Particularities: Collected Essays on Ethnography and Education. George W. Noblit. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 1999. 225 pp.

The book’s title, Particularities, indicates George Noblit’s intention to "explore how a focus on particularities pushes an ethnographer to consider the details of the entire ethnographic process, not just the details of the scene being studied" (p. 3). The two main sections of this collection of Noblit’s writings reflect these foci. The first section addresses issues of ethnographic research methods; the second presents chapters on the topic of education and race.

The introduction and first section focus on a range of methodological issues. The introduction presents Noblit’s thoughts on reading and writing ethnographies. The five chapters that follow address topics as diverse as applied ethnography of education, holism, evaluation designs as political strategies, action research, and meta-ethnography.

The section on education and race comprises five chapters. Three of the chapters are from Noblit’s first ethnography, coauthored with Thomas Collins, which examines the processes in a desegregating school. The fourth chapter presents an ethnohistory of an African American school that closed after desegregation. These chapters portray the processes and unanticipated outcomes of desegregation. The final chapter, a "confessional tale," discusses how Noblit came to understand and appreciate the teaching of a strong female African American teacher.

The book offers many insights to ponder. It reminded me of how much contemporary educational anthropology and educational sociology overlap in their methodological and substantive interests, and of how much we could benefit from wider communication across these disciplines.

I agree with Noblit (p. 6) that this volume might be best used in a second course on qualitative research methods. The methods-oriented chapters in the first section of the book could be used to explore various issues related to ethnographic methods. These chapters could be paired with examples of the genre or topic being discussed. For example, students might read Noblit’s chapter on holism along with examples that incorporate holism in varying degrees. Or they might read examples of the various evaluation designs he discusses along with his chapter on evaluation designs as political strategies. Alternatively, Noblit’s chapters might be paired with others’ views on similar topics. For example, his chapter on meta-ethnography might be paired with the recent discussions on qualitative literature reviews in Review of Educational Research (68:4 and 69:1). The chapters in the second section of the book might be used as examples of different "genres" of ethnography, with the chapters on desegregated schools serving as examples of the realist approach and the final chapter serving as an example of a more postmodern approach.

Overall, I applaud this kind of retrospective endeavor. I think reflective collections by senior scholars could be both interesting and useful. And in this postmodern era, such a genre would certainly make sense. However, Noblit does not go far enough down the reflective path. At a basic level, there is very little contextualization of the individual chapters. When, where, and for what purposes were the chapters originally published? Why did he select these writings? How much editing was done for the collection? Full citations to the original works also would have been useful.

At a broader level, I wish Noblit had included his reflections on his work to date. As a sociologist who has contributed to the literature on research methods and on education and culture over at least the past 25 years, Noblit should have much to say. But the methodological chapters in the book do not provide a coherent understanding of Noblit’s perspective on ethnography or his thoughts on how the field and his own stance within it have changed over time. The chapters on education and race do not situate this work within the larger context of other studies with that focus.

In the book’s introduction Noblit makes a good case for the benefits of particularities, but, in the end, I wanted not only particularities but also some sense of patterns and some reflections on what it all means. I wanted Noblit’s reflections on where he has been, where he is now, and the journey in between.

© 2000 American Anthropological Association. This review will be cited in the June 2000 issue of Anthropology and Education Quarterly (31:2).

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