and its management in state-buildin

worshiped Pan Hu, a legendary figure, as part of their New Year's celebrations.

he treatment is anecdotal

"Miao albums" that were compiled by officials responsible for governing frontier areas during the late Yongzheng or early Qianlong periods. These albums contained illustrations and texts describing the customs and practices of different ethnic minority groups in southwest China.

Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples was based on direct observation,

China saw a rise in ethnographic representation of different peoples, including the development of a systematic ethnography of ethnic minority groups.

The chapter also explores the development of anthropology and ethnography as academic disciplines, which began to take shape in the 19th century.

The Logic of Care

ground-breaking for multispecies ethnography

The founding text of twentieth-century ethnography, BronisławMalinowski’s 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes howin the ‘kula chain’ of the Massim Islands off Papua New Guinea, menwould undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas inoutrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most importantones has its own name, and history of former owners) – only to holdit briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from anotherisland. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing

Just because a self-proclaimed qualitative researcher conducts a semi-structured interview with a customer at home does not automatically make it “ethnographic.”

interactional ethnographic approach,

Instead what he said first inspired him were Talmudic texts, quotes from the original source on a page surrounded by the commentaries of Talmudic scholars interpreting the text, and reacting to one another’s reinterpretations. “Am I saying we should be Talmudic writers? I think one can be worse things.”

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thnographicobservations

METHODS

Ethnographic Investigation

A repertoire of very general, made-in-the-academy concepts and systems of concepts-"integration," "rationalization," "symbol," "ideology," "ethos," "revolution," "identity," "metaphor," "structure," "ritual," "world view," "actor," "function," "sacred," and, of course, "culture" itself-is woven into the body of thick-description ethnography in the hope of rendering mere occurrences scientifically eloquent

Such a view of how theory functions in an interpretive science suggests that the distinction, relative in any case, that appears in the experimental or observational sciences between "descrip­tion" and "explanation" appears here as one, even more relative, between "inscription" ("thick description") and "specification" ("diagnosis")-between setting down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found, and beyond that, about social life as such. Our double task is to uncover the conceptual struc­tures that inform our subjects' acts, the "said" of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behavior. In ethnog­raphy, the office of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself-that is, about the role of culture in human life-can be expressed.

conceptualization is directed toward the task of generating interpretations of matters already in hand, not toward projecting outcomes of experimental manipulations or deducing future states of a determined system. But that does not mean that theory has only to fit (or, more carefully, to generate cogent interpre­tations of) realities past; it has also to survive-intellectually survive-realities to come. Although we formulate our interpretation of an outburst of winking or an instance of sheep­raiding after its occurrence, sometimes long after, the theoretical framework in terms of which such an interpretation is made must be capable of continuing to yield defensible interpretations as new social phenomena swim into view

The first is the need for theory to stay rather closer to the ground than tends to be the case in sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstraction. Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effective in anthropology; longer ones tend to drift off into logical dreams, academic bemusements with formal symmetry. The whole point of a semiotic approach to culture is, as I have said, to aid us in gaining access to the conceptual world in which our subjects live so that we can, in some extended sense of the term, converse with them. The tension between the pull of this need to penetrate an unfamiliar universe of symbolic action and the requirements of technical advance in the theory of culture, between the need to grasp and the need to analyze, is, as a result, both necessarily great and essentially irremovable.

Ethnographic findings are not privileged, just particular: another country heard from. To regard them as anything more (or anything less) than that distorts both them and their implications, which are far profounder than mere primitivity, for social theory.

Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape. So, there are three characteristics of ethnographic description: it is interpretive; what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse; and the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the "said" of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms ... But there is, in addition, a fourth characteristic of such description, at least as I practice it: it is microscopic.

But as the standard answer to our question has been, "He observes, he records, he analyzes"-a kind of veni, vidi, vici conception of the matter-it may have more deep-going consequences than are at first apparent, not the least of which is that distinguishing these three phases of knowledge­seeking may not, as a matter of fact, normally be possible; and, indeed, as autonomous "opera­tions" they may not in fact exist

But it is an aim to which a semiotic concept of culture is peculiarly well adapted. As interworked systems of construable signs (what, ignor­ing provincial usages, I would call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, some-· thing within which they can be intelligibly-that is, thickly-described ....

rom this view of what culture is follows a view equally assured, of what describing it is-the writing out of systematic rules, an ethnographic algorithm, which, if followed, would make it possible so to operate, to pass (physical appearance aside) for a native. In such a way, extreme subjectivism is married to extreme formalism, with the expected result: an explosion of debate as to whether particular analyses (which come in the form of taxonomies, paradigms, tables, trees, and other ingenuities) reflect what the natives "really" think or are merely clever simula­tions, logically equivalent but substantively different, of what they think. ...

One is to imagine that culture is a self-contained "super-organic" reality with forces and purposes of its own; that is, to reify it. Another is to claim that it consists in the brute pattern of behavioral events we observe in fact to occur in some identifiable community or other; that is, to reduce it.

Once human behavior is seen as (most of the time; there are true twitches) symbolic action-action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music, signifies-the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense

Here, in our text, such sorting would begin with distinguishing the three unlike frames of interpretation ingredient in the situation, Jewish, Berber, and French, and would then move on to show how (and why) at that time, in that place, their copresence produced a situation in which systematic misunderstanding reduced traditional form to social farce.

Analysis, then, is sorting out the structures of signification-what Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cipher clerk when it is much more like that of the literary critic-and determining their social ground and import.

Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, this passage conveys, as any similar one similarly presented would do, a fair sense of how much goes into ethnographic description of even the most elemental sort-how extraordinarily "thick" it is. In finished anthropological writings, includ­ing those collected here, this fact-that what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to-is obscured because most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or what­ever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly examined.

But the point is that between what Ryle calls the "thin description" of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher ... ) is doing ("rapidly contracting his right eyelids") and the "thick description" of what he is doing ("practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion") lies the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which, as a cultural category, are as much nonwinks as winks are nontwiches) in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn't do with his eyelids

how could we take something seriously that had birthed lolcats? 

If the Web were a concrete space, what would it look like?

We find that often we can learn more about the assignment that a student had been given than about the student herself.

Old standards no longer hold. Ethnographies do not produce timeless truths. The commitment to objectivism is now in doubt. The complicity with imperialism is openly challenged today, and the belief in monumentalism is a thing of the past.

concern with the meaning of actions and events to the people we seek to understand

When ethnographers study other cultures, they must deal with three fundamental aspects of human experience: what people do, what people know, and the things peo-ple make and use

Fieldwork, then, involves the disciplined study of what the world is like to people who have learned to see, hear, speak, think, and act in ways that are dif-ferent

Ethnography is the work of describing a culture

Ethnographic fieldwork is the hallmark of cultural anthropology

In order to discover the hidden principles of another way of life, the researcher must become a student

Rather than studying people, ethnography means learning from people

The goal of ethnography, as Malinowski put it, is “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.”

anthropologist goes to where peo-ple live and “does fieldwork.”

The essential core of ethnograph

The central aim of ethnography is to understand another way of life from the native point of view.

Ethnography is the work of describing a culture

Qualitative differences like spending on recruitment or types of degrees conferred matter to solvency and public perception.

Sociologist Dorothy Smith called this “textually-mediated social organization” or institutional ethnography.

However, a diverse body of work on thesocially situated nature of scientific communication alreadyexists which points the way. This ranges from Crane’s(1969) pioneering analyses of invisible colleges throughLatour and Woolgar’s (1979) classic study of laboratory lifeat the Salk Institute to Traweek’s (1992) richly texturedethnography of the HEP community. In addition, the workof Schatz and colleagues on the Worm Community Systemproject, which was designed to capture the full range ofknowledge, formal and informal, of the community of mo-lecular biologists who study the nematode worm C. elegans(see: http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/projects/wcs/index.html)can provide useful insights; so, too, research into the mate-rial practices and social interactions of scientists working incollaboratories, such as the Upper Atmospheric ResearchCollaboratory (see: http://intel.si.umich.edu/crew/Research/resrch08.htm) or the Space, Physics & Aeronomy ResearchCollaboratory (see: http://intel.si.umich.edu/sparc/) at theUniversity of Michigan

When Brenda starts working with a teacher for the first time, she begins by sharing much more about herself with others than she would have done back in 2008 when she began as an Education Advisor. She finds that it helps to forge a stronger connection.  She remembers hearing someone say that we are constantly asking our students to take risks and share information about themselves with the class and with the teacher, so as teachers we should model this and do the same with our students. This person convinced Brenda that it strengthens bonds, makes us more engaged with each other and makes the teaching and learning much more meaningful and fun.

One of the women in the Australian Shepherd breed is C.A. Sharp, she got her BA in RTF, has no formal genetics education, works as an accountant, was a breeder of Australian Shepherds who have nothing to do with Australia, they’re actually Western U.S. ranch dogs, they’re only called Australian through the Basque Sheep herders who immigrated to Australia during the same period. Sharp is an activist in the breed, and as a lay-activist publishes the Double Helix Network News, which organizes the breed interest in genetic health and disease issues. She and a friend organized a series of test-breedings around a certain eye disease which she was quite certain Australian Shepherds were subject to but which vets and geneticists denied. They designed an excellent data set to prove a point and then solicited a scientist to publish it under his name so that it could become a fact in the literature. There is a very savvy manipulation of scientific credibility in this story. It was also very clear that to make a fact a fact in an effective way, that is to say something that people will act on, requires also the emotional support system that would allow a breeder the chance not to feel stigmatized by the genetic disease of his or her dog. Thus, the emotional economy of the stabilization of a fact was also quite deliberately engaged as part of the work of doing genetics in this breed. It’s a complex sociality: the research design, the mating design, the alliance with veterinary opthamologists, with biochemical geneticists, with people who will form support groups, the alliance with the breed group movers and shakers to get a certain degree of openness. I was fascinated by the management of the material culture of making a fact whole, namely that these dogs are subject to this eye anomaly and that an action has to be taken. The kind of everyday story of what constitutes a fact, its literary material and social technologies is in Sharp’s practice in an extremely interesting way.

to research ‘sensory perception and reception’ requires methods that ‘are capable of grasping “the most profound type of knowledge [which] is not spoken of at all and thus inaccessible to ethnographic observation or interview” (Bloch 1998: 46)’ (Bendix 2000: 41). Thus sensory ethnography discussed in the book does not privilege any one type of data or research method. Rather, it is open to multiple ways of knowing and to the exploration of and reflection on new routes to knowledge.