Roger Sanjek’s Ethnography in Today’s World is a collected volume, made up of previously disseminated work. Many of the chapters had their first existence as oral presentations, but Sanjek has done a good job of sidestepping the common pitfalls of such transformations. Specifically, the chapters don’t feel like speeches that happen to have been written down and lined up one after the other. Each chapter has been re-crafted into a useful, insightful, and readable form. The overall flow of the book is a little uneven, however. While each chapter has value in and of itself, the through-line of the book is not quite as fluid, giving evidence of the book’s history as a collection of formally disparate pieces. The lack of fluidity is most noticeable when the text shifts from more personal accounts of specific fieldwork projects for which Sanjek is well known in one chapter to a scrutiny of ethnographic process in another. This lack of flow is a minor distraction rather than a major flaw, though, and the usefulness of the collected pieces easily overcomes that small issue.
The subtitle of the book, Color Full before Color Blind, applies more obviously to some of the chapters, wherein Sanjek engages in the political-economy informed, engaged anthropology the scholarly world has come to expect from him. Particularly in the first two chapters, the book discusses the political aspects of race (and the unexpected racial aspects of local politics), then the ritual creation and maintenance of ethnic identity/identities in the Elmhurst-Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York. Even there, the author’s political economy is not absent: “These rituals were not tangential to local politics. They were local politics” (36). Sanjek is not shy about putting forward his own intellectual biography, explaining how the identities he holds from various schools of thought shape the approach to ethnography that he takes. Part of his approach, informed by his studying and working in the 1960s in the US, is to strive for an applied, active, and engaged anthropology, which is where his “color full” paradigm of not eliding racial or ethnic identities comes into play.
Chapter 3 feels at first like a jarring shift to a discussion of Margaret Mead’s field and writing methodology, but it eventually becomes clear that Sanjek is attempting to use his fieldwork and writing experiences to explore what ethnography means in the anthropology of today. In so doing, he gives a very clear and valuable account of what ethnography is and how it came to be that way (chapters 3 and 4). As someone who teaches in an interdisciplinary curriculum with very few colleagues who understand my fields (folklore and anthropology), I find enormous potential in these two chapters to communicate what exactly it is that I do to my (well meaning, but often dismissive) colleagues. The same value can be realized by anyone teaching ethnographic methods to students. From basic understandings such as, “The word ‘ethnography’ has a double meaning in anthropology ...[t]he product depends upon the process but not in any simple A goes to B relationship” (59), to a more nuanced understanding that “anthropological theory is also autobiographical—even more significantly so than ethnography” (155), this book offers many insights into the doing of ethnography that will serve any methods class well. Chapters 5 and 6, on hidden power dynamics and the various forms of immediacy that ethnography allows (demands?) are likewise useful texts for teaching ethnographic practice and process. Even in chapter 7, when the focus of the book shifts back to the specific fieldwork description of the first two chapters, Sanjek drops hints of texture and insight, expressing pride in “the compliment from a reviewer of The Future of Us All about my ‘apparently inexhaustible capacity for absorbing the minutiae of local politics.’ (Anyway, I took it as a compliment)” (103).
Chapters 8 and 9 delve into the meat of ethnographic practice—the understanding of variable meaning being assigned to a given phenomenon (intermarriage in the former chapter, migration and diaspora in the latter) based on the contexts of the phenomenon and the people doing the meaning-making. Again, there is much of value in these chapters, but I found myself wishing for the tie into the previous chapters to be made more explicit. It is clear enough, but more explicit discussion of that tie would make the book more useful as a unit in the classroom. Imagining myself teaching from this book, I foresaw the need to make some connections for students. This need is probably less for the advanced undergrad or grad classroom, to be fair. This issue also crops up with chapter 10, which is largely framed by an examination of the development of Marvin Harris’ theoretical approach over his career.
The last two chapters of Ethnography in Today’s World function as a postscript to the volume. Chapter 11 is an affirmation of the value of ethnography to any exploration of culture, identity, or group processes, while chapter 12 is a rightly unapologetic call to continued action in the form of a publicly and politically engaged anthropology.
Overall, there is much to be valued and enjoyed in Roger Sanjek’s latest book. Each chapter has something to offer the ethnographer as well as the ethnography student. His writing is insightful and accessible as always. The lack of flow I discussed earlier means that the chapters may work more easily as individual pieces, but there is a through-line that can be constructed in the book. The fact that it needs some constructing is, as mentioned before, a distraction rather than a real flaw in the book. Sanjek’s latest is a useful text for anyone interested in ethnography.
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[Review length: 939 words • Review posted on October 1, 2014]