Michael H. Agar – författare

Challenging the assumed usefulness of conventional scientific procedures as the most appropriate models for the study of human affairs, author Michael Agar continues the premise set forth in his popular work, The Professional Stranger. Informed by a hermeneutic and phenomenological tradition, Agar's fundamental thrust is that the social investigator's practices and procedures are open to inspection and therefore subject to critical assessment. He places the researcher's own taken-for-granted ways of acquiring knowledge at the center of the research process. The author discusses tradition and ethnography and looks at ethnographic understanding, specifically discussing coherence, breakdown, resolution, inference and schema, and scripts. He explores the ways borrowed ethnographic terms have been used in new contexts and examines ethnographic language and method. Presenting and comparing two examples of such language, he uses the life history of an addict and the world of independent trucking. The author's lively and succinct style makes Speaking of Ethnography highly readable and enjoyable. Teachers, researchers, and students in the fields of sociology, anthropology, evaluation and research methods, education, psychology, management, and organization will find it a thought-provoking work.

Culture: How to Make It Work in a World of Hybrids offers a compelling and original way to think about promoting connections across human differences in our global society. This book provides a fresh vision for the core anthropological concept of “culture,” one attuned to our contemporary global society where people receive hybrid cultural influences from many places in many ways.Providing a stimulating look at one of the most basic topics in social science, it is written without academic jargon, is rich in humor, and is replete with provocative examples, making it accessible to undergraduate students in anthropology and other social sciences as well as to scholars and non-academic readers in fields where the fostering of intercultural (or, as this book argues, inter-hybrid)communications is vital.Michael Agar explores two meanings of culture: culture as a label for the beliefs and practices of a specific group, and culture as marking the boundary between modern humans and our ancestors together with the rest of the animal kingdom (although this book acknowledges that that boundary has changed to a slippery slope). By looking back at the emergence of language and culture, through a broad range of the social and natural sciences, those human universals that make connections across human differences possible—as well as those that constrain that ability—are identified. This book concludes with a discussion of social perspective taking as a promising approach toward the development of a shared “languaculture” by any group of diverse—hybrid—humans who need to work together to accomplish whatever task is at hand.