Shifting Grounds: Experiments in Doing Ethnography

by Ina-Maria Greverus (Editor), Regina Romhild (Editor), Gisela Welz (Editor)

This 11th issue of the Anthropological Journal on European Cultures is dedicated to presenting ongoing and recent innovative ethnographic work on Europe. Prompted by relentless social, political and cultural reconfigurations 'on the ground', the issue seeks to explore the challenges that these pose to ethnographic fundamentals. In doing so, it takes a broad and inclusive approach to what constitutes ethnography, considering questions of theory and practice in and beyond the field, and provocatively reflecting on what constitutes 'the field' itself. Fundamentals that are put under the Spotlight in the volume place and space, history and time, disciplinarity, relationships between ethnographic and other sites and modes of expertise, and forms of representation and reception. All of these, as we show, are in a state of movement - they are all destabilised by ongoing change within the world and within anthropology itself. A challenge for contemporary ethnography is to find ways of working with this flux and the disappearance of pre-existing (if sometimes overstated) categories and boundaries.

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003