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The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures.
ethnographer eth·nog'ra·pher n.In some classifications, these are synonyms for anthropology. In English either term denotes descriptive anthropology.
For more information on ethnography, visit Britannica.com.
The descriptive documentation and analysis of a contemporary culture.
A written description of an organization or small group based on direct observation.
Derived from the Greek ethnos ('nation or people') + graphia ('writing'), "ethnography" refers to the empirical and descriptive study of humanity in such large groups as communities or nations. Before about 1750, "anthropology" ('the study of man') referred to the study of human nature, that is, of the abstract individual. In the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophical speculation about human nature was replaced by the empirical study of particular historical nations, that is, anthropology became specific and collective, as the modern discipline of anthropology is today. The empirical study of specific historical nations did exist throughout the early modern era, but it is not called anthropology. The heading "ethnography" on this article indicates that early modern studies of nations are generally not recognized by modern anthropologists as sufficiently scientific. Most studies that we would call ethnographic were ad hoc reports of world travelers, missionaries, and explorers that encompassed far more than simply the various peoples encountered on the journey. Navigation, natural history, descriptions of climate, minerals, plants, and animals could all be included in a piece of travel writing.
The term "ethnography" came into use in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation of the term is from the 1834 Penny Cyclopedia (II, 97) which adopted it from German: "The term ethnography (nation-description) is sometimes used by German writers in the sense which we have given to anthropography." The first OED citation of "ethnology" comes from Pritchard's Natural History of Man (1842). Had the term been used in the early modern period, it would have been pejorative. From the fourteenth century to about the mid-eighteenth, "ethnic" (from Greek ethnikos 'heathen') referred to specifically foreign nations that were neither Christian nor Jewish, rather, pagan, heathen, or, by implication, "the other." Ethnography, therefore, was discourse about "Them" as opposed to "Us."
Attempts by Europeans to describe what they were seeing are as old as the voyages of discovery, even older. In antiquity, there were basically two ways of describing primitive human societies. Human history represented either a steady degeneration from a primitive golden age or progress from an initial rude and uncultivated condition. In the former case, primitives were portrayed as noble, free, and virtuous, as in the Greek geographer Strabo's descriptions of the Scythians; in the latter case, primitives were presented as cruel, ignorant, and evil, as in Book 7 of Pliny the Elder's Natural History.
When Europeans sailed off toward Elysium, the Islands of the Blessed, and the lands of the Hyperboreans (who were believed to live in a land of perpetual sunshine and abundance), they may not have expected to find monstrous people like the "blemmyes," whose heads were located below their shoulders, or incredible wealth in China as described by John Mandeville (d. 1372) and Marco Polo (c. 1254–1324). But when they encountered the apparently primitive inhabitants of Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands, what could they do but cast them in the classical terms they brought with them? Bartolomé de Las Casas reported that Columbus had carefully read and annotated Ptolemy's Geography and more recent geographic textbooks by Pope Pius II (reigned 1458–1464) and Pierre d'Ailly (1350–1420). Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) alternated between the Greek modes of golden age and savagery, here describing indigenous Americans as living naked in the forest with neither law nor religion and winning all they needed from the hand of nature, there describing a cannibal he met who had partaken of more than two hundred people. In his New World Chronicles, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera (1457–1526) compared parrots he had seen in the New World with descriptions by Pliny, and his account of society on Hispaniola resembled the golden age of Hesiod (fl. eighth century B.C.E.) and Virgil (70–19 B.C.E.). Thus it comes as little surprise that early modern Europeans described what they saw in terms similar to ancient Greeks and Romans, even when such language was misleading or prejudicial. Indeed, it was the only language they had.
As natural history emerged as a recognized genre of philosophical writing, ethnography was frequently appended to accounts of climate, topography, minerals, flora, and fauna, as if peoples and their cultures were just another feature of the natural landscape. Here human beings could be studied on three levels. On the physical level, one might report on a people's relative size, shape, and color and also its material culture and food, which were determined by the natural environment. On the social level, the author described customs, manners, and political organization. And on the intellectual or cultural level, the author could address a nation's achievements in the arts and sciences and in religion or philosophy.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, enough descriptive accounts of New World peoples had come in that ethnographers could offer detailed comparisons of New World peoples with the ancients. Joseph-François Lafitau's (1670–1740) comparison of the ancient Romans and Persians to the Americans of Louisiana is the most prominent example, and Lafitau represents the universalizing of an essential human nature. In the course of the eighteenth century, comparison gave way to classification, and classification meant the study of particulars and the drawing of distinctions. At this point we begin to see an ethnography that resembles modern anthropology, with each nation thoroughly unique and separate from the others. Naturalists could classify nations just as they classified minerals, plants, and animals. Humanity acquired its scientific designation as Homo sapiens in the eighteenth century from Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), but that designation of humanity as "wise" did not come easily. In moral and theological terms it was clear enough which creatures were human and which animal. But when one tried to draw the line between the seldom-seen orangutan and the wild man of Borneo, things became murky. Linnaeus himself wrote that he could find no quantitative difference between ape and human. Nor was the Linnean system universally accepted as eternal truth. It was simply a system, formed in the process of international debate, and over the first ten editions of Linnaeus's Systema Natura, he experimented with different classifications of humanity, dividing the genus Homo into several species. Linnaeus's French rival, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–1788), also divided humanity into two species—black and white.
Ultimately, human classification came down to the question of human origins. Did humanity originate in a single pair, male and female, either as told by the accounts in the Book of Genesis or by some other more naturalistic (perhaps evolutionary) process? Or did humanity represent several different and independent origins? If the former, then how could one account for the wide variety of color, stature, shape, and strength among global humanity, to say nothing of the differences in social organization, customs, manners, morals, and religion? Climate was one explanation. Montesquieu's explanation in Book 14 of L'esprit des lois (1748; The spirit of laws) is the most famous account of the effects of climate, but many others offered similar explanations. Like characterizations of primitives, the climate thesis reached back to antiquity in Polybius (204–123 B.C.E.) and Strabo. On its face, climate was convincing. It was known that plants and animals could be markedly transformed by their local environment, as when tropical plants were placed in European botanical gardens, or goldfish are kept in a ten-gallon tank. Europeans turned brown when exposed to the sun, and even within Europe there were degrees of color ranging from pale, blond Scandinavians to dark-haired, olive-skinned Spaniards.
Others noted that climate was not as effective as it was frequently taken to be. The short, dark-skinned Lapps neighbored the tall, fair Swedes. After four generations in Massachusetts, Africans were just as dark as they were in Africa. And Jews living on India's Malabar coast, supposedly since the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.C.E., were reported to look just like European Jews. Clearly some other force affected the physical attributes of human beings. If that force (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach [1752–1840] spoke of a teleological force contained in "genital liquid") was so persistent, and if it was assumed that all of humanity descended from a single human pair, then how could one account for human diversity? Polygenesis was tempting, but because of its obvious moral implications, few Europeans dared to hold that position before the second half of the nineteenth century.
Indeed, morality has been a major issue in ethnography ever since the first voyages of discovery. What impressed Europeans about the New World was not that it was inhabited by human societies but that those societies were so different from their own. Not only were they different, but they were understood to be inferior. It was Europeans who circumnavigated the globe to reach Tahiti, not Tahitians who, for all their navigational prowess, sailed to Europe. What should the relationship be between Europeans and their less-developed brethren? Certainly they had to be evangelized, and almost from the beginning Spaniards set out to convert Central, South, and North Americans to Christianity. But what means were appropriate? Could they be evangelized forcibly, as Charlemagne had converted the Saxons eight hundred years earlier? Could one justify purchasing enslaved individuals in Africa and forcing them to work on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, provided one treated them with restraint and attempted to care for their souls? All of these questions were explored in an ad hoc manner in accounts of the New World written by missionaries, traders, explorers, and planters in the early modern period.
There was unanimous agreement that, in technological terms, the ethnoi of the globe had not achieved what Europeans had. Less clear was whether that technological progress had been translated into any moral progress among Europeans themselves. Here was another use for ethnography. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) could point out that, despite accounts of human sacrifices and cannibalism in Central America, the real barbarians were the Europeans. That sentiment was echoed two centuries later by Georg Forster, one of Captain Cook's fellow travelers on his 1772–1775 voyage around the world, in a graphic account of cannibalism in New Zealand. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) famously argued in his two Discourses that social inequalities were European constructs and that the progress of the arts and sciences had brought not any moral improvement but the contrary. Both of Rousseau's arguments were supported by a selective reading of travel narratives.
Rousseau, of course, never left Europe. Neither did Montaigne. Both, however, considered themselves authorities on non-European peoples purely on the basis of their reading of others' travel reports. Real travelers, like Georg Forster, did not believe one could come to an adequate understanding of the ethnoi unless one visited them personally. On the other hand, scholars like Forster's nemesis Christoph Meiners (1747–1810), who disagreed with Forster on every level from the credibility of witnesses to the interpretation of evidence to the politics of the French Revolution, believed that visiting one or two places was insufficient for understanding humanity as a whole. Such knowledge one could only acquire through the comparative reading of others' travel accounts; no one could acquire firsthand knowledge of all the peoples of the globe. Thus began a debate over library research versus field research that persists in anthropology to the present day.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez. Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. Translated by Cyclone Covey. Albuquerque, 1983. Originally published 1542.
Casas, Bartolomé de las. The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account. Translated by Herma Briffault. Baltimore, 1992. Originally published 1552.
Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de. History and General Description of New France. Translated by J. G. Shea. 6 vols. New York, 1866–1872. Originally published 1744.
Forster, Georg. A Voyage Round the World. Edited by Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof. 2 vols. Honolulu, 2000. Originally published 1777.
Lafitau, Joseph François. Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times. Translated by William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore. 2 vols. Toronto, 1974–1977. Originally published 1724.
Meiners, Christoph. Grundriβ der Geschichte der Menschheit. 2nd ed. Lemgo, 1793.
Secondary Sources
Elliott, J. H. The Old World and the New 1492–1650. Cambridge, U.K., 1970.
Grafton, Anthony, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, Mass., 1992.
Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge, U.K., 1982.
Rowe, J. H. "Ethnography and Ethnology in the Sixteenth Century." Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 30 (Spring 1964): 1–19.
—MICHAEL CARHART
Ethnography (ἔθνος ethnos = people and γράφειν graphein = writing) is the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitative descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on 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, employ ethnographic research as a crucial research method. Many cultural anthropologists consider ethnography the essence of the discipline.
Cultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research and their canonical texts are mostly ethnographies: e.g. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by Bronisław Malinowski, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead, The Nuer (1940) by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, or Naven (1958) by Gregory Bateson. Cultural & social anthropologists today place such a high value on actually doing ethnographic research that ethnology—the comparative synthesis of ethnographic information—is rarely the foundation for a career. 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 "Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight" by Clifford Geertz, 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.
Cultural anthropologists, such as Clifford Geertz and Xavier Andrade, study and interpret cultural diversity through ethnography based on field work. It provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community. The fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their ways of life. Ethnographers are participant observers. They take part in events they study because it helps with understanding local behavior and thought.
Psychology, economics, sociology and cultural studies also produce ethnography. Urban sociology and the Chicago School in particular are associated with ethnographic research, although some of the most well-known examples (including Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Caton) were influenced by an anthropologist, Lloyd Warner, who happened to be in the sociology department at Chicago, and by sociologist Robert Park whose earlier career had included journalism. 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, Performance Studies, Folklore, and Linguistics are others fields which have made extensive use of ethnography. The American anthropologist George Spindler (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.
Ethnographic methods have been used to study business settings. Groups of workers, managers and so on are different social categories participating in common social systems. Each group shows different characteristic attitudes, behavior patterns and values.
Anthropologists like Daniel Miller and Mary Douglas have used ethnographic data to answer academic questions about consumers and consumption. Businesses, too, have found ethnographers helpful for understanding how people use products and services, as indicated in the increasing use of ethnographic methods to understand consumers and consumption, or for new product development (sometimes called 'design ethnography'). The recent Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (EPIC) conference is evidence of this. Ethnographers' systematic and holistic approach to real-life experience is valued by product developers, who use the method to understand unstated desires or cultural practices that surround products. Where focus groups fail to inform marketers about what people really do, ethnography links what people say to what they actually do—avoiding the pitfalls that come from relying only on self-reported, focus-group data.
Not all of these techniques are used by ethnographers, but interviews and participant observation are the most widely used.
Gary Alan Fine argues that the nature of ethnographic inquiry demands that researchers deviate from formal and idealistic rules or ethics that have come to be widely accepted in qualitative and quantitative approaches to research. Many of these ethical assumptions are rooted in positivist and post-positivist epistemologies that have adapted over time, but nonetheless are apparent and must be accounted for in all research paradigms. These ethical dilemmas are evident throughout the entire process of conducting ethnographies, including the design, implementation, and reporting of an ethnographic study. Essentially, Fine maintains that researchers are typically not as ethical as they claim or assume to be — and that “each job includes ways of doing things that that would be inappropriate for others to know”.[1]
Fine is not necessarily casting blame or pointing his finger at ethnographic researchers, but rather is attempting to show that researchers often make idealized ethical claims and standards which in actuality are inherently based on partial truths and self-deceptions. Fine also acknowledges that many of these partial truths and self-deceptions are unavoidable. He maintains that “illusions” are essential to maintain an occupational reputation and avoid potentially more caustic consequences. He claims, “Ethnographers cannot help but lie, but in lying, we reveal truths that escape those who are not so bold”.[2] Based on these assertions, Fine establishes three conceptual clusters in which ethnographic ethical dilemmas can be situated: “Classic Virtues,” “Technical Skills,” and “Ethnographic Self.”
Classic Virtues:[3]
“The kindly ethnographer” – Most ethnographers present themselves as being more sympathetic than they actually are, which aids in the research process, but is also deceptive. The identity that we present to subjects is different from who we are in other circumstances.
“The friendly ethnographer” – Ethnographers operate under the assumption that they should not dislike anyone. In actuality, when hated individuals are found within research, ethnographers often crop them out of the findings.
“The honest ethnographer” – If research participants know the research goals, their responses will likely be skewed. Therefore, ethnographers often conceal what they know in order to increase the likelihood of acceptance.
Technical Skills:[4]
“The Precise Ethnographer” – Ethnographers often create the illusion that field notes are data and reflect what “really” happened. They engage in the opposite of plagiarism, giving credit to those undeserving by not using precise words but rather loose interpretations and paraphrasing. Researchers take near-fictions and turn them into claims of fact. The closest ethnographers can ever really get to reality is an approximate truth.
“The Observant Ethnographer” – Readers of ethnography are often led to assume the report of a scene is complete – that little of importance was missed. In reality, an ethnographer will always miss some aspect because they are not omniscient. Everything is open to multiple interpretations and misunderstandings. The ability of the ethnographer to take notes and observe varies, and therefore, what is depicted in ethnography is not the whole picture.
“The Unobtrusive Ethnographer” – As a “participant” in the scene, the researcher will always have an effect on the communication that occurs within the research site. The degree to which one is an “active member” affects the extent to which sympathetic understanding is possible.
The Ethnographic Self:[5]
“The Candid Ethnographer” – Where the researcher situates themselves within the ethnography is ethically problematic. There is an illusion that everything reported has actually happened because the researcher has been directly exposed to it.
“The Chaste Ethnographer” – When ethnographers participate within the field, they invariably develop relationships with research subjects/participants. These relationships are sometimes not accounted for within the reporting of the ethnography despite the fact that they seemingly would influence the research findings.
“The Fair Ethnographer” – Fine claims that objectivity is an illusion and that everything in ethnography is known from a perspective. Therefore, it is unethical for a researcher to report fairness in their findings.
“The Literary Ethnographer” – Representation is a balancing act of determining what to “show” through poetic/prosaic language and style versus what to “tell” via straightforward, ‘factual’ reporting. The idiosyncratic skill of the ethnographer influences the face-value of the research.
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Nederlands (Dutch)
etnografie (beschrijvende antropologie), etnografisch werk
Français (French)
n. - ethnographie
Deutsch (German)
n. - Ethnographie, (wissenschaftliche Beschreibung von Volksgruppen)
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - εθνογραφία
Português (Portuguese)
n. - etnografia (f)
Español (Spanish)
n. - etnografía
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - etnografi
中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
民族志学, 人种志, 人种学
中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 民族誌學, 人種誌, 人種學
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) (علم المجتمعات البدائيه) دراسه و وصف الثقافات
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ידע-עם, תיאור העמים, אתנוגרפיה
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