The Handbook of Ethnography

Abstract

Of further interest are two sociologically inspired chapters. One of these by [Lodewijk Brunt] organizes ethnography under the rubric of communities and community studies, thereby giving credence to sociological as well as anthropological work and bringing together tribes, clans, bands, villages, cities, towns, neighbourhoods, immigrants, families, social classes and "imagined" communities of many kinds into some kind of common symbolic entity. Undoubtedly adjusting to the direction set for the volume, the author does not push his analysis into some intriguing spaces signalled by his particular choice of topic such as questions about the borders and limits of ethnography, of macro demands for knowledge beyond communities and other epistemological factors. The other chapter by [Liz Stanley] introduces North American social scientists to observational fieldwork carried out in Britain between 1937 and 1939 and again immediately after WWII. Intended to capture "the historical moment," the Mass-Observation's fieldwork was portrayed as "a new form of social science, an anthropology at home, a synthetic sociology, and as an alternative to the very different form that the university-based social sciences of the day had taken (p. 93)." Arising in response to the royal abdication crisis of 1936, the fieldwork project was committed to Unking "ordinary people" to science by having them observe each other within a variety of social occurrences and on a variety of debatable social issues. As these "subjective cameras" and the demands of the "new science" were at odds with each other, the author implies that the interests of ethnography were set back for some time to come, defeated by "high positivism." The emotional and ethical appeals of this type of fieldwork would be congenial to the ethnographic cultures of today. Although obviously ethnographic fieldwork is always hard work, the chapter by [Christopher Wellin] and [Gary Allan Fine] offers a fresh perspective on the enterprise. It places what is usually seen as "methodology" into the arena in which careers and labour is usually situated. The approach puts a different complexion on the complaints echoed by generations of anthropologists-the difficulties of entrée into the field, the continual presence of ethical issues, the impact of the research, the retention of disciplinary rules, the translation into favoured theoretical bundles, the mundane pressures of everyday fieldworking lives and a myriad of other dilemmas. They become part of the "dirty work of making a living," the problems of dealing with bosses and superiors, labour-intensive but not capital-intensive and indeed heir to all of the exigencies and demands recognized by all occupations and bureaucracies. The chapter is both provocative and entertaining. Yet anthropologists will inevitably bristle at being informed that they are "less subject to critical reflection" than are sociologists. The Writing Culture efforts are dismissed as "broad, political and literary critiques of ethnography and its linkages to colonial power" rather than reflection (p. 325), thereby giving no acknowledgment that those very efforts were only possible because of extensive earlier reflection. Parenthetically, those who are tiring of the continual genuflection to Writing Culture and to Geertz, will find some solace as well as some amusement in [Jonathan Spencer]'s playfully iconoclastic chapter on postmodern ethnographies. For him the mavericks who broke the mould, like Bateson, did so well before the volume in question and Clifford Geertz is a "literary dandy" (p. 445).