Social Research Methods
Week 2, Lecture 1 (Monday) Ethnographic Research
Ethnography
•Ethnography is the main method of anthropology
•It is widely used in sociology, education, health, organisational studies, and other
disciplines
•It uses participant observation as main method
•It produces ethnographies
Contemporary ethnographies
•Producing the superior self: The struggle for status and justification of inequality among
workers in luxury hotels (Rachel Sherman)
•Everybody knows him: how to build and maintain useful social networks (Laura
Clawson)
•Left high and dry: the lives of women married to seafarers in Goa and Mumbai (Helen
Sampson)
•It’s a suckers outfit: how urban gangs reintegrate ex-cons (Greg Scott)
•Parts unknown: undercover ethnography of organs trafficking (Nancy Scheper-Hughes)
•All in the journal Ethnography
Classic Ethnographies
•Ditton, Jason. 1977. Part-time crime: an ethnography of fiddling and pilferage. London:
Macmillan
•Barker, E. 1984 The making of a moonie: choice or brainwashing?, Oxford:Blackwell.
•Hobbs, D. 1988 Doing the business: entrepreneurship, the working class, and detectives
in the East End of London, Oxford: Clarendon.
•Scheper-Hughes, N. 1992 Death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in Brazil,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
•Whyte, W. F. 1955 Street Corner Society: the social structure of an Italian slum,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
•Willis, P. E. 1978 Learning to labour: how working class kids get working class jobs,
Farnborough, Hants: Saxon Ho.
A History of Fieldwork
•Social Anthropology and Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)
•The Trobriand Islands
•Book: Argonauts of The Western Pacific (Chapter One)
Malinowski’s Methodology:
•Data collected in context
•Time is essential
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