Ethnography in Context

Ethnography is an extremely broad church, and the range of methodological stances adopted by ethnographers extends across theoretical, political and technological divides. As a method it is intense and often makes considerable personal demands on the researcher, but as an academic product, the ethnography can be a vivid document with human resonance impossible to recreate by the application of any other methodology. This collection emphasises something of the range of possibilities by focusing on Ethnography in different settings. Implicit in the text is the very specific problems encountered by ethnographers engaging with these very specific fields. "Volume One: The Urban Condition" addresses attempts by ethnographers to describe and understand urban life. "Volume Two: Work" covers a range of employment experiences and highlights issues surrounding the ethnographic penetration of the work environment and the cultures that lay hidden within them. "Volume Three: Body, Sport and Leisure" considers the sociologies of health, sport and the body. "Volume Four: Deviance" features the move towards more contemporary forms of transgression in Ethnography itself.