Understanding Ethnographic Texts

In this volume, Paul Atkinson presents useful advice on how to read, and therefore how to write, ethnography. He examines how ethnographers create field notes and how they do interview transcriptions, inevitably revealing the author's hand. He outlines various literary conventions used in ethnographic writing and points out some of the recent experiments that have departed from traditional ethnographic style. He links these to an analysis of the contributions of postmodernist theory to ethnographic work.