Product Review

As a practical bridge between the classroom and the field, this down-to-earth, hands-on collection offers an impressive range of insightful, focused vignettes about cultural research that will jumpstart students’ thinking about the practice of anthropology. Reflecting the contributions of nearly two dozen practicing social scientists, each clearly written chapter of Doing Cultural Anthropology covers the fundamentals of a different data-collection technique. Following an overview of a particular ethnographic method, each author describes his or her own research project and shows how that technique is utilized. Learning-by-doing remains the thrust of the latest edition, which includes two new chapters plus significant revisions to five of the original contributions. Each chapter ends with suggestions for student projects that promote firsthand exposure to what ethnographers actually do. Readers are given just enough information to appreciate the technique and to practice it for themselves.