Reading Ethnography

Course Description

Summary

Ethnography is one of the key genres of writing in the discipline of anthropology and is employed across the social sciences. Proponents celebrate this genre for the nuance with which it describes social phenomena – while skeptics accuse it of getting too bogged down in detail. This course will consider how anthropologists read ethnography – what are some approaches to working with all of this detail? The course is organized around the close reading of several ethnographies, as well as students’ own selection of a recently published ethnography. Students will apply a variety of critical reading methods to the texts and develop short reflections, culminating in a book review. Through close engagement with ethnography, this course thus aims to provide students with critical research tools which will serve as an introduction to anthropology and the humanistic social sciences.