Over the last four decades, ethnography, which had long been imagined as a self-evident and unproblematic process of data collection, has become a complicated and tricky issue. This is especially true for anthropologists. The dense reflection and the vivid discussion about ethnography that emerged in the 1970â1980s inside the anthropological academic community clearly prove it. Ethnographic practice, ethnographic theory, and ethnographic writing are far from easy, epistemologically straightforward activities. Nevertheless, as a result of its widespread perception as both a powerful and easy-to-use tool to gain qualitative research data about a community, it became a privileged research method for sociologists, and also for psychologists and, finally, even for interculturally oriented scholars of any social science and humanities field (such as pedagogy).
With this volume we offer both a historical overview and a critical reflection on ethnographyâhow it originated, and how it was conceptualized, represented, and discussed by anthropologists.
It is intended as a tool for deepening the conditions that have seen the emergence of the research practice, the branches it has taken in relation to particular theoretical needs, the role it played in the construction of anthropological knowledge and the limits that sometimes affected its effectiveness.
It is also a âdenseâ support that is rich in indications and suggestions for anyone interested in practicing ethnography, studying it, becoming an anthropologist, or, more in general, doing social research.
Furthermore, it aims to emphasize the particular and innovative character of the Italian anthropological tradition with reference to an anthropological gaze full of political sensitivity, long unexpectedly overlooked; it aims to account for the great liveliness that Italian anthropology has taken on, especially in recent decades, in the critical confrontation with the international guidelines of the discipline.
The aspect that characterizes the volume is the central idea that animates it: repositioning ethnography at the core of the anthropological tradition and showing the extent to which ethnography is strongly connected to a sophisticated theoretical reflection and deeply embedded in cultural and social anthropology. Outside this intellectual endeavor, ethnography itself has little value, and nor does the knowledge one may hope to obtain through the naive use of a so-called âethnographic method.â
This does not mean to deny that ethnography also exists outside anthropology, for example in research based on Max Weberâs theory of social action, in the symbolic interactionism of the Chicago School or in ethnomethodology, but anthropology is certainly the discipline in which ethnography originated and which has cultivated it deeper and for longer. It is the discipline that maintains the most intimate and exclusive relationship with ethnography.
As a consequence, ethnography can no longer be viewed as the simple empirical side of anthropology, or as a âpracticalâ mode of research, a kind of technique; it requires a recognition of its high theoretical value since the real core of ethnography (and anthropological knowledge) lies in the way in which it formulates research problems and conceptually defines its objects.
âBeing thereâ in itself has no value; otherwise, the best ethnographers would be the missionariesâand there are those who have said thisâor they would be the ânativesâ themselvesâand there are those who have said this, as well.
So, the common thread of the essays contained in this volume, beyond the particular perspectives of the individual authors, therefore lies in the belief that ethnography is a theoretical elaboration tool and, because of this, it becomes an indispensable part in any production of knowledge on social and cultural facts.
We think that outside this frame, ethnography is nothing, just as little knowledge is believed to be able to derive by a âsimple useâ of the ethnographic method (that without reference theory does not exist).
In the chapters of the volume, in fact, there are many ethnographic approaches, aimed at grasping worlds, networks, or flows of meanings, which both sprang from and are projections of theoretical concepts and intellectual sensibilities, but there is no âmethod.â
To confirm what we say, we quote the sentence of a famous British social anthropologist, suspiciously very critical of the practice he had practiced for a long time, with intensity and with remarkable results during his career:
Anyone who is not a complete idiot can do fieldwork, [âŠ]. It has been my woeful experience that many a student comes home from the field to write just another book about just another people, hardly knowing what to do with the grain he has been at such pains to garner. (Evans-Pritchard 1973, p. 3)
This statement should not be understood as an absolute criticism of fieldwork. Rather, it is an implicit call to those solid foundations of theory that allow the anthropologist to win the decisive battle, that is not fought in the field but in the study afterward, Evans-Pritchard said. In fact, theoretically oriented ethnography is necessary in order to go beyond the surface of everyday projects, actions and words, toward those invisible bonds that bind individuals together and give body to the community (or communities) to which they belong.
Today (the last couple of decades), communities have opened up and become porous; the protagonists of primordial myths have been replaced (or joined) by movie stars or football champions, political leaders, and rock stars; the âdenseâ description is being replaced (or flanked) by the anthropology of global processes (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Fabietti et al. 2020).
Anyway, ethnography is not a simple âglobal interview.â There is always something more, there is always another âlevelâ that is not directly perceptible and that escapes the immediate conceptualization of the âhereââon the spotâand the ânowââin the presentâof empirical research, of fieldwork.
This âsomethingâ is certainly ambiguous, indeterminate, incoherent, asymmetrical, open to intertwining sometimes inextricable, but never completely meaningless; moreover, it is always attributable to constraints (for example, âmaterial conditions of existenceâ) and to power relationships (for example, âdominant and dominatedâ); in other words, it is identifiable.
This means that subjective, personal, and individual action is always rooted in society, history, and culture (Wright Mills 1961; Ginzburg 1986; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Appadurai 1996, 2004). The ways of this rooting are opaque, and we have the task of trying to make them as transparent as possible (cfr. Hannerz 2010). Without this projection in wider frames, toward the wider world of power and meaning, ethnography loses its potential.
So ethnography emerges in this volume as a fragmentâa multiplicity of fragmentsâwhich aims to be reunited with a (partial) totality (Fillitz 2013). How? There is no univocal answer to this crucial theoretical and methodological question, even if we consider the current enlargement of the classic ethnographic âfieldâ (Matera 2013).
Instead, there are many. Some of these are outlined in this volume. In fact, the volume presents both a historical overview of ethnography and a thematic discussion of its major trends, which have oriented research practice in the field in different periods. It also presents more marginalâin the sense that they are undervalued in history of anthropology or introductory textbooksâmodes of ethnographic research (for example feminist and phenomenological approaches), those that had less impact and resonance inside the academic community, but that nonetheless had a solid theoretical frame and a range of insights with regard to their effectiveness as paths to gaining anthropological knowledge.
The volume is divided into four parts.
Part I, Grounds for sociocultural anthropology: USA, UK, FR, IT, lays the foundations for our discussion. Enzo Vinicio Alliegro, in Ethnography before ethnography argues that, although anthropologists are used deconstructing mythological narratives to unveil their underlying logic of power and functioning, they themselves contribute and are victim to them. This is the case in the history of ethnography, which is often simplistically traced back to the works of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown in the early twentieth century. Through a thorough comparison with the specialist literature and relying on a large mass of documentary sources, the article deals with the origins of ethnography, focusing on the pioneering research activities conducted in the United States of America. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the sensitive and bloody question of the natives made the study of the so-called âredskinsâ urgent, and led to a methodology based on a long stay in the field. Even though an ill-concealed guilt has clouded this research period for a long time, after over a hundred years, it is now possible to go back to the contribution and brilliant intuitions of such students as Franz H. Cushing and James Mooney, who, along with colleagues of the Bureau of American Ethnology, laid the foundations of conscious scientific ethnological methodology, acknowledged as such first by M. Mauss and then by Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss. Particularly worthy in this sense is the âtransformative spiralâ triggered during his fieldwork experience, by which Cushing changed from an âextraneous unidentified objectâ into a trustworthy âsubjectâ according to a dynamic that recalls the anecdote that Clifford Geertz tells at the beginning of his perhaps most famous essay:
My wife and I were still very much in the gust-of wind stage, a most frustrating, and even, as you soon begin to doubt whether you are really real after all, unnerving one, when, ten days or so after our arrival, a large cockfight was held in the public square to raise money for a new school⊠(1973, p. 413)
In the ethnographic cases presented in Alliegroâs essay, the radical importance of the experience marks the researchers in the body, as well as in the mind, and it stands out and qualifies their research as ethnographic.
Why then, is the birth of ethnography linked to Malinowski?
Alessandro Mancuso, in Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard and the Issue of the Relationships between Fieldwork Methods, Ethnography and Theory in British Social Anthropology, analyzes another crucial context for ethnography, the British one, and focuses on the figure of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who has contributed to the consolidation of the procedures for the construction of anthropological knowledge.
Mancuso underlines how Radcliffe-Brownâs theoretical social anthropology program as a ânatural science of societyâ empirically founded on the âcomparative methodâ for generalization purposes on social phenomena has been seen as a fundamental research tool useful not only to guar...