Contours of Culture: Complex Ethnography and the Ethnography of Complexity [Hardcover]

InContours of Culturethe authors discuss the uses of various ethnographic methods in the study of culture, drawing on their field research with an opera company, Welsh artists, and classes on the popular Brazilian martial artcapoeira. In their practical research and in the research of other scolars, they encounter complex problems and themes that often require new ways of organizing and conceiving cultural material, and even new ways of giving expression to phenomena that are only partially understood. This book is not only about the inherent complexities involved in ethnography; it is also about the kinds of opportunities available to researchers immersed in this complexity and how they might grasp cultural settings in their entirety.Paul Atkinsonis Distinguished Research Professor in sociology at Cardiff University, in Wales.Sara Delamontis a reader in sociology at Cardiff University. William Housley is a lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University.

This is a powerful book, compelling in detail, vision, and grasp of the contemporary landscape in ethnographic research. The authors steer the field back to foundational moorings, to the careful ethnographic study of the multiple forms of daily life, including discourse, social interaction, narratives, stories, places, and spaces. We've long needed a book like this. In its passionate call for a return to foundations, it represents cutting-edge new directions in qualitative inquiry. Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Atkinson, Delamont and Housley's richly detailed and elegantly written plea challenges ethnographers to overcome what they see as the fragmentation of qualitative research to interpret the complexities of ordered social life. The authors call for attention to talk; narrative; physical and material things; places; space and time; and the visual and sensory aspects of social life-not as separate analytic enterprises, but as a fully sustained el3$