"This text is something of a masterclass in its own right. Few are as well placed to comment on the debates surrounding ethnography – debates which the author had been instrumental in shaping – and to offer a clear and authoritative call-to-arms to future, aspirant ethnographers. It is a passionate but realistic manifesto for those wishing to undertake the craft of ethnography and to do it well. All who read it will benefit."
- Sam Hillyard, Durham University
This major book from one of the world’s foremost authorities recaptures the classic inspirations of ethnographic fieldwork in sociology and anthropology, reflecting on decades of methodological development and empirical research. It is part manifesto, part guidance on the appropriate focus of the ethnographic gaze.
Throughout Atkinson insists that ethnographic research must be faithful to the intrinsic and complex organization of everyday life. An attempt to rescue ethnography from contemporary ‘qualitative’ research, the book is a corrective to the corrosive effects of postmodernism on the analysis of social organization and social action. Atkinson affirms the value of fieldwork, while incorporating contemporary perspectives on social analysis.
Paul Atkinson is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University, where he is also Associate Director of the ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics.
Industry Reviews
Sociologist Atkinson (Cardiff Univ., UK) has written what should become a classic in the field of ethnography. For those who feel that ethnographies written over the last 20 years lack the liveliness of the great community studies of the 20th century, this book contains answers. Atkinson offers a corrective to what has become a methodological fetishism in the field, focusing more on technique than the art of understanding human communities as lived. In the spirit of C. Wright Mills’s charge to “take it big” instead of getting bogged down in the small debates of intellectual status groups, Atkinson advises readers to preserve the strength of the humanistic ethnographic tradition. He admonishes grounded theory for creating a fixation on coding and thereby disaggregating research instead of coming to know it in a more complicated way. Anthropologists should not think of themselves as the chief proprietors of ethnographic research. In a pithy chapter on ethics, Atkinson elegantly explores how ethnography is in itself a deeply ethical practice with its own built-in means of regulation, and is often traduced by review committees whose concerns are chiefly legal, not ethical or moral, and whose tradition comes out of the medical sciences, which have no affinity with the ethically attuned approach of ethnographic research.
