Ethnography? (was Re: pre-capitalist sex)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Apr 17 10:42:07 PDT 2001



>Kelley Walker wrote:
>
>>DOUG! it isn't supposed to be and he doesn't claim it to be.
>>please don't criticize people on ethnographical methods if you
>>don't understand how it works and only know statoid econodrone
>>methods or something.
>
>So, Wolfe chooses a sample of people who are more affluent, more
>white, more married than the U.S. pop - and 100% suburban - and then
>interviews them using questions he doesn't publish and selectively
>reports answers from transcripts he doesn't publish either, and this
>is supposed to tell us something about how "America" thinks. It's
>crap, I say. It tells us more about the author than anything else.
>
>A lot of "ethnography" seems like journalism with pretentions to scholarship.
>
>Doug

Wolfe used polling statements and interviews to elicit responses to some topics of his choice (e.g., welfare, immigration, family structure, homosexuality). Does that count as "ethnography"? If so, what's the difference between "ethnography" & "journalism"? More importantly, what's the difference between "ethnography" and modern electoral campaign techniques of opinion polls & focus groups? Wolfe's method appears to have more in common with electoral campaign techniques than what is normally thought of as ethnography which involves "observation of culture in situ" for a prolonged period of time (on the definition of ethnography, see, for instance, Alexander Massey, "'The way we do things around here': the culture of ethnography," at <http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/2961/waywedo.htm>).

Yoshie



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