The social world is fascinating – full of complexities, tensions, and contradictions. Social scientists have long been interested in better understanding the social world around us. Unlike quantitative research, that focuses on collecting and analyzing numerical data to make statistical inferences about the social world, qualitative research contributes to empirical and theoretical understandings of society by examining and explaining how and why people think and act as they do through the use of non-numerical data. In other words, qualitative research uncovers social processes and mechanisms undergirding human behavior. In this chapter, we will discuss how to design a qualitative research project using two of the most common qualitative research methods: in-depth interviewing and ethnographic observations (also known as ethnography or participant observation). We will begin the chapter by discussing the what, how, and why of interviewing and ethnography. We will then discuss the importance of interrogating one’s underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions regarding research (and the research process) and the steps to follow in designing a qualitative study. We conclude the chapter by reviewing the different elements to consider when developing a qualitative research project.

This introductory chapter describes Chile’s recent and unprecedented wave of protests starting in late 2019 to situate this book within a broader socio-political context and academic debate. The book’s core contribution is the notion of mobilizational citizenship, which adds to the literature on social movements and citizenship studies. It explains how and why communities at the urban margins are able to sustain collective action over several decades and become prepared to support large-scale protests leading to a democratization process. To develop this theoretical argument, this book tells the story of two very similar urban communities founded in eastern Santiago in 1970. They have a similar socio-demographic configuration and location, their histories coincide, and grew as highly politicized and mobilized communities. Remarkably however, while one of the communities followed the pattern of demobilization observed across the country in the wake of its transition to democracy, the other is a counterexample of enduring mobilization. I studied this puzzling contrast through an ethnographic approach that included observations, interviews, and archival research.

This chapter offers a detailed ethnographic description of one of the participant teachers in the study as a concrete example of how teacher expertise may manifest itself in one of the many challenging contexts frequently found in the global South. It begins by summarising key features of her contexts and the challenges she faced in her work, also offering an overview of her personal background and her beliefs about teaching and learning. The chapter then discusses her interpersonal practices (relationships with learners) and her languaging practices – the complex ways in which she and her learners made use of resources from varied languages in the classroom. After this, I discuss how she managed curriculum content, developed resources and planned lessons before offering a detailed account of her classroom practices – how she structured lessons, balanced between whole class and learner-independent activities and offered individual support to learners in large classes. It also offers an account of her knowledge, reflection and professionalism, and closes with brief comparison of her expertise with the findings of prior expertise research, identifying both important similarities and insightful differences. Numerous lesson and interview extracts are provided to support the discussion and claims made.

This chapter aims to provide a survey of the recent and emerging conversations between theology (and more specifically moral theology or Christian ethics) and social anthropology (and more specifically the anthropology of morality). These conversations are presented as starting from two sides, as being a matter of theology attending to anthropology, and of anthropology engaging with theology. Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life is taken as providing an indication of the nature and promise of the first conversation for enriching theology’s social intelligence and its self-understanding (illustrated in particular by a discussion the Alder Hey scandal and of reproductive surrogacy), and Robbins’s Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life is taken as indicating the potential for the second, namely that beyond religious life providing material for ethnography, theological ideas and concepts may contribute to anthropological theory, even in relation to such central categories as the gift. The chapter closes with a consideration of some future directions which these conversations may take.

Dying Abroad starts from the premise that death and its attendant rituals prove an important window into the socioeconomic and political orders and hierarchies that structure human life in the twenty-first century. It argues that states, families, and religious communities all have a vested interest in the fate of dead bodies – including where and how they are disposed of and commemorated – and demonstrates that end-of-life decisions and practices are connected to larger political struggles over the boundaries of nation-states and the place of minoritized groups within them. At a time when a growing chorus of politicians lambast the failures of multiculturalism and call for the fortification of territorial borders, this book elucidates how posthumous practices anchor minority claims for inclusion and challenge hegemonic ideas about the nation.

What does an anthropology of the senses entail? How can one reconstruct writings and knowledge about Asia through the lens of the senses using anthropological analysis? What part do the senses play in everyday life in Asia across a variety of historical and contemporary contexts – stretching from the pre- to postcolonial and including the transnational? How are the senses connected to a range of everyday life domains that comprise religion, morality, foodways, music, linguistic practices, local–foreign interactions, and the migratory and economic movements of social actors and commodities? How might one develop theoretical argumentation and delineate interdisciplinary and comparative possibilities to analyse sensory cultures? The introductory chapter opens the book by putting forward these core queries that set the stage for subsequent chapters. Apart from charting the field of sensory anthropology, I explain why and how a sensory history of Asia that attends to a wide and non-exhaustive range of sensory cultures is important. I engage with current anthropological scholarship and others that focus in the main on Western cultures or non-industrial societies. I show how this book takes on theoretical, comparative and contextual commitments as key inquiries in articulating the social life of the senses in Asia.

This chapter critically engages with relevant legal consciousness literature and develops the conceptual framework of the book. It examines three accounts of law in everyday life – hegemony, alienation, and empowerment – and demonstrates their limitations in explaining the mixed, paradoxical effects of law observed through the experiences of interviewed workers and residents in Vietnam. The ethnographic approach adopted in this research foregrounds the complex nature of individuals’ life circumstances and their decision-making. The concept of precarity as applied in this book consists of three main components: Precarity as a phenomenon and result of the broader neoliberal economic structure, precarity as multifaceted and variegated individual experiences, and precarity as a ground of resistance. This chapter develops a three-pronged process that underpins the mutually reinforcing relationship between precarity and law, and identifies some of the factors that make a socialist country like Vietnam a suitable setting to explore such a relationship.

When doing classical fieldwork, ethnographers spend time in a foreign culture and try to describe this culture in a way that makes strange or unusual features understandable for their readers. It is a way to help addressees to see their own culture from a new perspective. The purpose of this chapter is to show how applied research can help to identify problems in society and professions and how it contributes to providing solutions by using the media linguistics toolbox. The chapter introduces some research frameworks, structures of various methods, and theoretical concepts. Furthermore, it aims to explain why the combination of linguistic and ethnographic frameworks is especially useful for finding out what people actually do when interacting in the context of digital media. The section on digital ethnography shows how doing research across offline and online spaces can broaden the understanding of the complexities of our contemporary world. Finally, the chapter introduces methods to generalize findings from ethnographic case studies systematically.

This chapter examines the literary representation of Afro-Cuban orality by three major Cuban literary figures of the twentieth century: Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, and Nicolás Guillén. Their writing is considered in the context of wider debates about the representational value of Latin American literary portrayals of the Other and the question of the subaltern speaking, thus linking them with the late 1980s body of criticism known as postmodern ethnography. In this sense, critics tend to favor Cabrera’s self-reflective innovative representation over Ortiz’s supposedly objective detachment as traditional anthropologist. However, this chapter draws attention to the fact that both Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s studies were forms of salvage ethnography, an approach based on the erroneous belief that oral traditions need to be preserved or rescued through writing. The chapter then addresses the son poetry of Nicolás Guillén as a contrasting representation of Afro-Cuban orality in the realm of written poetry that circumvents Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s reifying approaches by drawing on the lyrics of Afro-Cuban music son. Thus, the poem "Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio" achieves an openly subjective literary reworking of an Afro-Cuban son text while recognizing its parallel existence as a legitimate Afro-Cuban literary form and foregrounding its own status as copy.

Chapter 3 explores how Pseudo-Hegesippus uses the figure of the patriarch Abraham, along with several other biblical heroes, to drive a variegated discourse of Jewish ethnography throughout De Excidio. By zeroing in on two passages where Abraham and other Bible figures are used to talk about “what the Jews are like” (i.e., ethnic stereotyping), Pseudo-Hegesippus shows himself familiar with ancient ethnographic conventions and uses ethnography to present various pictures of the Jewish national character in the mouths of both Roman and Jewish narrative characters.

The preface describes the research methodology and the writing process that led to this book. It begins by explaining how the author collected information from the relevant sources, verified its completeness and accuracy, and analysed it under a unified framework. It then turns to the issue of storytelling style and to the author’s decision to present his findings in the form of a fictionalized account. In so doing, the preface discusses the problem of verifiability of classified information, the issue of trust between the narrator and the audience, and the promises and pitfalls of literary writing when it comes to informing, reporting, or commenting on real life.