Evergreen Ethnographies
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Publication date: 2012-10-01
Polish Sociological Review 2012;179(3):431-442
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ABSTRACT
The article promotes the argument that anthropological or ethnological knowledge is primarily
produced through ethnographies that present fieldwork experience. As publications that appear after
returning home, they provide the social sciences with the most recent information about the present
reality. Moreover, that is where we can find new methodological approaches and new theoretical concepts.
Our contemporary experience in such a fast-changing world shows the uselessness of the formerly applied
analytical notions, forcing us to search for a new form of description and new interpretative categories.
The article is actually a survey of the best known fieldwork monographs presented through theories,
schools and trends in cultural and social anthropology that have been constituted or overcome by these
very monographs, which are milestones in over a century of ethnological/anthropological research. As the
last ones are from the 21st century, they present not only the newest research results, but also the most
up-to-date methodologies.