methods can be successfully used to study important human concerns in anthropology.


Comparison in Anthropology

Comparison in Anthropology

Author: Matei Candea

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 1108474608

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Presents a systematic rethinking of the power and limits of comparison in anthropology.


Hope and Insufficiency

Hope and Insufficiency

Author: Rachel Douglas-Jones

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2021-09-17

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1800731019

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A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the concept’s role in a variety of different settings including government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories, assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed critical purchase on its persuasive power.


Thick Comparison

Thick Comparison

Author: Dr. Thomas Scheffer

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 900418113X

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"We have come a long way from Evans-Pritchard's famous dictum that "there is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method - and that is impossible." Yet a good 40 years later, qualitative social inquiry still has an uneasy relationship with comparison. This volume sets out "thick comparison" as a means to revive "comparing" as a productive process in ethnographic work: a process that helps to revitalise the articulation work inherent in analytical ethnographies; to vary observer perspectives and point towards "blind spots;" to name and create "new things" and modes of empirical work and to give way to intensified dialogues between data analysis and theorizing. Contributors are Katrin Amelang, Stefan Beck, Kati Hannken-Illjes, Alexander Kozin, Henriette Langstrup, Jèorg Niewèohner, Thomas Scheffer, Robert Schmidt, Estrid S²rensen, and Britt Ross Winthereik."--Publisher's website.


Ethnography and Virtual Worlds

Ethnography and Virtual Worlds

Author: Tom Boellstorff

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0691264864

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A practical guide to the ethnographic study of online cultures, and beyond Ethnography and Virtual Worlds is the only book of its kind—a concise, comprehensive, and practical guide for students, teachers, designers, and scholars interested in using ethnographic methods to study online virtual worlds, including both game and nongame environments. Written by leading ethnographers of virtual worlds, and focusing on the key method of participant observation, the book provides invaluable advice, tips, guidelines, and principles to aid researchers through every stage of a project, from choosing an online fieldsite to writing and publishing the results. Provides practical and detailed techniques for ethnographic research customized to reflect the specific issues of online virtual worlds, both game and nongame Draws on research in a range of virtual worlds, including Everquest, Second Life, There.com, and World of Warcraft Provides suggestions for dealing with institutional review boards, human subjects protocols, and ethical issues Guides the reader through the full trajectory of ethnographic research, from research design to data collection, data analysis, and writing up and publishing research results Addresses myths and misunderstandings about ethnographic research, and argues for the scientific value of ethnography


Ethnography and Human Development

Ethnography and Human Development

Author: Richard Jessor

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1996-08

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 9780226399034

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Studies of human development have taken an ethnographic turn in the 1990s. In this volume, leading anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists discuss how qualitative methodologies have strengthened our understanding of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development, and of the difficulties of growing up in contemporary society. Part 1, informed by a post-positivist philosophy of science, argues for the validity of ethnographic knowledge. Part 2 examines a range of qualitative methods, from participant observation to the hermeneutic elaboration of texts. In Part 3, ethnographic methods are applied to issues of human development across the life span and to social problems including poverty, racial and ethnic marginality, and crime. Restoring ethnographic methods to a central place in social inquiry, these twenty-two lively essays will interest everyone concerned with the epistemological problems of context, meaning, and subjectivity in the behavioral sciences.


Beyond the Case

Beyond the Case

Author: Corey M. Abramson

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 019060848X

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The social sciences have seen a substantial increase in comparative and multi-sited ethnographic projects over the last three decades. Yet, at present, researchers seeking to design comparative field projects have few scholarly works detailing how comparison is conducted in divergent ethnographic approaches. In Beyond the Case, Corey M. Abramson and Neil Gong have gathered together several experts in field research to address these issues by showing how practitioners employing contemporary iterations of ethnographic traditions such as phenomenology, grounded theory, positivism, and interpretivism, use comparison in their works. The contributors connect the long history of comparative (and anti-comparative) ethnographic approaches to their contemporary uses. By honing in on how ethnographers render sites, groups, or cases analytically commensurable and comparable, Beyond the Case offers a new lens for examining the assumptions, payoffs, and potential drawbacks of different forms of comparative ethnography.


The Value of Comparison

The Value of Comparison

Author: Peter van der Veer

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2016-05-19

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0822374226

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In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer makes a compelling case for using comparative approaches in the study of society and for the need to resist the simplified civilization narratives popular in public discourse and some social theory. He takes the quantitative social sciences and the broad social theories they rely on to task for their inability to question Western cultural presuppositions, demonstrating that anthropology's comparative approach provides a better means to understand societies. This capacity stems from anthropology's engagement with diversity, its fragmentary approach to studying social life, and its ability to translate difference between cultures. Through essays on topics as varied as iconoclasm, urban poverty, Muslim immigration, and social exclusion van der Veer highlights the ways that studying the particular and the unique allows for gaining a deeper knowledge of the whole without resorting to simple generalizations that elide and marginalize difference.


Comparing Ethnographies

Comparing Ethnographies

Author: Kathyrn Anderson-Levitt

Publisher:

Published: 2017-06-23

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0935302689

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Comparing Ethnographies presents cross-national comparisons that give researchers and students a fresh look at familiar concepts. How does it matter, for example, to think in terms of "majorities" rather than "minorities, "migrants" rather than "immigrants, or"intercultural education" rather than "multicultural education"? How does indigenous education or the work of teachers look different to ethnographers from differnt countries of the Americas? This engaging new volume edited by Kathryn Anderson-Levitt and Elsie Rockwell includes essays from experts throughout the Americas which help readers understand and learn from ethnographic educational research conducted across the Western Hemisphere, and also includes a practical guide to finding the relevant literature.


Meta-Ethnography

Meta-Ethnography

Author: George W. Noblit

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 1988-02

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 9780803930230

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How can ethnographic studies be generalized, in contrast to concentrating on the individual case? Noblit and Hare propose a new method for synthesizing from qualitative studies: meta-ethnography. After citing the criteria to be used in comparing qualitative research projects, the authors define the ways these can then be aggregated to create more cogent syntheses of research. Using examples from numerous studies ranging from ethnographic work in educational settings to the Mead-Freeman controversy over Samoan youth, Meta-Ethnography offers useful procedural advice from both comparative and cumulative analyses of qualitative data. This provocative volume will be read with interest by researchers and students in qualitative research methods, ethnography, education, sociology, and anthropology. "After defining metaphor and synthesis, these authors provide a step-by-step program that will allow the researcher to show similarity (reciprocal translation), difference (refutation), or similarity at a higher level (lines or argument synthesis) among sample studies....Contain(s) valuable strategies at a seldom-used level of analysis." --Contemporary Sociology "The authors made an important contribution by reframing how we think of ethnography comparison in a way that is compatible with the new developments in interpretive ethnography. Meta-Ethnography is well worth consulting for the problem definition it offers." --The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease "This book had to be written and I am pleased it was. Someone needed to break the ice and offer a strategy for summarizing multiple ethnographic studies. Noblit and Hare have done a commendable job of giving the research community one approach for doing so. Further, no one else can now venture into this area of synthesizing qualitative studies without making references to and positioning themselves vis-a-vis this volume." -Educational Studies