Archive for the 'ethnography' Category

What is ethnography for?

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

I was just looking back at my fieldnotes and was sort of surprised to come across this metacommentary on fieldwork that I wrote on the plane the first time I left for the field: One is reminded in flying to Europe of the class indistinction of anthropologists as professionals, of their dreadful similarity to tourists, [...]

Full of question marks

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

Continuing my analysis of the April 2010 debate at Paris-8 over the passage to “Expanded [Managerial] Competences,” which I invoked in my last post, I wanted to give a snippet of that discussion, since it says a lot about how French academics grapple with the future of their institution. I haven’t gone through the whole recording [...]

Excerpt: returning to the field

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

This is from my field notebook earlier this spring, as I returned to France after spending some time back in Chicago this winter. march 2 – on returning to france the sky hazed and prongs of sun forked into the railroad cars and the gravel ballast of the tracks. in the tunnel the buckles of [...]

The shape of ethnographic materials

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

My department asked me for a summary of my “results,” and I thought it would be worth posting some of that here because I think it’s worth trying to be public, and therefore honest, about what exactly one ends up with after a spell of ethnographic fieldwork. If I look at the physical form of [...]

The end of fieldwork

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

Who knows if anyone these days is still subscribed to this blog? But at any rate, this post is to say that I hope to resume posting, after a half year hiatus. I’m back in the States, having wrapped up my fieldwork in Paris a couple of weeks ago. At least, it’s wrapped up for [...]

Ways of using ethnographic data

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

(A van advertisement called “a new look at the future” is just one example of how the “future” is mobilized in French marketing discourse.) I am not a specialist in the literature on ethnographic methods per se, in spite of being an ethnographer by profession. This, I think, is a common situation for people in [...]

Fieldwork, Year 2

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

I’m sorry to see I haven’t posted a thing in a month. That should change rapidly as I get back into the swing of fieldwork. Starting a second year of research feels quite different from starting a first year; the language is somewhat less problematic, the campus feels familiar, and there are a lot of [...]

Urban surrealisms in the metro

Monday, April 12th, 2010

There are times when I feel like ethnography should be less about seeing the local point of view and more about prying free all those sights, events, phenomena that are locally invisible. For everyday life, in my fieldsite at least, is full of little absurdities and small surrealisms that seem to pass without notice. For [...]

The walk home from the field (is still the field)

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

After nights of fieldwork, ethnographers have to make their way home. For me, after I get off the metro, the walk looks like this: Except that the first time I try to take this picture, the camera focuses on the lines in the the bench where I propped my camera. When we correct for this [...]

Schematic of a French political system

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

I’ve been working on a grant application for next year and thinking about how to simplify my field situation for the sake of the grant reviewers. I started drawing some diagrams in the process, and while procrastinating from actually writing the text of my grant request, thought I would figure out how to make computer-generated [...]