Jan Blommaert is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) and is also affiliated to Ghent University (Belgium) and the University of the Western Cape (South Africa). He is the Director of the Babylon Research Center at Tilburg University.

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1: Ethnography as Couter-Hegemony: Remarks on Epistemology and Method

Chapter 2: Obituary: Dell H. Hymes (1927-2009)

Chapter 3: Ethnography and Democracy: Hymes' Political Theory of Language

Chapter 4: Ethnopoetics as Functional Reconstruction: Dell Hymes' Narrative View of the World

Chapter 5: Grassroots Historiography and the Problem of Voice: Tshibumba's Histoire Du Zaïre

Chapter 6: Historical Bodies and Historical Space

Chapter 7: Semiotic and Spatial Scope: Towards a Materialist Semiotics

Chapter 8: Pierre Bourdieu and Language in Society

Chapter 9: Combining Surveys and Ethnographies in the Study of Rapid Social Change

Chapter 10: Data Sharing As Entextualization Practice

Chapter 11: Chronotopes, Scales and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society

Chapter 12: Marxism and Urban Culture

Chapter 13: On Scope and Depth in Linguistic Ethnography: A Commentary

References

This book persuasively argues the case that ethnography must be viewed as a full theoretical system, rather than just as a research method. Blommaert traces the influence of his reading of classic works about ethnography on his thinking, and discusses a range of authors who have influenced the development of a theoretical system of ethnography, or whose work might be productively used to develop it further. Authors examined include Hymes, Scollon, Kress, Bourdieu, Bakhtin and Lefebvre. This book will be required reading for students and scholars involved in ethnographic research, or those interested in the theory of ethnography.