Lecture (LEC)

This graduate seminar concerns the intellectual history, major theoretical orientations, and analytical techniques that have shaped ethnographic research and writing as a creative, observational, and analytical practice. In the course, students will explore ethnography as a process, both in the sense of a longue durée cultural item that is a product of a specific historical academic lineage, and also as a form of work and praxis. We will read a broad range of ethnographic texts, starting with nineteenth-century travelogues and ending with contemporary, mixed-media contexts. At all points, we will attend to questions of voice, positionality, method of representation, concepts of authority, and analysis as presented in and interpreted through the texts, as well as the situational logics, historical contexts, access to information, power relations, rapport, and silences upon which those data are buttressed. By surveying a diversity of authors and styles, students will trace the shifting logics of how social scientists have documented, analyzed, conceptualized, and presented their research for almost two centuries.