Ordinary extraordinary ethnography

This is a very useful book, for which ethnographers and other qualitative social scientists should be grateful. It is helpful in the way of style guides: a rejuvenating reminder of first principles, helpful no matter the stage of one’s mastery of the subject. Qualitative researchers can easily fall victim to the “curse of knowledge” (Pinker 2014) and take shortcuts in both the analysis and presentation of data. Small and Calarco name five traits that sound qualitative research has: cognitive empathy, heterogeneity, follow-up, and self-awareness. Like a style guide that includes first a convoluted sentence and then a clear one, they include interview and participant observation extracts that do not benefit from the robustness that comes from those traits and then ones that do. The side-by-side comparisons are compelling and give practical ways for people to improve their literacy both in consuming and producing research.