Favorite Ethnographies List

Favorite Ethnographies List

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This list was generated by fellow anthropologists who responded to a request by Jo Anne Schneider. She requested anthropologists to send her their favorite ethnographies for her students. Well, the response was overwhelming and she sent the list over our list-serve.

I have provided this list to you and at the end of the list, I've provided some of my favorites not included.


  1. Anderson, Elijah. 1990. Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  2. Agar, Mike.1973. Ripping and Running: A Formal Ethnography of Urban Heroin Addicts.
  3. Applebaum, Herbert P.1981 Royal Blue: The Culture of Construction Workers. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
  4. Bourgois,Philippe 1995. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge
  5. Cassell, Joan 1991 Expected Miracles: Surgeons at Work. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  6. Chambliss, Dan. 1996. Beyond Caring. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  7. Cornelisen, Ann. 1977. Women of the Shadows: A Study of the Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy NY: Random House/Vintage.
  8. Davis, Susan G. 1997 Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience. U. of California Press.
  9. Fadiman, Anne. 1997. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  10. Fitchen, Janet M. 1995 Poverty in Rural America. A Case Study. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. (reissue with changes of 1981 work on rural non-farm poverty in New York State)
  11. Fleischer, Mark. 1989. Warehousing Violence. Sage.
  12. Fleischer, Mark. 1995. Beggars and Thieves.U Wisconsin
  13. Fleischer, Mark. 1998. Dead End Kids. U Wisconsin.
  14. Gagne, Marie-Anik. 1994. A Nation Within A Nation: Dependency and the Cree. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
  15. Gladney, Dru.1989 (or 1990?). Chinese Muslums.Harvard U. Press.
  16. Gregory, Stephen. 1998. Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  17. Halperin, Rhoda H. 1990 The Livelihood of Kin. Making Ends Meet "The Kentucky Way." Austin: University of Texas Press.
  18. Hamabata, Matthews. 1991. Crested Kimono, Cornell U.P. -- American anthropologist looking at marriage and family in upper class Japanese life
  19. Holland, Dorothy C. and Margaret A. Eisenhart 1990 Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  20. Hull, Glynda.1992. "Their Chances? Slim and None": An Ethnographic Account of the Experiences of Low-Income People of Color in a Vocational Program and at Work. Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education.
  21. Hutnyk, John. 1996 The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation. Zed Books.
  22. Kendall, Laurel. 1988. Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman, Univ. of Hawaii Press.
  23. Kingfisher, Catherine.1996.Women in the American Welfare Trap. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  24. Lamphere, Louise.1987. From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Immigrant Women in a New England Industrial Community. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  25. Leacock, Eleanor.1969.Teaching and Learning in City Schools. New York: Basic Books.
  26. Liebow, Elliot. 1999. (Reprint edition).Tally's Corner : A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. New York: Little Brown.
  27. Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna. 1993 In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. Princeton U. Press.
  28. McCarthy Brown, Karen -- Mama Lola: A Voodou Priestess in Brooklyn (1991) University of California Press
  29. Macleod's, Jay. 1995. Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-income Neighborhood. Boulder: Westview Press.
  30. Merlan, Francesca. 1998. Caging the Rainbow: Places, Politics and Aborigines in a North Australian Town. Honolulu: U of Hawaii Press.
  31. Meyerhoff, Barbara 1978 Number Our Days. New York: Simon and Schuster.
  32. Moffatt, Michael.1989 Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
  33. Newman, Katherine 1989.Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class. New York: Vintage Books.
  34. Newman, Katherine 1999. No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. New York: Alfred A Knopf and Russell Sage Foundation.
  35. Okely, Judith. 1983. The Traveller-Gypsies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  36. Passaro, Joanne. 1996. The Unequal Homeless: Men On The Streets, Women In Their Place. New York: Routledge.
  37. Portes, Alejandro and Alex Stepick. 1993.City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  38. Sharff, Jagna Wojcicka 1998.King Kong on 4th Street: Families and the violence of poverty on the Lower East Side. Westview.
  39. Spradley, James P., You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads, 1970 (reissued 2000 with new introduction by Merrill Singer), Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.
  40. Stack, Carol 1974. All Our Kin:Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper and Row.
  41. Stack, Carol 1996. Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South.New York: Basic Books.
  42. Stepick, Alex. 1997. Pride Against Prejudice, Haitians in the United States. Allyn & Bacon.
  43. Stewart, Kathleen. 1996. A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America. Princeton University Press
  44. Taylor, Lawrence J. 1995. Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  45. Watson, James (ed.) 1997. Golden Arches East, Stanford U.P..
  46. Williams, Brett. 1988. Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, DC. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

My list:


  1. Allison, Anne. 1994. Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. University of Chicago: Illinois.
  2. Arensberg, Conrad M. 1937,1968,1988. The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study. Waveland Press: Prospect Heights, Illinois.
  3. Aretxaga, Begona. 1997. Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton University Press: Princeton New Jersey.
  4. Bowen, Elenore Smith. 1964. Return to Laughter: An Anthropological Novel. Anchor Books, Double Day: New York.
  5. Deren, Maya. 1953. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Documentext,McPherson & Company.
  6. Farmer, Paul. 1992. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. University of California Press.
  7. Finkler, Kaja. 1985. Spirtualist Healer's in Mexico. Bergin and Garvey:South Hadley: Boston.
  8. Finkler, Kaja. 1994. Women in Pain: Gender and Morbidity in Mexico. University of Pennsylvania Press: Penn.
  9. Gordon, Milton R. 1964. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. University of Oxford Press: New York.
  10. Handler, Richard and Gable, Eric. 1997. The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. Duke University Press: North Carolina.
  11. Johnson, Hayes and Broder, David S. 1997. The System:The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point. Back Bay Books, a Little, Brown and Company: New York.
  12. (See my review.)
  13. Liebow, Elliot. 1993. Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women. Free Press: New York.
  14. Lutz, Catherine A. and Collins, Jane L. 1993. Reading National Geographic. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
  15. Martin, Emily 1994. Flexible Bodies: The Role of the Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Beacon Press: Boston.
  16. Maybury-Lewis, David. 1965,1988. The Savage and the Innocent. Beacon Press:Boston, Mass.
  17. Schneider, David M. 1968,1980. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
  18. Velez-Ibanez, Carlos C. 1997. Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States. University of Arizona Press: Tucson.

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