Ethnographer

And it's not the idea of we have to live because that's what my committee is saying or what the rules of ethnography is saying, right? So I do think that this is very interesting to talk about, especially because we want this podcast to be focused speaking more about the differences in the field work and the differences while you are designing your methodology, right? So now you are teaching this at the university, right? So I wanted to ask you a little bit more about your experience, right? Now, after finishing your book and now that you are teaching in another level that is different at high school, I wanted to ask you more about that experience and how different has been from high school, of course, and how are you seeing that this generation of like new social scientists are also tackling with all of these questions.

Yeah, I think that's a great question.

In fact, I wrote the appendix for my book is called Notes for Novice Ethnographers.

And I really wrote it with my undergrad students in mind.

So I was previously what they called a term professor, sort of a visiting professor at Barnard.

A correct picture of their mental operations would not be that of our precursor, but they and we have inherited from the same ancestry.

Ethnographers today divide into hostile camps upon the question of the significance of similarities in culture in widely separated areas.

When one finds a striking detail or a feature of custom or belief in populations widely separated, the immediate and natural assumption has always been that this similarity indicated relationship or contact in the past.

The assumption is a dangerous one and has been so frequently and rashly made as to bring contempt upon the method.

I always think of autoethnography as having, it's the baby between autobiography and ethnography.

And so it's finding, situating ourselves in these contexts, and it's borrowing from Ethnographers observing the world and using research methods and life writers like autobiographers, memoirists, essayists, personal essayists, writing about themselves in these cultural contexts in these worlds.

I like that, the baby in between the two.

The baby, absolutely.