Radical Ethnography of a Black Community

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community, published in 1974 and based on fieldwork begun in the 1960s, in many ways follows the traditional requirements of any ethnography, at least as the form was practiced since its beginnings as a formal subgenre (distinct from travelogues and other related forms of writing) in the late 19th century and extending through the 1980s when a number of anthropologists such as George Marcus began to question the fundamental assumptions underlying the field of anthropology itself and the fundamentally linked practice of ethnography.

Stack's book, like so many ethnographies before hers, seeks to explain the dynamics and particulars of a specific society by focusing on certain aspects of typical and individualized behaviors in that society, linking these behaviors to the material culture of the society. Ethnography is simply the observational branch of ethnology (although in fact ethnography has come to replace ethnology as a term, perhaps because ethnology has too many colonial implications). An ethnography traditionally describes a culture, including its language, the physical characteristics of its people, its material products, and its social customs. In describing a particular tribe, for example, ethnographers gather information about its location and g

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ate to Pacific Island societies or to bring back their stories to the West (well, at least not until Derek Freeman came along). But once an anthropologist turned her eye to a community close at home, the whole enterprise became more fraught, especially given the race politics of the time in which she was during this research and writing. The great strength of Stack's ethnographic work is the depth of her anthropological knowledge of cross-cultural customs and institutions and her ability to set aside expectations of older ethnographers when they did not explain what she found in her own fieldwork. Traditionally, anthropologists have defined the husband, wife, and their offspring as the basic social-economic unit constituting a family. This unit was regarded as the universal family grouping that provided sexual, economic, and reproductive and educational functions (Murdock 1949). This perspective on the family was clearly inadequate for a study of domestic life in The Flats (Stack, 1974, p. 30). This ability to perceive new (to the ethnographic literature) cultural categories and social institutions is one of the things that makes All Our Kin such a successful ethnography. Stack's ability to see these structures clearly is based
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Approximate Word count = 2547
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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