Methods In Social Anthropology (Hw)

Timetable

Wednesday, 10:45-12:15, Collegium Historicum on Morasko Campus, room 2.21 (Instytut Antropologii i Etnologii).

Classes start on 14. October 2025.

Weekly course over 15 weeks in winter term 2024-25

Module aim (aims)

This module aims at preparing students for individual or collaborative qualitative research projects with anthropological outlook. By introducing the traditions and recent methodological paradigms of socio-cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, it develops a sense for developing anthropological research projects and conducting ethnographic research in students. Through practise-led activities and case studies, it invites students to start building their own ethnographic research tool kit. A particular focus is on ethnographic research: In showing students the different domains, in which “ethnography” is used, the module helps distinguish between academic, commercial, artistic, and political qualitative research trajectories. A second focus is about understanding relationships in the research process. Thirdly we will address anthropological research as set of techniques of knowledge production and look at different formats of such knowledge production: at creative, collaborative, and interventional methods. 

Pre-requisites in terms of knowledge, skills and social competences (where relevant)

Appropriate English language skills and an interest in conducting an individual research.

Syllabus

1. Anthropology and Ethnography: What does it mean to be an anthropological researcher?

2. Searching and making a field: village, city, theme, global, multi-sited, mobile, un-sited3.

‘Etic’/’emic’, micro-macro; local-global: ‘small places, big issues’, home-and-away; Unpacking anthropological paradigms

4. Research Relationships and self-reflexiveness: Gender, race, class, ethnicity, subalternity, agency, elitism – social construction of the researcher and the communities under the study

5. Ethics, safety, and bureaucracy: research preparations. Between plan and coincidence, and the virtue of patience

6. How to engage in participant observation? The research cycle and the planned serendipity.

7. Narratives and stories: Conversations, interviews, (internal) dialogues.

8. What kind of knowledge and relationships can we gain from drawing diagrams, completing surveys, counting, inventarising, chatlogs?

9. Senses are hip! But where to go with multi-sensory ethnography?

10. Archival research and material culture research

11. Ethnography in the digital age

12. Leaving traces and transforming experience: Notetaking, sketching, tagging. Modes of bearing witness.

13. Ethnography as shared laboratory: Collaboration, engagement, and intervention

14. Responsibility, professional risks, and the notion of failure in history and today

15. Towards an imaginative ethnography?

Reading list

Weekly reading are subject to change by the lecturer. Most readings are made available by the lecturer on our designated TEAMS Channel. The passwords for logging into the modules are provided by the lecturer. Learning content symbol* Learning content description In the seminar we will address the some or all of the following readings. Details about the readings as well as access will be provided by the lecturer.

MSA_01 Anthropology and Ethnography What does it mean to be an anthropological researcher? Key Readings:Tim Ingold: Anthropology contra ethnography, Hau – Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(1), pp.21-26.Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardie, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor (2012) Ethnography and Virtual Worlds – A Handbook of Method, Chapter: Three Brief Histories, Princeton University Press, pp. 13-25. Great introductory readings: Amit, Vered (2000) Introduction: Constructing the Field , London, New York: Routledge.Bernhard Russel, H. (1998) On Method and methods in Social Anthropology, Introduction, in: Bernhard Russel, H. (1998) Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, London: Sage, pp. 9-38.Some fiction: Carthy, Tom (2015) Satin Island. A Novel. Penguin& Randomhouse: New York, London.[Fiction book about an professional anthropologist in a neoliberal urban development setting, who is losing sight of his methodological toolbox and field.]

MSA_02 Searching and making a field: village, city, theme, global, multi-sited, mobile, un-sited Key ReadingsClifford, James (1986) Partial Truths, in: Clifford, James and Marcus, George (eds.): Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, pp.1-26.Marcus G.E. (2011) Multi-sited Ethnography: Five or Six Things I Know About It Now, in: Simon Coleman and Pauline von Hellermann (eds.) Multi-Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods, Routledge: London, pp. 16-24.Other Readings: Joanna Cook, James Laidlaw and Jonathan Mair (2009) (Chapter 2) What if There is No Elephant? Towards a Conception of an Un-sited Field, in: In Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis, and Locality in Contemporary Social Research. Edited by Mark-Anthony Falzon. London: Ashgate, pp. 47-72.Sheller, Mimi and John Urry (2006) The new mobilities paradigm, Environment and Planning 38, pp 207-226.Dalsgaard, Steffen (2013) The field as a temporal entity and the challenges of the contemporary. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 21 (2), pp.213–225.

MSA_03 ‘Etic’/’emic’, micro-macro; local-global: ‘small places, big issues’, home-and-away; Unpacking anthropological paradigms James Ferguson (2011) (Chapter 12) Novelty and Method. Reflections on Global Fieldwork, in: Simon Coleman and Pauline von Hellermann (eds.) Multi-Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods, Routledge: London, s. 194-207Geertz, Clifford (1974) "From the Native's Point of View": On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28 (1) pp. 26-45. Ca?mpeanu, Claudia N. (2010) Touristing home: muddy fields in native anthropology, Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice Volume 2 (2), s. 15-29)

MSA_04 Research Relationships and self-reflexivenessGender, race, class, ethnicity, subalternity, agency, elitism – social construction of the researcher and the communities under the study Callaway, Helen: Ethnography and experience: gender implications in fieldwork and texts. In: Judith Okley and Helen Callaway: Anthropology and Autobiography, Routledge: London s. 29-48.Jakubowska, Longina (2012) Straw in the Anthropologist’s Boot. Studying Nobility in Poland, in Haim Hazan and Esther Hertzog: Serendipity in Anthropological Research. The Nomadic Turn. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 185-198. Okely J. 2005, Anthropology and autobiography. Participatory experience and embodied knowledge [in:] eds. Judith Okely and Helen Callaway, Anthropology and autobiography, London and New York, pp. 1-28.

MSA_05 Ethics, safety, and bureaucracy: research preparations. Between plan and coincidence, and the virtue of patience Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardie, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor (2012) Ethnography and Virtual Worlds – A Handbook of Method, Chapters: 1) Participant observation in Virtual Worlds and 2) Ethics, Princeton University Press.

MSA_06 How to engage in participant observation? The research cycle and the planned serendipity. Spradley, James (1980) Participant observation, Orlando, s. 3-34.Gary Alan Fine & James G. Deegan (1996) Three principles of Serendip: insight, chance, and discovery in qualitative research, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 9 (4).Rivoal, Isabelle ; Salazar Noel (2013) Contemporary ethnographic practice and the value of serendipity, Social anthropology, Vol.21(2), pp.178-185

MSA_07 Narratives and stories: Conversations, interviews, (internal) dialogues. Rapport, NJ 1999, "The Narrative as Fieldwork Technique: Processual Ethnography for a World in Motion". in V Amit (ed.), Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. Routledge, pp. 71-95.Boellstorff, Tom; Bonnie Nardie, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor (2012) Ethnography and Virtual Worlds – A Handbook of Method, Chapter: Interviews and Virtual Worlds, Princeton University Press, pp.92-112.

MSA_08 What kind of knowledge and relationships can we gain from drawing diagrams, completing surveys, counting, inventarising, chatlogs? Handwerker, Penn W. and Stephen P. Borgatti (1998) Reasoning with numbers, Bernhard Russel, H. (1998) Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, London: Sage, pp. 549-595.Boellstorff, Tom; Bonnie Nardie, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor (2012) Ethnography and Virtual Worlds – A Handbook of Method, Chapter: Other Data Collection Methods for Virtual Worlds Research, Princeton University Press, pp.113-128.

MSA_09 Senses are hip! But where to go with multi-sensory ethnography? Cox, Rupert, Andrew Irving and Christopher Wright (2016): Introduction: the sense of the senses, in R. Cox, A. Irving, Ch. Wright: Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology. Manchester: Manchester Scholarship Online. 16 p.Pink, Sarah (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography Chapter 1: Situating Sensory Ethnography. From Academia to Intervention London, Sage, p.7-23. Castaing-Taylor, Lucien: Sweetgrass: ‘Baaaaaaah. Bleeeeeeet’, in R. Cox, A. Irving, Ch. Wright: Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology. Manchester: Manchester Scholarship Online, 8 p.

MSA_10 Archival research and material culture research Bretell, Caroline B. (1998) Fieldwork in the archives: Methods and sources in Historical Anthropology, in: Bernhard Russel, H. (1998) Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, London: Sage, pp. 513-548.Buchczyk, Magdalena: To Weave Or Not To Weave: Vernacular Textiles and Historical Change in Romania, Textile, 12:3, 328-345, DOI: MSA_11 Ethnography in the digital age Daniel Miller (2013) Tales from Facebook, Oxford: Wiley.Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardie, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor (2012) Ethnography and Virtual Worlds – A Handbook of Method, Chapter: Participant observation in Virtual Worlds, Princeton University Press, pp. 69-91.

MSA_12 Leaving traces and transforming experience: Notetaking, sketching, tagging. Modes of bearing witness. Michael Taussig (2001) Chapter 1, 4 & 5 of I swear I saw this. Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. University of Chicago Press.Cox, Rupert (2011) Thinking though Movement:Practising Martial Arts and Writing Ethnography, in Tim Ingold (ed.) Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines. London: Routledge.

MSA_13 Ethnography as shared laboratory: Collaboration, engagement, and intervention Juris, Jeffrey and Kasnabish, Ale (2013) Conclusion The Possibilities, Limits, and Relevance of Engaged Ethnography | 366 (ed.) (2013) Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography & the Political, Duke University Press: Durham, London.Kazubowski-Houston, Magdalena (2011) "Don't Tell Me How to-Dance!": Negotiating Collaboration, Empowerment and Politicization, Anthropologica, 53 (2), pp. 229-243. Schneider, Arndt (2016) Appropriations across disciplines: the future of art and anthropology collaborations, in R. Cox, A. Irving, Ch. Wright: Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology. Manchester: Manchester Scholarship Online. 9 p.

MSA_14 Responsibility, professional risks, and the notion of failure in history and today Berreman, Gerald (1968) Is Anthropology Alive? Social Responsibility in Social Anthropology. Current Anthropology 9 (15), s. 391-396Pollard, Amy (2009) Field of screams: difficulty and ethnographic fieldwork, Anthropology Matters Journal 11(2), pp. 1-24.Okley, Judith: In response to Amy Pollard, Anthropology Matters Journal, pp. 1-4.

MSA_15 Towards an imaginative ethnography? Kazubowski-Houston, Magdalena (2018) Quiet Theatre: the radical politics of silence, Cultural Studies ? Critical Methodologies, 18(6) 410–422Culhane, Dara (2011) Stories and Plays: Ethnography, Performance and Ethical Engagements, Anthropologica, 53(2) pp. 257-274