Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualit

What is it like to have lived with bulimia for most of your life? To have a mother who is retarded? To fight a health insurance company in order to survive breast cancer? Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner have assembled innovative pieces which tackle these and other difficult questions, enlarging the space to practice ethnographic writing as the stories are told through memoirs, poetry, photography, and other creative forms usually associated with the arts. The authors demonstrate how ethnographic data can be converted into memorable experiences that readers can use in the classroom and everyday life.

What is it like to have lived with bulimia for most of your life? To have a mother who is retarded? To fight a health insurance company in order to survive breast cancer? Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner have assembled innovative pieces which tackle these and other difficult questions, enlarging the space to practice ethnographic writing as the stories are told through memoirs, poetry, photography, and other creative forms usually associated with the arts. The authors demonstrate how ethnographic data can be converted into memorable experiences that readers can use in the classroom and everyday life.

Norman K. Denzin

. . .Ellis and Bochner establish the need, importance and centrality of new forms of qualitative writing for interpretive ethnography . . . [establishing] autoethnographies, sociopoetics, and reflexive texts as central points of reference for innovative ethnographic practice in the next century. There is much to be learned from these important exemplars.

Carolyn Ellis: University of South Florida Arthur P. Bochner: University of South Florida