How to Read Ethnography

Paloma Gay y Blasco is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK.Huon Wardle is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews, UK.

'This is a fine book and a superb guide for students reading ethnographic texts. Drawing upon a judicious sampling of ethnographies from many epochs and parts of the world, the authors succeed brilliantly in disclosing the complex character of every essay in human understanding, as well as inspiring anthropologists to ponder the notion of comparison in radically new ways.'Michael D. Jackson, Harvard University, USA 'With veritable cartographic genius, the authors lead us across the fascinating terrain of ethnography and its diverse interlocuters. This second edition moves some important new horizons into sight. As surefooted and perspicacious as ever, the way our guides have us pause to take bearings on the journey gives fresh impetus to teaching and learning.'Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge, UK'There is a major and dominant image of anthropology, presenting it as the result of a sequence of progressive and ascending stages (fieldwork, ethnography, anthropological theory) toward a ‘science of mankind’. How to Read Ethnography documents, analyses, and exposes another image of the discipline – minor, interstitial, and much more interesting: the practice of anthropology as a movement of continuous and reversible variations between the dimensions of a knowledge that can only be built at the crossroads of what we learn in the field and what we read in the library.'Marcio Goldman, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

• Preface to the second edition Introduction: The concerns and distinctiveness of ethnography 1. Comparison: the ethnographic outlook 2. People in context 3. Relationships and meanings 4. Narrating the immediate 5. Ethnography as argument 6. Authors and authority 7. Taking a stance: theories for a changing world 8. Informants, interlocutors, collaborators Conclusion: Ethnography in the human conversation: a final remark