All too often anthropologists and other social scientists go into the field with unrealistic expectations. Different cultural milieus are prime ground for misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and interrelational problems. This book is an excellent introduction to real-world ethnography, using familiar and not-so-familiar cultures as cases. The book covers participant observation and ethnographic interviewing, both short and long term. These methodologies are open to problems such as lack of communication, depression, hostility, danger, and moral and ethical dilemmas—problems that are usually sanitized for publication and ignored in the curriculum. Among the intriguing topics covered are sexualized and violent environments, secrecy and disclosure, multiple roles and allegiances, insider/outsider issues, and negotiating friendship and objectivity.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- INTRODUCTION: Awkward Spaces, Productive Places
- PART I POSITIONED ENGAGEMENTS
- 1. Awkward Intimacies: Prostitution, Politics, and Fieldwork in Urban Mexico*
- 2. Disclosure and Interaction in a Monastery
- 3. Going Beyond “The West” and “The Rest”: Conducting Non-Western, Non-native Ethnography in Northern Thailand
- 4. Multiple Roles, Statuses, and Allegiances: Exploring the Ethnographic Process inDisability Culture
- 5. “He’s Not a Spy; He’s One of Us”: Ethnographic Positioning in a Middle-Class Setting
- 6. Dissent and Consent: Negotiating the Adoption Triangle
- 7. Doing Ethnography in “One’s Own Ethnic Community”: The Experience of an Awkward Insider
- 8. “And I Can’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore”: Fieldwork in Two Settings
- PART II ETHICAL ENGAGEMENTS
- 9. “Yo, Bitch* . . . ” and Other Challenges: Bringing High-Rish Ethnography into the Discourse
- 10. Reflections on Fieldwork Among Kenyan Heroin Users
- 11. Closed Doors; Ethical Issues with Prison Ethnography
- 12. Living in Sheds: Suicide, Friendship, and Research Among the Tiwi
- 13. Performing and Constructing Research as Guesthood in the Study of Religions
- PART III MULTI-SITED ENGAGEMENTS
- 14. Not Quite at Home: Field Envy and New Age Ethnographic Dis-ease
- 15. Multi-sited Transnational Ethnography and the Shifting Construction of Fieldwork
- 16. Multi-sited Methodologies: “Homework” in Australia, Fiji, and Kiribati
- References
- Contributors
- Index
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