Reading Response to Pink and Morgan (Nimrah Syed)

Tim Ingold, who is an anthropologist suggested that Ethnography is a way of conducting research “to describe the lives of people other than ourselves, with an accuracy and sensitivity honed by detailed observation and prolonged first‐hand experience” (2008a:69). I really liked this quote and understood it quite well as I have been taking many social science classes which are related to observation i.e. participant or non-participant observation. I quite agree that when we are observed by someone else lens then we can be more sufficiently and realistically seen instead of viewing ourselves on our own. Therefore, ethnography holds great importance as it has great amount of fieldwork involved.

I also really liked where they supported short term Ethnography over long term ethnography. They have also cleared in the minds of the readers that there is no point to consider the short term ethnography as inferior because many people think that it is usually conducted due to time constraints and deadlines etc.

Here, I would like to add that one of our classmate shared his story of being a part of the short ethnography study in Shanghai and he found it too fruitful and made useful conclusions by conducting a participant and non-participant research.

Finally, I feel like the article was a bit hard to focus on and I lost my interest in the middle because it lacked a lot of proofs to support their saying and mainly some interesting examples.

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