It is telling that Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, a monograph that so blatantly defies ethnographic convention, opens on an airplane en route to the Holy Land. As John Jackson later details, the classical anthropological trope of the “arrival scene” is an authenticating gesture, but one that finds little purchase in social worlds that abound with digital media technologies and accompanying “field-sites…[that] come knocking at our doors or flitting across our computer screens” (2013:48). In lieu of an arrival, the reader is made privy to a departure in a number of respects. By situating us in the cabin of a jetliner, Jackson makes clear that he has departed from the comforts of place, and along with it the comforts of an ethnographic paradigm that confers upon the anthropologist a divine right to interpretation.
The full book review can be downloaded here -> Thin Description Review_Ryan Jobson