Ethnographer's Toolkit

Abstract

The Ethnographer’s Toolkit (hereafter, the toolkit) consists of seven volumes, available separately or as a set. With the exception of volume 2, whose first author is Stephen Schensul, Jean J. Schensul and Margaret D. LeCompte alternate first authorship and are the sole authors of volumes 1 and 5. Those contributing to chapters in the remaining volumes are listed as authors of the volumes in which their work appears. The advance publication notice I received from the publisher proclaimed that the series covered “everything you need to know about doing ethnography in one package,” with the volumes designed to take the “novice fieldworker . . . through the multiple, complex steps of doing ethnographic research in simple, reader-friendly language.” These statements, the rest of the publisher’s write-up, and the title left me with the impression that this series would be useful, either as a resource or potentially as individual textbooks, when teaching introductory ethnographic research methods to either graduate or undergraduate students in anthropology. So, I was a bit surprised when the first line of each volume referred to “applied ethnographic research,” with the intended audience characterized as “educators; service professionals; professors of applied students in the fields of teaching, social and health services, communications, engineering, and business; and students working in applied field settings” (1:xiv). (More recent promotional material targets applied university-affiliated researchers.) In spite of the emphasis on using ethnography for identifying and solving human problems, the series touches only briefly on what the authors refer to as “compressed designs”—rapid ethnographic assessment or focused ethnography—and the value of long-term involvement at field sites is stressed repeatedly. At the same time, although the authors assert that the validity of one’s data depends on the cultural appropriateness of the collection process, the implications of these assertions for the conduct of ethnographic research are not explored in any depth, nor are references to relevant literature pro-