Ethnography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Kwame Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Distinct Features ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Ethnography (Understanding Qualitative Research) provides a comprehensive guide to understanding, conceptualizing, and critically assessing ethnographic research and its resultant texts. Through a series of discussions and illustrations, utilizing both classic and contemporary examples, the book highlights distinct features of ethnography as both a research methodology and a writing tradition. It emphasizes the importance of training—including familiarity with culture as an anthropologically derived concept and critical awareness of the history of ethnography. To this end, it introduces the notion of ethnographic comportment, which serves as a standard for engaging and gauging ethnography. Indeed, ethnographic comportment issues from a familiarity with ethnography’s problematic past and inspires a disposition of accountability for one’s role in advancing ethnographic practices. Following an introductory chapter outlining the emergence and character of ethnography as a professionalized field, subsequent chapters conceptualize ethnographic research design, consider the practices of representing research methodologies, discuss the crafting of accurate and evocative ethnographic texts, and explain the different ways in which research and writing gets evaluated. While foregrounding interpretive and literary qualities that have gained prominence since the late twentieth century, the book properly situates ethnography at the nexus of the social sciences and the humanities. Ethnography (Understanding Qualitative Research) presents novice ethnographers with clear examples and illustrations of how to go about conducting, analyzing, and representing their research; its primary purpose, however, is to introduce readers to effective practices for understanding and evaluating the quality of ethnography.

Historical Overview of Qualitative Research in the Social Sciences

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-58
Author(s):  
Svend Brinkmann ◽  
Michael Hviid Jacobsen ◽  
Søren Kristiansen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Technological History

Qualitative research does not represent a monolithic, agreed-on approach to research but is a vibrant and contested field with many contradictions and different perspectives. To respect the multivoicedness of qualitative research, this chapter will approach its history in the plural—as a variety of histories. The chapter will work polyvocally and focus on six histories of qualitative research, which are sometimes overlapping, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes even incommensurable. They can be considered articulations of different discourses about the history of the field, which compete for researchers’ attention. The six histories are: (a) the conceptual history of qualitative research, (b) the internal history of qualitative research, (c) the marginalizing history of qualitative research, (d) the repressed history of qualitative research, (e) the social history of qualitative research, and (f) the technological history of qualitative research.

Introduction

Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Changing Roles ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.

History and the Militarized Landscape

2018 ◽  
pp. 162-184
Author(s):  
David Biggs
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Environmental Processes ◽  
Central Vietnam ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The environmental history of war, especially its impacts on landscape, encompasses a much broader scope than the conflicts and the historiography of the late twentieth century. Ideas on the social and environmental processes of conflict draw from a much longer, global discourse. This chapter uses the ancient-to-modern conflict landscape of central Vietnam to argue for a multi-layered, broader analysis of the environmental history of conflict.

Historical Overview of Qualitative Research in the Social Sciences

2014 ◽  
pp. 16-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svend Brinkmann ◽  
Michael Hviid Jacobsen ◽  
Søren Kristiansen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Technological History

Qualitative research does not represent a monolithic, agreed-upon approach to research but is a vibrant and contested field with many contradictions and different perspectives. In order to respect the multivoicedness of qualitative research, we will approach its history in the plural—as a variety of histories. We will work polyvocally and focus on six histories of qualitative research, which are sometimes overlapping, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes even incommensurable. They can be considered as articulations of different discourses about the history of the field, which compete for researchers’ attention. The six histories are: (1) the conceptual history of qualitative research, (2) the internal history of qualitative research, (3) the marginalizing history of qualitative research, (4) the repressed history of qualitative research, (5) the social history of qualitative research, and (6) the technological history of qualitative research.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauri L. Hyers
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Thick Description ◽  
Diary Data ◽  
Popular Medium ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bear Witness

This introductory chapter discusses the history of the diary in popular culture and as a research method in the social sciences Over the last several centuries, diary keeping has evolved into a popular medium through which diarists can bear witness to their experiences and events of the world. The diary is a treasure trove, containing the riches of first-hand testimony on a wealth of subjects: from the adventures of travel to the despairs of prison, from the mundane ruminations of adolescence to the horrors of the battlefield. The embedded and contextualized nature of diary data appeals to those in the humanities and social sciences who are seeking the “thick description” that is the hallmark of qualitative research (Geertz, 2003).

Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medieval England

1994 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 430-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gervase Rosser
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Voluntary Association ◽  
The Social ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In the history of medieval ideas about community, a prominent place must be accorded to the fraternity, or guild. This type of voluntary association, found throughout medieval Europe, frequently applied to itself the name of communitas. The community of the guild was not, however, a simple phenomenon; it invites closer analysis than it has yet received. As religious clubs of mostly lay men and (often) women, the fraternities of medieval Christendom have lately been a favored subject among students of spirituality. Less interest, however, has recently been shown in the social aspects of the guilds. One reason for this neglect may be precisely the communitarian emphasis in the normative records of these societies, which most late twentieth-century historians find unrealistic and, perhaps, faintly embarrassing. But allowing, as it must be allowed, that medieval society was not the Edenic commune evoked in fraternity statutes, the social historian is left with some substantial questions concerning these organizations, whose number alone commands attention: fifteenth-century England probably contained 30,000 guilds. Why were so many people eager to pay subscriptions—which, though usually modest, were not insignificant—to be admitted as “brothers” and “sisters” of one or more fraternities? Who attended guild meetings, and what did they hope to achieve by doing so? What social realities gave rise to the common language of equal brotherhood? This essay is intended to shed some light on these questions by focusing on what for every guild was the event which above all gave it visible definition: the annual celebration of the patronal feast day.

Accounting for discovery

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Sampson ◽  
Paul Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Genetic Basis ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Autobiographical Work ◽  
Genetic Medicine ◽  
Important Milestone

The paper presents an analysis of genetic scientists’ accounts of a 1992 scientific breakthrough. Members of the research team were interviewed in the course of a wider study of the history of the discovery and its implications for clinical practice. The isolation of the genetic basis for myotonic dystrophy was an important milestone in the development of contemporary genetic medicine and a significant event in the lives and careers of the scientists involved. Despite the significance of some key publications on scientists’ discovery accounts, the paper argues that there has been a neglect of scientists’ narratives and accounting practices, despite the increased visibility of narrative analysis in the social sciences, the increasing sophistication of qualitative research methods, and the expansion of qualitative research on scientific work and practice. The paper outlines a number of themes in the scientists’ autobiographical work and their methods in recounting the discovery.

Gender and Literary Valorization: The Awakening of a Canonical Novel

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Corse ◽  
Saundra Davis Westervelt
Keyword(s):  
Reception History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Critical Position ◽  
Female Self ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Interpretive Strategies ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

We use the reception history of Kate Chopin's The Awakening to study the social context in which and processes through which literary texts are evaluated. We explain The Awakening‘s ascendancy from an initial negative critical position in 1899 to its current canonical status by the emergence of new “interpretive strategies” for understanding and evaluating texts. The dominant interpretive strategies of nineteenth-century reviewers sentimentalized women as selfless wives and mothers responsible for moral purity, making it difficult to construct a valued or fruitful narrative from The Awakening. Late-twentieth-century feminist interpretive strategies, however, were highly productive tools for rereading The Awakening, generating a socially resonant narrative focused on the search for an independent female self. Most important, we show that analytic attention to interpretive strategies allows sociologists to analyze both the meanings constructed from texts and the differential judgments attached to them under varying interpretive strategies.

How Does Paper Mean?

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Asheesh Kapur Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Book History ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Physical Attributes ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Specialized Form ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

At a 2004 conference at Princeton University, the leading practitioners of two influential approaches to studying the history of texts—the “history of the book” and “intellectual” history—compared the underpinnings of their respective methods. Robert Darnton contended that while seemingly “made for each other,” book history and intellectual history had proceeded along parallel paths over the late twentieth century, with the latter focused on the analysis of discourse, while historians of the book concerned themselves with the diffusion of texts. Quentin Skinner responded to Darnton by elaborating on these “contrasts.” He characterized the history of the book as “a specialized form of inquiry into the production, diffusion and enjoyment of printed and scribally published material,” while describing intellectual historians as primarily concerned with the meanings that actors in the past have ascribed to concepts as they expressed them in language. Intellectual historians, Skinner suggested, had paid relatively little attention to the social histories of how texts were produced and received, including questions of their physical attributes.

‘An Open and Notorious House of Lewdness’: Dora Noyce and the Danube Street Brothel

2018 ◽  
pp. 114-128
Author(s):  
Roger Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Local Level ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Law ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Second World ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Chapter 6 explores the life of Dora Noyce and her business enterprise at 17 and 17a Danube Street, Edinburgh, as a peg upon which to hang a broader review of how the law operated at the local level to regulate prostitution and brothel-keeping in late twentieth-century Scotland. Primarily based on oral history interviews and newspaper reports, the study reveals the social background and outlook of Dora Noyce before describing the operation of her brothel, including details of sexual transactions and the social status and motivation of the women employed as prostitutes. Thereafter, the history of the Danube Street brothel is located within a more general review of the law relating to brothel keeping in Scotland and its previous implementation prior to the Second World War. The study then focuses on the possible reasons for the degree of tolerance shown by the police authorities in Edinburgh to Dora Noyce from the 1950s through to the 1970s and the extent to which this signified a more complex and nuanced relationship between the law and the sexual underworld than is conventionally conveyed in police and court records.

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