In turn creative thinker and street flâneur, careful planner and adventurer, empathic listener and distant voyeur, recluse writer and active participant: the ethnographer is a multifaceted researcher of social worlds and social life.
In this book, sociologists Sarah Daynes and Terry Williams team up to explore the art of ethnographic research and the many complex decisions it requires. Using their extensive fieldwork experience in the United States and Europe, and hours spent in the classroom training new ethnographers, they illustrate, discuss, and reflect on the key skills and tools required for successful research, including research design, entry and exit, participant observation, fieldnotes, ethics, and writing up.
Covering both the theoretical foundations and practical realities of ethnography, this highly readable and entertaining book will be invaluable to students in sociology and other disciplines in which ethnography has become a core qualitative research method.
Industry Reviews
"On Ethnography is an exquisite essay on the ethnographic study of everyday life. Page by page we step into the field and linger with Daynes and Williams, deliberate the knotty paradox of social responsibility, experience the self-exposure of documenting, and find ourselves debating the nature of explanation, description, and interpretation. An impassioned and persuasive treatise on the process of doing and writing ethnography."
Carol Stack, University of California, Berkeley
"On Ethnography effectively describes the process of conducting fieldwork, while providing a rationale for the narrative style that documents ethnographically what subjects say and do together. Students of local culture will find this well-written and illuminating work highly informative and compelling."
Elijah Anderson, Yale University
