How to Read Ethnography is an essential guide to approaching anthropological texts. It helps students to cultivate the skills they need to critically examine and understand how ethnographies are built up, as well as to think anthropologically and develop an anthropological imagination of their own. The authors reveal how ethnographically-informed anthropology plays a distinctive and valuable role in comprehending the complexity of the world we live in. This fully revised second edition includes fresh excerpts from key texts for analysis and comparison along with lucid explanations. In addition to concerns with argument, authority, and the relationship between theory and data, the book engages with the purpose, value, and accountability of ethnographic texts, as well as with their reception and usage. A brand new chapter looks at the kinds of collaboration between informants/consultants and anthropologists that go into the making of ethnographic writing.
This book tells the remarkable story of the friendship between Liria Hernández, a Roma woman from Madrid, and Paloma Gay y Blasco, a non-Roma anthropologist. In this unique reciprocal experiment, the former informant returns the gaze to write about the anthropologist, her life and her environment. Through finely crafted and deeply moving text, Hernández and Gay y Blasco suggest new ways of doing and writing anthropology. The dialogue between Hernández and Gay y Blasco provides a courageous account of the entanglements and rewards of anthropological research. Drawing on letters, conversations, and fieldnotes gathered over twenty-five years, each of the authors talks about herself, the other, and the impact of anthropology on their two lives. They examine their intertwined trajectories as Spanish women and reflect on the challenges of devising their own reciprocal genre. Blending ethnography, life story and memoir, they undermine the dichotomy between author and subject around which scholarship still revolves.
Throughout the twentieth century, Spanish people have deployed conflicting sexual moralities in their struggle for political supremacy within the state. The Spanish Gypsies or Gitanos, who live at the very bottom of the Spanish socio-economic scale, have appropriated this concern with gender morality and, in the process, have reinvented themselves as the only honourable Spaniards. Although the Gitano gender ideology has a distinctively Spanish flavour, it revolves around a conceptualization of the female body that is radically different from that of other Spaniards. The subtle exploration of these acts of cultural invention is one of the original features of this important new ethnography. Another even more striking aspect of the work is the author's vision of the 'impermanent' nature of the Gitano social order and the absence of any representation of 'community' or 'society'. Unlike their non-Gypsy neighbours, Gitanos do not use concepts of tradition, territory or social harmony as bases for their singularity. Instead, they focus on the evaluation of personal moral performances in the present. In a cultural universe where all activities are markers of shared identity, and where personhood is always sexed, men and women continually enact the superiority of Gypsies over non-Gypsies. Through dress, manner and the management of emations, or at wedding rituals where the virginity of young brides is put to the test, the body works as the site of these processes.
This book tells the remarkable story of the friendship between Liria Hernández, a Roma woman from Madrid, and Paloma Gay y Blasco, a non-Roma anthropologist. In this unique reciprocal experiment, the former informant returns the gaze to write about the anthropologist, her life and her environment. Through finely crafted and deeply moving text, Hernández and Gay y Blasco suggest new ways of doing and writing anthropology. The dialogue between Hernández and Gay y Blasco provides a courageous account of the entanglements and rewards of anthropological research. Drawing on letters, conversations, and fieldnotes gathered over twenty-five years, each of the authors talks about herself, the other, and the impact of anthropology on their two lives. They examine their intertwined trajectories as Spanish women and reflect on the challenges of devising their own reciprocal genre. Blending ethnography, life story and memoir, they undermine the dichotomy between author and subject around which scholarship still revolves.
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