Books & ideas

Fortunetellers and Teahouse Workers

Di Wang — 2020-04-09T07:00:00Z

Is there a better way than drinking tea and chatting in a local teahouse to get a sense of everyday life in Sichuan's capital city? A historian of Chengdu and tea culture explains the role of teahouses in public life and the business opportunities they offer to migrant workers.

Academia on the Run?

Isaac William Martin — 2016-09-19T07:00:00Z

Two years ago Alice Goffman published On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American Ghetto —first attracting great praises, then even greater controversy. While most criticisms focused on the accuracy of the ethnographic research and some were pertinent, they might have been distractions from what was really disturbing sociologists at the time: the intrusion of market economy in academia.

Field Fright: Studying Urban Poverty in Boston

Nicolas Duvoux — 2015-01-05T08:00:00Z

How do sociologists deal with fear while investigating underprivileged environments? Drawing on his personal experience of field studies in a deprived Boston neighbourhood, Nicolas Duvoux shows that fear, while partially reflecting the social gap between researchers and their investigatees, can also help us understand the latter's practices and representations. [1]

Thinking Between Shores: Georges Devereux

François Laplantine — 2014-10-27T09:00:00Z

From the margins to which he was confined, Georges Devereux (1908-1985) formulated some of the most original scientific work of his century. In the wake of Freud, whose legacy he firmly defended, Devereux initiated the transcultural practice of psychiatry. François Laplantine, one of his former disciples, reconsiders the legacy of ethnopsychoanalysis' founder.

Informal Ethnography in New York

François Bonnet — 2013-09-23T07:30:00Z

In an unusual genre between fieldwork account and memoir, Sudhir Venkatesh proposes a sociological exploration of the informal economy of New York City. His ethnography of drug-dealers and sex-workers constitutes an occasion for him to reflect upon the limitations of “academic sociology”.

The Life of Others (and Ourselves)

Alvaro Santana Acuña — 2013-04-04T07:00:00Z

Andreas Glaeser's Political Epistemics is an account of the rise and fall of the East German Socialism as a field of consciousness. Relying on extensive archival research and interviews (including Stasi officers, secret informants & political dissidents), Glaeser offers a “theory of understandings” to provide a new angle on the question of how worldviews become institutionalized.

The Three Dimensions of Ethnography

Alexandra Bidet & Carole Gayet-Viaud & Erwan Le Méner — 2013-04-01T07:30:00Z

Looking back on several decades of intellectual activity, American sociologist Jack Katz explains his vision of a three-dimensional ethnography, combining human interactions, biographical experiences, and historical processes.

Exploiting the Urban Poor

Nicolas Duvoux — 2013-02-18T09:32:43Z

Although urban poverty in the USA is a subject that was largely absent from the 2012 American presidential campaign, it has reached very high levels. For a new generation of ethnographers now addressing this issue, exploitation is replacing abandonment as the explanation for the reproduction of urban poverty, in particular in the case of Afro-Americans.

The Ethnography of Disasters

David Bornstein & Florent Guénard — 2012-06-18T05:36:44Z

For Sandrine Revet, we need to move beyond statistics to see the ethnographic side of disasters. It is a necessary step if we are to understand their effects not only on public policies, but also on the behaviors and beliefs of the populations they affect. In the following interview, she examines the current revival in Disaster Studies and explains how they have come to be structured as a field.

The Elementary Forms of Happiness

Rémy Pawin — 2011-12-16T08:00:00Z

How do you recognize a happy person? A team of ethnologists recently tried to answer this question, in a volume that considers topics ranging from neo-rural communities in southern France to desert marathon-runners. The results are mixed, but the study manages to lay the groundwork for an ethological approach to happiness as a social experience.