Carol Stack's groundbreaking, radical ethnography of a black community in the middle decades of the 20th century is in some essential ways neither radical nor groundbreaking.
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 geographical environment. They also investigate all aspects of its culture, including food, shelter, dress, transportation, and manufacture of the tribe; its customs regarding government, property, and division of labor; its patterns of production and exchange; its customs regarding birth, adulthood initiation rites, marriage, and death; its religious ideas relating to magic, supernatural beings, and the universe; and its artistic, mythological, and ceremonial i...