Madeleine Grawitz. Methods des sciences sociales (Paris, France: Dalloz, 1972). See pages 180-183 for a concise summary of some classical social scientific works on this subject. Hannerz, Ulf (1998) ‘Transnational Research’, in H. Russell Bernard (ed.) Handbook of Methods in Anthropology. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. LOÏC WACQUANT Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Thanks! That's really helpful.

Isn't the structure dependant upon the sort of ethnography and application of the work that you are doing?

Thanks Alan, it certainly is. Do you know of any text that elaborates on these issues?

Joseph Sumpf and Michel Hugues in their dictionnaire de sociologie (Paris, France: Librairie Larousse, 1973, 216-217) define structure in their first two sentences of a two page definition as, "manière dont les parties d’un tout sont arrangées …" Applying this definition to Ulf Hannerz's methodology in his classic ethnography, Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969, 16-17), his reader can readily note many instances in which this anthropologist has arranged the contents of his chapters in a particular manner in which he structures them in chapters which form a whole around such chapter themes as, "The Setting, Life Styles, Walking My Walk and Talking My Talk, Male and Female, Streetcorner, Growing Up Male, Things in Common, Waiting for the Burning to Begin, Mainstream and Ghetto in Culture, and in an appendix, In the Field." In Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron's le métier de sociologue (Paris, France: Mouton, 1968, 73-74), they explain where it is appropriate in sociological studies to draw on methods drawn from ethnography. If a reader examines some contemporary published ethnographies such as Aje Carlbom's The Imagined versus the Real Other: Multiculturalism and the Representation of Muslims in Sweden (Lund, Sweden: Department of Sociology, Lund University, 2003), the reader sees how a type of cognitive structure, "multiculturalist ideals" translates into a type of social action which "when dealing with the Other...masks essential important cultural and social aspects and processes." Similarly In Sara Johnsdotter's Created by God: How Somalis in Swedish Exile Reassess the Practice of Female Circumcision (Lund, Sweden: Lund Monographs in Social Anthropology, 2002), refers to Goode & Ben-Yehuda's (1995) concept of moral panic consisting of concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and volatility to describe Swedish viewers empirical reaction to a documentary, "The Forgotten Girls," that she recorded in observable manifestations such as important newspaper articles, mass media presentations, discussions by journalists and politicians about the extent and need to take immediate action about this problem, exaggerated figures, and a intensive interest one week before and after the broadcast (the World Trade Center terror attack occurred five days later), after which the mass media lost interest. Dr. Johnsdotter emphasizes that it was the sudden overexposure of the question, the official discussion's being stamped by exaggeration, moral indignation, and pointing to many more cases than there were in reality that constituted the moral panic. She also raises questions about equality before the law in Sweden when clitorodectomy is compared to other practices. Sara Johndotter demonstrates that a deeply enrooted tradition can be given up in a relatively quick way but could be supported if Swedish Somalis' own discussion had a greater place in the official society. Dr. Johnsdotter concludes that then signals in their own group would construct clitorodectomy as a practice from which most Swedish Somalis would choose to distance themselves. When her ethnography was published in 2002, Sara Johnsdotter anticipated that the new generation of Swedish Somalis would be able to speak and write Swedish fluently and be able to move around in Swedish and Somali cultural circles with an understanding of appropriate cultural codes and be heard in the wider Swedish society to a much greater degree than the immigrant generation she described.

Russ Bernard's text 'Research Methods in Anthropology' is an excellent resource for some of your questions along with the Handbook of Methods in Anthropology. His reference section is good also. You may wish to review some other existing ethnographic texts as a model for structuring your own work. Many dissertations and theses are available to download online for free through your university library.

Thanks Barry and Donna, this will certainly help me write a good paper on ethnographic texts (and how they're structured).

Could help also "Fieldnotes. The making of Anthropology" edited by Roger Sanjek, Cornell Univ.ersity Press, 1990; and I found beautiful pages on this subject in "What color is the sacred" of Michael Taussig, University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Thanks Francesco!

try these links to work by people like James Clifford, George Marcus, Said, Fisher etc

http://www.dourish.com/classes/readings/Clifford-OnEthnoAuthority-Reprsnts.pdf

http://www.scm.uni-halle.de/reporting_list/study_days/sektion3/2303618_2303641/

http://nicknicholas.net/ethnographic.html

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743141

Thanks John, great!

Hello! You're sure to get a lot of answers on such an open question. The following suggestions for reading are comprised of authors who have raised particular questions about the approach of ethnography; Kathleen Stewart, Dr. Kirin Narayan, and Edith Turner.

Review of Kathleen Stewart's book, Ordinary Affects

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wal/summary/v044/44.2.schaberg.html

Dr. Narayan's published works page at UW Madison, but specifically her article about Ethnography and Fiction

http://www.anthropology.wisc.edu/narayan%20book%20site/pub.htm

This is just an overall reading list from VT which includes Edith Turner's article, "Introduction to the Art of Ethnography". This list holds some of the most frequently cited works over the last 15 years.

http://www.sociology.vt.edu/Programs/Graduate/Forms/Qualitative_Methods.pdf

Best of success to you!

Regards,

Sherry Teal, MTSU

Hi, only reading this now, for some reason. Still useful though.

Thanks a lot!

Much has been written on this (e.g. Laurel Richardson's short book Writing Strategies (Sage)) but the best that I've found (i.e. most useful for my own research and the most popular with my students) is Howard Becker 1986 Writing for Social Scientists (University of Chicago Press).

sorry, I've been away from the site for a while. thanks for the recommendations. I know Becker's book and I'll certainly look for the other publications. much appreciated.

Hi Philippe,

The chapter by Atkinson & Hammersley is great. I'll check the other chapters. Thanks!

The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art  by James Clifford. or if you want something shorter and more precise then you can ook at the article by Tim Ingold 'that's enough about ethnography'