Ethnography
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Ethnography (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos = folk/people and γράφω grapho = to write) is a qualitative research
design aimed at exploring cultural phenomena. The resulting field study or a case
report reflects the knowledge
and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group.[1][2][3] An ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing, the
nature of a people.
An ethnographer is a participant
observer who,
following an eight page code of ethics, and using a set of classical virtues
and a set of technical skills, forms questionnaires, interviews, and the participant's own observations into what is called
"an ethnography" or "field study" or "case
report".[4][5] The typical ethnography is an holistic study[6][7] and so includes a brief history, and
an analysis of theterrain,
the climate,
and the habitat.
In all cases it should be reflexive, make a substantial contribution toward the
understanding of the social life of humans, have an aesthetic impact on the
reader, and express a credible reality. It observes the world (the study) from
the point of view of the subject (not the participant ethnographer) and records all observed
behavior and describes all symbol-meaning relations using concepts that avoid
casual explanations.
The
ethnography, as the empirical data on human societies and cultures,
was pioneered in the biological, social, and cultural branches of anthropology but
has also become a popular in the social sciences in general—sociology,[8] communication
studies, history—wherever people study ethnic groups, formations, compositions,
resettlements, social welfare characteristics, materiality, spirituality, and a
peoples ethnogenesis.[9]
Data collection methods
Data
collection methods are meant to capture the "social meanings and ordinary
activities" [10] of
people (informants) in "naturally occurring settings" [10] that
are commonly referred to as "the field." The goal is to collect data
in such a way that the researcher does not impose any of their own bias on the
data.[10] Multiple
methods of data collection may be employed to facilitate a relationship that
allows for a more personal and in-depth portrait of the informants and their
community. These can include participant observation, field notes, interviews,
and surveys. Interviews are often taped and later transcribed, allowing the
interview to proceed unimpaired of note-taking, but with all information
available later for full analysis. Secondary research and document analysis are
also employed to provide insight into the research topic. In the past kinship
charts were commonly used to "discover logical patterns and social
structure in non-Western societies".[11] However anthropology today focuses
more on the study of urban settings and the use of kinship charts is seldom
employed.
In
order to accomplish a neutral observation a great deal of reflexivity on the
part of the researcher is required. Reflexivity asks us "to explore the
ways in which a researcher's involvement with a particular study influences,
acts upon and informs such research".[12] Despite these attempts of reflexivity
no researcher can be totally unbiased, which has provided a basis to criticize
ethnography.
Traditionally,
the ethnographer focuses attention on a community, selecting knowledgeable
informants who know the activities of the community well.[13] These
informants are typically asked to identify other informants who represent the
community, often using chain sampling.[13] This
process is often effective in revealing common cultural common denominators
connected to the topic being studied.[13]Ethnography relies greatly on
up-close, personal experience. Participation, rather than just observation, is
one of the keys to this process.[14]Ethnography
is very useful in social research.
Differences across disciplines
The
ethnographic method is used across a range of different disciplines, primarily
by anthropologists but also frequently by sociologists.Cultural studies, economics, social work, education, ethnomusicology, folklore, religious studies, geography, history, linguistics, communication studies, performance studies, advertising, psychology, usability and criminology 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, Ethnologische
Excursion in Johore (1875)
by Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead, The Nuer (1940) by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Naven (1936, 1958) byGregory Bateson or "The Lele of the Kasai" (1963) by Mary Douglas.
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 emicviews of where the
culture begins and ends. Using language or community boundaries to bound the
ethnography is common.[15] Ethnographies are also sometimes
called "case studies."[16] 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 are Carol Stack's All Our Kin, Jean Briggs' "Never in Anger", Richard Lee's "Kalahari
Hunter-Gatherers", Victor Turner's
"Forest of Symbols", David Maybry-Lewis'
"Akew-Shavante Society", E.E. Evans-Pritchard's "The
Nuer" and Claude Lévi-Strauss' "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.[17]
Bronisław Malinowski among Trobriandtribe
A
typical ethnography attempts to be holistic[18][19] 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.[20] Practices of childrearing,
acculturation and emic views on personality and values usually follow after
sections on social structure.[21] 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.[22]
As
ethnography developed, anthropologists grew more interested in less tangible
aspects of culture, such as values, worldview and whatClifford 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"[23] 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.
This
critical turn in sociocultural anthropology during the mid-1980s can, in large
part, can be traced to the influence of the now classic (and often contested)
text, Writing Culture: The
Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, (1986) edited by James Clifford and George Marcus.Writing Culture helped bring changes to both
anthropology and ethnography often described in terms of being 'postmodern,'
'reflexive,' 'literary,' 'deconstructive,' or 'poststructural' in nature in
that the text helped to highlight the various epistemic and political
predicaments that many practitioners saw as plaguing ethnographic
representations and practices.[24] Where Geertz's and Turner's interpretive
anthropology recognized subjects as creative actors who constructed their
sociocultural worlds out of symbols, postmodernists attempted to draw attention
to the privileged status of the ethnographers themselves. That is, the
ethnographer cannot escape their own particular viewpoint in creating an
ethnographic account thus making any claims of objective neutrality on the part
of their representation highly problematic, if not altogether impossible.[25] In
regards to this last point, Writing
Culture became a focal point
for looking at how ethnographers could describe different cultures and
societies without denying the subjectivity of those individuals and groups
being studied while simultaneously doing so without laying claiming to absolute
knowledge and objective authority.[26] Along with the development of
experimental forms such as 'dialogic anthropology' and 'narrative ethnography,' Writing Culture helped to encourage the development of
'collaborative ethnography.'[27] This
exploration of the relationship between writer, audience, and subject has
become a central tenet of contemporary anthropological and ethnographic
practice wherein active collaboration between the researcher(s) and subject(s)
has helped blend, in certain instances, the practice of collaboration in
ethnographic fieldwork with the process of creating the actual ethnographic
product that emerges from the research itself.[27][28][29]
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. Cayton, Jr.. 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 Elijah Anderson, Mitchell Duneier, Loic Wacquant on black America and Glimpses of
Madrasa From Africa, 2010 Lai Olurode. 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.
[edit]Communication studies
Beginning
in the 1960s and 1970s, 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.
Scholars
of communication studies use ethnographic research methods to
analyze communication behaviors, seeking to answer the "why" and
"how come" questions of human communication.[30] 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 social group being studied.[31]
Other fields
The
American anthropologist George Spindler 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."[32]
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.
[edit]Evaluating
ethnography
Ethnographic
methodology is not usually evaluated in terms of philosophical standpoint (such
as positivism and emotionalism). Ethnographic studies
nonetheless need to be evaluated in some manner. While there is no consensus on
evaluation standards, Richardson (2000, p. 254)[33] provides 5 criteria that ethnographers
might find helpful.
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?"[34]
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'?"
References
2.
^ In The
Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (pp 3-30). New York: Basic Books,
Inc., Publishers
3.
^ Philipsen,
G. (1992). Speaking Culturally: Explorations in Social Communication. Albany,
New York: State University of New York Press
4.
^ Boaz. N.T.
& Wolfe, L.D. (1997). Biological anthropology. Published by International
Institute for Human Evolutionary Research. Page 150.
5.
^ Maynard,
M. & Purvis, J. (1994). Researching women's loves from a feminist
perspective. London: Taylor & Frances. p. 76
12.
^ [nightingale,
David & Cromby, John. Social Constructionist Psychology: A Critical
Analysis of Theory and Practice. Philadelphia: Open University Press. p.228.]
13.
^ a b c G. David
Garson (2008). "Ethnographic
Research: Statnotes, from North Carolina State University, Public
Administration Program". Faculty.chass.ncsu.edu. Retrieved 2011-03-27.
14.
^ Genzuk,
Michael, PH.D., A
Synthesis of Ethnographic, Center for Multilingual, Multicultural Research, University of
Southern California
16.
^ Chavez,
Leo. "Shadowed Lives: Undocumented workers in American society (Case
Studies in Cultural Anthropology). 1997 Prentice Hall.
17.
^ "University Press of Florida:
Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia".
Upf.com. 2009-11-15.
Retrieved 2011-03-27.
24.
^ Olaf
Zenker & Karsten Kumoll. Beyond Writing Culture: Current Intersections of
Epistemologies and Representational Practices. (2010). New York: Berghahn
Books. ISBN
978-1-84545-675-7. Pgs. 1-4
25.
^ Paul A.
Erickson & Liam D. Murphy. A History of Anthropological Theory, Third
Edition. (2008). Toronto: Broadview Press. ISBN
978-1-55111-871-0. Pg. 190
26.
^ Paul A.
Erickson & Liam D. Murphy. A History of Anthropological Theory, Third
Edition. (2008). Toronto: Broadview Press. ISBN
978-1-55111-871-0. Pgs. 190-191
27.
^ a b Olaf
Zenker & Karsten Kumoll. Beyond Writing Culture: Current Intersections of
Epistemologies and Representational Practices. (2010). New York: Berghahn
Books. ISBN
978-1-84545-675-7. Pg. 12
28.
^ Luke E.
Lassiter. 'From "Reading over the Shoulders of Natives" to
"Reading alongside Natives", Literally: Toward a Collaborative and
Reciprocal Ethnography'. (2001). Journal of Anthropologcal Research,
57(2):137-149
29.
^ Luke E.
Lassiter. 'Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology'. (2005). Current
Anthropology, 46(1):83-106
30.
^ Rubin, R.
B., Rubin, A. M., and Piele, L. J. (2005). Communication
research: Strategies and sources. Belmont,
California: Thomson Wadworth. pp. 229.
31.
^ Bentz, V.
M., and Shapiro, J. J. (1998). Mindful inquiry in social research. Thousand
Oaks, California: Sage. pp. 117.
34.
^ For
postcolonial critiques of ethnography from various locations, see essays in
Prem Poddar et al, Historical Companion to Postcolonial
Literatures--Continental Europe and its Empires, Edinburgh University Press,
2008.
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