Ethnologia Europaea Journal of European Ethnology

Book excerpt: Ethnography has become something of a buzzword in recent years. It is talked about and invoked in disciplines ranging from anthropology and ethnology to literature, history, business administration and design studies. Textbooks that teach ethnography tend to imbue students with the impression that ethnography is a mode of systematic investigation by which the researcher gets closer to the realities of people's everyday lives. But how straightforward are these processes in reality? As ethnography spreads into new folds of research both within and without the academy, the contributions in this volume demonstrate the manner in which field methods are adjusting, transforming or taking new forms altogether. If textbooks might lead students to believe that observations and interviews are the grounds upon which "good" ethnography can regularly be produced, the authors in this volume take as their point of departure the realisation that ethnography is being used in a multitude of different contexts which forces them -- and us as readers -- to question the "regularities" and "irregularities" of their own work.