By George E. Marcus

In the Nineteen Eighties, George Marcus spearheaded a big critique of cultural anthropology, expressed so much sincerely within the landmark e-book Writing tradition, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography via Thick and skinny updates and advances that critique for the past due Nineteen Nineties. Marcus provides a sequence of penetrating and provocative essays at the adjustments that proceed to comb throughout anthropology. He examines, particularly, how the discipline's vital perform of ethnography has been replaced through "multi-sited" methods to anthropology and the way new examine styles are remodeling anthropologists' careers. Marcus rejects the view, usually expressed, that those adjustments are undermining anthropology. the combo of conventional ethnography with scholarly experimentation, he argues, will simply make the self-discipline extra full of life and diverse.

The ebook is split into 3 major elements. within the first, Marcus exhibits how ethnographers' culture of defining fieldwork by way of peoples and locations is now being challenged by means of the necessity to examine tradition by means of exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts between a number of usually likely incommensurate websites. the second one half illustrates this emergent multi-sited of analysis via reflecting it in a few of Marcus's personal prior study on Tongan elites and dynastic American fortunes. within the ultimate part, consisting of the formerly unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography via Thick and Thin," Marcus examines the evolving specialist tradition of anthropology and the predicaments of its new students. He indicates how scholars have more and more been interested in the sector as a lot through such strong interdisciplinary events as feminism, postcolonial experiences, and cultural reports as by means of anthropology's personal traditions. He additionally considers the impression of demographic alterations in the discipline--in specific the truth that anthropologists aren't any longer nearly completely Euro-Americans learning non-Euro-Americans. those alterations increase new concerns concerning the identities of anthropologists with regards to these they research, and certainly, approximately what's to outline criteria of ethnographic scholarship.

Filled with willing and hugely illuminating observations, Ethnography via Thick and Thin will stimulate clean debate concerning the earlier, current, and way forward for a self-discipline present process profound transformations.