No longer unsecure about their aesthetic sensibilities, contemporary ethnographers have expanded upon the established tradition of impressionistic and confessional fieldwork to produce works that not only stimulate the intellect, but that also delight the senses. From visual to reflexive ethnography, from narrative to arts-based inquiry, from hypertext to multimodal scholarship, and from autoethnography to performance ethnography, fieldwork has undergone a revolution in data collection practice and strategies of representation and dissemination. Read more …
Real Women Run: Running as Feminist Embodiment
Real Women Run: Running as Feminist Embodiment is a series of linked essays, haiku, and analysis of women’s embodied stories of running: how they run, how running fits into the context of their lives and relationships, how they enact or challenge cultural scripts of women’s activities and normative running bodies, and what running means for their lives and identities.
Off the Grid: Re-assembling Domestic Life
Off-grid isn’t a state of mind. It isn’t about someone being out of touch, about a place that is hard to get to, or about a weekend spent offline. Off-grid is the property of a building (generally a home but sometimes even a whole town) that is disconnected from the electricity and the natural gas grid.
Schooled on Fat: What Teens Tell Us About Gender, Body Image, and Obesity
Schooled on Fat explores how teens navigated the fraught realities of body image within a high school culture that reinforced widespread beliefs about body size as a matter of personal responsibility while offering limited opportunity to exercise and an abundance of fattening junk foods.
Ferry Tales: Mobility, Place, and Time on Canada’s West Coast
Imagine living in a place where feet and cars won’t get you very far without the help of a ferry boat. Picture having to surrender your freedom of movement to the vagaries of marine weather, to restrictions imposed by ferries’ timetables and loading capacity, and to the unpredictable fluctuations of daily and seasonal traffic. Visualize having to travel up to 36 hours to reach the nearest grocery store (and having to pay up to $300 for the privilege to get to it) and then needing to wait a week for the next homebound ferry.
Beads, Bodies, and Trash: Public Sex, Global Labor, and the Disposability of Mardi Gras
Beads, Bodies, and Trash merges cultural sociology with a commodity chain analysis by following Mardi Gras beads to their origins.
Digital Drama: Teaching and Learning Art and Media in Tanzania
Digital media and intercultural interaction in Tanzania, animated with African sights, sounds, and sentiments. A vivid portrayal of everyday life in East Africa’s only institute for practical art training, narrated through the life histories of students, teachers, and alumni. Cultural digitization in the historical context of a nation that has mixed tribalism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and cosmopolitanism in astonishingly creative ways. Cultural hybridity as a starting point for rethinking one of the classic concepts in anthropology – liminality – while introducing a new way of understanding statehood – the state of creolization.
Concrete and Dust: Mapping the Sexual Terrains of Los Angeles
Concrete, Exile and Dust focuses on the performative nature of sexualized identity in Hollywood, the people that live in its underbelly and surrounding valleys, the sexual geographies of the place, and the ways in which sexual agency is mapped on the body and in consciousness.
Water in a Dry Land: Place Learning Through Art and Story
An echidna lying dead on the road, soft pink palms turned upwards; floating across the Bokhara Plains at dusk in a luminous golden globe of light; massive sacred carved tree trunks locked in a wire cage; sun on river alive with pattern of fish trap rocks; body immersed in artesian water watching the Southern Cross silver into enormous indigo sky….
My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century
“My father was born into war,” begins this remarkable saga in Alisse Waterston’s intimate ethnography, a story that is also twentieth century social history. This is an anthropologist’s vivid account of her father’s journey across continents, countries, cultures, languages, generations—and wars. It is a daughter’s moving portrait of a charming, funny, wounded and difficult man, his relationships with those he loved, and his most sacred of beliefs. And it is a scholar’s reflection on the dramatic forces of history, the legacies of culture, and the enduring power of memory.
