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Fall Term, 2005

instructor: William W Kelly

Meeting in Room 1, 158 Whitney Avenue on Mondays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.

Ethnography is the detailed depiction and focused analysis of a human lifeway in extended form as an ethnographic monograph or in shorter form as a journal article. It is the central form of writing and mode of representation in anthropology, or at least that large sector of the discipline that calls itself sociocultural anthropology. This has been so for over a century, dating back to at least the mid-19th century.

This seminar takes up three sets of issues about the nature, forms, and standing of ethnography in the history and current practices of the discipline.

• Much contemporary debate about what we might call the politics and poetics of ethnography dates from the 1980s, a time when authorial intentions, expository strategies, and reader effects of ethnographies were called into serious question. Indeed, twenty years later, we are still working within and against the critiques of ethnographic conventions levelled in influential works of that decade. With now considerable hindsight, it is useful to reconsider some of the claims of these skeptics and critics. In particular, this seminar revisits the common claim that there was a "classical period" in anthropology of structural-functionalism and cultural holism that was marked by a dominant form of ethnographic writing. Is this a sustainable claim about our history? If so, what were these conventions of classical ethnography and how should we appraise them?

• A second set of issues arises from treating ethnographic "classics" in slightly different terms. That is, are there in fact classics of ethnography as well as classical ethnography? That is, does our discipline have a recognized canon of centrally significant ethnographic monographs? What does it include and what have been the standards of inclusion and exclusion? Is older ethnography still worth reading? Is it still possible to write ethnography? Should we contemplate anthropology without ethnography?

• Finally, I want to consider through our readings and discussions the broader question of just how ethnography does and should work as the privileged medium of our writing and representation. By their elaborations of the details of a lifeworld, ethnographies can become mired in mindless description, but this in fact is much rarer than often claimed. Rather, for much of the discipline's century of history, ethnographies have been generally a more ambitious form of grounded analysis, both deploying and contributing to more general theoretical arguments. They are in fact our most common form of theory-building, and understanding how this is so adds to our appreciation of the strengths and limitations of our discipline.

This seminar is intended for graduate students in anthropology and for upperclass students in the Departmental undergraduate major. You must have formal background in anthropology to enroll, and to facilitate discussion, enrollment is limited to ten students. I am not able to include auditors. Please see the syllabus page for a schedule of sessions and readings and the logistics page for details of the seminar organization and writing expectations.