Approaches to Ethnography: Analysis and Representation in Participant Observation

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AuthorColin Jerolmack
PublisherOxford University Press, USA
PublishedOct 30 2017
Book FormatPaperback
ISBN-139780190236052
Dimensions8.1 X 5.5 X 0.7 inches
Weight 0.7 pounds
BISAC
CategoriesSocial Science > Sociology - Social Theory
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

No ethnographer can record and analyze everything that she encounters in the field. We must make choices about what to look at and how to look at it, which means privileging some aspects of social life while bracketing others. Approaches to Ethnography enumerates the key analytic strategies-which Jerolmack and Khan call approaches-that ethnographers deploy to tame the buzzing confusion of the social world. The book identifies eight approaches that typify ethnography, which it groups and compares along four axes: 1) Micro, organizational, and macro; 2) people and places, and mechanisms; 3) dispositions and situations; and 4) reflexivity. Each approach, it is shown, enables the illumination of a distinct dimension of the social world.

Every chapter is written by a seasoned ethnographer who enumerates one of the approaches and reflects on how that approach shapes their field site selection, observations, and analysis. Taken as a whole, the chapters show how these approaches, which operate more like sensitizing devices than theoretical mandates, can play a greater role in guiding the kinds of questions that get asked and answered in the field than whether one adopts an inductive or deductive stance toward theory. Engaging, accessible, and often inspiring, Approaches to Ethnography offers a practical and novel way to teach, evaluate, and conceptualize ethnographic research.

Author Bio

I am a professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at New York University. I am also chair of the Dept. of Environmental Studies.

My new book, Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town (Princeton University Press, April 2021), is an intimate, ethnographic account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet—whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet—is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public’s consent. Based on time I spent living in a rural Pennsylvania community, the book documents the dramatic confrontation between personal sovereignty and the public good that unfolds from the fact that landowners have the right to lease the subsurface of their property for oil and gas development.

This "deeply reported" (Publisher's Weekly) community study reveals "the tradeoffs that follow from America's liberty-loving ways" (Sarah Smarsh [author of Heartland], the Atlantic). What's more, it serves as a lens through which to understand the cultural polarization that drives so much of contemporary American politics and stymies efforts to combat climate change.

Research Interests

Ethnography; urban communities; environmental sociology; animals and society; culture; health; social theory.

Education