Quotes About Ethnography

This definition was not just limited to establishing a method for exploring the specificity of one human group in relation to another. It also desired, from the outset, to renounce the prejudiced and racist ethnography about which the West has never tired of berating itself. The intention could not have been loftier, but the well-known saying tells us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Because

The Greeks first identified the Amazons ethnographically, as a nation of men and women distinguished by something outstanding in their gender relations. Later, any ambivalence or anxiety that knowledge of this alternative gender-neutral culture evoked among Greeks was played out in their mythic narratives about martial women.

Ethnography of course means many things. Minimally, however, it has always meant the attempt to understand another life world using the self - as much of it as possible - as the instrument of knowing.

Instead of doing emotion work, we suggest that fieldworkers become more aware of their feelings and use them as data. As Arlie Hochschild (1983) argued, we can use feelings as clues [...]

To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one's ability to learn something new that exceed the frameworks with which one enters.

No longer do companies study consumers' psyches only by asking people what they think about technology and how they use it. Now they conduct observational research, dispatching anthropologists to employ their ethnographic skills by interviewing, watching and videotaping consumers in their natural habitats.

Ethnography must become self-critical, imaginative, and constructive; the field worker must be a willing agent of reform, but without sacrificing his scientific integrity.

I've sort of been an anthropologist of modern America, in a non-academic way. Whether it's Marines or Tupperware salesladies, high end audiophiles or bike couriers, I'm fascinated by the hallmarks of the American tribe.

Zanadto wlaz?em w towarzystwo, które tu kwitnie. Ci?gle zadaj? si? z Francuzk? i drem franc[uskim] (?ydkiem) z pierwszej oraz z ma?p? australsk?, wobec której wypuszczam zreszt? du?o snobizmu naukowego.

The final goal of which an ethnographer should never lose sight…is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world

Therefore, anthropology, the study of man, should be the core of every other discipline. Someday, it will.

I look at my time on this earth as social anthropology, at home and in work life.

The barbaric vernacular word for roasted human in New Guinea and elsewhere was long pig: I have never had the relevant degustatative experience myself, but it seems that we do, if eaten, taste very much like pigs.

Vespucci thrilled readers with gruesome accounts of the Indians' customs.

I think I've read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called 'The Philadelphia Negro'. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data.

I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.

I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.

As a group, anthropologists are not too fond of people who work in the business world.

The anxiety around such work [vulnerably written ethnographies] is that it will prove to be beyond criticism, that it will be undiscussable.

L'antropologia, dal mio punto di vista, è una filosofia che include le persone.

The Fijians, however, complained that the flesh of the whites was too salty and tough, and that a European sailor was hardly fit to eat; a Polynesian tasted better.

New Guinea, though it accounts for only a small fraction of the world's land area, encompasses a disproportionate fraction of its human diversity. Of the modern world's 6,000 languages, 1,000 are confined to New Guinea.

For anthropologists, even the exotic's not exotic, let alone the everyday.

The intrusion of outsiders in the day-to-day lives of Africans was the sort of thing I had always criticized.