Content area
Full Text
Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011, 289 pp. $19.00 paper (978-0-226-20683-7).
Since its first publication in 1995, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes has become one of the seminal texts for those teaching social science students the intricacies of creating, developing, organizing, and processing fieldnotes and writing ethnographies. Written during the surge of interest in ethnographic writing during the 1980s and 90s, the authors made a valuable contribution by filling a long-standing gap in the literature of ethnographic methods training and providing beginners with an intimate understanding of how to take, organize, and develop fieldnotes.
While ethnographic research itself has since receded somewhat, nonetheless, the authors were motivated to write a second edition for two fundamental reasons. First, there has been a significant increase in the publication of articles and chapters concerned with the process of writing fieldnotes which consider and incorporate reflexive insights. Second, and, more importantly, the experience of teaching another generation of students made the limitations of their original work more obvious to the authors. As such, to aid comprehension, the authors have substantially reorganized the contents of some chapters and have provided a more detailed discussion of the issues of race, class, and gender.
Despite these changes, the authors' central focus remains the same: how to effectively take and maintain rigorous fieldnotes so as to turn fieldwork experiences and observations into a finished ethnography. As such, they explain how to balance observing with writing and effectively demonstrate that the recording of fieldnotes is equally as important as what is written in the text. Throughout, the authors stress that the ethnographic researcher is not just observing and recording some objective reality but, rather, is always subjectively implicated in the observations and interpretations. It comes to...