Asking and Listening: Ethnography as Personal Adaptation

Giving students the capacity to include ethnography in their own experience! Asking and Listening is the first book to trace the changing ways in which human beings have learned to look at “the Others Beyond the Gate” with their strange languages and stranger customs. Not a history of ethnography so much as a chronicle of its uses and potentials, Asking and Listening examines the premises of ethnography and concerns itself with a wide range of issues such as ethnocentrism and the morass of cultural relativism, the cultures of corporations, and the meaning of ethnography for government policy. It ends with an examination of the problems in charting our tomorrows: ethnography in the information age, and for the future. Through its pragmatic analysis of cultures as storehouses of alternatives in the way universal problems can and have been approached, Asking and Listening offers students not merely the opportunity to make sense of descriptions of other peoples’ lifeways, but makes such ethnographic knowledge immediately useful in their own lives, choices, and career plans.