Living the Ethnographic Life

Rose makes a plea to break down the corporate mould of ethnography and refashion it as a democratic form of thought and existence in which the ethnographer is fully engaged with the subject. He links the origins of ethnography with the travel journals of colonizing European traders, merchants and soldiers, and then shows how modern ethnograpy, embedded in corporately organized universities, has adopted this imperial philosophy and structure. The author offers an alternative to "corporate" ethnography: one which is concerned with its subject, experiments with new forms of ethnographic expression, and connects ethnography more directly to the world it claims to describe. Through the use of poetry, story, epigaph and scholarly analysis, Rose introduces the possibility of ethnography as a way of life.