Quick Ethnography (QE) is an easy-to-read guide to the rapid collection of high quality ethnographic data for use in research, policy analysis, and decision-making. It addresses the needs of social scientists grappling with complex cultural social interactions and cultural change occurring in communities around the globe by offering a comprehensive, integrated multi-method approach that will increase research productivity. Handwerker provides step-by-step procedures for producing lots of data very quickly, outlining how ethnographers must control field preparation, data collection, and...

What makes a 17-year-old girl decide to wrap a bomb around her body, walk into a supermarket, and detonate it, killing herself and an 18-year old girl shopping there? In this provocative and important book, renowned anthropologist W. Penn Handwerker shows that individual choices, from the fatal to the mundane, are fundamentally questions of culture--what it is, where it comes from, and the complex ways it changes and evolves. In accessible and engaging prose, he walks readers through the process of how the human imagination produces new things, shaped by culture and experience but also...

What makes a 17-year-old girl decide to wrap a bomb around her body, walk into a supermarket, and detonate it, killing herself and an 18-year old girl shopping there? In this provocative and important book, renowned anthropologist W. Penn Handwerker shows that individual choices, from the fatal to the mundane, are fundamentally questions of culture--what it is, where it comes from, and the complex ways it changes and evolves. In accessible and engaging prose, he walks readers through the process of how the human imagination produces new things, shaped by culture and experience but also...

The story of human evolution, or Our Story, is about the development and refinement of cultures. Individuals cannot do things on their own, this book argues; their choices are driven by heuristics, biases, illogical preferences, and irrational assumptions about the nature of reality. So how did humanity survive? By forming more and more successful cultures, which are teams of people who share a specific vision of the world. Because cultures-as-teams are more effective if there is a strong correspondence among the members, they select individuals who clarify the team's vision and force...

The story of human evolution, or Our Story, is about the development and refinement of cultures. Individuals cannot do things on their own, this book argues; their choices are driven by heuristics, biases, illogical preferences, and irrational assumptions about the nature of reality. So how did humanity survive? By forming more and more successful cultures, which are teams of people who share a specific vision of the world. Because cultures-as-teams are more effective if there is a strong correspondence among the members, they select individuals who clarify the team's vision and force...