Cultural Anthropology· 2012Q1
ETHNOGRAPHY IN LATE INDUSTRIALISM
- 569citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2012year
Short summary
Contemporary ethnography should adopt a 'looping' approach, using ethnographic findings to inform and creatively redirect further engagement within a problem domain, fostering collaboration and activist potential.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Late industrialism is characterized by degraded infrastructure, exhausted paradigms, and new media chatter.
- Advocates for ethnography that is 'attuned to its times' and employs a 'looping' methodology.
- Looping ethnography uses findings to refine and redirect future engagement within a problem domain.
- This method emphasizes collaboration with interlocutors to generate new idioms and world-engaging practices.
- The approach is framed as activist, aiming to provoke new articulations and attend to emergent realities.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
This essay situates contemporary ethnography within late industrialism, a historical period characterized by degraded infrastructure, exhausted paradigms, and the incessant chatter of new media. In the spirit of Writing Culture, it calls for ethnography attuned to its times. It also calls for ethnography that “loops,” using ethnographic techniques to discern the discursive risks and gaps of a particular problem domain so that further ethnographic engagement in that domain is responsive and creative, provoking new articulations, attending to emergent realities. Ethnographic findings are thus fed back into ethnographic engagement. This mode of ethnography stages collaboration with interlocutors to activate new idioms and ways of engaging the world. It is activist, in a manner open to futures that cannot yet be imagined.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Cultural Anthropology, 2012 · DOI ↗
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Field: Anthropology
AnthropologySocial Sciences