The Ethnographer′s Way

“Offering an agenda for contemporary ethnographic research design that finally brings our disciplinary methods in line with current ethnographic theory, The Ethnographer’s Way provides a radically transformed cartography for research. This exceptional book will become canonical for its meticulously tested step-by-step instructions, its thoughtful, generous, and generative set of solutions, and the possibilities it will open up in the academy.” - Emilia Sanabria, author of Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil

“The Ethnographer’s Way is an outstanding guide for students to investigate their own set of desires for places, questions, and theories that can become the conceptual glue that holds a project together for proposals, fieldwork, and writing. Deeply attentive to the psychological difficulty of imagining a truly ethnographic project before the fieldwork has been done, it is a manual for transforming the feeling of being overwhelmed into insight. This is a much-needed book for which there is no equivalent.” - Joseph Dumit, author of Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health

"[B]y the end, researchers should have all the material they need to develop solid research and grant proposals. Indeed, many of the students in the authors’ courses have won prestigious grants to support their fieldwork. . . . Vivid examples walk readers through the process of identifying a new project’s core concepts, drawing out their multidimensionality and situating them within the scholarly literature — all while bringing these seemingly disparate elements (or dimensions) together into a cogent frame of inquiry." - Adia Benton, Chronicle of Higher Education

"Peterson and Olson’s handbook offers an excellent, clear, and accessible multidisciplinary step-by-step guide to designing ethnographic fieldwork methods and research." - Emma Abell-Selby, Anthropological Notebooks