This lecture series provides an overview of what the academic genre of ethnography has achieved over the past century or so. Although ethnographic monographs have also been written by scholars of various disciplines, this lecture series focuses on sociocultural anthropologists’ endeavors. Rather than discussing the possibilities and limitations of ethnography abstractly, the aim of this course is to provide a perspective on what an ethnography have (and have not) accomplished, by discussing critically two or three ethnographic monographs, many but not all of which are in the context of Asia, each time, both locating them in academic and social contexts of the time and and relating them to various ongoing debates.