Ethnographic Things

Ethnographic demography: the use of ethnographic texts by demographers

Covering Things with Things

An abstract NP-hard covering problem is presented and xed-parameter tractable algorithms for this problem are described. The running times of the algorithms are expressed in terms of three parameters: n, the number of elements to be covered, k, the number of sets allowed in the covering, and d, the combinatorial dimension of the problem. The rst algorithm is deterministic and has running time O...

Reassembling Ethnographic Museum Collections

This volume addresses fundamental questions about the nature, value, and efficacy of museum collections in a postcolonial world and the agency of indigenous people in their production. The book’s primary focus lies with those objects that, by way of their specific histories, have been defined as “ethnographic”; however, the question of the contexts in which things are defined as “art” as oppose...

Infrastructure and Ethnographic Practice

By bringing together science studies, information science and ethnographic fieldwork in interdisciplinary research the author argues for the relevance of ethnographic practices when studying information systems as infrastructures of communication. Ethnographic fieldwork focuses attention on fringes and materialities of infrastructures and renders the researcher able to read the invisible layers...

On Ethnographic Sincerity

This essay posits sincerity and humor as linked ways of politicizing the interactions that underpin all ethnographic encounters. This politicization is contrasted with conventional anthropological preoccupations with authenticity (and fetishizations of ethnographic writing), and it demands attention to the human bodies that constitute ethnographic intersubjectivity. Combining a discussion of Ha...