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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
(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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]