{"id":945,"date":"2017-11-28T20:30:01","date_gmt":"2017-11-28T20:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/?page_id=945"},"modified":"2018-06-27T17:10:42","modified_gmt":"2018-06-27T16:10:42","slug":"the-book-case-introduction","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/the-book-case-introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"1. The Book-CASE: Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"
Welcome. Plea<\/i>se read the\u00a0instructions<\/a>\u00a0for reviewing before commenting.\u00a0We ask contributors to be generous when thinking along with our pieces and to keep in mind that the final chapters are intended to be short essays.\u00a0Visit matteringpress.org<\/a> for more information on its other books. Readers might\u00a0also want to have a look at this resource<\/a> created by one of the book’s editors, Emily Yates-Doerr, which catalogues key Open Access anthropology publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n

By\u00a0Emily Yates-Doerr\u00a0and\u00a0Christine Labuski<\/em><\/p>\n

We launch this book with a question:\u00a0What is an ethnographic case?\u00a0<\/em>As ethnography is a process and practice of authorship, this question produces another:\u00a0What can it be made to be?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The pieces in this text explore what cases can generate, and our reasons for resisting or embracing them as modes of analysis. There is a rich and variable history to \u201cthinking in cases\u201d (Forrester 1996<\/a>). The expository medical case, attentive to the unusual and particular, has long been used as a tool for both diagnosis and instruction. The psychoanalytic case is built from fragments of remembered details with therapeutic objectives. The legal case establishes a precedent, while the criminal case comes to the detective as a mystery to be solved. The ethnographic case may be all of these things at once: instructing, dis\/proving, establishing, evoking. It may achieve different ends altogether.<\/p>\n

We make a case for our field and our fieldsites through the use of ethnographic cases. Often told in the form of a story, the case can be an illustrative representation. It can also be an exception that draws attention to a rule. It can bring into exquisite detail a micro that is situated, like the tiniest of matryoshka dolls, within a macro. At other times it destabilizes these nested hierarchies, showing that what is big is (also) small, or that significant power resides in that which may be very hard to see. The ethnographic case can interrupt the networked connections of any cybernetic system by attending not to a whole (and not even to its capillary endpoints) but to the details of a situation that is at once expansive and immediate. Though explicitly incidental, cases distinguish themselves from other short forms of narrative by way of the expertise they invoke. Solving, learning from, or interpreting the case requires a level of engagement that presumes both knowledge and curiosity, the proficient habitus that makes improvisation possible. Interpretive expertise, in other words, transforms the extemporaneous into the routine, the anecdote into the lesson. Case closed. Or is it?<\/p>\n

What follows our introduction is a series of \u201cethnographic cases.\u201d We will feature entries by scholars whose cases illuminate, even as they unsettle, how we work with cases. To pay homage to the traditional ethnographic monograph, the pieces have been assembled as an expanding bookCASE. The format of this bookCASE makes evident that changes are underway in the practice of ethnography. Above, we referred to ethnography as a technique of\u00a0authorship<\/em>\u00a0in order to highlight relations of power (author-ity) that accompany the assembly of cases. But the method of this authorship \u2013 writing, drawing, filming, illustrating \u2013 is not given, any more than an author\u2019s singularity.<\/p>\n

In medical, law, and business schools, exemplary cases have long been used as pedagogical tools. Similarly, we hope this collection can serve as a resource for teaching. You might use them to encourage your students to consider how to narrate an occurrence or event from the material of the everyday. Along the way, we might find that ethnographic cases produce a very different form of expertise than those produced in medicine, law, or business.<\/p>\n

This bookCASE might be taken as a response to a\u00a0recent challenge<\/a>\u00a0that the term ethnography is too vague and too overused to be useful (Ingold 2014). Rather than displace the term, the bookCASE seeks to shore it up\u2014 to invigorate it with the insights and interferences offered by attentive fieldwork. In many ways, \u201cthe case\u201d and ethnography may seem antithetical: the former a short reflection, the latter based on a commitment over time. However, we suspect that a case becomes\u00a0ethnographic<\/em>\u00a0in the way that it situates the narration of any given event within other narratives. The particulars of ethnographic cases may not aspire to generality, but may instead change the practice of and possibility for generality. The questions we began with are not ones we seek to answer definitively, but to open up and turn around\u2014 ones that we hope will lead to other questions and help us to narrate other conditions of possibility.<\/p>\n

The chapters in this book focus on the worlds that materialize through research. Taken together, they offer an intervention into our craft of re-description. We hope they make you want to author cases.<\/p>\n

\n

A note on Further Reading<\/strong><\/p>\n

Above we have cited: Forrester, John (1996),\u00a0If p, then what? Thinking in cases. History of the Human Sciences<\/em><\/a>\u00a09(3):1-25<\/em>; from the terrific book,\u00a0Science Without Laws<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2007),\u00a0<\/em>edited by Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Norton Wise. (The book is dedicated to Clifford Geertz, who, in the company of many involved in\u00a0Writing Culture<\/em><\/a>, gave sustained, critical attention to the practice of telling stories. See\u00a0this 2012 issue in Cultural Anthropology<\/a>\u00a0for an update). We have also cited a recent piece Hau piece by Tim Ingold (2015)\u00a0That\u2019s Enough About Ethnography<\/a>\u00a04:(1), as a point of\u00a0departure. \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Emily Yates-Doerr is assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She is carrying out a study of the UN\u2019s efforts to improve human capital through maternal nutrition. She is author of\u00a0<\/em>The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Christine Labuski is an anthropologist and assistant professor of Women\u2019s and Gender Studies at Virginia Tech, where she also directs the Gender, Bodies & Technology initiative. Her book\u00a0<\/em>It Hurts Down There: The Bodily Imaginaries of Female Genital Pain<\/em><\/a>, tracks the emergence and physiological realization of vulvar pain conditions in the contemporary United States.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome. Please read the\u00a0instructions\u00a0for reviewing before commenting.\u00a0We ask contributors to be generous when thinking along with our pieces and to keep in mind that the final chapters are intended to be short essays.\u00a0Visit matteringpress.org for more information on its other books. Readers might\u00a0also want to have a look at this resource created by one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4565,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/945"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8612,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/945\/revisions\/8612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}