Ways of Knowing Small Places Intersections of American Literature and Ethnography since the 1960s

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.