Stephanie Albert February 1, 2014 English 1102 Homework 5

After reading part of The Four Faces of Ethnography, I had a little bit of knowledge of the differences between classical, modern, and postmodern ethnographies. From the reading I perceived a classical ethnography as something like we are doing in class. It has an opening sentence that grabs the reader, has heading and subheadings, and has a conclusion that summarizes everything. I consider the classical ethnography most similar to the six paragraph paper. Mainstream ethnography seems more informational but with an objective point of view. The author has a lot of say in this paper and is opposite from what we are doing considering we need to stay subjective towards our topic. It contains data and charts and is a lot more formal. As for the postmodern ethnography, I do not understand it as well. Maybe it was because the reading was not divided into intro, mid body, and conclusion. The only thing I took from it was that it opposes the classical method and that the author is very involved in the group while researching. I am not sure if this is true but that is my best guess.

Questions: 1. What exactly is a postmodern ethnography? Was I right in my statement about it? 2. If classical and modern ethnographies are so different, why are the conclusions the same? Is that just a general way to summarize your findings? 3. In our own ethnographies, what format should we stick to? (If there is a specific one) 4. In the opening it says that ethnographies express one of three types of tales; realist, impressionist, and confessional. What does this mean?