Ethnographic Practice in the Present

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In its assessment of the current "state of play" of ethnographic practice in social anthropology, this volume explores the challenges that changing social forms and changing understandings of "the field" pose to contemporary ethnographic methods. These challenges include the implications of the remarkable impact social anthropology is having on neighboring disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography and linguistics, as well as the potential 'costs' of this success for the discipline. Contributors also discuss how the ethnographic method is influenced by current institutional contexts and historical "traditions" across a range of settings. Here ethnography is featured less as a methodological "tool-box" or technique but rather as a subject on which to reflect.

Jon P. Mitchell is Reader in anthropology at the University of Sussex. His main ethnographic research was conducted in Malta, covering themes of ritual and religion, politics and the state, history, memory and modernity, and popular culture. His publications include Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta (Routledge, 2002), Powers of Good and Evil: Social Transformation and Popular Belief (jointly edited with Paul Clough, Berghahn, 2002), Modernity in the Mediterranean (edited special issue of Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2002), Human Rights in Global Perspective (jointly edited with Richard Ashby Wilson, Routledge, 2003). His current research focuses on the religious origins of secular charity.