Paper short abstract:

Anthropologists frequently set ethnography apart by suggesting that it embodies a distinctive form of attention. What ideas about the meaning of attention are embedded in these methodological appeals?

Paper long abstract:

An ongoing concern of anthropologists and other ethnographers is how to distinguish the research methods of ethnography from other practices it closely resembles, ranging from journalism to the everyday lives of ethnographic subjects themselves. One distinguishing feature that has appealed to many writers on the subject is the idea that ethnographers, while engaged in fieldwork, embody a distinctive form of attention—a mode of engagement with the world that may be more particular, more general, more informed, more intense, or more motivated than "ordinary" participants. Drawing on an analysis of anthropological texts, this paper examines appeals to attention in the methodological literature, bringing them into dialogue with writing about attention from other humanistic fields. Historians, for example, have drawn attention to the normative qualities of attentional regimes: in workplaces, devotional settings, and in education, the concept of attention has long been entangled with ideas about how to lead a good life and to embody virtue. If ethnographic attention is an epistemic virtue, can we critically examine its foundations? What might ethnography look like without appeals to the normative value of attentiveness?