Summary
Contents
Subject index
Written by a leading authority, Thinking Ethnographically discusses a wide range of analytic ideas that can and should inform ethnographic analysis. In introducing the notion of “granular ethnography” it argues for an approach to qualitative research that is sensitive to the complexities of everyday social life. A much-needed antidote to superficial research and analysis, the text deals not merely with the practical methods of fieldwork, but with the far more ambitious enterprise of turning ethnographic data into productive ideas and concepts. Author Paul Atkinson enables us not merely to do ethnography, but truly to think ethnographically. His book will prove invaluable to students and researchers across the social sciences.
Time and Memory
Time and Memory
Introduction
It is something of a truism that the ‘ethnographic present’ can often appear to suppress time. We present our social actors and their social settings and in our monographs they can seem frozen in time. That is, of course, because the best of ethnographies can re-create situations and characters that remain vivid. When we think of the inmates of Goffman’s asylum, the inhabitants of Whyte’s Italian-American community, Liebow’s unemployed men at the street corner, they endure (Goffman 1961; Liebow 1967; Whyte 1981). They become icons in the ethnographic genre. But they can float in a vacuum. We can easily forget the extent to which they inhabit a historical and temporal universe. Now this chapter is not an argument for more ‘history’ ...
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