300650 Exploring Anthropology through Ethnographic Texts (MA: Soziologie der globalen Welt) (S) (SoSe 2025)

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Requirements for participation, required level

Publishing a full-length book (commonly called an ethnography or ethnographic monograph) is a significant milestone in anthropology. While articles may make the case for specific arguments, a book allows an in-depth exploration of a research project and often showcases groundbreaking work with multiple arguments. In view of the importance of publishing a book, academic journals usually have special sections devoted to reviewing new books, and reviewers will take care to examine the arguments made in new ethnographies, considering both the arguments made and the empirical material on which those arguments are based.

We can say then that to explore anthropology and the sort of questions that anthropologists ask, is also to explore ethnographies. We can and should engage with books as a whole, looking at their component parts, how these fit together and what they contribute to scholarship. In this course, we will explore four ethnographies published in the last four years. We will read each in detail, considering what arguments the authors make, what material they use for these, and whether we find these arguments convincing, lacking or both.

This is an excellent course for those who would like to undertake in depth reading, and you will find that your academic writing will improve as a result of detailed reviewing of other people’s writing. For those seeking an academic career, writing book reviews is a vital part of academic writing and often the entry point into writing for publication. This course is excellent preparation for that, and we will discuss writing for a book review formally for an academic journal in the final session.

Bibliography

The three ethnographies on which we will focus during this course (in this order) are
1. Deng, Grazia Ting (2024) Chinese espresso: contested race and convivial space in contemporary Italy Princeton University Press
2. Borisova, Elena (2024) Paradoxes of migration in Tajikistan: locating the good life UCL Press
3. Gearin, Alex (2024) Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous visions and modern worlds Stanford University Press