Overview
Ethnography is a fundamental part of anthropology. Ethnography “the writing of culture” is used in two contrasting senses, referring both to the method of qualitative research characterized by living and working among people through the process of participant observation and to the product of this research: the written account. This course will focus largely on the process of producing, reading and interpreting written accounts of culture, not on the methodology required for ethnographic research. Anthropology 402: Ethnographic Research Methods will provide an updated ethnographic methods course.
In this course we will review approaches to ethnography, read a series of ethnographies, consider ethics and contemporary issues in ethnography, and gain a sense of present and future directions and significance of ethnography. The ethnographies represent a range of approaches, and represent communities from North America, Africa, and Australia, including cosmopolitan urban and rural traditional societies, recorded by women and men.
Outline
The course consists of the following units.
- Unit 1: Introduction- What is ethnography?
- Unit 2: The Realist Tale
- Unit 3: Confessional Tales
- Unit 4: Interpretive Ethnography and Critical Ethnography
- Unit 5: Betwixt and Between- Fieldwork , the Academy and the People
- Unit 6: Reflections on Contemporary Ethnography
- Unit 7: Ethnography as Story/ Sharing the Story
- Unit 8: Post Modernism and Ethics
- Unit 9: New Contexts, New Directions- Ethnography in the Globalizing World
Evaluation
To receive credit for ANTH 401, the student must complete all assignments, achieve a minimum overall grade of D (50 percent), and a passing mark on the final assignment (critical essay or research paper).
| Activity | Weight |
| Essay 1 Ethnography Review | 20% |
| Essay 2 Ethnography Review | 20% |
| Ethics Essay | 15% |
| Critical Review or Research Paper | 45% |
| Total | 100% |
To learn more about assignments and examinations, please refer to Athabasca University’s online Calendar.
Materials
Digital course materials
Links to the following course materials will be made available in the course:
AAA Handbook on Ethics
American Anthropological Association Statement on Ethics
Physical course materials
The following course materials are included in a course package that will be shipped to your home prior to your course’s start date:
Van Maanen, John. 2nd., 2011. Tales of the Field, On Writing Ethnography. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Van Maanen, John, Ed. 1993. Representation in Ethnography. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Smith-Bowen, Elenore. 1954. Return to Laughter. New York: Anchor, Doubleday.
Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bourgeois, Philippe. 1995. In Search of Respect, Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, Deborah Bird. 2000. Dingo Makes Us Human, Land and Life in an Australian Aboriginal Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fienup-Riordan, Ann. 1990. Eskimo Essays, Yup’ik Lives and How We See Them. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Cruikshank, Julie, in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith and Annie Ned.1990. Life Lived Like a Story, Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Rabinow, Paul. 1986. Representations are Social Facts. Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory. In Writing Culture, the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Pp234- 261.
Anderson, Kevin Taylor. 1999. Ethnographic Hypermedia: Transcending Thick Descriptions. Sights-Visual Anthropology Forum
Fabian, Johannes. 2002. Virtual Archives and Ethnographic Writing, “Commentary” as a new Genre? CA*Forum on Theory in Anthropology. Current Anthropology 43(5): 775-786.