Repositioning Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in the Social Sciences: Ethnography, thick description, and reflexive sociology

Year 2016, Issue: 44, 35 - 59, 01.04.2016

Trevor Cunnington

Abstract

This article is a disciplinary intervention into the academic work on James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ collaborative, multi-media work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men LUNPFM . While many of the published articles on LUNPFM have appeared under the auspices of literary studies and its corollaries, this article re-contextualizes it in the social sciences. Originally marketed as a sociological work, it anticipates some of the most innovative techniques and approaches in the social sciences in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although its poetic digressions make it of literary interest as well, its exhaustive description and analysis of phenomena is reminiscent of Clifford Geertz’ take on “thick description,” and it uses the emic technique of anthropology. As well, it resembles in some respects Pierre Bourdieu’s work Distinction, especially in its formal presentation and in some of the aesthetic observations Agee makes. It bridges the literary and the sociological fields effectively

Keywords

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Aesthetics, Interdisciplinarity, Geertz, Bourdieu

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