December 16, 2005

Ethnography Manifesto Urges Scholars to View Research Subjects as Collaborators

By DAVID GLENN

OPEN-SOURCE SCHOLARSHIP: This month the American Anthropological Association presented one of its major annual honors, the Margaret Mead Award, to the authors of The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie's African American Community (AltaMira Press, 2004). That book portrayed a little-discussed dimension of Muncie, Ind., a small city that has been the object of scholarly scrutiny since 1929, when Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd published the classic Middletown: A Study in Modern