When is ethnography ‘real ethnography’?

Fleming, Jenny and Rhodes, R.A.W. (2023) When is ethnography ‘real ethnography’? In, Fleming, Jenny and Charman, Sarah (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Police Ethnography. 1 ed. Abingdon, Oxford. Routledge, pp. 53-70. (doi:10.4324/9781003083795-5).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

Once ethnography travelled beyond the boundaries of its home discipline of social and cultural anthropology, total immersion became less intensive and definitions of ethnography became ever more expansive so that it now covers at-a-distance fieldwork, an ethnographic sensibility, and stories that must meet aesthetic criteria of evaluation. We describe eight varieties of ethnography: hit-and-run, historical, focus groups, autoethnography, visual, applied, performance, and digital. We argue that, although each variety may not involve immersive observation, all are still ethnography because they share an ethnographic sensibility, which is about recovering the meaning of everyday life – about sitting where the other person is sitting. Every version of ethnography we discuss is ‘real’ ethnography because it deploys this ethnographic sensibility.

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