“Missionaries in the Row Boat”? Ethnological Ways of Knowing as a Challenge to Social History

Medick, Hans

doi:10.1017/s0010417500014353

Cited by 89 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…As Marcus () has noted, traditionally ahistorical ethnography obscures these processes . Alternately, one may view an ethnographic approach to history as a way to recover historical nuance in the face of structural or otherwise narrowly macro‐historical approaches to the past (Medick ). Thus, there are scholars in both fields who view a combined approach as not only possible, but potentially fruitful.…”

Section: Historicizing Ethnography For International Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first of these methods involves modeling primary historical research on ethnographic methods. Drawing on approaches occurring at the intersection of ethnography and history can allow the researcher to recreate and understand localized fields of subjective and intersubjective meaning (Cohn ; Medick ; Ohnuki‐Tierney ; Murphy et al ). IR scholars can thereby gain a quasi‐ethnographic grasp of important historical events and processes, often drawing on primary written sources.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Hanging Out in International Politics: Two Kinds of Explanatory Political Ethnography for IR

MacKay

Levin

2015

Int Stud Rev

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The use of ethnographic methods is on the rise in International Relations. However, research in this area has largely been constrained to critical or interpretive analysis of nontraditional objects of study. This has been driven in part by two practical problems that limit ethnographic analysis: that of aggregation, as international phenomena are necessarily large in scale, and that of access, as institutional settings are often closed or secretive. While we commend critical and nontraditional research for driving much‐needed expansion of the disciplinary agenda, we offer a complementary account, arguing that scholars can also use ethnographic methods in explanatory research. To do so, we draw on two methodological literatures in anthropology. The first approximates ethnographic research through historical immersion. The second applies ethnographic methods at multiple research sites, tracking transnational phenomena across them. The paper sketches prospective studies of each kind, concerning the creation and implementation of the United Nations. While neither method is entirely new to IR, the methodological literatures in question have yet to receive systematic treatment in the field.

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Section: Historicizing Ethnography For International Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Hanging Out in International Politics: Two Kinds of Explanatory Political Ethnography for IR

MacKay

Levin

2015

Int Stud Rev

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“…But to say that history occupies an increasingly important place in the field of anthropology is not to say that historians and anthropologists conceive of or practice history in the same way (Medick 1987;Sheridan 1988a;cf. Cohn 1980).…”

Section: The Emergence Of a More Historical Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Histories for Anthropology: Ten Years of Historical Research and Writing by Anthropologists, 1980–1990

Kellogg¹

1991

Social Science History

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Editor’s Note: Susan Kellogg’s article on anthropology and history continues our special series “History and the Other Social Sciences.” There will be one further article, by David Robertson, on political science and history. An expanded version of the whole series will then be published as a book by Duke University Press.The past, once considered the exclusive domain of historians and antiquarians, has increasingly been embraced by anthropologists. Today, it is difficult to find a major anthropological study that does not claim to offer a diachronic, processual, historical analysis. In examining 10 years of historical anthropological writing, I cover three broad topics in this essay. First, I explain the emergence of a more historical anthropology as a widespread response to a crisis in the conceptualization of culture. Second, I argue that while there are certain identifiable themes that cut across this literature, in general, it reflects long-standing topical interests within anthropology; I review this literature according to these topics rather than divide it into interpretive or cultural studies versus studies of political economy. Third, I try to assess this body of work critically. I concentrate here on anthropological history as both research and textual practice, as well as briefly examine anthropological uses of the concepts of time, colonialism, and structure and agency.

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“…On Alltagsgeschichte, seeFletcher (1988).6 Medick (1987) expresses the ambivalence toward modernization typical of many historians of everyday life. SeeKocka (1982) for the views of the critical theorists on the romanticist strains of Alltagsgeschichte.7 For examples of the distinction between authentic and coopted working class culture, seeBroszat (1982) andGroh (1982).…”

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confidence: 99%

German Club Life as a Local Cultural System

Eidson

1990

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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In the shadow of the Historikerstreit over the meaning of the Nazi era, West German historians are conducting a less highly publicized but similarly politicized debate about the role of ethnography in social history. The following analysis of local club life, based on ethnographic and archival research in Boppard on the Rhine, is offered as a contribution to and comment on this debate from the viewpoint of interpretive cultural anthropology. I contend that “local knowledge”—to employ the phrase by Clifford Geertz—is indispensable to broader historical syntheses, though for different reasons than have been suggested by either critics or advocates of cultural anthropology among West German historians.

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“Missionaries in the Row Boat”? Ethnological Ways of Knowing as a Challenge to Social History

Cited by 89 publications

References 25 publications

Hanging Out in International Politics: Two Kinds of Explanatory Political Ethnography for IR

Hanging Out in International Politics: Two Kinds of Explanatory Political Ethnography for IR

Histories for Anthropology: Ten Years of Historical Research and Writing by Anthropologists, 1980–1990

German Club Life as a Local Cultural System

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