This new edition of a classic introductory text opens with an extensive chapter that brings ethnography up to date and aims it toward the next century. Agar shows how the fundamentals endure even as they adapt to a world unimagined when the research perspective developed more than 100 years ago.
This new edition of a classic introductory text opens with an extensive chapter that brings ethnography up to date and aims it toward the next century. Agar shows how the fundamentals endure even as they adapt to a world unimagined when the research perspective developed more than 100 years ago.
In our global, multicultural world, how we understand and relate to those who are different from us has become central to the politics of immigration in western societies. Who we are and how we perceive ourselves is closely associated with those who are different and strange. This book explores the pivotal role played by ‘the stranger’ in social theory, examining the different conceptualisations of the stranger found in the social sciences and shedding light on the ways in which these discourses can contribute to an analysis of cross-cultural interaction and cultural hybridity. Engaging with the work of Simmel, Park and Bauman and arguing for the need for greater theoretical clarity, Theories of the Stranger connects conceptual questions with debates surrounding identity politics, multiculturalism, online ethnicities and cross-cultural dialogue. As such, this rigorous, conceptual re-examination of the stranger will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in social theory and the theoretical foundations of discourses relating to migration, cosmopolitanism, globalisation and multiculturalism.
Participant observation is the foundation of ethnographic research design and supports and complements other types of qualitative and quantitative data collection. Qualitative research in such diverse areas as anthropology, sociology, education, medicine draws on the insights gained through the use of participant observation. The authors have written a guide to the collection of systematic data in naturalistic settings - communities in many different cultures - to achieve an understanding of the most fundamental processes and patterns of social life. This book serves as a basic primer for the beginning researcher and as a useful reference and guide for experienced researchers in many fields who wish to reexamine their own skills and abilities in light of best practices of participant observation. This new edition includes discussions of participant observation in nontypical settings, such as the Internet, participant observation in applied research, and ethics of participant observation. It also explores in greater depth the use of computer-assisted analysis of textual data in issues of sampling and in linking method with theory.
Social scientists have generally remained impervious to a major economic and cultural adaptation—namely, the peripatetic lifestyle—although this adaptation has been an integral part of developments within the socioeconomic and cultural networks that social scientists study. This lack of interest derives perhaps from the ambiguous integration of peripatetics into these networks as well as the often negatively charged constructs -Gypsies, outsiders, or marginal others—imposed on peripatetics by dominant cultures. As peddlers of the strange to borrow a phrase from Clifford Geertz, peripatetics are situated at the fringes of their host societies and many students of the social ecological and behavioral sciences still continue to overlook the roles of peripatetic peoples. This collection presents the latest in cross-cultural comparative research on the nature of peripatetic peoples. Contributors examine the place of peripatetic peoples in the everyday lives and diverse cognitive maps of client communities. Relying on Georg Simmel's construct of The Stranger, the contributors to this volume suggest that peripatetic peoples are simultaneously outsiders and insiders, but most important, they are entrepreneurial middlemen traders par excellence. All told, the essays provoke vital reassessments of the anthropological focus on the role and status of cultural brokers and go-betweens in political, economic, and social interactions.
The Intellectual as Stranger explores the historical association between images of the intellectual and those of the stranger, or the outsider to society. Using detailed case-studies, Pels examines the ambiguous strangerhood of political intellectuals such as Marx, Durkheim, Sorel, Freyer and Hendrik de Man.
Examining the relationship between strangers, embodiment and community, Strange Encounters challenges the assumptions that the stranger is simply anybody we do not recognize and instead proposes that he or she is socially constructued as somebody we already know. Using feminist and postcolonial theory this book examines the impact of multiculturalism and globalization on embodiment and community whilst considering the ethical and political implication of its critique for post-colonial feminism. A diverse range of texts are analyzed which produce the figure of 'the stranger', showing that it has alternatively been expelled as the origin of danger - such as in neighbourhood watch, or celebrated as the origin of difference - as in multiculturalism. The author argues that both of these standpoints are problematic as they involve 'stranger fetishism'; they assume that the stranger 'has a life of its own'.
This volume examines the cultural legacy of Jewish emigration from the Maghreb and the Middle East in the years following 1948. Drawing on the remarkable cinematic and literary output of the last twenty years, this collection posits loss as a new conceptual framework in which to understand Jewish-Muslim relations. Previous studies of Jewish emigration have followed the mass departure of Jews, but the contributors to this book choose to remain behind and trace the contours of Jewish absence in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern societies. Attuned to loss in this way, the cultural memories of Jewish-Muslim life transcend the narratives of turmoil, taboo, and nostalgia that have dominated Muslim and prevalent scholarly perspectives on Jewish emigration. Read as a whole, the collection affords an uncommon opportunity to mourn and heal through a nuanced reckoning with the absence of Jews from communities in which they had lived for millennia. Its wide geographic reach and interdisciplinary nature will speak both to scholars and lay readers in Amazigh studies, Arabic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Jewish studies, memory studies, and a host of other disciplines. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Iskandar Ahmad Abdalla, Abdelkader Aoudjit, İlker Hepkaner, Sarah Irving, Stephanie Kraver, Lital Levy, Nadia Sabri, and Lior B. Sternfeld.
This edited volume explores the educational significance of intercultural experience. It offers a broader conception of interculturality than commonly found in the area of foreign language teaching. Contributors represent a diverse range of academic and professional interests. The aim of the book is to encourage dialogue and interchange across this range, and beyond, to stimulate thinking about the educational value of intercultural experience.
Strangers in New Homelands is a collection of papers emanating from Annual International Conferences on the Social Reconstruction of the concept of “home” among immigrants in the diaspora. For many immigrants in the diaspora, the concept of “home”, around which this conference has revolved, evokes confusion, fear, hopes, and aspirations. The presentations in this book therefore seek to throw light on what this concept means for many people who have uprooted themselves from their familiar environments and settled or seek to make new homes out of strange and unfamiliar environments. The contributors in this publication were drawn from the field of researchers on immigrant and refugee movements and settlements, education, community development and front-line immigrant and refugee settlement workers. They draw on experiences from their research, field practice vignettes, personal experiences and case work examples to highlight and explore the critical issues involved in the field of forced and voluntary migration and resettlement around the world, and the settlement of migrants and refugees in new societies. Cumulatively, the contributors examine the challenges of settlement, integration and adaptation that new comers face in host societies. The critical approaches and strong balance of research with applications show the implications of the issues for the profession of social work and allied fields. The scholarship presented here also highlights the implications of the issues discussed for further research and social policy development. Anyone interested in learning about the challenges and intricacies of the migration process around the world must read this book. It is highly recommended for politicians, policy makers, social work professionals, educators and organizations dealing with immigrants and refugees.