Books about Ethnographer from Amazon.com

Covers the latest competing theories in the field

Get a handle on the fundamentals of biological and cultural anthropology

When did the first civilizations arise? How many human languages exist? The answers are found in anthropology - and this friendly guide explains its concepts in clear detail. You'll see how anthropology developed as a science, what it tells us about our ancestors, and how it can help with some of the hot-button issues our world is facing today.

Discover:

• How anthropologists learn about the past
• Humanity's earliest activities, from migration to civilization
• Why our language differs from other animal communication
• How to find a career in anthropology

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Price: $10.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Book Two of the Ethnographer's Toolkit series provides the reader with an introduction to participant and non-participant observation, interviewing, and ethnographically informed survey research, including systematically administered structured interviews and questionnaires. These essential methods are the basic building blocks of ethnographic data collection, providing researchers with tools to answer the principal ethnographic questions: "What's happening in this setting?"; "Who is engaging in what kind of activities?"; and "Why are they doing what they're doing?" The authors describe when and how to use these basic techniques and offer numerous examples of how these methods have worked in practice. Checklists, extended case studies, definitions, and cross-references aid the reader in understanding these methods..
Price: $23.86 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Ethnographer's Toolkit series begins with this overview volume, which defines the ethnographic enterprise, links research strategies to theoretical paradigms, and outlines the ways in which an ethnographic study can be designed. Using practical, straightforward language, the authors of this volume introduce readers to the ethnographic process, identifying issues, choices, and techniques covered in greater depth in other kit volumes, including chapters on the personal qualities of a good researcher and on research ethics. As a guide to the contents of the Toolkit series, or as a stand-alone introduction to ethnography, this volume will be extremely valuable to all novice ethnographers..
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Introductory textbook for qualitative methods classes done in the form of a comic book..
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Book Five of the Ethnographer's Toolkit series provides the reader with a variety of methods for transforming piles of fieldnotes, observations, audio and videotapes, questionnaires, surveys, documents, maps, and other kinds of data into research results that help people understand their world more fully and facilitate problem solving. Using methods common to qualitative and quantitative methods, this slim volume discusses ways of organizing, retrieving, rendering manageable, and interpreting the data through everything from simple statistics to narratives, graphic representation to triangulation. The volume keeps a continuous focus on producing results that can be used in policy and programmatic settings..
Price: $9.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In addition to the traditional use of participant observation, interviews, and surveys, qualitative researchers have developed a variety of other methods to obtain information in their studies. Visual data from film and still photographs are now supplemented with video and computer techniques and are used in many settings. Focused group interviews, once in the domain of market researchers, are now regularly used by qualitative researchers as well. Elicitation techniques, such as triads, pile sorts, and freelists, originally developed by cognitive anthropologists have been widely adopted to help understand the inner workings of the members of a group. In this brief volume, these three sets of methods are explained in simple, practical language. The authors describe when and how to use these sets of techniques for community research, market research, and formative evaluation and other health, social welfare, and educational settings both domestically and internationally..
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Algonquian and Iroquois natives of the American Northeast were described in great detail by colonial explorers who ventured into the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning with the writings of John Smith and Samuel de Champlain, Gordon Sayre analyzes French and English accounts of Native Americans to reveal the rhetorical codes by which their cultures were represented and the influence that these images of Indians had on colonial and modern American society. By emphasizing the work of Pierre François-Xavier Charlevoix, Joseph-François Lafitau, and Baron de Lahontan, among others, Sayre highlights the important contribution that French explorers and ethnographers made to colonial literature.

Sayre's interdisciplinary approach draws on anthropology, cultural studies, and literary methodologies. He cautions against dismissing these colonial texts as purveyors of ethnocentric stereotypes, asserting that they offer insights into Native American cultures. Furthermore, early accounts of American Indians reveal Europeans' serious examination of their own customs and values: Sayre demonstrates how encounters with natives' wampum belts, tattoos, and pelt garments, for example, forced colonists to question the nature of money, writing, and clothing; and how the Indians' techniques of warfare and practice of adopting prisoners led to new concepts of cultural identity and inspired key themes in the European enlightenment and American individualism..
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Penned by advanced graduate students amidst their dissertation fieldwork, these provocative essays capture the challenges and intricacies of that anthropological rite of passage. The collection’s authors frankly portray the mistakes they made in the field, their struggle to analyze the events unfolding before their eyes, the psychological and emotional frustration seemingly endemic to "doing" ethnography, and the ethical complexities of researching living people. The authors present these essays not as models of ideal fieldwork or as a series of lessons about how to overcome potential hurdles one faces in the field, but rather as a window into the complexities of "being" an ethnographer in the contemporary world. Against a backdrop of subject populations increasingly informed about global relations of power and, more specifically, informed about the topography of American imperialism, these humanistic essays vividly reflect recent shifts in both the focus and methods of anthropological research, as well as the dilemmas underlying the construction of anthropological knowledge. They are meant to spark discussion and debate. While tailored to an audience relatively new to ethnographic fieldwork (and intended as a teaching tool), this collection should appeal to anthropologists and ethnographers at all points in their career..
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It is George Stocking, more than anyone else, who has made the history of anthropology available to us. . . . [This] volume provides a multifaceted examination of anthropology from the time that fieldwork emerged as a defining element of our profession until (almost) the present. . . . Essential reading for anthropologists now.Daniel A. Segal, American Anthropologist For this collection, Stocking has written comments on each of the eight essays included, as well as an introduction providing autobiographical and historiographical context and an afterword reconsidering major themes of the essays in relation to the recent past and present situation of academic anthropology. The essays themselves address the work and influence of Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski; anthropology's powerfully mythic aspect and persistent strain of romantic primitivism; the contradictions of its relationship to the larger sociopolitical sphere; its problematic integration of a variety of natural scientific and humanistic inquiries; and the tension between its scientific aspirations and its subjectively acquired data. The Ethnographer's Magic may be read at several levels by practitioners from several disciplines: intellectual history, history of science, anthropology, even comparative literature, new cultural history, and literary criticism. Strikingly original in its design, it presents the historiographer as composer, responsive to his own lived experience [and] to those whom he encounters deliberately and by chance, defensive at times, disengaging himself from academic political sensibilities over certain issues, but, above all, a primary researcher into the further reaches of anthropology as a profession and as a discipline.Joan Vincent, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

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With contributions from leading researchers in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folklore, this volume contains personal, imaginative accounts of ethnographic fieldwork that do not fit into a traditional scholarly context, but are a vital and engaging aspect of studying different cultures. Individual pieces vary from autobiographical accounts of ethnographers' experiences in the field to fictional narratives. Together they invite the reader to places across the globe, offering richly detailed portraits of informants, local cultures, and life in the field..
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