Renewable ethnography: Ethnographic pebbles & Labyrinths in the way of theory

Abstract

Anthropology in the 1990s has actively engaged with science studies, as in the 1980s it engaged with feminism, media studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. Cultural vocabularies and social understandings of today's worlds increasingly draw from the new life sciences and information sciences. The openness of ethnographically-empirically grounded cultural analyses to the historical moments in which they are put to work makes them capable, like experimental systems in science, of creating new epistemic things. Six dissertations and five approaches to pedagogy for first (dissertation) fieldwork are reviewed.