@article{1479447,
      recid = {1479447},
      author = {Jackson Jr., John L., },
      title = {Thin Description : Ethnography and the African Hebrew  Israelites of Jerusalem /},
      pages = {1 online resource (404 p.) :},
      abstract = {The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are often  dismissed as a fringe cult for their beliefs that African  Americans are descendants of the ancient Israelites and  that veganism leads to immortality. But John L. Jackson  questions what "fringe" means in a world where cultural  practices of every stripe circulate freely on the Internet.  In this poignant and sophisticated examination of the  limits of ethnography, the reader is invited into the  visionary, sometimes vexing world of the AHIJ. Jackson  challenges what Clifford Geertz called the "thick  description" of anthropological research through a  multidisciplinary investigation of how the AHIJ use media  and technology to define their public image in the  twenty-first century. Moving beyond the "modest witness" of  nineteenth-century scientific discourse or the "thick  descriptions" of twentieth-century anthropology, Jackson  insists that Geertzian thickness is impossible, especially  in a world where the anthropologist's subjects craft their  own self-ethnographies and critically consume the  ethnographer's offerings. Taking as its topic a group  situated along the fault lines of several  diasporas--African, American, Jewish--Thin Description  provides an account of how race, religion, and ethnographic  representation must be understood anew in the twenty-first  century, lest we reenact old mistakes in the study of black  humanity.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1479447},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674726253},
}