Literary Ethnography

What the ethnographer is in fact faced with—except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection—is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households … writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.

From The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz (1973).

1. by-sun-and-candlelight likes this
2. socio-logic reblogged this from reblogging4reference
3. whizzledizzle likes this
4. reblogging4reference reblogged this from literary-ethnography
5. praxjarvin reblogged this from thedisassociation
6. praxjarvin likes this
7. suchwonderfulnonsense reblogged this from thedisassociation
8. thedisassociation reblogged this from literary-ethnography
9. reblogging4reference likes this
10. filsdelalune reblogged this from fyeahanthropology
11. filsdelalune likes this
12. varshhhmellow likes this
13. corneta likes this
14. fyeahanthropology reblogged this from thissinkingboat
15. thissinkingboat reblogged this from literary-ethnography
16. unwordinglanguage likes this
17. awaitingrevolution reblogged this from literary-ethnography
18. blackspaceandstars likes this
19. gardant likes this
20. mrsfeathers reblogged this from alphacaeli
21. alphacaeli reblogged this from savage-america
22. redarmada likes this
23. juiceonice reblogged this from savage-america
24. juiceonice likes this
25. savage-america reblogged this from noellejt
26. imawhatever reblogged this from noellejt
27. noellejt reblogged this from literary-ethnography
28. measuringthedistance reblogged this from literary-ethnography
29. noellejt likes this
30. toriedactyl likes this
31. pr1medirective likes this
32. katiehillier reblogged this from literary-ethnography
33. neobohemians reblogged this from literary-ethnography
34. teamanthro reblogged this from literary-ethnography
35. literary-ethnography posted this