This collection constitutes another solid, suggestive and significant contribution to what is now one of the most dynamic arenas in the humanities and outside: Culture. The essays speak to all manner of representational practices and explore vital questions that no scholar interested in social dynamics of any kind can afford to ignore.

As the title says, not only do ethnographers objectively research and write "about" cultures, in the process, they are also "writing Culture": that is, we constitute the cultural realities even as we attempt to describe them. Language is not a transparent window through which we describe an already existing reality. language "is the maker of this world" says Fisher. Understanding this, the ethnographer is confronted with writing and its importance in the ethnographic description and analysis of cultural worlds. Self-reflexivity in writing ethnography is central to the text. Who has the authority to write Others into being? How does my position as a gendered, racial, and class subject affect my "writing-up" of culture? These are just some of the questions posed by this text, with the added bonus of some possible answers as well. A must read for anyone on the verge of conducting ethnographic research. Also a great text for qualitative research courses concerned with issues of postmodernity and postcolonialism.

This classic work by Marcus and Fischer is still important to an understanding of changing global and local conditions in postmodernity and how we, as ethnographers, might proceed. This text was very helpful in the researching and writing of my ethnography (now a book: Native Americans in the Carolina Borderlands: A Critical Ethnography, Carolinas Press, 2000). I needed help in conceptualizing hybrid cultural forms and found it in Marcus's and Fisher's text. I also found the text useful for helping me think through the popular cultural critique that needed to be articulated from the everyday discourses of my participants. If you are interested in critical ethnography, this is a must read. Anthropologists, Sociologists, and folks in Cultural Studies and Communications will want to have this text in their reference libraries.

I found this book on the new arrivals shelf of our university library. It turned out to be so thought-provoking that I read it with great interest in order to grasp the critical questions and illuminating answers posed by George E. Marcus as to how to be a responsible citizen in democratic politics.

The greatness of this book is that Marcus has successfully pointed out the pitfalls associated with the 'rational choice' theory in approaching the relations between citizen and politics. To be an attentive and responsible citizen, as he convincingly argues, one needs to have emotion, passion, and sentiment to make rational calculations and move forward in democratic politics.

The most important parts of the books are Chapter 5 'The Uses of Habit and Enthusiasm,' Chapter 6 'The Uses of Anxiety,' and Chapter 7 'the Dangers of Loathing. In these chapters, drawing on research in neuroscience, Marcus succinctly explores and examines both good and down sides of emotions, as compared to reason and rationality, in democratic politics.

After you finish reading this book, you will, as I did, understand that emotion and reason are not mutually exclusive and hostile opposites; they are in fact helping and working with each other in breeding a population of good and responsible citizens.

This collection of would-be anthropological writings primarily from Rice University authors is a much-needed addition to an area of society that has entirely insuffient coverage. Not only media, but cyberspace, has somehow escaped going under the social-anthropological microscope.
While this text does so, in some cases, quite well, in other pieces, the work is obviously exploratory, experiemental and possibly of questionable value.
The essay on the electronic venacular is, of course, already dated, but it is a detailed examination of the Internet from a user's perspective. The author looks at specific programs and how users employ them to express themselves. But it seems like a drop in a very large bucket of work that needs to be done on the growing globe of Internet users.
The essays A Torn Page, Framed and A Tale of an Internet are too abstract and experimental to be effective, but Computing for Tibet and Shades of Twilight were excellent pieces. Both grounded in specific communicators and communications and both exploring how the media are interacting with people politically, emotionally, personally. Dorine Kondo, who wrote Shades of Twilight, has done great scholarship in previous publications, so it's not surprise that her work her is excellent. She explores a new form of drama as a new form of communication. If I could rate the various essays separately from the whole book, I'd give her essay a solid 5 on the Amazon scale.
Also, scoring a 5 would be Rewriting New York City. The author examines graffiti as a form of expression. It's a new area and it's interesting to compare ideas of banning graffit as loss of freedom of speech and the autoBots on MSN chat room that give chatters the boot for typing the word, "piss" into a phrase in the chat room dialog. How much freedom of expression does the culture REALLY allow?
Good scholarship, new roads into new territories.

The field of anthropology, as Professor Marcus sees it, has arrived at a crossroads. It can no longer afford to go on viewing the world as an assembly of distinct communities, each worthy of being viewed in isolation. But anthropological traditions and methods are still very much rooted in the early 20th century when ethnographic studies were conceived. Something must be done, Marcus asserts, to get anthropology back in line with the world it attempts to explain.

The force of this argument stems apparently from the fact that, well, it IS a small world after all. From the sands of the Sahel to the forests of the ..., no one is sheltered from outside cultural, political and economic influences anymore. The inescapable phenomenon known as globalization, says Marcus, necessitates no less than anthropology's reinvention of itself, so as to become capable of analysis that's more "holistic" (this being one of the author's favorite adjectives). One must view peoples and cultures today in "juxtaposition" (his favorite noun) if one is to understand the nature of the connections between them. And the tool Marcus proposes to achieve such holistic juxtapositions is the Multi-Sited Ethnography.

I am with the good doctor 100 percent, that is, when I can understand just what it is he is trying to say. Marcus is the kind of writer who actually prefers words like "exegesis" over more readily accessible ones like "interpretation." His numerous references to thinkers outside anthropology ("Wittgensteinian" is one of his more erudite adjectives) only serve to thicken the fog. Come on, George! You are a tenured professor, a made man, and you needn't go on trying to impress the girls with the size of your vocabulary.

Still, "ETHNOGRAPHY THROUGH THICK AND THIN" makes a valuable contribution to the field of anthropology, and I hope Marcus's message is heard and taken to heart by his colleagues. But next time, Professor, try to cut out the fat and streamline your writing a wee bit, for the benefit of the unwashed non-eggheads like me.