L’etnografia: una pratica teoricamente orientata

Over the last four decades, ethnography, which had long been imagined as a self-evident and unproblematic process of data-collection, has become a complicated and tricky issue. This is especially true for anthropologists, as the dense reflection and the vivid discussion about ethnography that has emerged since the 1970-80s inside the anthropological academic community clearly demonstrates. Ethnographic practice, ethnographic theory, and ethnographic writing are far from being easy and epistemologically straightforward activities. Nevertheless, as a result of its widespread perception as both a powerful and easy-to-use tool to gain qualitative research data about a community, it became a privileged research method for sociologists, and also for psychologists and, finally, even for interculturally oriented scholars of any social science and humanities field (such as for example pedagogy). This edited volume aims to reposition ethnography at the core of the anthropological tradition and to show the extent to which ethnography is strongly connected with a sophisticated theoretical reflection and deeply embedded/rooted in cultural and social anthropology. Outside this intellectual endeavour, ethnography itself has little value, and nor does the knowledge one may hope to obtain through the naive use of a so-called “ethnographic method”. The volume presents both a historical overview of ethnography and a thematic discussion of its major trends that have in different periods oriented research practice in the field. It presents also more marginal – in the sense that are undervalued in history of anthropology or introductory textbooks - modes of ethnographic research (for example feminist and phenomenological approaches), those that have had less impact and resonance inside the academic community, but that nonetheless had a solid theoretical frame and a range of insights with regard to their effectiveness as paths to gain anthropological knowledge.