Ethnography in Late Industrialism

Item Type Journal Article Author Kim Fortun URL https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01153.x License © 2012 by the American Anthropological Association Volume 27 Issue 3 Pages 446-464 Publication Cultural Anthropology ISSN 1548-1360 Date 2012 Extra _eprint: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01153.x DOI 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01153.x Accessed 2026-07-07 01:54:31 Library Catalog Wiley Online Library Language en Abstract This essay situates contemporary ethnography within late industrialism, a historical period characterized by degraded infrastructure, exhausted paradigms, and the incessant chatter of new media. In the spirit of Writing Culture, it calls for ethnography attuned to its times. It also calls for ethnography that “loops,” using ethnographic techniques to discern the discursive risks and gaps of a particular problem domain so that further ethnographic engagement in that domain is responsive and creative, provoking new articulations, attending to emergent realities. Ethnographic findings are thus fed back into ethnographic engagement. This mode of ethnography stages collaboration with interlocutors to activate new idioms and ways of engaging the world. It is activist, in a manner open to futures that cannot yet be imagined.