Assessment & assignments

  1. Active Participation (10%,)

  2. Ethnography of Histories (50%)

  3.  Ethnography of Objects (40%)

Ethnography & History

Some historians insist a historian comes to know the past by literally rethinking the ideas of historic figures. Therefore, all history becomes the history of thought (Flynn 1974). Although, social sciences investigate phenomena through methods/methodologies and fieldwork that yield empirical evidence. In other words, social scientists look at phenomena by following perceptions, while historians look through them by rethinking what was perceived. This course as a skill learning course introduces students to ethnography, its interdisciplinary use, and how ethnography can be included in historians' toolbox. This course is influenced by, designed, and taught according to The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez.  Therefore, the learning outcomes are proposed in the form of a communal act and growth. This course follows an interdisciplinary perspective so that students learn how empirical qualitative methods from social sciences contribute to history and historical research:

  1. Learn ethnographic methods through collaboration and co-creation (interviewing, observation-participation, visual analysis/photo-elicitation) and their applications in (oral) history.

  2. Discuss and arrives at the difference between Emic and Etic within knowledge production

  3.  Connect with each other and acquire storytelling/writing skills by knowledge of past (history) to contemporary.

  4. Think with each other and gain familiarity with interdisciplinarity and decolonial collaborative knowledge production

A former student in the Ethnographic Storytelling Workshop (2019) wrote explained consumption culture through  the history of the toaster. She found the toaster in the field visit to a secondhand shop and she illustrated cultural changes through design and how consumers communicate with an object. This story is a good example of how objects have histories, they encapsulate meaning-making processes and they can be approached ethnographically. 
These readings could guide more those interested in the topic:
  1. Geismar, H., & Horst, H. A. (2004). Materializing Ethnography. Journal of Material Culture, 9(1), 5-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183504041086
  2. Lillios, K.T. Objects of Memory: The Ethnography and Archaeology of Heirlooms. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 6, 235–262 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021999319447 
  3. Marschall, S. (2019). ‘Memory objects’: Material objects and memories of home in the context of intra-African mobility. Journal of Material Culture, 24(3), 253-269. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183519832630

Course Readings:

  1. Faubion, Jame. Handbook of Ethnography. : SAGE Publications Ltd, 2001. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781848608337

  2. Matt Hodges (2015) Reinventing “History”?, History and Anthropology, 26:4, 515-527, DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2015.1074901

  3. Michaela Fenske, and John Bendix. “Micro, Macro, Agency: Historical Ethnography as Cultural Anthropology Practice.” Journal of Folklore Research 44, no. 1 (2007): 67–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4640221

  4. Palmié, Stephan, and Charles Stewart. "Introduction: For an anthropology of history." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1 (2016): 207-236. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.014

  5. Diana Espírito Santo (2022) The Route of Orion: Towards a deconstructive history of alien contact in Chile, History, and Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2022.2034623

  6. Leonardo, M. D. (1987). Oral history as ethnographic encounter. Oral History Review, 15(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1093/ohr/15.1.1

  7. Amy Starecheski (2014) Squatting History: The Power of Oral History as a History-Making Practice, The Oral History Review, 41:2, 187-216, DOI: 10.1093/ohr/ohu030

  8. Gerard Forsey, M. (2010). Ethnography as participant listening. Ethnography, 11(4), 558–572. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138110372587

  9. Gürsel, Zeynep (2023), Looking Together as Method. Vis Anthropol Rev, 39: 200-229. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12281

  10. Christian Feet, (2004) Ethnographic Objects: Polymaterial and Polycultural. the link here

  11. Buchczyk, M. (2018), Ethnographic Objects on The Cold War Front: The Tangled History of a London Museum Collection. Mus Anthropol, 41: 159-172. https://doi.org/10.1111/muan.12185

  12. Fabian, Johannes. “On Recognizing Things. The ‘Ethnic Artefact’ and the ‘Ethnographic Object.’” L’Homme, no. 170 (2004): 47–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40590211