Extract

This book requires a lot of the reader. Its most unique contribution is methodological: the development of a method the author refers to as “historically embedded ethnography.” By this he means that ethnography best contributes to social theory when it is linked to history in a very particular way. Most importantly, history is not most productively used in ethnography to make empirical claims about a specific field site. Rather, by tacking back and forth between ethnographic data from a field site and archival data about the social institution of which the field site is an example, historically embedded ethnographers should be able to more fully conceptualize broad, historically contingent processes of social organization. Lara-Millán argues that his approach responds to critiques in sociology that sometimes tag ethnographic studies as “under-theorized” and at other times claim they are “over-theorized.” Historically embedded ethnography is his attempt to find the proper place for ethnography in sociological theory-building.

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