From Notes To Narrative Writing Ethnographies That Everyone Can Read

Ethnography centers on the culture of everyday life. So it is ironic that most scholars who do research on the intimate experiences of ordinary people write their books in a style that those people cannot understand. In recent years, the ethnographic method has spread from its original home in cultural anthropology to fields such as sociology, marketing, media studies, law, criminology, education, cultural studies, history, geography, and political science. and#160;Yet, while more and more students and practitioners are learning how to write ethnographies, there is little or no training on how to write ethnographies well.

and#160;From Notes to Narrative picks up where methodological training leaves off.and#160; Kristen R. Ghodsee, an award-winning ethnographer, addresses common issues that arise in ethnographic writing. Ghodsee works through sentence-level details, such as word choice and structure. She also tackles bigger-picture elements, such as how to incorporate theory and ethnographic details, how to effectively deploy dialogue, and how to avoid distracting elements such as long block quotations and in-text citations. She includes excerpts and examples from model ethnographies. The book concludes with a bibliography of other useful writing guides and nearly one hundred examples of eminently readable ethnographic books.

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 and#147;safe for human differences.and#8221; 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.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is professor of gender and womenandrsquo;s studies at Bowdoin College, and a former Guggenheim Fellow in Anthropology and Cultural Studies.and#160; She is the author of five books, most recently Lost In Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism and The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe.