Ethnography has long defined anthropology as a discipline. But what precisely does ethnography mean today at a moment of transnational migration, mobile lifestyles, consumer citizenship, and deterritorialized subjectivities? And how does ethnography work as a (social, political) critique and how to think critically about ethnography if we are to challenge, rather than merely accept, the tenets of 'being there'? In this class, we 1) engage a close reading of a number of ethnographies—both old and new, canonical and experimental—and 2) consider the meta-issue of Ethnography by looking at debates of the 1980s and more recent attempts to theorize a practice and ethics of ethnography.
