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ethnography

 
Dictionary: eth·nog·ra·phy   (ĕth-nŏg'rə-fē) pronunciation
n.
The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures.

ethnographer eth·nog'ra·pher n.
ethnographic eth'no·graph'ic (ĕth'nə-grăf'ĭk) or eth'no·graph'i·cal adj.
ethnographically eth'no·graph'i·cal·ly adv.

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Descriptive study of a particular human society. Contemporary ethnography is based almost entirely on fieldwork. The ethnographer lives among the people who are the subject of study for a year or more, learning the local language and participating in everyday life while striving to maintain a degree of objective detachment. He or she usually cultivates close relationships with "informants" who can provide specific information on aspects of cultural life. While detailed written notes are the mainstay of fieldwork, ethnographers may also use tape recorders, cameras, or video recorders. Contemporary ethnographies have both influenced and been influenced by literary theory. See also Bronislaw Malinowski; cultural anthropology.

For more information on ethnography, visit Britannica.com.

Geography Dictionary: ethnography
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ethology

In some classifications, these are synonyms for anthropology. In English either term denotes descriptive anthropology.

Archaeology Dictionary: ethnography
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[Ge]

The descriptive documentation and analysis of a contemporary culture.

A written description of an organization or small group based on direct observation.

History 1450-1789: Ethnography
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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

Wikipedia: Ethnography
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Ethnography (Greek ἔθνος ethnos = folk/people and γράφειν graphein = writing) is a branch within anthropology and in sociology.[1] It is a methodological strategy used to provide descriptions of human societies, which as a methodology does not prescribe any particular method (e.g. observation, interview, questionnaire), but instead prescribes the nature of the study (i.e. to describe people through writing) [2]. In the biological sciences, this type of study might be called a "field study" or a "case report," both of which are used as common synonyms for "ethnography" [3].

Contents

Introduction

Ethnographic studies are usually holistic, founded on the idea that humans are best understood in the fullest possible context, including: the place where they live, the improvements they've made to that place, how they are making a living and providing food, housing, energy and water for themselves, what their marriage customs are, what language(s) they speak and so on. Ethnography has connections to genres as diverse as travel writing, colonial office reports, the play and the novel.[4] Many cultural anthropologists consider ethnography the essence of the discipline.[5] It would be a rare program in graduate cultural anthropology that didn't require an ethnography as part of the doctoral process.[6]

Evaluating Ethnography

Ethnographic methodology is not usually evaluated in terms of philosophical standpoint (such as positivism and emotionalism), ethnographies nonetheless need to be evaluated in some manner. While there is no consensus on evaluation standards, Richardson (2000, p. 254) [7] provides 5 criteria that ethnographers might find helpful. They

  1. Substantive Contribution: “Does the piece contribute to our understanding of social-life?”
  2. Aesthetic Merit: “Does this piece succeed aesthetically?”
  3. Reflexivity: “How did the author come to write this text…Is there adequate self-awareness and self-exposure for the reader to make judgments about the point of view?”
  4. Impact: “Does this affect me? Emotionally? Intellectually?” Does it move me?
  5. Expresses a Reality: “Does it seem ‘true’—a credible account of a cultural, social, individual, or communal sense of the ‘real’?”

Data Collection methods

One of the most common methods for collecting data in an ethnographic study is direct, first-hand observation of daily participation. This can include participant observation. Another common method is interviewing, which may include conversation with different levels of form and can involve small talk to long interviews. A particular approach to transcribing interview data might be genealogical method. This is a set of procedures by which ethnographers discover and record connections of kinship, descent and marriage using diagrams and symbols. Questionnaires can be used to aid the discovery of local beliefs and perceptions and in the case of longitudinal research, where there is continuous long-term study of an area or site, they can act as valid instrument for measuring changes in the individuals or groups studied.

Differences across disciplines

The ethnographical method is used across a range of different disciples, primarily by anthropologists but also frequently by sociologists. Cultural studies, economics, social work, education, ethnomusicology, folklore, geography, history, linguistics, communication studies, performance studies and psychology are other fields which have made use of ethnography.

Cultural and social anthropology

Cultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research and their canonical texts which 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 (1936, 1958) by Gregory Bateson. Cultural and 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.[citation needed] The typical ethnography is a document written about a particular people, almost always based at least in part on emic views of where the culture begins and ends. Using language or community boundaries to bound the ethnography is common.[8] Ethnographies are also sometimes called "case studies."[9] Ethnographers study and interpret culture, its universalities and its variations through ethnographic study based on fieldwork. An ethnography is a specific kind of written observational science which 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. Classic examples is Carol Stack's All Our Kin, Jean Briggs's "Never in Anger," Richard Lee's "Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers," Victor Turner's "Forest of Symbols," David Maybry-Lewis's "Akew-Shavante Society," E.E. Evans-Pritchard's "The Nuer" and Claude Levi-Strauss's "Tristes Tropiques." Iterations of ethnographic representations in the classic, modernist camp include Bartholomew Dean’s recent (2009) contribution, Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia. [1]

A typical ethnography attempts to be holistic[10][11] and typically follows an outline to include a brief history of the culture in question, an analysis of the physical geography or terrain inhabited by the people under study, including climate, and often including what biological anthropologists call habitat. Folk notions of botany and zoology are presented as ethnobotany and ethnozoology alongside references from the formal sciences. Material culture, technology and means of subsistence are usually treated next, as they are typically bound up in physical geography and include descriptions of infrastructure. Kinship and social structure (including age grading, peer groups, gender, voluntary associations, clans, moieties, and so forth, if they exist) are typically included. Languages spoken, dialects and the history of language change are another group of standard topics.[12] Practices of childrearing, acculturation and emic views on personality and values usually follow after sections on social structure.[13]. Rites, rituals, and other evidence of religion have long been an interest and are sometimes central to ethnographies, especially when conducted in public where visiting anthropologists can see them.[14]

As ethnography developed, anthropologists grew more interested in less tangible aspects of culture, such as values, worldview and what Clifford Geertz termed the "ethos" of the culture. Clifford Geertz's own fieldwork used elements of a phenomenological approach to fieldwork, tracing not just the doings of people, but the cultural elements themselves. For example, if within a group of people, winking was a communicative gesture, he sought to first determine what kinds of things a wink might mean (it might mean several things). Then, he sought to determine in what contexts winks were used, and whether, as one moved about a region, winks remained meaningful in the same way. In this way, cultural boundaries of communication could be explored, as opposed to using linguistic boundaries or notions about residence. Geertz, while still following something of a traditional ethnographic outline, moved outside that outline to talk about "webs" instead of "outlines" [15] of culture.

Within cultural anthropology, there are several sub-genres of ethnography. Beginning in the 1950s and early 1960s, anthropologists began writing "bio-confessional" ethnographies that intentionally exposed the nature of ethnographic research. Famous examples include Tristes Tropiques (1955) 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.

Sociology

Sociology is another field which prominently features ethnographies. Urban sociology and the Chicago School in particular are associated with ethnographic research, with some well-known early examples being Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Caton. Some of the influence for this can be traced to the anthropologist Lloyd Warner who was on the Chicago sociology faculty, and to Robert Park's experience as a journalist. 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. Other important ethnographies in the discipline of sociology include Pierre Bourdieu's work on Algeria and France, Paul Willis's Learning To Labour on working class youth, and the work of Mitchell Duneier and Loic Wacquant on black America. 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.

Communication Studies

Beginning in the 1960s and 70s, ethnographic research methods began to be widely employed by communication scholars. Studies such as Gerry Philipsen's analysis of cultural communication strategies in a blue-collar, working class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, Speaking 'Like a Man' in Teamsterville, paved the way for the expansion of ethnographic research in the study of communication.

Scholar of communication studies use ethnographic research methods to analyze communication behaviors, seeking to answer the "why" and "how come" questions of human communication.[16] Often this type of research results in a case study or field study such as an analysis of speech patterns at a protest rally or the way firemen communicate during "down time" at a fire station. Like anthropology scholars, communication scholars often immerse themselves, participate in and/or directly observe the particular wikt:social group being studied.[17]

Other fields

The American anthropologist George Spindler (Stanford University) was a pioneer in applying ethnographic methodology to the classroom.

Anthropologists like Daniel Miller and Mary Douglas have used ethnographic data to answer academic questions about consumers and consumption. In this sense, Tony Salvador, Genevieve Bell, and Ken Anderson describe design ethnography as being "a way of understanding the particulars of daily life in such a way as to increase the success probability of a new product or service or, more appropriately, to reduce the probability of failure specifically due to a lack of understanding of the basic behaviors and frameworks of consumers."[18]

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 (such as video ethnography). The recent Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (EPIC) conference is evidence of this.[citation needed] 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.

Ethics

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 would be inappropriate for others to know”.[19]

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”.[20] Based on these assertions, Fine establishes three conceptual clusters in which ethnographic ethical dilemmas can be situated: “Classic Virtues,” “Technical Skills,” and “Ethnographic Self.”

Much debate surrounding the issue of ethics arose after the ethnographer Napoleon Chagnon conducted his ethnographic fieldwork with the Yanomamo people of South America.

Classic Virtues

  • “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.[21]

Technical Skills

  • “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.[22]

The Ethnographic Self

  • “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.[23]

Seven principles should be considered for observing, recording and sampling data according to Denzin:

  1. The groups should combine symbolic meanings with patterns of interaction.
  2. Observe the world from the point of view of the subject, while maintaining the distinction between everyday and scientific perceptions of reality.
  3. Link the group’s symbols and their meanings with the social relationships.
  4. Record all behaviour.
  5. Methodology should highlight phases of process, change and stability.
  6. The act should be a type of symbolic interactionism.
  7. Use concepts that would avoid casual explanations.

See also

Notable ethnographers

References

  1. ^ "Ethnology" at dictionary.com.
  2. ^ Maynard, M. & Purvis, J. (1994). Researching women's loves from a feminist perspective. London: Taylor & Frances. p. 76
  3. ^ Boaz. N.T. & Wolfe, L.D. (1997). Biological anthropology. Published by International Institute for Human Evolutionary Research. Page 150.
  4. ^ Rsoaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth.
  5. ^ Rosaldo, op cit, Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Culture, Ember and Ember, Cultural anthropology.}}
  6. ^ This can be seen by doing anthropology: Google it.
  7. ^ Richardson,L. (2000). Evaluating ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 6(2), 253-255
  8. ^ Naroll, Raoul. Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology.
  9. ^ Chavez, Leo. "Shadowed Lives: Undocumented workers in American society (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology). 1997 Prentice Hall.
  10. ^ Ember, Carol and Melvin Ember. Cultural Anthropology. 2006. Prentice Hall, Chapter One
  11. ^ Heider, Karl. Seeing Anthropology. 2001. Prentice Hall, Chapters One and Two.
  12. ^ cf. Ember and Ember 2006, Heider 2001 op cit.
  13. ^ Ember and Ember 2006, op cit., Chapters 7 and 8
  14. ^ Truner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols. remainder of citation forthcoming
  15. ^ Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Culture Chapter one.
  16. ^ Rubin, R. B., Rubin, A. M., and Piele, L. J. (2005). Communication research: Strategies and sources. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadworth. pp. 229.
  17. ^ Bentz, V. M., and Shapiro, J. J. (1998). Mindful inquiry in social research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp. 117.
  18. ^ Salvador
  19. ^ Fine, p. 267
  20. ^ Fine, p. 291
  21. ^ Fine, p. 270-77
  22. ^ Fine, p. 277-81
  23. ^ Fine, p. 282-89
  • Agar, Michael (1996) The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. Academic Press.
  • Douglas, Mary and Baron Isherwood (1996) The World of Goods: Toward and Anthropology of Consumption. Routledge, London.
  • Erickson, Ken C. and Donald D. Stull (1997) Doing Team Ethnography : Warnings and Advice. Sage, Beverly Hills.
  • Fine, G. A. (1993). Ten lies of ethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 22(3), p. 267-294.
  • Hymes, Dell. (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Kottak, Conrad Phillip (2005) Window on Humanity : A Concise Introduction to General Anthropology, (pages 2–3, 16-17, 34-44). McGraw Hill, New York.
  • Miller, Daniel (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Blackwell, London.
  • Spradley, James P. (1979) The Ethnographic Interview. Wadsworth Group/Thomson Learning.
  • Salvador, Tony; Genevieve Bell; and Ken Anderson (1999) Design Ethnography. Design Management Journal.

Suggested Reading

  • "On Ethnography" by Shirley Brice Heath & Brian Street, with Molly Mills.
  • The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz.

External links


Translations: Ethnography
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Dansk (Danish)
n. - etnografi

Nederlands (Dutch)
etnografie (beschrijvende antropologie), etnografisch werk

Français (French)
n. - ethnographie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Ethnographie, (wissenschaftliche Beschreibung von Volksgruppen)

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - εθνογραφία

Italiano (Italian)
etnografia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - etnografia (f)

Русский (Russian)
этнография

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

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 기술적 인종학

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 民族誌

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) (علم المجتمعات البدائيه) دراسه و وصف الثقافات‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮ידע-עם, תיאור העמים, אתנוגרפיה‬


 
 

 

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