Ethnography

Definition

Ethnography (from the Greek words ethnos = nation, and graphein = writing) refers to the qualitative research method of description of human social phenomena, based on the data obtained primarily from the fieldwork. Ethnography is a holistic research method founded in the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other. The genre has both formal and historical connections to travel writing and colonial office reports. Several academic traditions, in particular the constructivist and relativist paradigms, claim ethnography as a valid research method.

Paul Leedy, a famous ethnographer, writes: "In an ethnography, the researcher looks at an entire group-more specifically, a group that shares a common culture -in depth. The researcher studies the group in its natural setting for a lengthy period of time, often several months or even years. The focus ... is on the everyday behaviors of the people in the group, with an intent to identify cultural norms, beliefs, social structures, and other cultural patterns." As such, ethnography can be seen as the fundamental research method of cultural anthropology. Ethnography relies primarily on data of the detailed description of social life or cultural phenomena of particular group of people. In order to collect valid data, ethnographers engage in participant observation - spending significant amount of time with the people they study. They use observation method, interviews with open-ended questions, audio and video recordings of behavior, and collect all other data relevant to the culture studied. Ethnographers engage in their social events, rituals and customs, all in purpose to get the point of view of a person of that particular group. That "native's point of view" is called an emic perspective. The final goal of emic perspective is the data that are free of observer's own concepts and assumptions. On the opposite side of emic perspactive is the etic perspective, that is, the outsider's point of view, or how outsiders see the observable phenomena in the particular group or culture. In contrast to emic, etic perspective is based upon observer's assumptions about the phenomena he or she studies.

Application

Cultural anthropology, one of the four fields of anthropology, grew up around the practice of ethnography. Its canonical texts are mostly ethnographies, e.g. Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski, The Nuer by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead, or Naven by Gregory Bateson.

Within cultural anthropology, there are several sub-genres of ethnography. Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, anthropologists began writing "confessional" ethnographies that intentionally exposed the nature of ethnographic research. Famous examples include Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss, The High Valley by Kenneth Read, and The Savage and the Innocent by David Maybury-Lewis, as well as the mildly fictionalized Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (Laura Bohannan). Later "reflexive" ethnographies refined the technique to translate cultural differences by representing their effects on the ethnographer. Famous examples include Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco by Paul Rabinow, The Headman and I by Jean-Paul Dumont, and Tuhami by Vincent Crapanzano. In the 1980s, the rhetoric of ethnography was subjected to intense scrutiny within the discipline, under the general influence of literary theory and post-colonial/post-structuralist thought. "Experimental" ethnographies that reveal the ferment of the discipline include Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by Michael Taussig, Debating Muslims by Michael F. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, A Space on the Side of the Road by Kathleen Stewart, and Advocacy after Bhopal by Kim Fortun.

Dangers and ethics of ethnographic research

Since ethnographic research takes place in natural surroundings, and since it aims to discover the local person's point of view, ethnographers mingle with local people and spend sometimes longer periods of time with them. The inevitable consequence of this process is that two different cultures - one of the local people and the other of the ethnographer - meet and interact. Several different problems come up during this interaction:

1) observer bias - when researcher's own subjectivity influences objectivity of the data. In the ethnographic research subjects of the research are described by researcher through his own cultural thought system, using researcher's own terminology. In a sense, they are "observer's actors" (see Galibert, 2004). One of the first to address this problem was E. E. Evans-Pritchard. He objected against then predominant views of anthropology as "natural science" (Radcliffe-Brown), in which observer usually directly contrasted his own culture with the culture of the objects. The result of such contrast was that other cultures were often measured with measuring tools from the researcher's culture. Evans-Pritchard claiming instead that anthropolocical research is not an exact science, but an "art", in which researcher needs to put himself in the "shoes" of the subject, looking through his eyes.

2) acting subjects - when subjects of the research act in order to please the researcher or perform better their supposed role

3)

Other related fields

Sociology and other cultural studies often use ethnographic method in their research. Urban sociology and the Chicago school sociology in particular are associated with ethnographic research. Some of the most well-known examples (including Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by Clair Drake) were influenced by an anthropologist Lloyd Warner, who happened to be in the sociology department at Chicago. Symbolic interactionism developed from the same tradition and yielded several excellent sociological ethnographies, including Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine, which documents the early history of fantasy/role-playing games. But even though many sub-fields and theoretical perspectives within sociology use ethnographic methods, ethnography is not the sine qua non of the discipline, as it is in cultural anthropology.

Education, Ethnomusicology, and Folklore are others fields which have made extensive use of ethnography. The American anthropologist George Spindler from Stanford University was a pioneer in applying ethnographic methodology to the classroom. James Spradley is another well-known ethnographer, especially for his book, The Ethnographic Interview, published in 1979.

Netnography is a new form of ethnography, which involves conducting ethnographic studies on the Internet.

Further Reading

Galibert, C. (2004). Some preliminary notes on actor–observer anthropology. International Social Science Journal, 56(181), 455-467

Hamabata, M. M. (1990). Crested Kimono: Power and Love in the Japanese Business Family. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Kutz, E., & Roskelly, H. (1991). An Unquiet Pedagogy. NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc.

Leedy, P., & Ormrod, J. (2001). Practical Research. NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc.

Public Interest Anthropology at University of Pennsilvania. Methods: What is Ethnography? from: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthro/CPIA/METHODS/Ethnography.html