Representing Ethnography

Qualitative research, especially ethnography, has seen a paradigm shift since 1968. This so-called ‘Third Moment’ was concerned with the critical issue of the textual representation of ethnographic work. There was a call for a turn towards texts that mirrored the messiness of social life, that were faithful to the many voices of social worlds, in which the artfulness of ethnographic writing was manifest and in which the ethnographer was visibly present in the text.

This major work, Ethnographic Discourse, brings together into one set all the important material on this ‘rhetorical turn’ in qualitative research. Many of the critiques of the rhetorical turn are particularly hard to obtain and have never been gathered together in an accessible way.

Volume I focuses on the contexts and controversies of ...

Editors' Introduction: Ethnographic Representation and Rhetoric

PaulAtkinson and SaraDelamont

Sometimes a particular book or journal article marks the arrival in the spotlight of a new argument or standpoint. When James Clifford and George Marcus (1986) edited a collection of papers called Writing Culture they were creating one of those moments. Twenty-one years later, that volume is still controversial, and the issues they highlighted have remained important ever since (cf. Jacobson 1991, Spencer 2001). It was widely held to be a prime mover in the so-called ‘crisis of representation’ in cultural and social anthropology. In the twenty-plus years since the publication of that edited collection, social scientists across many disciplines have become increasingly aware of the textual nature of their arguments, and of the methodological – even ...

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