Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge

Documents reflects on the new challenges to humanistic social science in a world in which the subjects of research increasingly share the professional passions and problems of the researcher.

Documents are everywhere in modern life, from the sciences to bureaucracy to law; at the same time, fieldworkers document social realities by collecting, producing, and exchanging documents of their own. Capping off a generation of reflection and critique about the promises and pitfalls of ethnographic methods, the contributors explore how ethnographers conceive, grasp, appreciate, and see patterns, demonstrating that the core of the ethnographic method now lies in the way ethnographers respond to, and increasingly share the professional passions and problems of, their subjects.