From Water to Wine

Part monograph, part methods handbook, and including poetry, photos and other media, this highly original work explores the emergent middle class in Angola through the lens of the senses.

Jess Auerbach is a post-doctoral scholar at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

"From Water to Wine demystifies social science research for twenty-first-century students by showing the ‘receipts’ that will ‘trip us out of our eyes’ and alienate us from our stereotypes and cognitive biases. Auerbach is committed to an ethic of revelation—insisting that the audience witness the experiences and materials that inform her work. The result is a creatively conceived text that is about the emergent Angolan middle class, but also about the author’s journey using ethnography to navigate the textures of race, class, color, power, and privilege across six countries and three continents."

Daniel J. Hoffman, University of Washington:

"There are many experimental forms of ethnography, but here is one written by a digital native for digital natives. It is the first ethnography I am aware of that one inhabits the way one inhabits the Internet—fast paced, disjointed, multi-modal, jumping scales from deeply personal to meta-commentary. Few scholars today could pull this off so effortlessly, though no doubt more and more will try. This could be, and in my mind should be, an effective model for how it is done."