Abstract
A “tradition” in learning anthropology is to “muddy one’s hands in the field” rather than knowing how to get hands dirty before fieldwork. Senior anthropologists often teach ethnographic methods by sharing their own experiences, emphasizing how to practice those methods in everyday life. This apprenticeship-like approach is practical, yet it also leaves much space for conceptualizing and theorizing the methods. Dong Xuan’s book, Reconstructing Commonsense: Methods and Texts of Educational Ethnographies, attempts to balance “doing ethnography,” “imagining how to do ethnography,” and “teaching ethnography.” The book seeks to explore alternative approaches both by reviewing the history of disciplinary development of anthropology and by discussing methodological operations in the fieldwork with personalized reflections. It also intends to probe into some classic anthropological debates.
The book includes three sections. The first section is divided into four chapters, each focusing on one period in the history of anthropology. Unlike normal textbooks that often start with an introduction telling how anthropology became an independent discipline in the social sciences, this book traces how ethnography has become a shared methodology in the discipline, and how the standards of a “good” ethnography have been generated, debated and changed over the past century. Dong Xuan points out that the standards of a “good” ethnography mirror the changing orientations and values of the social sciences in Western academia. A typical case is how Gregory Bateson’s Naven has been treated since its publication (pp. 27–32).
The second section explores the everyday practices of ethnographic skill by focusing on some classic issues that new learners often encounter. Chapter 5 examines how to prepare for long-term fieldwork, while Chapters 6 and 7 detail how to do participant observation as well as how to write fieldnotes and field logs. Chapters 8 and 9 provide some examples to show how to analyze field data and write an ethnographic thesis. One contribution of these chapters is that Dong demonstrates how a novice can approach the field step by step, whereas mature anthropologists’ experience of sharing often concentrates on their thinking, adapations, and reactions in specific ethnographic encounters. By offering many real cases and tips, Dong’s text will provide apprentices of anthropology a hands-on guide for doing their own fieldwork.
The third section focuses on two themes; one is research ethics, and the other is the prospects for ethnographic methods in the future. For research ethics, Dong asks an interesting question: can ethnographers lie to their interviewees? It is a simple question with complicated and uncertain answers. How to deal with it depends on a researcher’s personality, professional training, and to some extent cultural habits. For the future development of ethnographic methods, Dong depicts three trends within China and outside, namely multisited ethnography, online ethnography, and overseas ethnography. Multisited ethnography and online ethnography have attracted much attention worldwide because researchers need to adapt themselves to the rapid changes of the world. Few topics can be explored through being situated only in one place such as a village in a remote area. Also, as people rely on the internet much more than before, the “virtual world” is no longer simply parallel to the “real world.” Rather, it has become a crucial part of everyday life. In this sense, the so-called online ethnography will break the boundaries between the “virtual” and “real.” And the virtual is sometimes the real. Just like the shift of research sites, another significant shift of research focus for Chinese anthropologists is to do fieldwork overseas and this contributes Chinese perspectives to global academic production.
Dong Xuan’s book has three potential contributions. First, it shows both how to teach and learn ethnographic methods. More importantly, he not only uses his field experiences as examples for teaching, but also elaborates on how novices could gain inspiration from other texts such as novels. Second, it brings some classical debates in anthropology back in ways that sharpen the “ethnographic eyes.” Researchers (and students) often see “debates” in the academic context more as theoretical issues than methodological issues. To some extent, the book breaks this stereotype by probing into questions like “what is an author?” during different phases in anthropology’s history as a discipline. Third, it enriches the discussion for how to hammer an ethnography into shape. It is well known that although a thesis demands some basic requirements, writing an ethnography is a personal journey. However, new learners still need some guidances for further exploring writing styles. In this sense, a hands-on manual will be useful.
As a text originally prepared for teaching, this book also has some shortcomings. Two areas could be enhanced. First, it would be better for the author to write more about the complicated interrelations between anthropological theories and fieldwork practice. Second, it would be even better if the author could use more examples from works of educational ethnography, as that would benefit readers from outside the field in a more concrete way.
Lastly, beautifully written and skillfully organized, this book will attract a wide readership, I believe, especially among scholars and postgraduates in anthropology and the sociology of education.