Ethnography

Ethnography (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω grapho "I write") is the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. An ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group. The word can thus be said to have a double meaning, which partly depends on whether it is used as a count noun or uncountable. The resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a c ...more

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio
Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
Righteous Dopefiend
Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (updated with a new preface)
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States
Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street
Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Argonauts of the Western Pacific
Sidewalk
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries)
The Forest People

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Matthew Desmond
[...] ethnography is what you do when you try to understand people by allowing their lives to mold your own as fully and genuinely as possible.
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

...tales in search of an excuse for their telling.
John Van Maanen, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography

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