Ways of Knowing Small Places

Ways of Knowing Places analyzes several responses to a crisis in
American ethnographic and literary representation that began roughly in
the 1960s. Confronted by unprecedental social, economic, and
epistemological change initiated by decolonization and the Civil Rights
movement, American ethnographers and minority writers of fiction had to
rethink their relation to the small places and cultures that had
hitherto been central to their writing. Small, isolated places -
particularly islands - had been key sites for studying non-western
peoples through participant observation.

• author: Dominika Ferens