Description
Filled with images and hands-on examples of encounters with crafts and craft workers, the book takes you on a sensory journey through glassblowing, woodworking, silversmithing, photography, life drawing, and perfume blending. These fieldwork snapshots provide insight into the ethnography of knowledge, skill, and craft.
Helping to inform more reflective fieldwork, this book explores how analytical perspective varies based on the researcher and their physical environment. If you are looking to hone or expand your ethnographic practice, Paul shows you the exciting possibilities and implications of applying ethnographic methods to new contexts and media.
About the Author
Paul Atkinson is Emeritus Profesor of Sociology at Cardiff University. Recent publications include Ethnographic Engagements, with Sara Delamont (Routledge 2021) and Reflexivity and Social Research, with Emilie Morwenna Whitaker (Palgrave 2022). His quartet of books on Ethnography includes For Ethnography (SAGE 2014), Thinking Ethnographically (SAGE 2017) and Writing Ethnographically (SAGE 2019) and Crafting Ethnography (SAGE 2022). The fourth edition of Hammersley and Atkinson Ethnography: Principles in Practice was published by Routledge in 2019. He was a co-editor of the SAGE Foundations of Social Research Methods. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Learned Society of Wales.
Reviews
Paul Atkinson, one of sociology's most distinguished ethnographers, has written a remarkable, readable work. Deeply personal and richly analytic, he demonstrates the importance of embodied experience and practical knowledge in making both craft objects and ethnographic texts. Describing his training in shaping wood, silver, glass, and other crafts, materiality and performance are exquisitely joined. This final volume of Atkinson's methodological quartet caps a project that demonstrates how field methods in the hands of a gifted practitioner truly matter. -- Gary Alan Fine
Through 'thick participation' we learn with our bodies, and our communication involves much more than words. In this lovely book, Paul Atkinson embarks on an apprenticeship of the senses to show how there can be, as he puts it, 'a lot to be learned from a little'. -- Tia DeNora
This fourth of a quartet of magnificent books on ethnography explores the value of an 'aliquot' of fieldwork, aiming at learning much from little instead of little from (too) much data. During thick participation in various sites of craft and artistic activity detailed attention is given to the practical activities of making and doing. In their context methodological issues of the craft of (sensory) ethnography are discussed and illuminating theoretical ideas developed. This book is brilliant and a must-read for every ethnographer. -- Thomas S. Eberle
Book Information
ISBN 9781529701227
Author Paul Atkinson
Format Paperback
Page Count 176
Imprint Sage Publications Ltd
Publisher Sage Publications Ltd
Weight(grams) 280g