解读民族志

This course helps students to develop a critical understanding of texts and explains how to identify and analyze the core ideas in order to apply these ideas to other areas of study. Above all, it enables students to read ethnographies anthropologically and to develop an anthropological imagination of their own. Combining lucid explanations with selections from key texts, this course is a guide for those new to the subject or in need of intellectual refreshment. The course begins with the basic concerns addressed in all ethnograpic texts by anthropologists — the concern with understanding different cultural or social life worlds by reference to each other, that is to say, through comparison. The course proceeds to examine the distinctive stylistic devices, techniques of processing information and modes of argument that anthropologists use to address the concerns. We focus on (i) how anthropologists portray lived experience; and (ii) how they shape this portrayal through positioning the ethnography as an argument. It then opens up the discussion by considering the social and cultural settings within which ethnographies are produced. The course concludes by showing that ethnographic writing delivers a distinct kind of knowledge. We explore in detail what this knowledge involves and the continuing importance of ethnography for a conversation about what it means to be human.