As ethnographers, one of the ways we can understand globalisation is by considering aspects of everyday life and material culture that are shaped by the political, economic and cultural forces of globalisation. For this assignment, which builds from the fieldwork training exercises we do in class and online, you will choose an object of material culture, such as a product we eat or drink, or something we wear or use in everyday life, and conduct an ethnographic exercise to observe and analyse this object in use. You will conduct this study by completing the following steps: Step 1: Choose an object of material culture that you would like to study. Please make sure to choose an object from your own life or family/cultural experience. Step 2: Conduct a short field-work study, in two settings, to observe how the object is used or consumed locally. The act of observing a practice is a very focused form of doing ethnographic research and, as with all research activity, it is important to document this. You should make detailed field notes about the circumstances of the observed practice in each setting (location, time, day, setting, people, mood, your impressions), and also what you observe happening over the period of each observation. For example, if you decide to do a biography on coffee, you might observe a context in which people drink coffee (for example, in a caf, or in the home). Make notes about what people do, how they use the object, and how the object seems to function – socially, materially, and culturally. Step 3: After you have completed your fieldwork observations, read through your field notes to make sense of what you have observed. What do your fieldnotes reveal about the social and cultural significance of the object you have observed? What does this tell you about the culture in which the object is being used?
