{"product_id":"the-poverty-of-the-ethnography-of-poverty-9780197804001","title":"The Poverty of the Ethnography of Poverty","description":"Recapitulating the three ages of urban ethnography born in Chicago a century ago, this book puts into historical and analytical perspective a controversy over the ethnography of the nexus of race, class, and morality in and around the black American ghetto in the age of triumphant neoliberalism, in order to draw from it positive lessons for the theory and practice of fieldwork. Thoughtless empiricism, acceptance of problematics prefabricated by ordinary and political common sense, confusion between folk and analytical categories, confinement to the immediate perimeter of interaction, bifurcating moralism: these are all traps that every ethnographer encounters sooner or later on her path and that only collective vigilance can hope to thwart. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThis epistemological return is an opportunity to pinpoint the danger of \u003cem\u003eethnographism\u003c\/em\u003e, the tendency to want to describe, interpret, and explain a phenomenon based solely on the elements discerned through fieldwork, and to call for the correlative practice of an \u003cem\u003eenactive, structural, and historicized ethnography\u003c\/em\u003e that sets out to embed the micro-actions observed in the interlocking series of nested social spaces that shape them and give them sense. Such an ethnography allows us to avoid falling into one or another of the five fallacies of participant observation: interactionism, inductivism, populism, presentism, and the hermeneutic drift. And to move beyond Clifford Geertz's \"thick description\" with the \"thick construction\" inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, whose mission is to construct scientifically the ordinary social construction of reality.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLoïc Wacquant \u003c\/strong\u003eis Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique, Paris. His books have been translated into twenty languages and include \u003cem\u003eBody and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer \u003c\/em\u003e(expanded anniversary edition, 2022), \u003cem\u003eThe Invention of the \"Underclass\" A Study in the Politics of Knowledge \u003c\/em\u003e(2022), \u003cem\u003eBourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory\u003c\/em\u003e (2023), and \u003cem\u003eRacial Domination\u003c\/em\u003e (2024).\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51580046770450,"sku":"9780197804001","price":103.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_2fdbcaff-5094-47aa-8c03-e66747473463.jpg?v=1756204533","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-poverty-of-the-ethnography-of-poverty-9780197804001","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}