ANTH 565: ETHNOGRAPHY AS SCIENCE AND LITERATURE November 26-28: Ethnography of Institutions

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Another split week, reading Lorna Rhodes's Total Confinement or part of it for Monday, and Joseph Angrosino's Opportunity House, or part of it for Wednesday. Both of these are ethnographies of institutions rather than of communities in the traditional sense, let alone of the fictitious "whole cultures." Nov 26: Ethnographic writing and the Institution Ethnography is a bit different here, where the thing described is part of the American author's complex culture and society, but a part that is not very familiar to the author outside the context of the ethnography (Rhodes has never served time, and Angrosino is not mentally retarded). We want to explore here what differences in approach, both expository and rhetorical, are required when writing an institutional rather than a community or "culture" ethnography. Post on the differences that this kind of subject, in conjunction with the intended audience's presumed familiarity with the subject, makes on the way the ethnography is written, the way it gains its ethnographic authority, and the ways it affects you as a reader. Nov 28: OK, maybe we can talk about Foucault I must admit I was nonplussed when I found out one of you had chosen "foucault@u." for your UW email address. In the first place, I look more like Foucault than anybody here, and in the second place, while I have learned some interesting things from Foucault, I am suspicious of Foucault-worship (and Marx-worship, Lacan-worship, whatever Intellectual-worship). But when we deal with the analysis of institutions (ethnographic or otherwise), we are forced to take account of the man and his ideas, since he began from the institution and spread his ideas to the society. So read the chapter on Panopticism from Foucault's Discipline and Punish and post on the ways the authors use MF's ideas in their ethnographic analysis.

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