From Notes to Narrative

Ethnography is a qualitative method that focuses on the culture of everyday life and examines the diversity of worldviews that shape the social politics of local communities, making the world safe for human differences. In recent years, the ethnographic method has spread from its origins in cultural anthropology and sociology to a variety of academic disciplines and even to the business world and the military. In this guidebook, Kristen Ghodsee offers ethnographers across all these disciplines and contexts practical advice on writing prose that is compelling and accessible to fellow scholars and nonspecialist readers alike. In addition to issues of sentence-level clarity, she addresses such matters as how to incorporate both theory and ethnographic details, how to construct and effectively deploy dialogue, and how to choose and discuss images. The book is structured into twelve brief chapters, each including judiciously selected excerpts and examples from model ethnographies, and it concludes with an extensive bibliography."