Ancestral Lines, Second Edition
At the core of the Teaching Culture series of ethnographies is John Barker’s Ancestral Lines: The Maisin of Papua New Guinea and the Fate of the Rainforest. This…
Tag: ethnography
Thinking with selfies
Kath Albury @KathAlbury continues our edition of ‘The Person in the (Big) Data‘ by talking about her research into young people and sexting. Instead of educating those who…
Origins and Scope of Thick Ethnography
Within a historical context, ethnography attempts to be holistic in nature based in part on emic views. It is written, observational science that provides an account of a…
Tanya Cassidy’s and Abdullahi El Tom’s “Ethnographies of Breastfeeding: Cultural Contexts and Confrontations” by Ben Kasstan
Ethnographies of Breastfeeding: Cultural Contexts and Confrontations Tanya Cassidy and Abdullahi El Tom (editors) Bloomsbury, 2015, 255 pages Ethnographies of Breastfeeding offers a timely insi…
The filmmaking case: the ethics of (mis)representation by Anna Wilking
As a visual anthropologist, I went to the field with the intent of making a documentary film about one of my informants, while also conducting ethnographic research with…
Trace ethnography: a retrospective
Stuart Geiger @staeiou continues our edition of ‘The Person in the (Big) Data‘ with a reflection on his practice of ‘trace ethnography’ that focuses on the trace-makin…
Why abstinence-only drug education doesn’t work—in fact, it backfires spectacularly.
I talked to a lot of middle-class recreational drug users for my research. None of them had any idea when they were younger that they’d end up dropping…
Geertzian moments (or, ‘when ethnographers lose their shit’)
Returning home from hunting on our Husband’s country, fieldwork (2008) There are certain moments during fieldwork that anthropologists refer to as ‘Geertzian moments’ o…
The Self at Stake: Thinking Fieldwork and Sexual Violence
[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Alix Johnson] I don’t intend to write about surveillance and suspicion, but then I spend my first five months of fieldwork feeling watched. …
The Person in the (Big) Data
This edition of EM is jam-packed with methods for doing people-centred digital research and is edited by EM co-founder Heather Ford, newly-appointed Fellow in Digital Methods at the Universi…
Filming Empathy – Part 1
In their essay “Whatever Happened to Empathy?” Hollan and Throop1 cite the ambivalence that Franz Boas felt about the usefulness of the concept for ethnography: On the one…
The intangible narcotic: What does ‘vibe’ mean, really?
There’s a term that comes up pretty frequently when talking about electronic music events. A search within my interviews (excepts from which are quoted here) and field notes…
Neely Laurenzo Myers’ Recovery’s Edge: An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency by Ellen Rubinstein
Recovery’s Edge: An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency by Neely Laurenzo Myers Vanderbilt University Press, 2015, 192 pages “RECOVERY! GET IT, GET OVER IT, OR…
Lemon Difficult: Building a Strategic Speculation Consultancy
Joseph Lindley works with design fiction in order to facilitate meaningful speculation about the future. In between he likes to make music, take photographs and combine the other two…
Free e-seminar: ‘It’s like a family!’ The unity and community of journalists
‘It’s like a family!’ The unity and community of journalists: On connections between newsrooms and how journalists share a community of practice Working Paper to the EASA Media…
A dilemma at the heart of multispecies anthropology: the “inclusion” of animals
“the “inclusion” of animals is not necessarily the most interesting issue, but rather how they are included [Candea 243]. If following a classic or “Durkheimian” model, where social…
Craig Young: an interview in SF
I did this interview for a project called Automated Anthropologist. (I went to San Francisco and let it be known that I was prepared to do anything anyone…
Bud Caddell
Whenever I have the chance to talk to Bud Caddell, I take it. This’s because while I know the future is badly distributed (in Gibson’s famous phrase), I fervently…
The Making of Lissa: Still Time—An ethnoGRAPHIC Novel
On World Anthropology Day, we are thrilled to highlight an important project that is currently in the works. This guest post is about the making of a graphic…
Don’t panic: the smart city is here!
Ding Wang, in her own words, ‘has a special interest in pursuing degrees whose names consist of two random words’ (specifically Tourism Management, Design Ethnography, and now Dig…
Myths perpetuated by the Ghomeshi trial (re-blog)
(Re-blog from PressProgress.ca) A Toronto court heard final arguments Thursday in the trial of former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi. Ghomeshi is charged with four counts of sexual…
A close-up look at Chinese social media platforms
Tom McDonald and Xinyuan Wang introduce China’s social media platforms Chinese social media is remarkable because despite extensive media coverage and academic research, these platforms remain s…
Everybody’s an Ethnographer!
Dhruv Sharma has a background in anthropology, has worked in various countries as an ethnographer, and also holds a master’s degree in design ethnography from Dundee University. His doctoral …
Feelings into words: Harvest Festival Part 2
Describing, in words, what it’s like to be at a rave is one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do for my research. How can one…