Ethnography

Definition

Ethnography (from the Greek words ethnos = nation, and graphein = writing) refers to the qualitative research method of describing human social phenomena, based on data obtained primarily from fieldwork. The ethnographer immerses him or herself in the life of the social group in order to collect the necessary data. The roots of ethnographic studies are found in the reports of travelers and historians as far back as the Greek writer Heroditus, and, more recently, of traders and colonial administrators. The inherent difficulty of ethnographic studies is immediately apparent in these reports, as the writers often misinterpreted, for various reasons, the activities they witnessed in foreign cultures.

Ethnography has been the fundamental research method of cultural anthropology. It relies primarily on detailed descriptions of the social life and cultural phenomena of a particular group of people. 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."

In order to collect valid data, ethnographers engage in participant observation – spending significant amount of time with the people they study. They use observational methods, interviews with open-ended questions, audio and video recordings of behavior, and collect all other data relevant to the culture studied. Ethnographers engage in social events, rituals and customs, in order to understand the point of view of a person of that particular group. That "native's point of view" is called an emic perspective, as opposed to the etic perspective, or the outsider's point of view. The goal of an emic perspective is to acquire data that are free of the observer's own concepts and assumptions.

Ethnography is a holistic research method based on the idea that a system's properties cannot be accurately understood as the sum of its individual elements. Therefore, the ethnographer not only observes every individual aspect of the society but also aims for complete immersion in order to experience the society as a whole.

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.

Problems 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 researchers need to put themselves in the "shoes" of the subjects, looking through their eyes.

2) acting subjects - when subjects of the research, in a presence of a researcher, consciously or unconsciously act in order to please the researcher, or to better perform their supposed roles.

3) ethics - often researchers are faced with several ethical questions during their research. Sometimes they may go undercover, infiltrating into the certain group of people they plan to study, in order to gain better understanding of that group. The question here is how ethical it is to use deception to gain data from people of that group. Another question researchers might face is whether to interfere or not when encountering certain "unusual" behavior of the subjects studied. In some cultures incest or even canibalism may be considered a normal form of behavior, so a researcher might be confronted with a dilemma of whether to interfere in the customs of a local culture, or to leave it intact.

Importance of ethnography

Ethnographic method is becoming increasingly important in the modern world. It closed down the gap between cultures, enabling people to better understand true meaning and value of different customs and practices in once distant cultures. In doing ethnographic research one must subdue one's own cultural grounding in order to enter into the mindset of people one studies. Only by putting oneself into the "shoes" of others, one can understand the background of other's thoughts and behaviors. Many companies today start to realize it, thus investing great amount of money in market research, where ethnographic method is used to investigate the preferences of certain population. Ethnoghraphic method is also used in psychological research, sociology, politics, and other spheres of life.

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.