Crafting Ethnography
- Paul Atkinson - Research Professor in Sociology at Cardiff University
Filled with images and hands-on examples of encounters with crafts and craft workers, the book takes you on a sensory journey through glassblowing, woodworking, silversmithing, photography, life drawing, and perfume blending. These fieldwork snapshots provide insight into the ethnography of knowledge, skill, and craft.
Helping to inform more reflective fieldwork, this book explores how analytical perspective varies based on the researcher and their physical environment. If you are looking to hone or expand your ethnographic practice, Paul shows you the exciting possibilities and implications of applying ethnographic methods to new contexts and media.
Paul Atkinson, one of sociology’s most distinguished ethnographers, has written a remarkable, readable work. Deeply personal and richly analytic, he demonstrates the importance of embodied experience and practical knowledge in making both craft objects and ethnographic texts. Describing his training in shaping wood, silver, glass, and other crafts, materiality and performance are exquisitely joined. This final volume of Atkinson’s methodological quartet caps a project that demonstrates how field methods in the hands of a gifted practitioner truly matter.
Through ‘thick participation’ we learn with our bodies, and our communication involves much more than words. In this lovely book, Paul Atkinson embarks on an apprenticeship of the senses to show how there can be, as he puts it, 'a lot to be learned from a little'.
This fourth of a quartet of magnificent books on ethnography explores the value of an ‘aliquot’ of fieldwork, aiming at learning much from little instead of little from (too) much data. During thick participation in various sites of craft and artistic activity detailed attention is given to the practical activities of making and doing. In their context methodological issues of the craft of (sensory) ethnography are discussed and illuminating theoretical ideas developed. This book is brilliant and a must-read for every ethnographer.