Approaches to Ethnography Analysis and Representation in Participant Observation

Approaches to Ethnography illustrates the various modes of representation and analysis that typify participant observation research. In contrast to the multitude of ethnographic textbooks, handbooks, and readers on the market, this book is neither a "how-to" guide nor a catalogue of substantive themes such as race, community, or space; it also avoids re-hashing epistemological debates, such as grounded theory versus the extended case method. Instead, this volume concisely lays out the predominant analytic lenses that ethnographers use to explain social action--for instance, whether they privilege micro-interaction or social structure, people and places or social processes, internal dispositions or situational contingencies. Each chapter features a prominent ethnographer delineating a distinct approach to the study of everyday life and reflecting on how their approach shapes the way they analyze and represent the field. Taken together, the collection is a practical guide that spells out how different styles of ethnography illuminate different dimensions of everyday social life. As such, Approaches to Ethnography complements and augments--but not duplicate--existing ethnographic methods and logic of inquiry texts for undergraduate and graduate courses on qualitative research methods.

Colin Jerolmack is an assistant professor of sociology and environmental studies at New York University. He is the author of The Global Pigeon (Chicago, 2013), a comparative ethnography of how our relationships with animals shape city life. Shamus Khan is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School (Princeton, 2011), an ethnographic study of an elite boarding school, and coeditor of The Practice of Research: How Social Scientists Answer their Questions (with Dana Fisher, Oxford, 2013).