This new edition of a classic introductory text opens with an extensive chapter that brings ethnography up-to-date and aims it toward the next century. At a time when numerous disciplines, organizations, and communities are discovering ethnography, Agar shows how the fundamentals endure even as they adapt to a world unimagined when the research perspective developed more than 100 years ago. Contemporary discussions of ethnography are loaded with choices, primarily "either-or" options. Just as the first edition crossed the qualitative-quantitative divide, the new edition integrates classical scientific notions with new concepts such as narrative and interpretation.
Agar updates the contrast between the researcher's apprenticeship to knowledgeable informants and the hypothesis-testing mode that still dominates social science, while demonstrating the complementarity of the two. Drawing extensively from his own research experience, he illustrates the stages of the ethnographic process from inception through the emergence of a focus, and toward a subsequent formalization of methods and analysis. In the process, he illustrates several approaches designed to reconcile the contradictory demands of the scientific process and human behavior. It analyses the changes in ethnographic studies during the last fifteen years. It outlines the conflict between science and interpretation. It presents the politics of ethnography, both personal and global. It describes the 'new' participant observation. It sheds light on ethno-logic. It includes methods for the non-positive.
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Preface | ix
1Ethnography reconstructed: the stranger at fifteen | 1
2The concept of fieldwork
Reasons for becoming an ethnographer | 55
Mystique as a communication problem | 57
Reasons for worrying about methods | 59
How this book was written | 63
A research biography | 66
3Getting started
Picking an area | 73
A review on the literature | 76
The network "in" | 79
Getting funds | 82
4Who are you to do this?
Personality and cultural background | 92
Ethnography and personality | 100
Presentation of self | 104
5Ethnography
The mainstream | 113
Ethnographic research differences | 119
Goals of ethnography | 127
6Beginning fieldwork
Who talks first | 134
Asking informal questions | 139
Analysis of informal interviews | 152
Types of informal interviews | 155
Interviews and observations | 156
Field notes | 161
Ethnographic goals revisited | 163
7Narrowing the focus
Sampling people | 168
Sampling events | 173
Distributions | 175
The systematic test | 180
The formal-informal mix | 182
The narrowing funnel | 183
8Informal to formal: some examples
Simulated situation | 186
Frame elicitation | 187
Hypothetical situation | 197
The three methods in use | 198
Systematic-test methodology | 204
An example from Houston | 211
Hypothesis-testing revisited | 218
Coda | 220
9The ethnographic research proposal
Budget | 226
Staff | 228
The research context | 229
Human subjects | 231
10Ethnography in context
Theory in ethnography | 237
A language for culture theory | 240
When is an ethnography not an ethnography? | 241
Accounting for the accounts | 246
The pragmatic context | 247
Ethnography in prospect | 251
References | 253
Index | 265