1. Notes on ethnographic writing Notes on ethnography & historiography
Dr. Linda C.H. LAI

2. Why ethnography? Ethnography emphasizes The empirical dimension
The empirical dimension as social cultural processes
The empirical dimension as perceptible details
Material culture in the everyday domain and daily routine
The making of portraits of human agencies
The researcher's being there
The accumulation of details to form documents for future interpretation
The mediation effect of the tools of observing and recording

3. Why ethnography?
Revisionist views in historiography (the writing of history):
The French Annales School: ordinary mass and 'longue duree‘ (long duration)
History for differences (Cultural Studies and Media Studies)
History from the bottom up (Peter Burke)
History of the everyday life (Alf Luedtke): fragments and miniatures
The rising importance of narrative theories in historiography: more cross- breeding between history and literature, the shift from documentary model to interpretive model to the making of knowledge premised on the use of language
THE PRACTICE OF ETHNOGRAPHY HAS A STRONGER LINKAGE WITH HISTORIOGRAPHY...

4. Tales of the Field: Writing as a representational form
Realist tales:
one observes a lot watching…, highlighting the experiential author, documentary style in reporting and interpretive omnipotence
Confessional tales:
to gain understanding, look at what the practitioners of a field do…; demystifying fieldwork or participant-observation
Impressionist tales:
to attend to the poetic dimension of a situation in additional to facts and accurate accounting; poetry can be historical, precise, objective; to highlight the episodic, complex, and ambivalent realities often ignored by realist tales

5. Tales of the Field: Writing as a representational form
Critical tales:
to account with a Marxist edge, with a concern for representing social structure seen and experienced through the eyes of disadvantaged people…
Formal tales:
to build, test, generalize, and exhibit theory
Literary tales:
to explicitly reveal the borrowing of fiction-writing techniques to tell the story; a mixture of a sense of what is noteworthy and a narrative sense
Jointly told tales:
dialogic and polyphonic authority in fieldwork representations; researcher + researcher // researcher + informer (fieldworker + native)

6. Tales of the Field: Writing as a representational form
Reference:
Van Maanen, John (1988): Tales of the Field: on Writing Ethnography. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

7. Multiplicity of visual ethnography
Archiving Homes
(Kelly Yang and Sylvia Lui)

8. Multiplicity of visual ethnography
Read Chapters 1 + 2: Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography