Social Sciences
Ethnography
Ethnography is a research method used to study and understand social groups and cultures. It involves immersive fieldwork, participant observation, and interviews to gain an in-depth understanding of the group's customs, behaviors, and beliefs. Ethnographers aim to provide rich, descriptive accounts of the culture they study, often resulting in detailed ethnographic texts or films.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
12 Key excerpts on "Ethnography"
eBook - ePub- Steve Chapman, Patrick McNeill, Patrick Mcneill(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
4 Ethnography‘Ethnography’ literally means writing about the way of life, or culture, of social groups. At its simplest, it involves the researcher inserting themselves into the natural setting of the social group being studied and participating in and observing their daily activities. Other methods, particularly informal interviews and the analysis of documents such as diaries may be used to sketch out a fuller picture.The purpose of such research is to describe the culture and life style of the group of people being studied in a way that is as faithful as possible to the way they see it themselves and to the social contexts in which their behaviour occurs. The idea is not so much to seek causes and explanations, as is often the case with survey-style research, but rather to ‘tell it like it is’, to capture what Brewer (2000) notes are ‘social meanings and ordinary activities’ (p. ).The aims of ethnographic research are strongly linked to the broader theoretical frameworks of phenomenology and interpretivism (see pp. ) which argue that all social action is intentional. In other words, people choose to behave the way they do. Interpretivist sociologists argue that in order to understand social life, we must first examine social interaction and especially the social meanings or interpretations that people attach to their behaviour. They argue that we can only do this by adopting ethnographic research methods because these allow researchers access to the ‘lived experience’ of particular social groups and to think themselves into the perspectives of their members.Ethnography, therefore, is about imitating real life. Weber called this ‘Verstehen’, i.e. being able to emphathize with or think like the people that are being studied. This closeness to the research subjects has led interpretivists to claim that Ethnography produces the most valid and authentic type of qualitative data of any type of social research method.
eBook - PDF- Alison Jane Pickard(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Facet Publishing(Publisher)
Introduction The goal of Ethnography is to combine the view of an insider with that of an outsider to describe a social setting. The resulting description is expected to be deeper and fuller than that of the ordinary outsider, and broader and less culture-bound than that of the ordinary insider. (Wilcox, 1982, 462) As with ‘case study’, the term Ethnography refers to the research method and the research output; Ethnography is the process of engagement and the written account of that engagement (Agar, 1996). The most common use of ethnographic research is in anthropology, although social science research has increasingly adopted this method, which focuses on interpretations of behaviour or specific events in the everyday lives of individuals. The primary data collection technique is participant observation, although other methods of collecting information concerning the context are often used. An ethnographic study begins with no a priori assumptions; the researcher seeks to explore and although the research will have a focus, the theoretical framework acts as cognitive signposts rather than controlling the direction of the investigation. Ethnography uses descriptive narrative to analyse and present the findings from the investigation; the purpose is to build theory by describing situations as they are and presenting patterns within a context. Many of my students have asked me what the difference is between a case study and an Ethnography, an understandable question, as these methods are similar. Conducting an ethnographic study may, on the surface, appear to be very similar to case study research but it is the extent to which the researcher is immersed in the context that is the real and most obvious difference. The focus of Ethnography is to describe and interpret a cultural and social group, whereas the focus of case study is to develop an in-depth analysis of a single case.
eBook - PDF- Stephen Pihlaja(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Although recognising the intellec- tual antecedents of Ethnography in anthropology and sociology, there is no consensus about what counts as Ethnography (Hammersley, 2018). Simply put, Ethnography refers to the description and interpretation of people’ s behaviours and attitudes to make sense of the world from their perspectives. Hammersley and Atkinson (1983, p. 2) observe, ‘the ethnographer participates, overtly or covertly, in people’ s lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions; in fact collecting whatever data is available to throw light on the issues with which he or she is concerned.’ Ethnography goes beyond merely describing people’ s social and cultural practices, but captures the complexity and multilayeredness of social experi- ence, and social rules and patterns. In this respect, Ethnography ‘describe[s] the apparently messy and complex activities that make up social action, not to reduce their complexity but to describe and explain it’ (Blommaert and Jie 32 2010, p. 11–12). Doing Ethnography is, thus, an interpretivist and inductive process: the empirical data guide the ethnographer to the application of par- ticular theories rather than the other way round. Ethnography is also reflexive; ethnographers are part of the social world they are studying and they actively shape that world. The following excerpt is from a six-page narrative documenting my second visit to the Sri Murugan Temple in Newham, East London. My visit to the Temple was part of a multisited, three-year collaborative team Ethnography entitled ‘Becoming Literate in Faith Settings: Language and Literacy Learning in the Life of New Londoners’ (the BeLiFS project), supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK. The study investigated how sixteen children aged between four and twelve develop their language and literacy learning and belonging through religious activities in London, UK.
- William Outhwaite, Stephen Turner, William Outhwaite, Stephen Turner(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
Ethnography is for this reason—explicitly or implicitly—wedded to the notion of the case study, which describes in detail a particular event or series of events, to derive from it broader inferences about social process or the human condition (Gluckman, 1940). A major part of the legitimacy for this induction process is careful attention within ethnographic work to the context of events, since it is assumed that events seen out of context might be misunder-stood. Indeed, so central is context that it is not merely a pre-condition for the development of general theory out of particular event; rather, context when well described is the develop-ment of theory: ‘description is explanation’ (Hammersley, 1992: 23; see also Dilley, 1999). The description of events in context is particu-larly poignant—indeed, necessary—when dealing with situations unfamiliar to the general readership. Such work allows us to 3 Ethnography J o n P. M i t c h e l l CASES, COMPARISONS, AND THEORY see the world from ‘the native’s point of view’ (Malinowski, 1922: 25) and to better understand motivation and meaning of social action. The methodology that has developed along-side and which is used to deliver these descriptive goals is what Clammer (1984) has called the ‘fieldwork concept’. This involves a long-term period of social immersion in a par-ticular setting, from which is generated the totalizing and holistic descriptive account— the ‘Ethnography of …’ the group being researched. Within this fieldwork, the domi-nant method is ‘participant observation’, although like ‘Ethnography’ this label is used to gloss over the variety of methods actually used by ethnographers—from simple observa-tion to the collection of stories/life histories, interviewing, household surveys, archival research, and so on. Indeed, in practice, ethno-graphers tend to let context drive not only their descriptions but also their research ques-tions and methodological practice.
eBook - PDFCultural Anthropology
The Human Challenge
- William Haviland, Harald Prins, Bunny McBride, Walrath, William Haviland, Harald Prins, Bunny McBride, William Haviland, Harald Prins, Bunny McBrideWalrath(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
47 In this chapter you will learn to ● Explain why fieldwork is essential to Ethnography. ● Situate historical changes in research questions and applications within their economic, social, and political contexts. ● Describe ethnographic research—its challenges and methods. ● Discuss the relationship between methods and theory. ● Contrast key theoretical perspectives in anthropology. ● Recognize the ethical responsibilities of anthropological research. As briefly discussed in Chapter 1, cultural anthropology has two main scholarly components: Ethnography and ethnology. Ethnography is a detailed description of a particular culture primarily based on firsthand observation and interaction. Ethnology is the study and analysis of different cultures from a comparative or historical point of view, utilizing ethnographic accounts and developing anthropological theories that help explain why certain important differences or similarities occur among groups. Historically, anthropology focused on non-Western traditional peoples whose languages were not written down—people whose communication was often direct and face-to-face and whose knowledge about the past was based primarily on oral tradition. Even in societies where writing exists, little of inter- est to anthropologists is detailed in writing. Thus, anthropologists have made a point of going to these places in person to observe and experience peoples and their cultures firsthand. This is called fieldwork. Today, anthropological fieldwork takes place not only in small-scale communi- ties in remote corners of the world, but also in modern urban neighborhoods in in- dustrial or postindustrial societies. Anthropologists can be found doing fieldwork in a wide range of places and within a host of diverse groups and institutions, includ- ing global corporations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), mining towns, tourist resorts, migrant labor communities, slums, prisons, and refugee camps.
- Dan Shapiro, Michael Tauber, Roland Traunmüller(Authors)
- 1996(Publication Date)
- North Holland(Publisher)
Within CSCW, the usefulness of the ethnographic preoccupation with the native view (here the user's perspective) has gained Ethnographic Workplace Studies and CSCW 27 increasing recognition and it is now taken for granted that careful in situ participant observation before the design phase and user participation during the design phase are indispensable for the success of a project. Working with Ethnography What, then, does Ethnography consist of? How does one do Ethnography? As noted, ethnographic field work typically involves participant observation, a combination of observation and in-situ question asking, carried out while participating in the ongoing activities and events of a community (Bernard et al., 1984). Participant observation is not unproblematic. To be able to function simultaneously as observer and participant is a complex skill that requires training, experience and continuous reflection on the process. Depending on the degree of involvement with the community, it also raises particular ethical problems of responsibility for the welfare of study participants (Gilbert et al., 1991). In workplace research it has to be possible to assure workers that none of the data collected for research purposes will be accessible to management for evaluation of individuals or in any other form that could be damaging to them. Such assurances and safeguards need to be worked out ahead of time and must be scrupulously adhered to by all participants. The participant observer When anthropologists study entire communities, they more likely than not become residents of the community. Since our work tends to involve working communities that are not necessarily residential communities, we simply try to become as much a part of the scene as local conditions allow. In practice this can range from taking up residence and participating in the full panoply of local activities to a position more akin to the proverbial fly-on-the-wall.
eBook - PDFPhilosophy of Anthropology and Sociology
A Volume in the Handbook of the Philosophy of Science Series
- Dov M. Gabbay, Paul Thagard, John Woods(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- North Holland(Publisher)
The pivotal question of twentieth century Ethnography is the product of the foregoing epistemic and metaphysical issues: to what extent is Ethnography a generalizing form of inquiry? Anthropologists who treat culture as a collection of individuals take Ethnography to be primarily descriptive. The goal of Ethnography is to capture the native’s point of view, and this is taken to require a description of the representations, experiences, or other traits of the individuals. There is little or no need for the generation or testing of hypotheses. On the other hand, anthropologists who treat culture as something distinct from individuals are faced with an epistemic problem. They must use what the individuals say and do as evidence for their understanding of the culture. Their statements about the norms, institutions, or other cultural forms are hypotheses that must be tested against more concrete forms of evidence. Ethnography is thus a form of inquiry that requires hypothesis generation and testing. The role of moral or political values in social scientific inquiry is the final broad issue relevant to this discussion of Ethnography. 4 Ethnography developed as part of the colonial encounter. At the very least, ethnographic research required the cooperation of colonial authorities; occasionally, it was more deeply implicated. Willingly or unwillingly, ethnographers occupied a position in a structure that dominated and exploited non-European peoples. The very concept of culture, some have argued, is a product of the need to govern indigenous groups. When the political critique of Ethnography, and by extension, all of cultural anthropol-ogy, emerged in the late nineteen-sixties, it precipitated a crisis. Today, many anthropologists take it for granted that the concept of culture has been decon-structed.
eBook - PDF- Christian Scharen, Aana Marie Vigen(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
Spe-cifically, the shared assumption with secular, quantitative method here is that 1 Bellah, “The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry,” 381–401. 2 Having said this, we wish to emphasize that we certainly recognize the need to put the scriptures and core beliefs of a community into use within concrete lives and situations. Sacred scriptures and faith claims must somehow be visible and active within embodied contexts or else they cease to “live” or be relevant. What is Ethnography? 5 there is an “objective” truth that can be discovered through observation of the phenomena in question. In other words, good scientific or theological inquiry depends on the proper deduction of facts derived from careful reading, reflec-tion, interpretation and recording of data. Thus, whether the pursuit is theo-logical or scientific in nature, the method is deductive, meaning that general, a priori principles are discovered in sources of information (e.g. sacred texts, nature, philosophical writings) that hold true in concrete situations across time and space and thus can be applied in specific contexts and hold universally. 3 In strong contrast to quantitative protocols and reports, Ethnography values a very different kind of data—often discovered through disciplined attention to a few research sites or participants. Consequently, some researchers who prize quantitative data find its methods too narrow and its findings too anec-dotal to be of any real scientific value. They may dismissively liken it to the quaint storytelling of a well-intentioned, perhaps tiresome, relative who yam-mers away at the family gathering about times long past—at first amusing, but ultimately of little interest or insight. For their part, and as Scharen discusses in greater depth in Chapter 3, some theologians (Hauerwas, Milbank) are skeptical of qualitative methods because they think they import secular the-ologies implicitly under the guise of “neutral” or “objective” social science.
eBook - PDF- Dydia DeLyser, Steve Herbert, Stuart Aitken, Mike Crang, Linda McDowell, Dydia DeLyser, Steve Herbert, Stuart Aitken, Mike Crang, Linda McDowell(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
As we have discussed in this chapter, eth-nography as a methodology raises significant questions about the status and situations of knowledges used and created in geography. An ethnographic approach to qualitative 134 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE GEOGRAPHY research complements geographers’ concerns for understanding and depicting spaces, places, and local-global experiences. Crucially, ethnographers do more than consider what methods would generate the best data in their research design, which is a common way that social scientists use multi-ple-methods, such as structured interviews, survey results, or census data. Projects can either begin with ethnographic research prac-tices, to be later supplemented by other qualitative and/or quantitative research tech-niques, or can itself constitute a rich disserta-tion, academic text, or public creative project. Ethnography as a research practice is itera-tive, or non-linear – that is, we are concerned with writing as we observe and with how we participate as we write, all the while revisit-ing and thinking through our past participa-tions and observations. Ethnography makes explicit processes and power relations involved in knowledge cre-ation through intersubjective and responsible approaches to research topics and research partners. Participating in the field means par-ticipating in creating knowledge, with people heretofore conceived of as ‘subjects’ – some of the co-writing we discussed in this chapter attest to the opportunity ethnographic depic-tion has to ‘decolonizing’ research represen-tations more generally. In other words, Ethnography is more about its ‘doing’ than it is about the procurement of ‘facts.’ For this reason, Ethnography presents opportunities to reimagine the practice of research more generally and offers scholars the possibility of contributing to the world at large. REFERENCES Behar, R. (1994) Translated woman: crossing the border with Esperanza .
eBook - PDF- Celia Roberts, Michael Byram, Ana Barro, Shirley Jordan, Brian V Street(Authors)
- 2000(Publication Date)
- Multilingual Matters(Publisher)
Developing an Ethnographic Method In previous sections, there have been several references to ethnographic ways of thinking or an ‘ethnographic imagination’. This requires the capacity to observe and record some aspects of everyday life and to ‘read’ this data in interpretive ways which are themselves constantly questioned. For example, something as commonplace as the layout of a supermarket or a town or village market can be systematically docu-mented and analysed in order to discover the underlying pattern behind the classification of consumables. We may conclude that goods are displayed in a supermarket according to semiotic principles concerning ritual pollution; but on what basis have we concluded this? Are the find-ings based on one data source or several? Did initial analysis inform subsequent data collection? How far is the interpretive analysis based on more general conceptual categories? And do we present our conclu-sions as general facts, a particular case, the writer’s own view or . . . ? The last section of this chapter illustrates some of the ways in which the conceptual frameworks introduced above are linked to ethnographic methods so that students can begin to ask and answer some of these questions for themselves. The course is structured so that the more conceptually based units and the methods units are integrated, reflecting the necessary relationship between conceptual thinking and data collection, analysis and writing up which gives Ethnography its special character. Participant observation Participant observation (PO) is the first of the methods units intro-duced on the course, some weeks before the students embark on their ‘home Ethnography’. Participant observation is generally recognised as the essential method for doing Ethnography. As the name suggests, it is a method involving simultaneously both participation and observation.
eBook - PDF- Rebecca Hardin, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Rebecca Hardin, Kamari Maxine Clarke(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- University of Wisconsin Press(Publisher)
Nor does this mean that the ethnographic portraits that we were given of these societies by our predecessors are complete or correct in every detail, or that the societies were frozen in time, unchanged and unchanging. Yet it can be argued that they were in important ways more like each other than like, say, U.S. society, or British society, or Japanese society of that time. It was in studying these societies that our anthropology, anthropology as a profession, took shape—when people, mostly male, from the white Western capitalist world went somewhere else, to a somewhere else that was distinguished by being what the West was not. What anthropologists did when they got there was called fieldwork. Its practice was Ethnography, the method of cultural anthro- pology, and it became highly prized. The British anthropologist C. G. Seligman was not merely joking when he said that “field research in anthropology is what the blood of the martyrs is to the Church” (Stocking 1996, 115). A romanticism with which anthropology has always been affected gave special, near-mystical power to the words the field. It was in so-called primitive societies that this first happened. Ethnography addressed societies such as those for good reasons. It has been remarked that ethnographers were sometimes incorrigible romantics, sometimes servants of imperialism, and often egotistical; but none of those things really explains where they went. As Alfred Louis Kroeber was to write, anthropology specialized in studying “primitive” peoples because no other field took them seriously. But he also made clear that anthropology never intended to study only such people; it was a field worldwide in scope, interested in the most exotic in humankind, but also, as he put it, “equally [interested] in ourselves, here, now, at home” (Kroeber 1953, xiii).
eBook - ePub- Donal Carbaugh, Patrice M. Buzzanell(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The chapter unfolds in three related parts. First is the approach that I and my colleagues take to the study of communication: (1) a focus on local means and meanings of communication in particular social milieus; and (2) an ethnographic method for the study of those means and meanings in any given situation. Second is the development, within the communication discipline, of a network of scholars who practice this approach and educate others to use it. The third presents two examples of how participants in this network are applying this approach to the study of cultural factors in communication in order that they might understand and shape communication in important arenas of contemporary social practice.A CULTURALLY-ORIENTED APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF COMMUNICATION
There are two aspects to what I am describing here as an approach to the study of communication: (1) the manner; and (2) the object, of the approach. To name the manner in one word, it is Ethnography, and I begin with that.The ethnographer is concerned to approach a research site with an attitude of exploration, that is, with curiosity about what may be found there. Typically, a research site is an organization, community, neighborhood, locale, or country, that is, a physical site in which people are living and interacting, including digital locales. A site for ethnographic inquiry could also be a body of textual material that has been constructed for the purposes of research. In such cases, the materials examined could be a batch of letters, a collection of media reports, electronic recordings of life stories, or other materials that constitute a body of discourse that can be approached in an exploratory way for an ethnographic purpose.To speak of an ethnographic purpose requires that such a purpose be defined. I treat it as such if the researcher approaches a body of materials not only in an exploratory manner but also with an eye and an ear to the discovery of local means and meanings, especially when those local means and meanings can be shown to have some history in the site in which they are experienced. To specify further, as an ethnographer of ways of communicating, the ethnographer trains her eyes and ears to local means of communicating, and to a local system of meanings associated with those means.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
