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The purpose of this paper is to challenge some of the taken for granted assumptions of contemporary ethnographic practice by exploring reasons for fieldwork and the debt that is owed to those in the field.

Exploring traditional and contemporary reasons for fieldwork and comparing ostensive and performative styles of reporting organization studies.

The argument is that traditional ethnographic approaches do not fit contemporary organizing practices. In their place, a “symmetrical ethnology” is proposed.

More reflective use of labels and terms.

Better communication with practitioners.

Better dialogue with wider circles.

An important and timely critique of ethnography together with a reformulation and a number of suggestions for future practice.

The full ‘storytelling’ paper was written in 1978 and was influential in its time. It is reprinted here, introduced by an Author's reflection on it in 2014. The chapter describes the author’s early disenchantment with traditional approaches to educational research.

He regards educational research as, at best, a misnomer, since little of it is preceded by a search. Entitled educational researchers often fancy themselves as scientists at work. But those whom they attempt to describe are often artists at work. Statistical methodologies enable educational researchers to measure something, but their measurements can neither capture nor explain splendid teaching.

Since such a tiny fraction of what is published in educational research journals influences school practitioners, professional researchers should risk trying alternative approaches to uncovering what is going on in schools.

Story telling is posited as a possible key to producing insights that inform and ultimately improve educational practice. It advocates openness to broad inquiry into the culture of the educational setting.

Anthropologists have long discussed the ways in which their discipline has been entangled, consciously and unconsciously, with the colonized populations they study. A foundational text in this regard was Michel Leiris' Phantom Africa (L'Afrique fantôme; Leiris, 1934), which described an African ethnographic expedition led by Marcel Griaule as a form of colonial plunder. Leiris criticized anthropologists' focus on the most isolated, rural, and traditional cultures, which could more easily be described as untouched by European influences, and he saw this as a way of disavowing the very existence of colonialism. In 1950, Leiris challenged Europeans' ability even to understand the colonized, writing that “ethnography is closely linked to the colonial fact, whether ethnographers like it or not. In general they work in the colonial or semi-colonial territories dependent on their country of origin, and even if they receive no direct support from the local representatives of their government, they are tolerated by them and more or less identified, by the people they study, as agents of the administration” (Leiris, 1950, p. 358). Similar ideas were discussed by French social scientists throughout the 1950s. Maxime Rodinson argued in the Année sociologique that “colonial conditions make even the most technically sophisticated sociological research singularly unsatisfying, from the standpoint of the desiderata of a scientific sociology” (Rodinson, 1955, p. 373). In a rejoinder to Leiris, Pierre Bourdieu acknowledged in Work and Workers in Algeria (Travail et travailleurs en Algérie) that “no behavior, attitude or ideology can be explained objectively without reference to the existential situation of the colonized as it is determined by the action of economic and social forces characteristic of the colonial system,” but he insisted that the “problems of science” needed to be separated from “the anxieties of conscience” (2003, pp. 13–14). Since Bourdieu had been involved in a study of an incredibly violent redistribution of Algerians by the French colonial army at the height of the anticolonial revolutionary war, he had good reason to be sensitive to Leiris' criticisms (Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964). Rodinson called Bourdieu's critique of Leiris' thesis “excellent’ (1965, p. 360), but Bourdieu later revised his views, noting that the works that had been available to him at the time of his research in Algeria tended “to justify the colonial order” (1990, p. 3). At the 1974 colloquium that gave rise to a book on the connections between anthropology and colonialism, Le mal de voir, Bourdieu called for an analysis of the relatively autonomous field of colonial science (1993a, p. 51). A parallel discussion took place in American anthropology somewhat later, during the 1960s. At the 1965 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Marshall Sahlins criticized the “enlistment of scholars” in “cold war projects such as Camelot” as “servants of power in a gendarmerie relationship to the Third World.” This constituted a “sycophantic relation to the state unbefitting science or citizenship” (Sahlins, 1967, pp. 72, 76). Sahlins underscored the connections between “scientific functionalism and the natural interest of a leading world power in the status quo” and called attention to the language of contagion and disease in the documents of “Project Camelot,” adding that “waiting on call is the doctor, the US Army, fully prepared for its self-appointed ‘important mission in the positive and constructive aspects of nation-building’” a mission accompanied by “insurgency prophylaxis” (1967, pp. 77–78). At the end of the decade, Current Anthropology published a series of articles on anthropologists’ “social responsibilities,” and Human Organization published a symposium entitled “Decolonizing Applied Social Sciences.” British anthropologists followed suit, as evidenced by Talal Asad's 1973 collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. During the 1980s, authors such as Gothsch (1983) began to address the question of German anthropology's involvement in colonialism. The most recent revival of this discussion was in response to the Pentagon's deployment of “embedded anthropologists” in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. The “Network of Concerned Anthropologists” in the AAA asked “researchers to sign an online pledge not to work with the military,” arguing that they “are not all necessarily opposed to other forms of anthropological consulting for the state, or for the military, especially when such cooperation contributes to generally accepted humanitarian objectives … However, work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another violates professional standards” (“Embedded Anthropologists” 2007).³ Other disciplines, notably geography, economics, area studies, and political science, have also started to examine the involvement of their fields with empire.⁴

The purpose of this paper is to identify the structural dimensions of a new museal offer, museoparks, which use edutainment and more generally re‐enchantment strategies.

To bring out the symbolic dimensions specific to these cultural sites, the methodology used is based on the analysis of photographic media.

The analysis reveals four main symbolic dimensions structuring these hybrid cultural offers: spectacularization, immersive character, ritualized character, and very intense merchandizing of the experience.

This analysis allows us to update a hybrid, complex and re‐sized form of cultural experience that goes beyond the classic combination identified in the analysis of edutainment strategies (educational and fun dimensions).

From a managerial action perspective, this research provides keys to understanding the strategies proposed by the hybrid offers of museoparks; strategies that might inspire many museum managers eager to imitate them.

This research provides keys for understanding the logic underlying the structuring of the experience offered by cultural institutions.

This study was conducted on children and adolescents from the three tribal cultures from Northern Tanzania: the Hadza, the Datoga and the Iraqw. The comparative data on aggression and conflict management skills were measured at Endomaga Boarding School, Lake Eyasi, Mangola in Northern Tanzania, in 2005‐2006. The final sample included 219 children, ranging from 7 to 20 years of age. No sex differences were found in self‐ratings or frequency of occurrence of physical, verbal and indirect aggression in Iraqw children and adolescents, or in self‐ratings in Hadza. Hadza boys reported a higher occurrence of physical and indirect aggression during the previous week compared to girls. No differences between the sexes were found in constructive conflict resolution and third‐party interventions practiced by Iraqw and Datoga children and self‐ratings in Hadza. Hadza boys reported a higher frequency of constructive conflict resolution and third‐party interventions compared to girls. Significant sexual dimorphism on the 2D:4D ratio was found for our African sample. A significant negative correlation between the right hand 2D:4D ratio and ratings on physical aggression was found for the girls. The girls with the lowest finger index estimated themselves as more verbally aggressive, compared to girls with a medium 2D:4D ratio.

If the bibliographic apparatus is the measure of a discipline's maturity, anthropology has come of age. Anthropology now has at least one entry in nearly all of the standard library reference formats — abstracts, annuals, atlases, dictionary‐encyclopedia, directories (to serials, biographical information, and academic departments), guides to the field, handbooks, indexes, library catalogs, and literature reviews. Some titles do not pigeon‐hole neatly into these categories, and some are beginning efforts, but it is important to know that they do at least exist.