Asking and Listening: Ethnography as Personal Adaptation

Description

Giving readers the capacity to include ethnography in their own experience! Asking and Listening is the first book to trace the changing ways in which human beings have learned to look at "the Others Beyond the Gate" with their strange languages and stranger customs. Not a history of ethnography so much as a chronicle of its uses and potentials, Asking and Listening examines the premises of ethnography and concerns itself with a wide range of issues such as ethnocentrism and the morass of cultural relativism, the cultures of corporations, and the meaning of ethnography for government policy. It ends with an examination of the problems in charting our tomorrows: ethnography in the information age, and for the future. Through its pragmatic analysis of cultures as storehouses of alternatives in the way universal problems can and have been approached, Asking and Listening offers readers not merely the opportunity to make sense of descriptions of other peoples' lifeways, but makes such ethnographic knowledge immediately useful in their own lives and choices and career plans. Titles of related interest from Waveland Press: Anderson, Around the World in 30 Years: Life as a Cultural Anthropologist (ISBN 9781577660576); Angrosino, Projects in Ethnographic Research (ISBN 9781577663690); DeVita, Stumbling Toward Truth: Anthropologists at Work (ISBN 9781577661252); Garbarino, Sociocultural Theory in Anthropology: A Short History (ISBN 9780881330564); Gardner-Hoffman, Dispatches from the Field: Neophyte Ethnographers in a Changing World (ISBN 9781577664512); Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, Enhanced Edition (ISBN: 9781478602095); and van der Elst, Culture as Given, Culture as Choice, Second Edition (ISBN 9781577662693). Contents 19 Four Notes Chapter One The Others Chapter Two Becoming You Chapter Three Ethnography before Anthropology 10 Chapter Four The Discovery of Culture and the Discovery of Comparison 14 Chapter Five The Beginnings of Ethnographic Fieldwork 21 Chapter Six Participant Observation 24 Chapter Seven Using Alien Ideas to Examine Our Own 27 Chapter Eight Comparing Cultures 30 Chapter Nine The Morass of Cultural Relativism 33 Chapter Ten Premises and Ethnography 37 Chapter Eleven Their Culture—and Yours 41 Chapter Twelve Does Ethnography Falsify Reality? 45 Chapter Thirteen Beyond Academe 50 Chapter Fourteen Culture Shock 52 Chapter Fifteen The Aliens Next Door 55 Chapter Sixteen The Collapse of Colonialism 58 Chapter Seventeen Who Speaks for Whom? 62 Chapter Eighteen The Democratization of Ethnography 69 Chapter Nineteen Ethnography and Applied Anthropology 72 Chapter Twenty Ethnography in Business and Industry 76 Chapter Twenty-One Ethnography and Creativity 78 Chapter Twenty-Two Ethnography and Government 82 Chapter Twenty-Three The Internet Chapter Twenty-Four Ethnocentrism in a Culture with Many Lifestyles 93 Chapter Twenty-Five Ethnocentrism in a Shrinking World 96 Chapter Twenty-Six Tempocentrism and the Future 100 Index