Asking and Listening: Ethnography as Personal Adaptation

by Paul Bohannan, Dirk Van Der Elst

Giving readers the capacity to include ethnography in their own experience! Asking and Listening is the first book to trace the changing ways in which human beings have learned to look at "the Others Beyond the Gate" with their strange languages and stranger customs. Not a history of ethnography so much as a chronicle of its uses and potentials, Asking and Listening examines the premises of ethnography and concerns itself with a wide range of issues such as ethnocentrism and the morass of cultural relativism, the cultures of corporations, and the meaning of ethnography for government policy. It ends with an examination of the problems in charting our ethnography in the information age, and for the future. Through its pragmatic analysis of cultures as storehouses of alternatives in the way universal problems can and have been approached, Asking and Listening offers readers not merely the opportunity to make sense of descriptions of other peoples' lifeways, but makes such ethnographic knowledge immediately useful in their own lives and choices and career plans. Titles of related interest from Waveland Anderson, Around the World in 30 Life as a Cultural Anthropologist (ISBN 9781577660576); Angrosino, Projects in Ethnographic Research (ISBN 9781577663690); DeVita, Stumbling Toward Anthropologists at Work (ISBN 9781577661252); Garbarino, Sociocultural Theory in A Short History (ISBN 9780881330564); Gardner-Hoffman, Dispatches from the Neophyte Ethnographers in a Changing World (ISBN 9781577664512); Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, Enhanced Edition ( 9781478602095); and van der Elst, Culture as Given, Culture as Choice, Second Edition (ISBN 9781577662693).

Genres: Anthropology, School, Nonfiction, Read For School

107 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Javier]

I had just finished reading No Anthropology: The Case for American Greatness and I thought I would get the other side of things. You know, teach the controversy and all that.

Bottom-line: I'm siding with GOD