In the 1980s, George Marcus spearheaded a major critique of cultural
anthropology, expressed most clearly in the landmark book Writing
Culture, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography through
Thick and Thin updates and advances that critique for the late 1990s.
Marcus presents a series of penetrating and provocative essays on the
changes that continue to sweep across anthropology. He examines, in
particular, how the discipline's central practice of ethnography has
been changed by "multi-sited" approaches to anthropology and how new
research patterns are transforming anthropologists' careers. Marcus
rejects the view, often expressed, that these changes are undermining
anthropology. The combination of traditional ethnography with scholarly
experimentation, he argues, will only make the discipline more lively
and diverse.
The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Marcus shows
how ethnographers' tradition of defining fieldwork in terms of peoples
and places is now being challenged by the need to study culture by
exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often
seemingly incommensurate sites. The second part illustrates this
emergent multi-sited condition of research by reflecting it in some of
Marcus's own past research on Tongan elites and dynastic American
fortunes. In the final section, which includes the previously
unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin,"
Marcus examines the evolving professional culture of anthropology and
the predicaments of its new scholars. He shows how students have
increasingly been drawn to the field as much by such powerful
interdisciplinary movements as feminism, postcolonial studies, and
cultural studies as by anthropology's own traditions. He also considers
the impact of demographic changes within the discipline--in particular
the fact that anthropologists are no longer almost exclusively
Euro-Americans studying non-Euro-Americans. These changes raise new
issues about the identities of anthropologists in relation to those they
study, and indeed, about what is to define standards of ethnographic
scholarship.
Filled with keen and highly illuminating observations, Ethnography
through Thick and Thin will stimulate fresh debate about the past,
present, and future of a discipline undergoing profound transformations.
