Transforming Ethnographic Knowledge

The ethnographic methods that anthropologists first developed to study other cultures-fieldwork, participant observation, dialogue- are now being adapted for a broad array of applications, such as business, conflict resolution and demobilization, wildlife conservation, education, and biomedicine. In Transforming Ethnographic Knowledge, anthropologists trace the changes they have seen in ethnography as a method and as an intellectual approach, and they offer examples of ethnography's role in social change and its capacity to transform its practitioners. Senior scholars Mary Catherine Bateson, Sidney Mintz, and J. Lorand Matory look back at how thinking ethnographically shaped both their work and their lives, and George Marcus suggests that the methods for teaching and training anthropologists need rethinking and updating. The second part of the volume features anthropologists working in sectors where ethnography is finding or claiming new relevance: Kamari Maxine Clarke looks at ethnographers' involvement (or non-involvement) in military conflict; Csilla Kalocsai employs ethnographic tools to understand the dynamics of corporate management; Rebecca Hardin and Melissa Remis take their own anthropological training into rainforests where wildlife conservation and research meet changing subsistence practices and gendered politics of social difference; and Jim Yong Kim shows how anthropological thinking can transcend the cost-benefit logics that often prevail as the international community attempts to address global health crises.

Rebecca Hardin is associate professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment and in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is coeditor of Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form, a special edition of the journal Current Anthropology. Kamari Maxine Clarke is professor of anthropology at Yale University and author of Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa and Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities.