What is ethnography?Ethnography refers to a wide range of qualitative methods employed by practitioners of many humanities and social science fields. These methods are well illustrated in the working papers linked below. Gail E. Bader, William Graves III, and James M. Nyce “When, and under what types of conditions, does any particular ‘metaphor’ or ‘trope’ serve to promote cooperation and social integration? When, and under what types of conditions, does it serve to promote conflict and social disintegration? When and how is the ‘aptness’ of any given ‘metaphor’ or ‘trope’ lost? We believe these to be among the most central, enduring questions in the Human Sciences. . . . This paper will be gin to examine an important new set of tropes that are being employed to re-organize work in a research library once again. These new tropes argue for and rationalize the re-organization of middle-class, professional work in ways that can be seen, depending on one’s perspective, to liberate the individual’s potential for creative work in a bureaucratic organization and to give free rein to individual initiative or to deskill professional work practices, routinize such practices or even to eliminate jobs completely. . . . We have just begun this study and much important ground remains to be covered, so in this paper we will focus quite specifically and, admittedly narrowly, on the institutional rhetoric of the ‘change agent,’ an individual whose official job it is to guide the changes occurring in the re-organization of work at this research library. What follows, then, represents our initial analyses of a number of open-ended, in-depth interviews with several key administrators against the background of our independent readings of an extensive set of recent ‘strategic planning’ documents the library has provided us with. This is a critical starting point for our entire on-going study, for the rhetoric of the ‘change agent’ clearly represents the present authoritative voice of strategic planning in this institution.” Amy Paugh “The relationship between work and family has been a topic of research and analysis in many disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and anthropology, among others. This research has focused on how working families manage or allocate time throughout the day and at different life stages, their goals and values, and the concerns and stresses families face. . . . Much of this research relies on recall data, such as questionnaires, interviews, and reports of experiences and feelings some time after they occurred. Very few studies have examined the actual daily lives of working families, particularly their social interactions at home during which they discuss and organize family life and activities, and communicate about their needs, feelings, concerns, and desires. . . . Children’s social worlds, an area still largely neglected in the social sciences as a whole, are even less focused upon. . . . Despite enduring discourses in the US on declining ‘family values’ . . . . and the plight of children of working families (e.g., ‘latchkey kids’), little research has actually focused on the everyday lives of children and the social interactions in which they engage in the context of working family life. This paper attempts to draw the lives of children more fully into the discussion on work and family through a language socialization approach, with a particular focus on what children are learning about work (and family) in middle-class dual-earner American families.” Bradd Shore “The study of myth and ritual in the context of contemporary families will look a bit different from the studies done of the subjects in more traditional societies, the kinds of places that have conventionally been the fieldwork sites for anthropologists. At first glance myth and ritual might seem like an odd subject matter in the context of an agenda for understanding the challenges of contemporary American dual-earner families. Isn’t it the case that myth and ritual largely irrelevant to the lives of contemporary American families, belonging rather to the world of ‘traditional’ societies? It is certainly true that linking myth and ritual to the lives of contemporary families requires some careful framing of these terms. But the idea that myth and ritual are relatively unimportant in modern life paradoxically is a misleading myth of modernity that covers up the actual importance of myth and ritual in the lives of modern families. Indeed, it is the thesis of this essay that when one examines the structure of the middle-class American family, especially its developmental structure over time, myth and ritual will be shown to play an extraordinarily important part in the constitution of family life.” Marshall P. Duke, Robyn Fivush, Amber Lazarus, and Jennifer Bohanek “The work that we describe here has been performed as part of the larger work of the Sloan Center for the Study of Myth and Ritual in American Life at Emory University. Our major objectives are to examine the process of co-construction of narratives about both targeted family events and everyday family experiences and to relate the process of narrative co-construction to standardized measures of family functioning and child well-being. Our focus on co-constructed family narratives follows from clinical theory already reviewed, as well as empirical data indicating that family narratives provide an important context for child socialization. . . .”
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