ethnographic research in anthropology

Breaking Down Barriers – Using Ethnography to Build Cultural Understanding

Ethnography is a research method used to study human cultures and societies. At its core, ethnography is the study of human cultures and societies through observation and participation in their day-to-day activities.

Ethnographers aim to gain an in-depth understanding of the culture they are studying by immersing themselves in it and observing it from within. This approach allows them to gather rich qualitative data that can help explain how people think, behave, interact with one another, and make sense of their world.

This research method is widely used across various fields such as anthropology, sociology , education, business, and more to gain insights into different cultures and ways of life.

Ethnography – An Introduction

Ethnography is a research method that involves the systematic study of human cultures and societies through observation and participation in their daily activities. It typically requires immersion in the culture being studied, often for an extended period of time, to gain a deep understanding of its norms, values, beliefs, and practices.

The key components of ethnography include participant observation, fieldwork, and data analysis.

Participant observation involves the researcher taking an active role in the culture they are studying by participating in its activities and observing its members’ behaviour. Fieldwork refers to the process of collecting data through direct observation, interviews, and other methods while living among the people being studied. Data analysis involves interpreting the data collected during fieldwork to develop insights into the culture under study.

Ethnography differs from other research methods like surveys or interviews in several ways. Surveys typically involve collecting data from a large group of people using standardized questions or measurements. Interviews involve asking individuals about their experiences or opinions on a particular topic. In contrast, ethnography emphasizes direct observation of cultural practices and behaviors within their natural context rather than relying on self-reported information.

Overall, ethnography provides a unique perspective on human cultures and societies that cannot be obtained through other research methods. By immersing themselves in a culture and experiencing it first-hand, ethnographers can gain insights into how people think, behave, and interact with one another that would be difficult to obtain through any other means.

Participant Observation

Participant observation is a research method used in ethnography and other social sciences that involves the researcher taking an active role in the culture or group being studied.

In participant observation, the researcher immerses themselves in the culture and participates in its activities while observing and recording their experiences. This approach allows the researcher to gain a deep understanding of the culture’s norms, values, beliefs, and practices from an insider’s perspective.

Participant observation typically involves several stages, including gaining entry into the culture or group being studied, establishing trust with its members, learning about its social structure and dynamics, participating in its activities while observing them, and collecting data through field notes or other methods.

The process is time-consuming and challenging, but it can provide rich qualitative data that would be difficult to obtain through other means.

Fieldwork is a research method used in ethnography and other social sciences that involves conducting research in the natural environment or “field” where the culture or group being studied is located. In the context of ethnography, fieldwork typically involves immersing oneself in the culture being studied to gain a deep understanding of its norms, values, beliefs, and practices.

During fieldwork, researchers may engage in participant observation by actively participating in the activities of the culture they are studying while observing and recording their experiences. They may also conduct interviews with members of the culture to gain additional insights into their perspectives and experiences.

Cultural Informant Interviews

Cultural informants are individuals who are knowledgeable about the culture being studied and can provide valuable information to researchers. The ethnographer interviews them to gain insights into their perspectives, experiences, and beliefs.

During cultural informant interviews, researchers ask open-ended questions to gather information about the society’s norms, values, beliefs, and practices. The goal is to gain a deep understanding of the culture from the perspective of its members. Informants may be chosen based on their expertise in specific areas or because they are representative of particular groups within the culture being studied.

Cultural informant interviews can be conducted individually or in groups and may take place in person or remotely. They typically involve building rapport with informants over time to establish trust and create an open dialogue.

Analysing and Describing Ethnographic Findings

Analyzing and describing ethnographic findings involves interpreting the data collected during fieldwork in order to draw conclusions about the culture being studied. The anthropologist begins by organizing their field notes, transcripts, and other data into categories or themes that emerge from the data itself. This involves identifying recurring patterns, themes, or ideas that arise during observation or interviews.

Once the anthropologist has organized their data into categories or themes, they identify the key cultural concepts that emerge from their analysis. These may include values, beliefs, practices, symbols, or social structures that are central to the culture being studied.

The anthropologist then uses their data to describe the norms and behaviors that are common within the culture being studied. This could involve discussing how people interact with each other in social settings or how they communicate with one another.

To understand cultural practices and beliefs fully, it’s important for the anthropologist to provide context for them. One of the ways anthropologists achieve this aim is by using a style known as thick description .

Thick description refers to the practice of providing detailed, contextualized accounts of cultural phenomena. When writing anthropological reports, ethnographers aim to provide readers with enough information to understand the cultural context in which events or activities took place. This type of detailed description is essential for understanding the complexities of human cultures and societies.

Based on their analysis of the data, the anthropologist draws conclusions about what they have learned about the culture being studied. This could involve making generalizations about cultural values or identifying unique features of a particular group within the culture.

Finally, the anthropologist presents their findings in a clear and concise manner using appropriate qualitative research methods such as narrative description, thematic analysis, or grounded theory.

Best Practices for Conducting Ethnographic Research

Develop a clear research question: Before beginning your research, it’s important to have a well-defined research question that will guide your study and help you stay focused on what you want to learn.

Build rapport with participants: Ethnography often involves spending extended periods of time in the field and building relationships with members of the community being studied. It’s essential to establish trust and create an open dialogue with participants.

Use multiple methods: Ethnographers use a variety of data collection methods, including observation, interviews, surveys, and document analysis. Using multiple methods can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the culture being studied.

Maintain detailed field notes: Accurate and detailed field notes are crucial for ethnographic research as they provide a record of observations, conversations, and experiences that can be analyzed later.

Practice reflexivity: Reflexivity is the process of reflecting on one’s own role in the research process and how this may impact data collection and analysis. Ethnographers should be aware of their own biases and assumptions and actively work to minimize their influence on the study.

Ensure confidentiality: Confidentiality is critical in ethnographic research as participants may share personal information or engage in behaviors that could put them at risk if made public. Researchers must take steps to protect participant privacy and ensure that any information shared is kept confidential.

Analyze data systematically: After collecting data, it’s essential to analyze it systematically using established qualitative research methods such as coding, thematic analysis, or grounded theory.

By following these best practices, ethnographers can conduct rigorous and ethical research that provides valuable insights into human cultures and societies while also respecting the rights and privacy of participants.

How Ethnography Differs from Other Qualitative Methods

Ethnography differs from other qualitative research methods, such as focus groups or interviews, in two key ways.

First, the main aim of ethnographic research is the interpretation of the shared norms and beliefs of the community under study. This means that ethnographers are more interested in understanding how a group interacts with each other and their cultural worlds than they are in individual perspectives.

Second, ethnography relies heavily on fieldwork. This means that ethnographers must immerse themselves in the daily lives of the people they are researching in order to understand their culture. This can be done through direct observation or participation in activities. This means that ethnographers often live with the people they are researching for extended periods of time in order to really understand their culture.

The Ethical Considerations of Ethnographic Research

When conducting ethnographic research, there are a number of ethical considerations that need to be taken into account in order to ensure that the research is conducted in a responsible and respectful manner. This is especially important when working with vulnerable populations.

The following are some of the challenges involved in conducting ethnographic research and the ethical considerations that need to be taken into account.

Informed Consent

Conducting anthropological research requires gaining the trust of those being studied. This can be a challenge, especially if the researcher is coming from a different culture.

It is important to build relationships of trust and mutual respect in order to conduct ethical research. This can be done by spending time getting to know the people you will be working with, learning about their culture and customs, and respecting their way of life. If people do not trust you, they will not participate in your research.

It is also important to obtain informed consent from those who will be participating in your research. This means that participants must be made aware of what the research entails, what their role in the research will be, and how their personal information will be used. Participants must also be given the opportunity to ask questions and withdraw from the study at any time.

Respecting Privacy and Confidentiality

Another ethical consideration is protecting the confidentiality of participants. This means keeping their information safe and ensuring that it will not be used for any purpose other than what was originally agreed upon.

In some cases, researchers may need to change the names of participants or use pseudonyms in order to protect their identity. Any recordings or notes that are made during the course of the research should also be kept confidential.

This can be a challenge in ethnographic research because the very nature of the methodology involves observing people in their natural environment. This means that researchers may inadvertently collect personal information about participants without their knowledge or consent. One way to overcome this challenge is to establish clear boundaries with participants at the beginning of the research process and make sure they are aware of what information will be collected and how it will be used.

Code of Ethics

All anthropologists are bound by a code of ethics which sets out principles for conducting responsible and ethical research. The code of ethics includes principles such as respect for human dignity, protecting participant welfare, minimizing harm, upholding confidentiality, and obtaining informed consent.

The Challenges of Conducting Ethnographic Research

The goal of ethnographic research is to understand how people interact with each other and the world around them. In order to do this, ethnographers immerse themselves in the lives of the people they are studying. This can be a challenge, both logistically and emotionally. Here are some of the challenges involved in conducting ethnographic research.

Gaining access to the people being studied

One of the biggest challenges in conducting ethnographic research is gaining access to the necessary people and places. This can be difficult for a number of reasons, including language barriers, unfamiliarity with local customs, and lack of personal connections.

One way to overcome this challenge is to partner with someone who is already familiar with the community you’re researching. This person can act as a guide and introduce you to key members of the community who can provide valuable insights into your research topic.

Another challenge faced by many ethnographers is gaining the cooperation of research subjects. This can be difficult because people are often reluctant to talk about sensitive topics or share personal information with strangers. One way to overcome this challenge is to build rapport with your research subjects by establishing trust and demonstrating your understanding of their culture and values. Only once you have gained their trust should you begin asking questions about your research topic.

Time Commitment

Another challenge is the time commitment required. In order to really understand a culture, an ethnographer needs to spend a significant amount of time observing and interacting with the people in that culture. This can be logistically difficult, especially if the society under study is located in a different country or region. It can also be emotionally challenging, as it requires an ethnographer to be open and vulnerable with the people they are studying.

Analysis and Interpretation

Once an ethnographer has collected their data, they then face the challenge of analysis and interpretation. This is difficult because ethnographers must not only understand the culture they are studying, but also their own culture and biases.

In addition, ethnographic data often takes the form of unstructured observations, interviews, and field notes, which can be challenging to organize and interpret. One way to overcome this challenge is to use data management software like NVivo or Atlas.ti to help you organize and analyse your data.

And finally, the ethnographer must find a way to communicate their findings to others who have not experienced the society first hand. This is where thick description is crucial.

Conclusion – Ethnography is a Powerful Tool

Ethnography is a powerful research method that allows anthropologists to study human cultures and societies in depth. Its strength lies in its ability to provide rich, detailed descriptions of cultural practices, beliefs, and values while also providing context for these phenomena.

Ethnography differs from other qualitative research methods in that it emphasizes the importance of long-term fieldwork and participant observation as a way of gaining deep insights into cultural phenomena. By immersing themselves in the culture being studied, ethnographers can gain a nuanced understanding of complex social processes and interactions.

As such, ethnography continues to be an important tool for anthropologists seeking to understand the diverse ways in which people live and interact with one another around the world.

Related Terminology:

Thick description: A type of ethnographic data that provides highly detailed, contextualized accounts of social phenomena.

Triangulation: A method used by ethnographers to corroborate their findings by collecting data from multiple sources.

Qualitative research : A type of research that uses inductive, observational methods to generate rich, detailed data about a particular phenomenon.

Quantitative research: A type of research that uses deductive, statistical methods to generate numerical data about a particular phenomenon.

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Anthropology@Princeton

What is ethnography.

Ethnography is a research method central to knowing the world from the standpoint of its social relations. It is a qualitative research method predicated on the diversity of culture at home (wherever that may be) and abroad. Ethnography involves hands-on, on-the-scene learning — and it is relevant wherever people are relevant. Ethnography is the primary method of social and cultural anthropology, but it is integral to the social sciences and humanities generally, and draws its methods from many quarters, including the natural sciences. For these reasons, ethnographic studies relate to many fields of study and many kinds of personal experience – including study abroad and community-based or international internships. For further discussion about ethnography, see Why Study Anthropology .

All Anthropology concentrators  take two core methods courses on ethnography: 

• ANT 300 Ethnography, Evidence and Experience ( offered in fall terms )
• ANT 301 The Ethnographer's Craft ( offered in spring terms )

Students interested in anthropological ways of knowing and in learning ethnographic methods, but are unable to major in Anthropology, are encouraged to take courses offered by the department on a broad range of topics, as well as methods courses, such as Ethnography for Research and Design ( ANT 302 ) and Datafication in Ethnography ( ANT 456 ). All students are welcome to consult Anthropology faculty about their research interests. The VizE Lab for Ethnographic Data Visualization  may be especially helpful.

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ethnography

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ethnography , descriptive study of a particular human society or the process of making such a study. Contemporary ethnography is based almost entirely on fieldwork and requires the complete immersion of the anthropologist in the culture and everyday life of the people who are the subject of his study.

There has been some confusion regarding the terms ethnography and ethnology . The latter, a term more widely used in Europe, encompasses the analytical and comparative study of cultures in general, which in American usage is the academic field known as cultural anthropology (in British usage, social anthropology). Increasingly, however, the distinction between the two is coming to be seen as existing more in theory than in fact. Ethnography, by virtue of its intersubjective nature, is necessarily comparative. Given that the anthropologist in the field necessarily retains certain cultural biases, his observations and descriptions must, to a certain degree, be comparative. Thus the formulating of generalizations about culture and the drawing of comparisons inevitably become components of ethnography.

The description of other ways of life is an activity with roots in ancient times. Herodotus , the Greek traveler and historian of the 5th century bc , wrote of some 50 different peoples he encountered or heard of, remarking on their laws, social customs, religion, and appearance. Beginning with the age of exploration and continuing into the early 20th century, detailed accounts of non-European peoples were rendered by European traders, missionaries, and, later, colonial administrators. The reliability of such accounts varies considerably, as the Europeans often misunderstood what they saw or had a vested interest in portraying their subjects less than objectively.

Modern anthropologists usually identify the establishment of ethnography as a professional field with the pioneering work of both the Polish-born British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia ( c. 1915) and the American anthropologist Margaret Mead , whose first fieldwork was in Samoa (1925). Ethnographic fieldwork has since become a sort of rite of passage into the profession of cultural anthropology. Many ethnographers reside in the field for a year or more, learning the local language or dialect and, to the greatest extent possible, participating in everyday life while at the same time maintaining an observer’s objective detachment. This method, called participant-observation, while necessary and useful for gaining a thorough understanding of a foreign culture, is in practice quite difficult. Just as the anthropologist brings to the situation certain inherent , if unconscious, cultural biases, so also is he influenced by the subject of his study. While there are cases of ethnographers who felt alienated or even repelled by the culture they entered, many—perhaps most—have come to identify closely with “their people,” a factor that affects their objectivity. In addition to the technique of participant-observation, the contemporary ethnographer usually selects and cultivates close relationships with individuals, known as informants, who can provide specific information on ritual, kinship , or other significant aspects of cultural life. In this process also the anthropologist risks the danger of biased viewpoints, as those who most willingly act as informants frequently are individuals who are marginal to the group and who, for ulterior motives ( e.g., alienation from the group or a desire to be singled out as special by the foreigner), may provide other than objective explanations of cultural and social phenomena. A final hazard inherent in ethnographic fieldwork is the ever-present possibility of cultural change produced by or resulting from the ethnographer’s presence in the group.

Contemporary ethnographies usually adhere to a community , rather than individual, focus and concentrate on the description of current circumstances rather than historical events. Traditionally, commonalities among members of the group have been emphasized, though recent ethnography has begun to reflect an interest in the importance of variation within cultural systems. Ethnographic studies are no longer restricted to small primitive societies but may also focus on such social units as urban ghettos. The tools of the ethnographer have changed radically since Malinowski’s time. While detailed notes are still a mainstay of fieldwork, ethnographers have taken full advantage of technological developments such as motion pictures and tape recorders to augment their written accounts.

2.3 Ethnography and Ethnology

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Identify early anthropological practices pertaining to ethnography.
• Define ethnology and provide examples of how it is used in anthropology.
• Describe efforts to achieve multiple perspectives in anthropological research.
• Define feminist anthropology and describe its aims.

The Development of Ethnography and Ethnology

As discussed in What is Anthropology? ethnography is a method used by cultural anthropologists to create a description of a culture or society. Ethnographers gather and utilize information from many sources, such as fieldwork, museum collections, government records, and archaeological data. In the 19th century, a form of ethnography developed that was called armchair anthropology , in which theories about human societies and human behaviors were proposed solely based on secondhand information. Lewis Henry Morgan is a well-known practitioner of this type of research. The content of his most famous publication, League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), was gathered primarily from other books he read. Morgan did meet with Native peoples at various times in his career, but he did not conduct ethnographic research among the Iroquois before writing League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois .

In the later 19th century, numerous anthropologists and other scholars undertook research projects with hundreds of tribes throughout the Americas, many of them by then living solely on federal reservations. Many of these researchers were influenced by Columbia University professor Franz Boas , a German scientist who was originally trained as a physicist but became most famous as an anthropologist. Boas insisted that scholars obtain ethnographical information directly from the peoples they aimed to write about, rather than collecting information from other published sources. Boas quickly established himself as a leader in the field of anthropology and eventually took an associate role at the federal Bureau of American Ethnology.

Boas advocated for and published in all four fields of anthropology and asked many key questions in his scholarship. In his 1907 essay “ Anthropology ,” Boas identified two basic questions for anthropologists: “Why are the tribes and nations of the world different, and how have the present differences developed?” (Boas [1974] 1982, 269). Boas was responsible for hiring scholars and sending them out into the field to collect information about various Indigenous peoples. His standards of field research became the foundation of the contemporary science of anthropology.

One area of interest for early anthropologists was the similarities and differences between various Indigenous societies. This interest in comparison led to a branch of anthropology called ethnology , which is a cross-cultural comparison of different groups. In early anthropology, ethnology’s aim was to understand how various Indigenous societies were related to one another. This included the relations among language dialects, dress, and appearance and to what degree and in what direction various tribes had migrated from one location to another. Early anthropologists explored these questions with the hope of tracking changes in tribal cultures. Another leading concern was how Native peoples initially got to the Americas. Anthropologists have used the practices of ethnology to establish relationships and shared cultural elements that help illuminate migration patterns of peoples from the “old” to the “new” world. Ethnology is still a common practice in linguistics, archaeology, and biological anthropology.

Some additional uses of ethnology are fused with archaeological methods and analysis. Ethnoarchaeology is a form of archaeology in which, following methods largely created by American archaeologist Lewis Binford , archaeologists access ethnographic information about recent or existing human cultures to draw conclusions about human cultures in the archaeological past. In Binford’s 1978 study Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology , he draws comparisons between the ways in which contemporary Indigenous peoples disposed of animal remains and the evidence observed in Nunamiut refuse sites. These comparisons inform a model that is used to understand more about how Indigenous peoples’ ancestors may have disposed of remains in the past. Such models are not perfect, but many Indigenous cultures have maintained aspects of their culture to the present day.

Perspective and Interpretation in Ethnography

Ethnography is still commonly used by cultural anthropologists. Practitioners today consult multiple informants during their research in order to gather a variety of perspectives on a culture or society. No one person has a full or authoritative view of their own culture; multiple viewpoints are essential to a full description. Many early anthropological studies only invited male perspectives, introducing a male bias into the resulting ethnographies. Now, anthropologists deliberately seek varied perspectives, consulting people of different genders and ages and who occupy different roles.

Anthropologists can introduce significant bias into an ethnography. The most challenging aspect of fieldwork in cultural anthropology is to observe and study another culture without bias. Having an ethnocentric or etic perspective means someone is judging a culture according to the standards of their own culture and belief system. To observe a culture from the perspective of the people being researched is to have an emic perspective . For anthropologists to be effective researchers, they must be able to observe and gather data from unbiased and emic perspectives. In addition, an anthropologist’s interpretation of the information gathered can significantly alter their research findings. Earlier anthropologists were primarily male and White, so their findings were based on interpretations made through these lenses. Feminist anthropology attempts to address this male bias. Feminist anthropology is recognized as having begun as early as the 1850s, with attempts made (by male anthropologist) to include more information on women in their ethnographic research. In the 1920s, female anthropologists such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ruth Benedict began publishing in the field, but not until the 1928 publication of Margaret Mead ’s Coming of Age in Samoa did a female anthropologist gain prominence.

Women’s contributions and perspectives became much more pronounced in the later parts of the 20th century. Feminist anthropologists seek not only to claim a role for themselves in the field equal to that offered to men but also to expand the focal points of anthropological inquiry to include areas of life such as family, marriage, and child-rearing, as well as the economic and social roles played by women. The dominance of male anthropologists had biased analysis of human societies toward male-dominated roles and activities. Many early archaeological research, for example, assigned no role to women in early societies or assumed that women’s roles were limited to maintaining households and raising children. Evidence of women’s subsistence and economic activities was either not looked for or ignored. It was also assumed that women in early societies had subservient roles to men, when in fact most early societies have now been found to be very egalitarian, with equal status accorded to women and men. Feminist anthropology has both expanded research to include women’s roles and aimed to understand the gender roles in other societies on their own terms, rather than according to the gender roles of the researcher’s own society.

Other perspectives emerged in anthropology in the 1970s as more members of minority groups began entering the field. One category of minority voices that has been a significant asset to anthropology is that of people with Indigenous ancestors. Practitioners with this type of background are part of a subfield called Indigenous anthropology . Indigenous anthropology is discussed in detail in Indigenous Anthropology .

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Ethnography pdf

• Methods & Methodology

Ethnographic fieldwork, carried out according to the method of long-term participant-observation, is what defines social anthropology. The method is inductive and open-ended. As such, the method directs the anthropologist to study that which is of significance to the community studied rather than test a number of hypotheses formulated in advance of the fieldwork. Anthropology is a comparative discipline, seeking to unravel the complexity and variety of human understanding and human social and cultural life. For this reason, anthropologists have sought out societies that seemed to be very different from their own and, during the first half of the twentieth century, most went to undertake their fieldwork in small - often minority - communities in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. While this is still the case to a large extent, today many anthropologists have directed their ethnographic gaze toward communities closer to home. Thus the method of participant-observation is found to be useful by those who, for example, study life in a large bank, or the gay community in an American urban setting, as much as in a settlement in the Malaysian rain forest. The method is based on the paradoxical activity of participating fully in peoples’ lives, while simultaneously observing it from a distance. To base one’s study on the ‘native’s point of view’, and to disentangle what really goes on rather than what people say goes on, is one central advantage of the method. This forces the researcher to allow herself to be open to the unexpected event or utterance. The ethnographer always engages with contemporary anthropological theory in her interpretations. Ethnographic fieldwork is thus performed in active relationship with anthropological theory. 

Introduction: ethnography and anthropology

Ethnographic fieldwork is the method that defines social anthropology. The key word here is fieldwork. Anthropology is an academic discipline that constructs its intellectual imaginings upon empirical-based knowledge about human worlds. Ethnography is the practice developed in order to bring about that knowledge according to certain methodological principles, the most important of which is participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork. Current understandings of both anthropology and ethnography are the result of years of debate and practice. While anthropologists are endlessly debating the premises for their understanding of different societies, they mostly agree that anthropology has nothing to offer the world without ethnographic fieldwork. At the same time, ethnography is just an empty practice without a concern for the disciplinary debates in anthropology departments and publications. It is therefore wrong to separate them; they are part and parcel of each other. Anthropology and ethnography are so intertwined that together they have become a basic premise for the anthropological epistemology. [1]  This is how anthropologists understand the world. This is the premise for how they perform their fieldwork – wherever that may be – and this is the basis for their writings.

The following is a useful definition of ethnography: ‘the recording and analysis of a culture or society, usually based on participant-observation and resulting in a written account of a people, place or institution’ (Simpson & Coleman 2017). Having said that, the empirical focus for ethnographic research is in flux. For example, in recent years, some anthropologists have moved away from face-to-face participant observation to studying alternative constructions of cultural life, such as emergent online virtual worlds (e.g. Boellstorff 2012). Ethnography is today used for both the actual fieldwork during which the anthropologist collects material, and the subsequent text – an ethnography. Here, ethnography will be used in the former sense, and this entry will seek to unravel the complexities that are hidden in the seemingly simple definition.

Participant-observation

The ethnographic method is called participant-observation. It is undertaken as open-ended inductive long-term living with and among the people to be studied, the sole purpose of which is to achieve an understanding of local knowledge, values , and practices ‘from the “native’s point of view”’. [2] The task of the ethnographer is to contextualise insight of local values and practices within wider local significations, and to render them probable ; to show how theirs is a meaningful alternative as a way of life. That is the be-all and end-all of anthropology and, as such, central to disciplinary identity.

Regardless of where the fieldwork is undertaken, the ethnographer must first have obtained a thorough grounding in the basic principles of the discipline of anthropology. The main overarching issues to keep in mind are: what are the persistent questions – the essential perplexities (Needham 1978) – about human life to be investigated and how are these handled in each case? Which are the central theoretical concepts to be addressed? What are the ‘gate-post’ issues from a particular region – those that previous ethnographers have identified as significant there and that need to be addressed? Through addressing these issues, the anthropologist hopes to contribute to fundamental intellectual quandaries about the nature of social institutions and social life.

The choice of where to go is often dictated by two considerations: a place that the anthropologist thinks would be congenial to her taste, perhaps a place she has heard of or read about and which appealed to her imagination and sense of adventure; and a place that she thinks might help her to answer some theoretical issues that, through readings and lectures, have aroused her intellectual curiosity. Together these two concerns add up to a general desire to explore the unknown [3] : whether geographically, socially, culturally, or intellectually. Through rigorous and persistent study of the various institutions, ideas, and practices that are encountered, an anthropologist seeks to provide an ethnographic study of the community that is informed and anthropologically relevant. However, increasingly anthropologists are eager to investigate places or people closer to their own experience. The so-called ‘anthropology at home’ trend has shown that a place for investigation may nevertheless be as unfamiliar as life in distant places. A pioneering work, and subsequent classic, was the study of young Italian men in a poor part of Boston carried out by the Harvard academic W.F. Whyte (1943). This has been followed by studies on a wide variety of local institutions and social groups in the anthropologist’s own country (see endnote v). It is particularly common for anthropologists from the Global South to undertake their ethnographic research in their own country.

Anthropologists insist that what they do, and that which distinguishes their research from that of other academic disciplines, is participant–observation. At first glance that seems straightforward. The anthropologist goes to the selected group of people that she wants to study and settles down in their midst. She seeks to participate in daily and ceremonial life, preferably as a contributor as she becomes affiliated to a household or some other local group, and all the while she will observe, ask questions, and take notes. She may also use a number of other methods, such as formal and informal interviews, focus groups, and use audio/ visual recordings. However, while such methods are shared by other disciplines, anthropologists argue that they gain a different and more holistic and profound understanding when they engage in a participant-observation regime. An ethnographic study seeks to come to grips with the complex socio-cultural institutions and practices that are more or less taken for granted by the people themselves. Through a holistic investigation in which patterns of behavior, utterances, and actions are contextualised and placed in relation to each other, a world view [4] may be detected: ideas about human nature, gender, family, economy, politics and religion become discernible.

What those who undertake some form of ‘qualitative research’ often fail to appreciate, is that what people say they do is often very different from what they actually do. Such paradoxes become apparent only through long-term fieldwork. The anthropologist’s antennas must be at work all the time in order to pick up the unstated and the taken-for-granted, as well as tensions and conflicts, all of which must be brought to bear on the analysis of the bigger whole.

Only through familiarity with local values and practices will the magic of serendipity come into play. Serendipity, in contrast to what many believe, is not just a chance event. It is the ability to make discoveries, by accidents and wisdom , of things which one was not in quest of. [5] Wisdom required for serendipitous discoveries is obtained through the day-to-day participant observation that develops a particular way of being and seeing – a way that springs out of anthropological concerns.

Participant-observation is far from a straightforward or generally agreed upon project. But every anthropologist, whether a graduate student or professor, writes in their research proposal that participant-observation will be the major method to be pursued. Participant-observation is not a clearly defined practice. It is better regarded as a methodological ‘onion,’ with no firm centre. The method is based on the paradox of participating fully in peoples’ lives, while simultaneously observing them from a distance. Nevertheless, it is the method that identifies the discipline. Full participation may be a fantasy. Nevertheless, most anthropologists would agree that it is an ambition which is central to the future identity of the discipline. Regardless of whether the fieldwork is in an Indonesian village or a large company in a European city, that is what anthropologists strive to achieve. According to the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, participant-observation can never become more than a fiction, or an illusion (1968: 154). However close one gets to the people one studies, the anthropologist and the people know that she is not a real member of the group and that she will leave after one or two years; that her world is very different from theirs. But it is an illusion that is necessary in order to achieve the insights that are sought. It is only through this that ‘thick description’ becomes possible. That is why language is important; anthropologists try not to work with interpreters.

One often hears that ‘the alien gaze’ is a necessary component of ethnographic fieldwork because it is difficult to identify the significance of one’s own practices. It is noticing the unfamiliar and the unexpected, however mundane, that sharpens the attention and renders everything to be of potential interest. This is one reason for undertaking fieldwork outside one’s own socio-cultural domain. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that participant-observations presuppose a central premise, namely that any ethnographic experience must be preceded by an examination of ones’ own ‘pre-understanding’ – to be reflexive about the understanding that is brought from home. To cultivate a reflexive alien gaze is particularly important when undertaking one’s ethnographic research close to ‘home’. Many will argue that such research is best carried out after having had the experience of fieldwork elsewhere – this was my experience [6] – while others claim that a conceptual boundary between home and away is artificial.

A brief history of ethnographic research in anthropology

Although anthropology can be said to have started as a distinct academic discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century, ethnographic fieldwork was not a necessary part of it. Rather, in Britain a group of men subsequently termed ‘armchair anthropologists’ laid the groundwork for the comparative study of human society and culture. That was a time when intellectual life was heavily influenced by the theories of evolution developed by Charles Darwin (1970 [1859]). Herbert Spencer, Sir Edward B. Tylor, and Sir James Frazer were the most prominent contributors to the debate. Their research was undertaken in their offices in British universities - not out in the bush - where they developed their theories of the evolution of culture. They based their analyses upon the many texts that were available on life in ‘primitive, uncivilized and undeveloped’ parts of the world, from material collected by missionaries, traders, scientists , and travelers. Although in many cases these provided well-observed details about local practices and ideas, they were, nevertheless, randomly collected from a biased western, Christian position without a theoretical model beyond the evolutionary one. The evolutionary school of thought maintained that humans had gone through a number of stages in order to achieve the assumed pinnacle of their own time. Religion, kinship, and marriage practices as well as technology were the chief criteria for allocating a particular social group a place on the evolutionary ladder. Both Tylor’s Primitive culture (1871) and Frazer’s The golden bough (1890) became bestsellers and were printed in many editions. It was not until the arrival on the British anthropological scene of the Polish intellectual Bronislaw Malinowski (see below) at the end of World War I, whose path-breaking studies of the Trobriand Islanders were based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, that participant-observation became integral to the discipline of social anthropology.  

A similar situation pertained in France where the sociologist Émile Durkheim established his influential group of armchair anthropologist-philosophers called the Année Sociologique . Again, ‘savage and exotic’ beliefs and practices were the focus for their studies, but they were analyzed in sociological terms, unlike the British and Americans (see below) who tended to look to the individual actor. The British and the French armchair anthropologists were extremely well-read about ‘primitive’ customs and beliefs, but they had never visited, let alone lived in, one of the ‘exotic’ social groups that they claimed to study. The situation in the United States developed in a somewhat different fashion. The lawyer-ethnographer L.H. Morgan took a serious interest in the Iroquois people who lived close to him in Rochester, New York. He visited them over a long period of time – from the 1850s until his death in 1881 – and learned to speak their language. Morgan undertook a systematic study of their kinship system. His discovery, that patterns of kinship terminology in other, even unrelated, American Indian cultures were very similar to those of the Iroquois, launched a systematic survey of kinship nomenclature that provided a template for modern studies of kinship in anthropology. His major work, Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family (1871) was widely read and highly influential; amongst its readers were Marx and also Engels, whose work, The origins of the family , private property and the state (1902 [1884]) drew directly upon Morgan’s work. However, American anthropology got a powerful kick in a new direction  – a direction in which ethnographic fieldwork became an essential part –  when the German anthropologist Franz Boas established an anthropology department at Columbia University in New York in 1899. Boas argued that in-depth long-term field research was essential for an understanding of alien cultures and went to study the Kwakiutl society on the Pacific Northwest coast (1966) over a period of more than twenty years during the first part of the twentieth century. Boas trained a number of talented students, all of whom undertook their own field studies – mainly of various American Indian groups. Perhaps the most famous of his students was Margaret Mead, whose ethnography based on participant-observation study of teenage girls on Samoa (1928) created a lot of attention and debate in America.

Boas and his students were firm cultural relativists. That is, they argued that each culture should be studied according to its own beliefs and values , that there is nothing essentially human that transcends culture. This gave rise to the so-called nature or nurture debate that, in some form or other, is still with us today. Today, however, the extreme form of cultural relativism is contested, not least through the experience of ethnographic fieldwork that refutes the notion of many humanities. Anthropologists argue for a psychic and cognitive unity of mankind. The job of the anthropologist is to demonstrate the many ways that humans imaginatively create socio-cultural worlds.

Malinowski and the birth of British social anthropology

In Britain, anthropology developed in a somewhat different direction following the groundbreaking ethnographic studies written by the Polish intellectual Bronislaw Malinowski, who went to the Trobriand Island off Papua New Guinea in 1918. Malinowski subsequently became a professor of social anthropology at the London School of Economics where he inspired a number of students, many of whom became central figures in the anthropology departments in British universities. Malinowski argued strongly for fieldwork and he did so from a clearly-argued theoretical position.

His chapter on methods in the book The Argonauts of Western Pacific became the ‘bible’ for British ethnographers/anthropologists of his own and subsequent generations:

The field ethnographer has seriously and soberly to cover the full extent of the phenomena in each aspect of tribal culture studied, making no difference between what is commonplace, or drab, or ordinary and what strikes him as astonishing and out-of-the way (1922: 11).

And, according to Malinowski, the final goal is ‘to grasp the native’s point of view, his relations to life, to realise his vision of his world’ (1922: 25, original emphasis). The principles that Malinowski identified apply today as much as then. They apply not just to those undertaking ‘exotic’ fieldwork in small communities far away, but equally to those studying groups or institutions in their own country. As noted above, in order to perform good ethnographic fieldwork in ‘modern’ settings, it can be an advantage to have undertaken fieldwork in an alien small-scale society first (see endnote v). Either way, fieldwork is informed throughout by anthropological concerns. Ethnographic fieldwork used to be more open-ended than it is today, when increasingly anthropologists go to the field with a particular research question in mind. This may be due to difficulties in obtaining funding and high university fees, as well as a trend towards more policy-oriented research, often as part of a multi-disciplinary research group. However, the ideals of the participant-observation method guide all interaction in the field, and ethnographic field research continues to be inductive. 

American cultural anthropology focused on identifying cultural values and ethos embedded in individual actors, and their field-research revealed much about religious understandings, mythology, and notions of personhood. British, French, and Scandinavian social anthropology was preoccupied with social structure and institutions. Ethnographers from these countries sought to map this primarily through the study of kinship systems. While American anthropologists were largely studying American Indians in their own country and in Central America, European anthropologists went to Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. The British and French tended to undertake their field research in their own colonies , and continued to go to the same countries after they became independent. Ethnographic fieldwork demonstrated beyond doubt that there was no basis for maintaining the evolutionary model of human mentality. Formally speaking, a psychic and cognitive unity of mankind was accepted and the scientific interest lay in exploring the variations of socio-cultural modes that human imagination gave rise to. 

Representation and the Writing culture debates

Fieldwork has been debated over and over. Anthropologists have always engaged in soul-searching regarding their disciplinary practices. Debates about methods, the status of findings, and the profoundly personal and idiosyncratic nature of fieldwork have all been hotly discussed – in and out of print – since the famous London School of Economics seminars under Malinowski. However, in this anthropologists may be their own worst enemies. Indeed, they could be in danger of debating away ethnographic fieldwork as they did culture through the ‘ writing culture ’ debate at the end of the twentieth century, leaving the ground open for other disciplines to claim it for their own. The effect of the Writing culture critics (Marcus & Fisher 1986) rendered fieldwork, especially in ‘exotic’ places in the South, politically incorrect in many university departments. The thrust of this postmodernist critique was directed at the kind of texts that had resulted from ethnographic fieldwork. These were, it was argued, pretending to provide an objective picture of the communities studied, on par with scientific research, whereas fieldwork is highly personal and idiosyncratic and findings are coloured by the training and personality of the anthropologist. Furthermore, anthropology was claimed to be an extension of colonial practice. Not only was there a concern that comparison simply extends the colonial gaze, but also it became politically problematic and morally unacceptable to study supposedly powerless small communities in former colonial domains, to make them, the argument went, into the reified ‘Other’ (e.g. Dresch 1992). As a result of these two aspects of the critique, many chose instead to do historical archival studies or studies ‘at home’ or so-called ‘dialogical studies’ (Borneman & Hammoudi 2009). However, many were critical of Writing culture ’s assertions. Questioning who had replaced the ‘other’ as a result of this critique, Robbins suggested that the ‘suffering other’ at home had become the legitimate subject for anthropological ethnographic investigation (Robbins 2013). He further considers ‘how recent trends in anthropology might coalesce in a further shift, this one toward an anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the critical force of an earlier anthropology without taking on its weaknesses (Robbins 2013: 447). Many would agree and argue that for this to be achieved, the comparative ambition of anthropology must be cherished.

Two more points are worth making in regard to the postmodern critique of ethnographic practice in the South. First, most who have carried out fieldwork in rural areas of Asia, Africa, or Latin America do not agree that they ‘study down’ in any post-colonial sense. As they settle in unfamiliar and often uncomfortable circumstances, the relationship may be an unequal power relationship, but not in the sense the critics argued. More often anthropologists are at the mercy of the communities they study, struggling to gain acceptance, coping with unfamiliar language and trying to understand what goes on around them. They are rarely in a position to influence anything, even should they wish to do so. At the same time, as the people studied become literate and highly educated, they increasingly become active partners in the anthropological enterprise, thereby enhancing the understanding and knowledge of the field-worker and, simultaneously, giving themselves a new window through which they can view their own society in a changing world.

To many inside and outside anthropology, policy-oriented research may today seem more ideologically correct, more useful and relevant in a rapidly changing world, than simply setting off for the Highlands of New Guinea. However, it is worth bearing in mind that much innovative theoretical insight of general import was gained from the early studies of small-scale societies in the Pacific, Amazonia, and Africa, and that these have shaped the anthropology of development and applied anthropology as much as they have academic anthropology. In recent years, equally high-quality ethnographic fieldwork continues to be undertaken in New Guinea and Oceania, not least inspired by the work of Marilyn Strathern (1989), as well as in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which has impacted contemporary theory. Gender studies have been revitalised, a new-found interest in indigenous ontologies and concepts of personhood has inspired much exciting theorising, and novel interpretations of exchange and classification owe their sources to both old and new ethnographic fieldwork from these places.

Not everybody goes to the jungles of South America or Southeast Asia, the villages of sub-Saharan Africa, India or the Middle East, the islands of the Pacific or far-flung Arctic settlements. Some go to urban areas on the same continents, others find places or topics in the Global North. However, regardless of where or what, most would argue that they perform a micro-study of some kind and that the same methodological criteria are adhered to. Many are part of a large, multidisciplinary team where the anthropological contribution is highly valued, while others carve out their own micro-field in a globalised world.  

While the cutting edge in the discipline may be the most recent theoretical concepts, they often soon lose their attraction, whereas the old anthropological texts based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork rarely lose their salience. Ethnographic texts from two or three generations ago do not become outdated in the same way as fanciful theoretical treatises.  While many may disagree with the early interpretations, they value and draw on the empirical observations of what may no longer be observed. Anthropologists return to them in seeking to enhance the understanding of their own material. Malinowski’s studies from the Trobriand Islands is a prime example. Among the many others, one finds Schapera’s work on the Khoisan people of South Africa (1935), Audrey Richards illuminating study on Bemba (Zambia) girls’ initiation rites (1956), and Boas’ work on the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest coast (1966). These, like all good ethnographies, are scrupulous in their attention to detail.

Multi-sited and multi-temporal fieldwork

In recent years two new approaches have appeared in anthropological methodology: multi-sited and multi-temporal fieldwork. Both are advocated as a means towards a fuller and more complex understanding. Multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) is a method of data collection where the ethnographer, rather than staying in the same community over time, follows a group, a material object, a particular topic, or social issue through different field sites geographically and/or socially. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork arose as a response to new topics for anthropological investigation, such as the study of reproduction and reproductive technologies, new modes of electronic communication such as internet and mobile telephones, transnational adoption , and local mobility and migration.

Multi-temporal fieldwork (Howell & Talle 2012) involves a continued relationship with the site of one’s original fieldwork. The anthropologist returns again and again at relatively frequent intervals, thus deepening the relationship with the people and widening the scope of anthropological practice in subtle ways. The British anthropologist Raymond Firth, famous for his studies of the Polynesian Tikopia community, made the point that there are two kinds of re-study: the dual-synchronic – a comparison of then and now after number of years, and the diachronic study – a continuous study of people and events over time (Firth 1959). Today, the latter is the more common, due largely to the ease of modern means of travel. Multi-temporal fieldwork enables the ethnographer to follow the community through times of change, and to record their reactions to outside influences – economic, technological, and social – that challenge old values and practices.

With the rapid spread of mobile telephones and internet, communication may be maintained with many field sites after the ethnographer has returned home. This renders ethnographic research more dynamic than was previously possible.

Ethnography and fieldwork in other disciplines  

It is first and foremost the fieldwork method of participant-observation and the kinds of anthropological questions, debates, and analyses that spring out of it as these are embedded in an holistic analysis – questions about social production , and the cultural meaning of, for example: kinship, sociality, labour , money , exchange, social stratification, conflict, authority, gender etc. – that gives anthropology its special identity and that which distinguishes it from the other social sciences.

Due to a decrease in funding and pressure on publishing, PhD students as well as academic staff are having to change their research practice. A shorter period of fieldwork is becoming common and more topic-focused research questions are increasingly demanded. This raises the question of what insights anthropologists can provide that a clever investigative journalist cannot, or someone from Cultural Studies armed with an exciting theoretical concept (Howell 1997). Anthropologists will still claim that only the very nature of their ethnographic method of long-term participant observation can provide a unique contribution to knowledge about other life-worlds.

Recently, a number of other disciplines have taken to use ‘ethnography’ or ‘ethnographic  fieldwork’ in the methods section of their books, papers, and research applications. Most anthropologists would be very skeptical of the kind of methodology that is proposed under that rubric. ‘Qualitative research’ is not the same as ethnography. Open-ended interviews and focus groups do not replace the insights obtained from twenty-four hour / twenty months of  informed ‘hanging around’. This challenges anthropologists to make clear what they mean by ethnographic fieldwork and what is so special about it. It is important to clarify this for the future of the discipline; otherwise, ‘…our protest will be of no avail unless we can explain what we mean by ethnography in terms of what is cogent and intellectually defensible’ (Ingold 2016). If anyone may ‘do’ anthropology, or ethnography, then what is so special about our contribution? Marilyn Strathern is reported to have said that anthropologists study social relationships by making social relationships. Perhaps that is the answer?

In his response to criticisms from the Writing culture debate, Spencer wrote, ‘Anthropologists…[do not just write, they] wade into paddy fields, get sick and read bad novels rather than confront another day of mounting misapprehensions; they also take photographs, make films and tape recordings […] the fact that they mainly do it by themselves in strange places is another oddity…’(Spencer 1989: 160). The main point is that not only do anthropologists undertake long-term deep immersion fieldwork regardless of the geographical location of their ‘field’, but they insist that ethnography and anthropology are two sides of the same coin. Others seem not to appreciate the epistemological consequences from such a unity. In his epilogue, ‘Notes on the future of anthropology’, to the volume of the same title edited by Ahmed and Shore (1995), the sociologist Anthony Giddens argues that anthropology has nothing unique to offer, that with the ‘disappearance of the exotic’ and the fall of colonialism , the distinctiveness of anthropology is under threat. He goes on to state that:

[a] discipline which deals with an evaporating subject matter, staking claim to a method which it shares with the rest of the social sciences anyway, and deficient in theoretical traditions […] does not exactly add up to defensible identity of anthropology today (Giddens 1995: 274).

The continued practice of participant-observation ethnography and the resulting theoretical development of the discipline of anthropology since that time clearly refute Giddens’ claim. Further, to assert as Giddens did, that there are no more ‘exotic’ places to study, is equally uninformed. Anyone who has travelled in Central or Southeast Asia, Melanesia, or the African continent knows that there is no shortage of potentially interesting localities in which to settle in order to conduct in-depth anthropological fieldwork. They may not be isolated empty blobs on the map, but people live in an ever-changing world and they cope with new ideas and practices in unpredictable ways. At the same time, the notion of ‘exotic’ is being challenged as anthropologists study a range of urban communities in the Global North as well as in the Global South. Religious, gay, youth, poor, immigrant, bankers, hospital wards, and many more communities in the vicinity may be as ‘remote’ from their previous experience and as ‘exotic’ as any community in the Global South. Anthropology as a discipline without participant-observation fieldwork would have very little to offer the academic world, or the general public. The aim of ethnography is to continuously expand our knowledge about the richness of human imagination and the ways that humans organise their lives. In order to achieve that, the comparative ambition of anthropology must be maintained. A substantial proportion of new recruits must continue to undertake long-term fieldwork in places far-away from their home : places where they have to learn to communicate in a previously-unknown language. This is the key to render alternative solutions to the organization of social and cultural life meaningful and understandable to the outsiders. When all is said and done, some form of cultural relativism remains the discipline’s trade mark. This is how anthropology differs from the other social sciences. There may simply be no future for the armchair (or even desktop) anthropologist.

In conclusion

Social anthropology developed from Malinowski and Boas through Firth, Evans-Pritchard, Mead, Leach, Douglas, Needham, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Geertz, Sahlins, Strathern, and many, many others. Despite their important theoretical differences, they had one thing in common: a commitment, through ethnographic fieldwork, to explore social, cultural, cognitive, and moral forms of life in places far from home – geographically and culturally. The aim was, and is, to use that knowledge to address overarching theoretical questions concerning the variety and similarity of human life as this is manifested through kinship, religion, classification, economic, and political life.

Anthropology is a discipline of amazement; knowledge of other peoples’ lives obtained during ethnographic fieldwork never ceases to astonish, even stupefy the ethnographer. Studies that throw light upon alien practices and values often lead to self-examination. They make one acknowledge that so much of what is taken for granted, what is considered to be ‘natural’ and right, is very far from the case. At the same time, the ethnographer discovers that so much is also common across space and lived culture. This results in an appreciation of both difference and sameness. These ethnographic experiences render invalid claims of radical alterity or of human incommensurability.  

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Note on contributor

Signe Howell is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. Her D.Phil was obtained at the University of Oxford and was based on 18 months of fieldwork with the Chewong – a hunter-gatherer community in the Malaysian rainforest. She has subsequently undertaken fieldwork in eastern Indonesia and she has performed a major study on values and practices of transnational adoption in Norway. She has published widely based on her three fieldworks.

Prof. Signe Howell, Postboks 1091, Blindern 0317 Oslo, Norway. [email protected]​

[1] This potential confusion of the two terms is most commonly found in Anglo-Saxon anthropology. In France one talks of ethnologie or anthropologie sociale and in Germany it used to be Völkerkunde .

[2] The expression ‘the native’s point of view’ is as applicable to the study of middle-class managers in a German town as it is to a South Sea island community. It is a methodological term independent of place.

[3] The desire to untangle the ‘unknown’ is not always the driving force behind an ethnographic venture. Some may be more interested in untangling the underlying sociality of their own world (see, e.g., Okely & Callaway 1996, Lewin & Leap 1996).

[4] The expression ‘world view’ is theoretically contentious in anthropology. However, rather than entering the debate, here I use the term in its simple form as expressed by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world’.

[5] Definition adapted from 'Serendipity' (Little, Fowler & Coulson 1964: 1946).

[6] Having undertaken ethnographic fieldwork in two societies that correspond to the traditional perception of small-scale communities far away from my own home (the hunting and gathering community in the Malaysian rainforest [Chewong], and an agricultural community in the highlands of an island in Eastern Indonesia [Lio]), I turned my anthropological gaze homewards. I undertook a study of the practice of transnational adoption in Norway. Not only did I live in Norway at the time, but I had also adopted a daughter from Nepal. This made the research challenging in several ways and raised ethical questions on how far to delve into people’s most private and personal lives. The practical business of doing participant-observation fieldwork here was very different from the previous two. It was also methodologically more challenging. As there was no community to settle in, I had to find alternative methods to come to grips with the kinds of ideas, values, and practices that constituted the diffuse world of transnational adoption. I interviewed a range of social workers and bureaucrats handling adoption applications, politicians who formed legislation, the NGOs that actually provided the supply of children, prospective parents and parents with adopted children, and adoptees themselves. I read historical documents that dealt with adoption and I became interested in changes in adoption laws in Norway, other Western countries, and in the countries that sent children abroad in adoption; I studied international treaties and conventions on children and childrens’ rights and on the control of international adoption. The project took on global perspectives. In addition, I joined a group of adoptive families with children from Korea on a two-week ‘return – or motherland – visit’ to Korea, and a group of prospective parents on their mind-blowing journey to collect their children in Ethiopia. I supervised students doing fieldwork in Colombia and Brazil and in orphanages in China and in India. Through all these activities, and several more, I hoped to build up a holistic understanding of the complex picture of the practice of transnational adoption from the point of view of the many actors involved (Howell 2006). I am convinced that had I not had the experience of doing fieldwork twice previously, I would not have been able to complete my research on transnational adoption in Norway. I was less anxious about intruding into people’ lives. My eyes had been trained to look in seemingly irrelevant places, my mind was open to notice the seemingly insignificant moments and make use of the unexpected. 

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Ethnography

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Ethnography by John L. Jackson LAST REVIEWED: 11 January 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 11 January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0001

Ethnography is a term that often is employed to describe both a recognizable literary genre within the social sciences (writings that attempt to holistically capture people’s cultural beliefs/practices) and a brand of qualitative fieldwork that produces such social scientific accounts (the collecting of sociocultural data based on long-term, face-to-face interactions). Anthropology’s disciplinary emphasis on ethnography is still considered one of its most distinctive features. Even in an age when human genomics and statistical analyses of massive data sets are popularly considered, in some circles, as more compellingly “scientific” and “objective” techniques for analyzing social life, ethnographic research and writing have continued to occupy a central place in anthropology’s methodological toolkit, a means of constructing nuanced and detailed descriptions of people’s cultural worlds. Ethnography has a long and robust history in the discipline, but it is not a concept without controversy or conflicting characterizations. Moreover, anthropology is far from the only discipline with a stake in the definition and future of ethnography, and the term morphs (in big and small ways) as it travels across traditionally disciplinary dividing lines—and even well beyond the academy.

Ethnographic research is published in a number of peer-reviewed/refereed journals. Some of these journals are linked to specific intradisciplinary concerns/conversations, while others are more decidedly interdisciplinary. American Anthropologist includes research from every subfield in the discipline, and it highlights quite a bit of ethnographic work. American Ethnologist and Anthropological Quarterly publish ethnographic research on a variety of topics, but they do not consistently feature work from all of anthropology’s conventional subfields, mostly highlighting scholarship conducted by cultural anthropologists. As its title indicates, Cultural Anthropology also publishes ethnographic research produced by (and for) cultural anthropologists, though the journal emphasizes theory building and courts an interdisciplinary readership. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute has been publishing a wide variety of anthropological research for more than 150 years, and Transforming Anthropology is a relatively new journal that features ethnographic research on race, Diaspora, and globalization. The European Association of Social Anthropologists seeks to encourage anthropology in Europe in publishing the bilingual journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale , and Current Anthropology promotes anthropology by showcasing a broad range of topics within the discipline and including a recurrent feature that allows scholars to publicly respond to articles published in the same issue, creating a critical and substantive dialogue around certain themes.

American Anthropologist .

This is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. It is peer reviewed, publishes in all four disciplinary subfields, and includes a consistent commitment to ethnographic research.

American Ethnologist .

This peer-reviewed journal is published by the American Anthropological Association and organized by the American Ethnological Association. It aims to demonstrate ethnography’s continued social and political relevance.

Anthropological Quarterly .

This peer-reviewed journal is published by the George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research and highlights work that uses ethnographic data to drive anthropological theorizing.

Cultural Anthropology .

This is a peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology that focuses on the link between ethnographic writing, critical social theory, and emergent cultural processes.

Current Anthropology .

This is a peer-reviewed journal published by the University of Chicago Press and organized by the Wenner Gren Foundation. It actively accepts articles linked to ethnographic research and also includes offerings from other anthropological subfields.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute .

This is the flagship journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, one of the oldest anthropological organizations in the world. It offers a broad definition of anthropological research and places a premium on accessible scholarship.

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale .

This peer-reviewed journal is published in English and French by the European Association of Social Anthropologists and emphasizes the links between social theory and anthropological methodology/practice.

Transforming Anthropology .

This is a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Anthropological Association and organized by the Association of Black Anthropologists. It focuses on issues of race, inequality, transnationalism, and Diaspora.

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Introduction to Ethnographic Research Methods

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• Wayne Fife  

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O pen up any introductory textbook in sociocultural anthropology and you will find a section explaining the importance of the concept of holism. The author will typically go on to explain that anthropologists are generally more interested in gaining an understanding of how human lives “make sense” within the contexts in which they live than we are in arriving at universal generalizations or “laws” regarding human behavior. This is particularly true of ethnographic researchers, who traditionally make extensive use of the participant-observation method in their work. Two key terms for an ethnographer are context and pattern. The goal of ethnographic research is to formulate a pattern of analysis that makes reasonable sense out of human actions within the given context of a specific time and place. This task of holism may seem simple enough when a student is reading about it in an introductory textbook, but when the same person turns into a researcher s/he is inevitably confronted with the following two questions: (1) how much context do I have to cover, and (2) how will I recognize a pattern when I see it? These are other ways of asking how a researcher who follows a qualitative, ethnographic strategy can ever know when a “holistic” understanding has been satisfactorily achieved.

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Fife, W. (2005). Introduction to Ethnographic Research Methods. In: Doing Fieldwork. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980564_1

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Methodology

• What Is Ethnography? | Definition, Guide & Examples

What Is Ethnography? | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on March 13, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on June 22, 2023.

Ethnography is a type of qualitative research that involves immersing yourself in a particular community or organization to observe their behavior and interactions up close. The word “ethnography” also refers to the written report of the research that the ethnographer produces afterwards.

Ethnography is a flexible research method that allows you to gain a deep understanding of a group’s shared culture, conventions, and social dynamics. However, it also involves some practical and ethical challenges.

Table of contents

What is ethnography used for, different approaches to ethnographic research, gaining access to a community, working with informants, observing the group and taking field notes, writing up an ethnography, other interesting articles.

Ethnographic research originated in the field of anthropology, and it often involved an anthropologist living with an isolated tribal community for an extended period of time in order to understand their culture.

This type of research could sometimes last for years. For example, Colin M. Turnbull lived with the Mbuti people for three years in order to write the classic ethnography The Forest People .

Today, ethnography is a common approach in various social science fields, not just anthropology. It is used not only to study distant or unfamiliar cultures, but also to study specific communities within the researcher’s own society.

For example, ethnographic research (sometimes called participant observation ) has been used to investigate  football fans , call center workers , and police officers .

Advantages of ethnography

The main advantage of ethnography is that it gives the researcher direct access to the culture and practices of a group. It is a useful approach for learning first-hand about the behavior and interactions of people within a particular context.

By becoming immersed in a social environment, you may have access to more authentic information and spontaneously observe dynamics that you could not have found out about simply by asking.

Ethnography is also an open and flexible method. Rather than aiming to verify a general theory or test a hypothesis , it aims to offer a rich narrative account of a specific culture, allowing you to explore many different aspects of the group and setting.

Disadvantages of ethnography

Ethnography is a time-consuming method. In order to embed yourself in the setting and gather enough observations to build up a representative picture, you can expect to spend at least a few weeks, but more likely several months. This long-term immersion can be challenging, and requires careful planning.

Ethnographic research can run the risk of observer bias . Writing an ethnography involves subjective interpretation, and it can be difficult to maintain the necessary distance to analyze a group that you are embedded in.

There are often also ethical considerations to take into account: for example, about how your role is disclosed to members of the group, or about observing and reporting sensitive information.

Should you use ethnography in your research?

If you’re a student who wants to use ethnographic research in your thesis or dissertation , it’s worth asking yourself whether it’s the right approach:

• Could the information you need be collected in another way (e.g. a survey , interviews)?
• How difficult will it be to gain access to the community you want to study?
• How exactly will you conduct your research, and over what timespan?
• What ethical issues might arise?

If you do decide to do ethnography, it’s generally best to choose a relatively small and easily accessible group, to ensure that the research is feasible within a limited timeframe.

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There are a few key distinctions in ethnography which help to inform the researcher’s approach: open vs. closed settings, overt vs. covert ethnography, and active vs. passive observation. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Open vs. closed settings

The setting of your ethnography—the environment in which you will observe your chosen community in action—may be open or closed.

An open or public setting is one with no formal barriers to entry. For example, you might consider a community of people living in a certain neighborhood, or the fans of a particular baseball team.

• Gaining initial access to open groups is not too difficult…
• …but it may be harder to become immersed in a less clearly defined group.

A closed or private setting is harder to access. This may be for example a business, a school, or a cult.

• A closed group’s boundaries are clearly defined and the ethnographer can become fully immersed in the setting…
• …but gaining access is tougher; the ethnographer may have to negotiate their way in or acquire some role in the organization.

Overt vs. covert ethnography

Most ethnography is overt . In an overt approach, the ethnographer openly states their intentions and acknowledges their role as a researcher to the members of the group being studied.

• Overt ethnography is typically preferred for ethical reasons, as participants can provide informed consent…
• …but people may behave differently with the awareness that they are being studied.

Sometimes ethnography can be covert . This means that the researcher does not tell participants about their research, and comes up with some other pretense for being there.

• Covert ethnography allows access to environments where the group would not welcome a researcher…
• …but hiding the researcher’s role can be considered deceptive and thus unethical.

Active vs. passive observation

Different levels of immersion in the community may be appropriate in different contexts. The ethnographer may be a more active or passive participant depending on the demands of their research and the nature of the setting.

An active role involves trying to fully integrate, carrying out tasks and participating in activities like any other member of the community.

• Active participation may encourage the group to feel more comfortable with the ethnographer’s presence…
• …but runs the risk of disrupting the regular functioning of the community.

A passive role is one in which the ethnographer stands back from the activities of others, behaving as a more distant observer and not involving themselves in the community’s activities.

• Passive observation allows more space for careful observation and note-taking…
• …but group members may behave unnaturally due to feeling they are being observed by an outsider.

While ethnographers usually have a preference, they also have to be flexible about their level of participation. For example, access to the community might depend upon engaging in certain activities, or there might be certain practices in which outsiders cannot participate.

An important consideration for ethnographers is the question of access. The difficulty of gaining access to the setting of a particular ethnography varies greatly:

• To gain access to the fans of a particular sports team, you might start by simply attending the team’s games and speaking with the fans.
• To access the employees of a particular business, you might contact the management and ask for permission to perform a study there.
• Alternatively, you might perform a covert ethnography of a community or organization you are already personally involved in or employed by.

Flexibility is important here too: where it’s impossible to access the desired setting, the ethnographer must consider alternatives that could provide comparable information.

For example, if you had the idea of observing the staff within a particular finance company but could not get permission, you might look into other companies of the same kind as alternatives. Ethnography is a sensitive research method, and it may take multiple attempts to find a feasible approach.

All ethnographies involve the use of informants . These are people involved in the group in question who function as the researcher’s primary points of contact, facilitating access and assisting their understanding of the group.

This might be someone in a high position at an organization allowing you access to their employees, or a member of a community sponsoring your entry into that community and giving advice on how to fit in.

However,  i f you come to rely too much on a single informant, you may be influenced by their perspective on the community, which might be unrepresentative of the group as a whole.

In addition, an informant may not provide the kind of spontaneous information which is most useful to ethnographers, instead trying to show what they believe you want to see. For this reason, it’s good to have a variety of contacts within the group.

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The core of ethnography is observation of the group from the inside. Field notes are taken to record these observations while immersed in the setting; they form the basis of the final written ethnography. They are usually written by hand, but other solutions such as voice recordings can be useful alternatives.

Field notes record any and all important data: phenomena observed, conversations had, preliminary analysis. For example, if you’re researching how service staff interact with customers, you should write down anything you notice about these interactions—body language, phrases used repeatedly, differences and similarities between staff, customer reactions.

Don’t be afraid to also note down things you notice that fall outside the pre-formulated scope of your research; anything may prove relevant, and it’s better to have extra notes you might discard later than to end up with missing data.

Field notes should be as detailed and clear as possible. It’s important to take time to go over your notes, expand on them with further detail, and keep them organized (including information such as dates and locations).

After observations are concluded, there’s still the task of writing them up into an ethnography. This entails going through the field notes and formulating a convincing account of the behaviors and dynamics observed.

The structure of an ethnography

An ethnography can take many different forms: It may be an article, a thesis, or an entire book, for example.

Ethnographies often do not follow the standard structure of a scientific paper, though like most academic texts, they should have an introduction and conclusion. For example, this paper begins by describing the historical background of the research, then focuses on various themes in turn before concluding.

An ethnography may still use a more traditional structure, however, especially when used in combination with other research methods. For example, this paper follows the standard structure for empirical research: introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion.

The content of an ethnography

The goal of a written ethnography is to provide a rich, authoritative account of the social setting in which you were embedded—to convince the reader that your observations and interpretations are representative of reality.

Ethnography tends to take a less impersonal approach than other research methods. Due to the embedded nature of the work, an ethnography often necessarily involves discussion of your personal experiences and feelings during the research.

Ethnography is not limited to making observations; it also attempts to explain the phenomena observed in a structured, narrative way. For this, you may draw on theory, but also on your direct experience and intuitions, which may well contradict the assumptions that you brought into the research.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Ecological validity

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

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Digital Ethnography: An Introduction to Theory and Practice

The rise of the internet age and digital spaces has created a whole new world for ethnographic investigation.

Anthropology has long been a discipline based on physical presence—archaeologists travel to ruins, biological anthropologists analyze physical remains, and sociocultural anthropologists travel to communities to interview, participate, and observe. However, especially in the latter subfield, the rise of the internet age and digital spaces has created a whole new world for ethnographic investigation, a methodology that usually relies on personal experience and face-to-face interactions. Nearly all of us engage in some form of online community, or at the very least, digital communication. From niche subreddits to your family’s Facebook posts to self-help webinars, the human experience exists in a blending duality: while still physical, increasingly digital. This reality became even more prescient with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and ubiquitous virtual contact. Thus, this guide provides you with both an introductory look into the background and theoretical grounding of digital ethnography while also exploring a few useful examples of this type of scholarship available in the JSTOR library .

Background & Theory

E. gabriella coleman, “ ethnographic approaches to digital media ,”  annual review of anthropology  39 (2010): 487–505..

In this widely useful introduction to digital ethnography, Coleman contends that while the variety and profundity of digital media makes this methodology difficult to approach, digital media is a critical object of anthropological inquiry. Admittedly, the elements of the cyberworld are incredibly difficult to distill into distinct categories, but Coleman critically provides three broad categories of media for investigation. First, they investigate the cultural politics of media—how digital spaces are tied to the creation, recreation, and subversion of cultural identities, representations, and thought. Second, they look toward the vernacular cultures of digital media to understand modes of communication, practices, and sociocultural groups dependent on the digital world. Third, they explore how digital media continues to shape other types of social practices from economic exchange to religious worship. While this piece is now more than a decade old, the insights of these categories are important for scholars investigating how digital spaces increasingly tie into cultural representations, group formation, and a myriad of social practices.

Keith N. Hampton, “ Studying the Digital: Directions and Challenges for Digital Methods ,”  Annual Review of Sociology  43, (2017): 167–188.

Hampton explores how the methods for studying digital technology both rely on well-established methods in the social sciences but also require innovations for scholarly study. While this article explores both the quantitative and qualitative applications of digital studies, their insight into digitally centered interviews, ethnography, and participant observation is the most part useful in this discussion. Hampton importantly clarifies that early digital ethnographic work sought to clarify between online and offline personas, whereas the methodology as currently used goes beyond these distinctions to immerse social science work in digital worlds that can span both time and place. For example, while traditional ethnography is limited to the present moment of the ethnographer’s experience, trace ethnography of existing internet logs, text data, and social media posts can also provide fruitful objects of study. Furthermore, digital social science work can remove cost as a barrier: it can make the practice of anthropology more accessible—even if there’s debate in the field over the quality of virtual interviews and observation. Finally, this text also provides many useful reviews, citations, and points of further exploration for those just dipping their toes into the waters of cyberethnographic work.

Jeffrey A. Tolbert and Eric D. M. Johnson. “ Digital Folkloristics: Text, Ethnography, and Interdisciplinarity ,”  Western Folklore  78, no. 4 (2019): 327–356.

Tolbert and Johnson outline and advocate for a “digital folkloristics” that combines the textual approaches of the digital humanities with the tools of digital ethnography. In doing so, they demonstrate that digital scholarship and ethnography have applications across disciplines beyond just rote anthropology. The paper moves beyond a call for studies of digital folklore  and instead endeavors to outline existing forms and methods of digital scholarship to inform its broad usage in the study of folklore. Even for those outside of the folklore space, Tolbert and Johnson’s work is useful in its broad exploration of concepts such as digital scholarship and the digital humanities while also pushing back on the at-times arbitrary and exclusionary divisions drawn between digital social science and non-digital social science. Additionally, the authors demonstrate the inherent and valuable interdisciplinarity of methods in digital scholarship—highlighting how digital ethnography can complement other forms of research including but not limited to folkloristics.

Anne Beaulieu, “ From Co-location to Co-presence: Shifts in the Use of Ethnography for the Study of Knowledge ,”  Social Studies of Science  40, no. 3 (2010): 453–470.

Approaching digital ethnography from the lens of science and technology studies (STS), Beaulieu explains how the shift from co-location (sharing a physical space) to co-presence (sharing interaction more broadly) allows for new studies of lab environments including e-research and e-science. Crucially, this piece questions the definition of the “field” as the object of ethnography and what types of fieldwork can provide insights into studies of knowledge production. While ethnographic studies of labs were critical for many of STS’s insights, including the epistemological and ontological diversity present in science, this type of research becomes more difficult in knowledge production spaces where research is less controlled and less centralized. Beaulieu’s example perfectly encapsulates this point: an ethnography of a life sciences lab is far different than an ethnography of a group of women’s studies scholars. The adoption of co-presence through digital ethnography that foregrounds the relationship between the ethnographer and the interlocutors and, critically, their bidirectional relationships, can provide for insightful accounts of anthropological subjects of study.

Daniela Paredes Grijalva, “ Paper, Pen and Today’s Communication Platforms: Remote Disaster Research during a Pandemic ,”  Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia  36, no. 2 (2021): 376–385.

The restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic upended many ethnographers’ attempts at fieldwork, including Grijalva’s. However, digital and remote ethnography have provided a salve for scholars who—for a multitude of reasons—are unable to physically visit their field site. While in-person fieldwork will remain central to the practice of anthropology, this scholarly note demonstrates how virtual ethnographic practices can still inform critical research. This article explores one route for remote ethnography, including starting with virtual contacts through e-mail, WhatsApp, and social media like Facebook Messenger. Grijalva reflected on these conversations through a more traditional practice: a diary of fieldnotes. They also document how the act of engaging in a localized or regional social media space can provide insight into social science questions. Of course, while remote methods can prove useful, they’re not without their faults—none more obvious than the difficulty in observing the particularities of everyday human interactions in a field site. Thus, Grijalva also takes the time to reflect on the implications of remote ethnography and how these methods may impact and limit anthropological scholarship when used.

Nicolle Lamerichs, “ Fan Membership: Traditional and Digital Fieldwork ,” in Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Cultures (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 47–58.

Lamerichs approaches ethnography through studies of participatory cultures—of fans and audiences. In doing so, they’re a part of the growth of qualitative methods in the realm of cultural studies. The analysis finds that online platforms and the results of digital ethnography are best placed within the context of offline spaces. This methodological hybridity allows for the treatment of many contexts as what Lamerichs refers to as “rich and social space[s] of production.” However, this article also cautions researchers looking to jump into digital ethnography. It explores some of the most critical challenges: determining the ethnographer’s level of involvement, selecting the proper method of record-keeping, and grappling with the ethics of the less-obvious researcher presence in online settings.

Digital Ethnography in Practice

Jowan mahmod, “ new online communities and new identity making: the curious case of the kurdish diaspora ,”  journal of ethnic and cultural studies 6, no. 2 (2019): 34–43..

Mahmod uses both online and offline methodologies to explore the creation of new forms of Kurdish identity through the related processes of diaspora, transnationalism, and digital forms of communication. To illuminate this complex subject, this article combines in-depth interviews with an ethnographic exploration of the online Kurdish community. It explores several critical topics of identity creation from online anonymity as a tool in the fight against gender inequality, the use of insults as identity markers, and the progression from victimhood to senses of entitlement post-diaspora in Europe. Overall, Mahmod finds that the view of diasporic communities (especially the Kurdish one) as a static and unified entity fails to understand their evolving nature and marked differences across generation—while also demonstrating the methodological value of combining in-person interviews with digital insights.

Kiri Miller, “ Grove Street Grimm: ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and Digital Folklore ,”  The Journal of American Folklore  121, no. 481 (2008): 255–285.

Miller takes a different approach to the digital social sciences through their academic treatment of the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas —treating this popular entry as an anthology of stories, a record of vernacular culture, a frame for performance, and a cultural artifact in its own right. Miller reimagines GTA as an entry into Grimm Brothers style folklore, engaging both in literary analysis and traditional ethnographic methods including interviews, survey work, and “visits” to the field site of the game world of San Andreas. Through this unique work, Miller argues that videogames and digital spaces are capable of folkloric qualities while also establishing new cultural traditions. They further contend that digital media genres including video games impact values and beliefs through the interpretation of the protagonist CJ in the game’s “episodic travails.” This treatment of both the digital game and space opens new opportunities and pathways for ethnography in cyber realms while inviting folklorists to approach a new medium.

Sheila Bock, “ Ku Klux Kasserole and Strange Fruit Pies: A Shouting Match at the Border in Cyberspace ,”  The Journal of American Folklore  130, no. 516 (2017): 142–165.

Bock utilizes digital ethnography to explore the collective social media performance of #PaulasBestDishes that mocked celebrity chef Paula Deen after she admitted to using the “N-word” and discussed a plantation theme for her child’s wedding. Specifically, Bock explores how the wordplay and vernacular expression of these tweets can illuminate parts of the complex racial dynamics and discourse at work in the United States. While this article relies heavily on cultural studies, historical exploration, and performance studies, it also interacts with ethnographic theory to draw key cultural insights from the realm of Twitter. This piece demonstrates how digital ethnographic investigations can operate much differently than traditional ones, even limiting themselves to the exploration of a single hashtag, while still providing valuable academic insight.

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Gordon L. Ulmer and Jeffrey H. Cohen, “ Ethnographic Inquiry in the ‘Digitized’ Fields of Madre de Dios, Peru and Oaxaca, Mexico: Methodological and Ethical Issues ,”  Anthropological Quarterly  16, no. 2 (2016): 539–560.

Ulmer and Cohen seek to detail the relationship between digital and physical methods of ethnography while also discussing both the privacy and ethical considerations of digital ethnographic inquiry using case studies from both authors’ work. Ulmer describes their hybrid fieldwork in Madre de Dios regarding conservation labor and Cohen reflects on their work in the 1990s and 2000s with craft producers in Oaxaca. In Ulmer’s case, digital media became a critical tool during conflicts between gold miners and government actors—and they continued to use the tool in their remaining fieldwork. Cohen’s fieldwork took place during the rise of Web 2.0, e-mail communication, and linkages between the digital and physical realms. They demonstrate that while digital ethnography can help inform research, limitations including slow internet speeds, netspeak, differential adoption of digital technologies by informant groups, and the third-party-present effect must be taken into consideration. Even more critically, scholars in the digital ethnography space must ensure for the protection of informant data—especially given the growing commercialization of private data, prevalence of data breaches, and widespread surveillance. This is even more poignant in cases where ethnographic topics could put “vulnerable” or disenfranchised populations at risk.

James Leibold, “ Blogging Alone: China, the Internet, and the Democratic Illusion? ”  The Journal of Asian Studies  70, no. 4 (2011): 1023–1041.

This study of the Chinese blogosphere employs digital ethnography alongside survey data and comparative analysis to illuminate the behavioral trends of what Leibold defines as the largest cyber-community. Digital ethnography works to cut against the bifurcated narrative that had surrounded academic treatments of the internet in China—a debate Leibold argues was stuck between digital-activism and cyber-censorship. Through direct engagement with many less-studied corners of China’s digital community, this article employs digital ethnography that provides a more nuanced understanding of the blogosphere and its impacts on the netizens who use it. This includes Leibold’s exploration of Han supremacist communities, the partial anonymity of certain online forums, and online vigilantism. These are aspects of Chinese culture and politics that would be inaccessible to traditional forms of ethnography and demonstrate how digital ethnography is a critical contribution as the digital space continues to expand.

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THE BASICS OF ETHNOGRAPHY: AN OVERVIEW OF DESIGNING AN ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND BEYOND

As a discipline concerned with cultural and social life, Anthropology has a unique scope in compare to other social sciences and humanities that addresses a thorough methodological scrutiny following the theoretical shifts over time and space. The current methodological trends in anthropology claim the role of the researcher as observer (to explore and examine a culture) to grasp the underlying meaning of the participants to interpret the action, perception and networks of the setting in contexts. In this juncture, it is necessary for the researcher to design his/her research methodology in such a way that clarifies the dimensions of the researcher, participants, selection of the research area, and/or problem and the very pros and cons that validates the research in its own essence. Ethnography as one of the major qualitative research approach in anthropology provides an opportunity to construct a specific kind of written observational manuscript about a particular culture. The present authors intend to address the different dimensions from historical genesis to gradual shifts into different theoretical perspectives and critiques as well, that arises from the discussions of ethnography to encircle the possibly significant ideas and issues in as simple and straightforward manner as possible.

Related Papers

Marian Crowley-Henry

In Chapter 3, Marian Crowley-Henry presents an aspect of the evolving research approach of ethnography and participant observation, delineating the complexities involved in classifying research as ethnographic, given underlying discrepancies in how the approach is applied and the respective philosophy behind its use.

Cogito. Multidisciplinary Research Journal

Sergiu Bălan

As a very often repeated observation says, in order to find out what anthropology is, one must see what anthropologists do, and what they do is mainly ethnography. Ethnography can be understood both as a process and as a product. As a process, it is for the anthropologist the same thing laboratory research is for the scientist and survey for the sociologist, the method par excellence. It has to meet three main requirements: long time residence among the members of the studied culture, linguistic proficiency and must be conducted in the form of participant observation. Understood as a product, ethnographic monograph must be holistic and to adopt the emic perspective, as opposed to the etic one.

An Ethnography of Global Landscapes and Corridors

Loshini Naidoo

Marshall University Digital Scholar

Brian A Hoey

Tribhuvan University Journal

Ganga Gautam

This article is an attempt to present the concept of ethnography as a qualitative inquiry process in social science research. The paper begins with the introduction to ethnography followed by the discussion of ethnography both as an approach and a research method. It then illustrates how ethnographic research is carried out using various ethnographic methods that include participant observation, interviewing and collection of the documents and artifacts. Highlighting the different ways of organizing, analyzing and writing ethnographic data, the article suggests ways of writing the ethnographic research.

Challenges and Solutions in Ethnographic Research

Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto

José Gerardo Alvarado

This article reviews references of ethnography as a method in the social sciences gathered by using GoogleTM, EBSCO, ProQuest, REDALYC, PSICODOC, Dialnet and LATINDEX. Anthropologists’ postmodern self-critique has influenced social scientists and ethnography has increasingly become a way to explore our forms of life. This translates into a perspective that responds to ethical, political, cultural, and social concerns about the production of knowledge. It seeks to excise the distance between researchers, often by collaborating with consultants in research projects. The ensuing reflections evoke possibilities generated from interactions in the field and an appreciation of a complexity that poses methodological challenges for researchers who see the field as a space from which they cannot be extricated.

Sultana Tania

Christopher A Howard

European Journal of Sociology

Histories and critiques of anthropology usually deal mainly with what anthropologists say, including what they say they do. However, like their informants, anthropologists are accustomed to saying one thing and doing another. The emphasis in this paper is on the nature of anthropological data and methods, and thus on what anthropologists really do. The argument is that what anthropologists do is often productive and sensible, but that it has very little relationship to what many anthropologists say they should be doing. Indeed those anthropologists who take such theoretical directives seriously labour under a considerable, self-inflicted handicap.

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Human Relations Area Files

Cultural information for education and research, an introduction to fieldwork and ethnography.

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Francine barone, human relations area files at yale university, ethnographic fieldwork.

Ethnographic fieldwork is how anthropologists gather data. Fieldwork is the process of immersing oneself in as many aspects of the daily cultural lives of people as possible in order to study their behaviors and interactions. Nearly any setting or location can become “the field”: a village along the Amazon river, a large corporate office in Tokyo, a small neighborhood café in Seattle, or even a social networking site like Facebook.

Fieldwork takes time. Anthropologists enter the field location much like a newborn child. They may have trouble communicating until they have learned the local language. They will likely make mistakes, and locals will find them funny or strange. It can take months or years to begin to accustom themselves to the society or community within which they will live and learn. In the fieldwork process, anthropologists eventually piece together ideas about kinship, language, religion, politics, and economic systems, which allows them to build a picture of the society.

Ethnography

Ethnography can mean two things in anthropology:

a) the qualitative research methods employed during fieldwork b) the written descriptive and interpretive results of that research

Doing ethnography

The hallmark method of ethnographic field research in anthropology is known as participant-observation . This type of data-gathering is when the anthropologist records their experiences and observations while taking part in activities alongside local participants or informants in the field site. Anthropologists also engage in informal conversations, more formal interviews, surveys, or questionnaires, and create photos, sound or video recordings, as well as conduct historical or archival research into correspondence, public records, or reports, depending on their research area. Some anthropologists use quantitative methods when analyzing their research, such as producing statistics based on their findings.

Writing ethnography

Ethnographic writing differs from other types of academic, historical, journalistic, or travel writing about peoples and places. While ethnographers may also keep a fieldwork diary containing personal notes, ethnography is much more than a recounting of daily events. Ethnography engages with the theoretical foundations of anthropology and is written with cultural contextualization in mind, speaking to anthropology as a discipline as well as furnishing greater understanding of the cultural world that has been explored. The aim of ethnographic writing is to produce work that contributes to, and advances, the comparative interpretation of human cultures and societies.

An insider’s view

Ethnography is a collaborative effort between the ethnographer and their research participants. Anthropologists have ethical codes that guide their behavior in the field as they rely on relationships with others in order to conduct their research. In the ethnographic process, informants or key participants can help to induct the ethnographer into the society and explain its customs and ways.

Traditionally, anthropologists have attempted to arrive at an emic perspective or “insider’s point of view”. In other words, ethnographers wish to understand the structures, categories, and patterns of behavior as conceptualized by members of the culture they are studying. This is contrasted with etic models, which are analyses of cultural meaning as seen from the “outside” by an objective observer. This uneasy simplification of emic vs. etic gets at the heart of the paradox of doing ethnography: what people say they do, what they say they should do, and what they actually do, rarely – if ever – coincide.

Anthropologists today are increasingly aware of their own views and biases that they carry with them into the field from their home cultures, acknowledging wherever possible how this affects their methods and findings. Despite all of the best intentions, any practicing fieldworker can tell you that fieldwork is, at best, unpredictable. A reflexive approach to ethnography acknowledges that no researcher can be 100% objective, and that fieldwork constitutes an ongoing dialogue of consent and mutual respect between participants and the ethnographer.

Workbook Activity 1: The Fieldwork Experience

Read the following passages in eHRAF World Cultures that describe different aspects of fieldwork and conducting ethnography. Then, answer the questions.

Malinowski (1922) – Argonauts of the Western Pacific , Chapter 1, Section VII, pages 17-21 on participant-observation  

• What is “the imponderabilia of actual life”?
• How does Malinowski suggest that ethnographers should observe and record this imponderabilia during fieldwork?
• According to Malinowski, why is it good for the ethnographer to sometimes put aside their notebook and camera?

Stross (1971) – Aspects of Language Acquisition by Tzeltal Children , “Appendix B: The Fieldwork”, pages 201-202 on data collection in the field  

• List the kinds of research methods that the ethnographer used during fieldwork.
• How did he familiarize himself with the field location?
• Describe the relationship(s) that the ethnographer had with informants.
• What unexpected problems did the ethnographer run into? How were they resolved?

  Textor (1973) – Roster of the Gods , Appendix One, pages 855-858 on working with key informants

• Describe the relationship between the ethnographer and his informants.
• How critical were the informants to completing the ethnographic research?
• Do you think that learning the local language is essential for doing fieldwork?

Landsman (1988) – Sovereignty and Symbol , pages 7-8 on taking notes with informants

• How did the emotions of informants/research participants impact the ethnographer’s fieldnotes?
• How were historical, archival, print, and photographic materials utilized in their study? How did informants assist with this?
• How critical do you think informants are to conducting ethnographic research?

  Hill (1972) – Rural Hausa: A Village and Setting , page 148 on the anatomy of poverty

• What do you think the author means by “the poor are usually unobserved”?
• Are there some types of insights that are difficult or impossible to ascertain through participant-observation? Why might this be the case?
• How do you think anthropologists should deal with sensitive information or vulnerable members of a culture?

Workbook Activity 2: Thinking Ethnographically

How would you observe the following cultural practices ethnographically?

• Shopping in a bookstore
• Traveling by public transportation
• Ordering takeout from your favorite restaurant
• Having coffee with friends at Starbucks

Choose one of these or select your own scenario. Write a brief ethnographic account of everyday events. Consider methods such as participant-observation, interviews, surveys, and engaging with informants. If you are unable to participate in these activities face-to-face, simply try and imagine how you would describe them to an outsider not familiar with your culture.

Begin by recording your “field notes”, keeping track of everything that you see and do, and what you observe others saying and doing.

Then, describe what’s happening from both emic and etic perspectives.

For the emic perspective , consider the activity you are engaged in and how it is viewed in your own culture. What are the established “rules” or patterns of each interaction that make up the scene you have chosen?

• For example, at a café, you might find that one of your friends buys coffee for the entire group, which is fairly typical among friends. If asked why they have done so, the buyer may simply reply that “it’s a nice thing to do”, and indicate that someone else would pay next time.

For the etic perspective , look beyond your notes and step outside your own cultural expectations. What over-arching structures, symbols, or meaning are at play in this setting?

• For example, why do you think people really take turns buying rounds of drinks? What happens if one person never pays for the coffee? Due to the fact that such a person would not be considered a good friend, an etic analysis might find that coffee exchange is meaningful for building and sustaining friendship rather than being about money.

Hill, Polly. 1972. Rural Hausa: A Village and Setting. Cambridge, England: University Press. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ms12-018 .

Landsman, Gail H. 1988. Sovereignty and Symbol: Indian-White Conflict at Ganienkeh. Albuquerque, N.Mex.: University of New Mexico Press. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=nm09-058

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ol06-001 .

Stross, Brian. 1971. Aspects of Language Acquisition by Tzeltal Children. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=nv09-010 .

Textor, Robert B. 1973. “Roster of the Gods: An Ethnography of the Supernatural in a Thai Village.” In Ethnography Series, 3, 44, 911 leaves. New Haven, Conn.: Human Relations Area Files. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ao07-011 .

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3 Doing Fieldwork: Methods in Cultural Anthropology

Katie nelson, inver hills community college [email protected] http://kanelson.com/.

Learning Objectives

Discuss what is unique about ethnographic fieldwork and how it emerged as a key strategy in anthropology.

Explain how traditional approaches to ethnographic fieldwork contrast with contemporary approaches.

Identify some of the contemporary ethnographic fieldwork techniques and perspectives.

Discuss some of the ethical considerations in doing anthropological fieldwork.

Summarize how anthropologists transform their fieldwork data into a story that communicates meaning.

FINDING THE FIELD

My first experience with fieldwork as a student anthropologist took place in a small indigenous community in northeastern Brazil studying the Jenipapo-Kanindé of Lagoa Encantada (Enchanted Lake). I had planned to conduct an independent research project on land tenure among members of the indigenous tribe and had gotten permission to spend several months with the community. My Brazilian host family arranged for a relative to drive me to the rural community on the back of his motorcycle. After several hours navigating a series of bumpy roads in blazing equatorial heat, I was relieved to arrive at the edge of the reservation. He cut the motor and I removed my heavy backpack from my tired, sweaty back. Upon hearing us arrive, first children and then adults slowly and shyly began to approach us. I greeted the curious onlookers and briefly explained who I was. As a group of children ran to fetch the cacique (the chief/political leader), I began to explain my research agenda to several of the men who had gathered. I mentioned that I was interested in learning about how the tribe negotiated land use rights without any private land ownership. After hearing me use the colloquial term “ índio ” (Indian), a man who turned out to be the cacique’s cousin came forward and said to me, “Well, your work is going to be difficult because there are no Indians here; we are only Brazilians.” Then, abruptly, another man angrily replied to him, stating firmly that, in fact, they were Indians because the community was on an Indian reservation and the Brazilian government had recognized them as an indigenous tribe. A few women then entered the rapid-fire discussion. I took a step back, surprised by the intensity of my first interaction in the community. The debate subsided once the cacique arrived, but it left a strong impression in my mind. Eventually, I discarded my original research plan to focus instead on this disagreement within the community about who they were and were not. In anthropology, this type of conflict in beliefs is known as contested identity .

I soon learned that many among the Jenipapo-Kanindé did not embrace the Indian identity label. The tribe members were all monolingual Portuguese-speakers who long ago had lost their original language and many of their traditions. Beginning in the 1980s, several local researchers had conducted studies in the community and had concluded that the community had indigenous origins. Those researchers lobbied on the community’s behalf for official state and federal status as an indigenous reservation, and in 1997 the Funai ( Fundação Nacional do Índio or National Foundation for the Indian) visited the community and agreed to officially demarcate the land as an indigenous reservation.

More than 20 years later, the community is still waiting for that demarcation. Some in the community embraced indigenous status because it came with a number of benefits. The state (Ceará), using partial funding from Funai, built a new road to improve access to the community. The government also constructed an elementary school and a common well and installed new electric lines. Despite those gains, some members of the community did not embrace indigenous status because being considered Indian had a pejorative connotation in Brazil. Many felt that the label stigmatized them by associating them with a poor and marginalized class of Brazilians. Others resisted the label because of long-standing family and inter-personal conflicts in the community.

Fieldwork is the most important method by which cultural anthropologists gather data to answer their research questions. While interacting on a daily basis with a group of people, cultural anthropologists document their observations and perceptions and adjust the focus of their research as needed. They typically spend a few months to a few years living among the people they are studying.

The “field” can be anywhere the people are—a village in highland Papua New Guinea or a supermarket in downtown Minneapolis. Just as marine biologists spend time in the ocean to learn about the behavior of marine animals and geologists travel to a mountain range to observe rock formations, anthropologists go to places where people are.

Doing Anthropology In this short film, Stefan Helmreich, Erica James, and Heather Paxson, three members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Anthropology Department, talk about their current work and the process of doing fieldwork .

Making the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange

The cultural anthropologist’s goal during fieldwork is to describe a group of people to others in a way that makes strange or unusual features of the culture seem familiar and familiar traits seem extraordinary. The point is to help people think in new ways about aspects of their own culture by comparing them with other cultures. The research anthropologist Margaret Mead describes in her monograph Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) is a famous example of this. In 1925, Mead went to American Samoa, where she conducted ethnographic research on adolescent girls and their experiences with sexuality and growing up. Mead’s mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas, was a strong proponent of cultural determinism, the idea that one’s cultural upbringing and social environment, rather than one’s biology, primarily determine behavior. Boas encouraged Mead to travel to Samoa to study adolescent behavior there and to compare their culture and behavior with that of adolescents in the United States to lend support to his hypothesis. In the foreword of Coming of Age in Samoa , Boas described what he saw as the key insight of her research: “The results of her painstaking investigation confirm the suspicion long held by anthropologists that much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization.” [1]

Mead studied 25 young women in three villages in Samoa and found that the stress, anxiety, and turmoil of American adolescence were not found among Samoan youth. Rather, young women in Samoa experienced a smooth transition to adulthood with relatively little stress or difficulty. She documented instances of socially accepted sexual experimentation, lack of sexual jealousy and rape, and a general sense of casualness that marked Samoan adolescence. Coming of Age in Samoa quickly became popular, launching Mead’s career as one of the most well-known anthropologists in the United States and perhaps the world. The book encouraged American readers to reconsider their own cultural assumptions about what adolescence in the United States should be like, particularly in terms of the sexual repression and turmoil that seemed to characterize the teenage experience in mid-twentieth century America. Through her analysis of the differences between Samoan and American society, Mead also persuasively called for changes in education and parenting for U.S. children and adolescents.

Another classic example of a style of anthropological writing that attempted to make the familiar strange and encouraged readers to consider their own cultures in a different way is Horace Miner’s Body Ritual among the Nacirema (1956). The essay described oral hygiene practices of the Nacirema (“American” spelled backward) in a way that, to cultural insiders, sounded extreme, exaggerated, and out of context. He presented the Nacirema as if they were a little-known cultural group with strange, exotic practices. Miner wrote the essay during an era in which anthropologists were just beginning to expand their focus beyond small-scale traditional societies far from home to large-scale post-industrial societies such as the United States. He wrote the essay primarily as a satire of how anthropologists often wrote about “the Other” in ways that made other cultures seem exotic and glossed over features that the Other had in common with the anthropologist’s culture. The essay also challenged U.S. readers in general and anthropologists in particular to think differently about their own cultures and re-examine their cultural assumptions about what is “normal.”

Emic and Etic Perspectives

When anthropologists conduct fieldwork, they gather data. An important tool for gathering anthropological data is ethnography —the in-depth study of everyday practices and lives of a people. Ethnography produces a detailed description of the studied group at a particular time and location, also known as a “ thick description ,” a term coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures to describe this type of research and writing. A thick description explains not only the behavior or cultural event in question but also the context in which it occurs and anthropological interpretations of it. Such descriptions help readers better understand the internal logic of why people in a culture behave as they do and why the behaviors are meaningful to them. This is important because understanding the attitudes, perspectives, and motivations of cultural insiders is at the heart of anthropology.

Ethnographers gather data from many different sources. One source is the anthropologist’s own observations and thoughts. Ethnographers keep field notebooks that document their ideas and reflections as well as what they do and observe when participating in activities with the people they are studying, a research technique known as participant observation . Other sources of data include informal conversations and more-formal interviews that are recorded and transcribed. They also collect documents such as letters, photographs, artifacts, public records, books, and reports.

Different types of data produce different kinds of ethnographic descriptions, which also vary in terms of perspective—from the perspective of the studied culture ( emic ) or from the perspective of the observer ( etic ). Emic perspectives refer to descriptions of behaviors and beliefs in terms that are meaningful to people who belong to a specific culture, e.g., how people perceive and categorize their culture and experiences, why people believe they do what they do, how they imagine and explain things. To uncover emic perspectives, ethnographers talk to people, observe what they do, and participate in their daily activities with them. Emic perspectives are essential for anthropologists’ efforts to obtain a detailed understanding of a culture and to avoid interpreting others through their own cultural beliefs.

Etic perspectives refer to explanations for behavior by an outside observer in ways that are meaningful to the observer. For an anthropologist, etic descriptions typically arise from conversations between the ethnographer and the anthropological community. These explanations tend to be based in science and are informed by historical, political, and economic studies and other types of research. The etic approach acknowledges that members of a culture are unlikely to view the things they do as noteworthy or unusual. They cannot easily stand back and view their own behavior objectively or from another perspective. For example, you may have never thought twice about the way you brush your teeth and the practice of going to the dentist or how you experienced your teenage years. For you, these parts of your culture are so normal and “natural” you probably would never consider questioning them. An emic lens gives us an alternative perspective that is essential when constructing a comprehensive view of a people.

Most often, ethnographers include both emic and etic perspectives in their research and writing. They first uncover a studied people’s understanding of what they do and why and then develop additional explanations for the behavior based on anthropological theory and analysis. Both perspectives are important, and it can be challenging to move back and forth between the two. Nevertheless, that is exactly what good ethnographers must do.

TRADITIONAL ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES

Early armchair anthropology.

Before ethnography was a fully developed research method, anthropologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used techniques that were much less reliable to gather data about people throughout the world. From the comfort of their homes and library armchairs, early scholars collected others’ travel accounts and used them to come to conclusions about far-flung cultures and peoples. The reports typically came from missionaries, colonists, adventurers, and business travelers and were often incomplete, inaccurate, and/or misleading, exaggerated or omitted important information, and romanticized the culture.

Early scholars such as Wilhelm Schmidt and Sir E. B. Tylor sifted through artifacts and stories brought back by travelers or missionaries and selected the ones that best fit their frequently pre-conceived ideas about the peoples involved. By relying on this flawed data, they often drew inaccurate or even racist conclusions. They had no way of knowing how accurate the information was and no way to understand the full context in which it was gathered.

The work of Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) provides a good example of the problems associated with such anthropological endeavors. Frazer was a Scottish social anthropologist who was interested in myths and religions around the world. He read historical documents and religious texts found in libraries and book collections. He also sent questionnaires to missionaries and colonists in various parts of the world asking them about the people with whom they were in contact. He then used the information to draw sweeping conclusions about human belief systems. In his most famous book, The Golden Bough , he described similarities and differences in magical and religious practices around the world and concluded that human beliefs progressed through three stages: from primitive magic to religion and from religion to science. This theory implied that some people were less evolved and more primitive than others. Of course, contemporary anthropologists do not view any people as less evolved than another. Instead, anthropologists today seek to uncover the historical, political, and cultural reasons behind peoples’ behaviors rather than assuming that one culture or society is more advanced than another.

The main problem with Frazer’s conclusion can be traced back to the fact that he did not do any research himself and none of the information he relied on was collected by an anthropologist. He never spent time with the people he was researching. He never observed the religious ceremonies he wrote about and certainly never participated in them. Had he done so, he might have been able to appreciate that all human groups at the time (and now) were equally pragmatic, thoughtful, intelligent, logical, and “evolved.” He might also have appreciated the fact that how and why the information is gathered affects the quality of the information. For instance, if a colonial administrator offered to pay people for their stories, some of the storytellers might have exaggerated or even made up stories for financial gain. If a Christian missionary asked recently converted parishioners to describe their religious practices, they likely would have omitted non-Christian practices and beliefs to avoid disapproval and maintain their positions in the church. A male traveler who attempted to document rite-of-passage traditions in a culture that prohibited men from asking such questions of women would generate data that could erroneously suggest that women did not participate in such activities. All of these examples illustrate the pitfalls of armchair anthropology.

Off the Veranda

Fortunately, the reign of armchair anthropology was brief. Around the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists trained in the natural sciences began to reimagine what a science of humanity should look like and how social scientists ought to go about studying cultural groups. Some of those anthropologists insisted that one should at least spend significant time actually observing and talking to the people studied. Early ethnographers such as Franz Boas and Alfred Cort Haddon typically traveled to the remote locations where the people in question lived and spent a few weeks to a few months there. They sought out a local Western host who was familiar with the people and the area (such as a colonial official, missionary, or businessman) and found accommodations through them. Although they did at times venture into the community without a guide, they generally did not spend significant time with the local people. Thus, their observations were primarily conducted from the relative comfort and safety of a porch—from their verandas .

Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1884–1942) pioneering method of participant observation fundamentally changed the relationship between ethnographers and the people under study. In 1914, he traveled to the Trobriand Islands and ended up spending nearly four years conducting fieldwork among the people there. In the process, he developed a rigorous set of detailed ethnographic techniques he viewed as best-suited to gathering accurate and comprehensive ethnographic data. One of the hallmarks of his method was that it required the researcher to get off the veranda to interact with and even live among the natives. In a well-known book about his research, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski described his research techniques and the role they played in his analysis of the Kula ceremony, an exchange of coral armbands and trinkets among members of the social elite. He concluded that the ceremonies were at the center of Trobriand life and represented the culmination of an elaborate multi-year venture called the Kula Ring that involved dangerous expeditions and careful planning. Ultimately, the key to his discovering the importance of the ceremony was that he not only observed the Kula Ring but also participated in it. This technique of participant observation is central to anthropological research today. Malinowski did more than just observe people from afar; he actively interacted with them and participated in their daily activities. And unlike early anthropologists who worked through translators, Malinowski learned the native language, which allowed him to immerse himself in the culture. He carefully documented all of his observations and thoughts. Malinowski’s techniques are now central components of ethnographic fieldwork.

Salvage Ethnography

Despite Malinowski’s tremendous contributions to ethnography and anthropology generally, he was nevertheless a man of his time. A common view in the first half of the twentieth century was that many “primitive” cultures were quickly disappearing and features of those cultures needed to be preserved (salvaged) before they were lost. Anthropologists such as Malinowski, Franz Boas, and many of their students sought to document, photograph, and otherwise preserve cultural traditions in “dying” cultures in groups such as Native Americans and other traditional societies experiencing rapid change due to modernization, dislocation, and contact with outside groups. They also collected cultural artifacts, removing property from the communities and placing it in museums and private collections.

Others who were not formally trained in the sciences or in anthropology also participated in salvage activities. For instance, in his “documentary” film Nanook of the North (1922), Robery Flaherty filmed the life of an Inuit man named Nanook and his family in the Canadian Arctic. In an effort to preserve on film what many believed was a traditional way of life soon to be lost, Flaherty took considerable artistic license to represent the culture as he imagined it was in the past, including staging certain scenes and asking the Inuit men to use spears instead of rifles to make the film seem more “authentic.”

Photographers and artists have likewise attempted to capture and preserve traditional indigenous life in paintings and photographs. Renowned painter George Catlin (1796–1872), for example, is known to have embellished scenes or painted them in ways that glossed over the difficult reality that native people in the nineteenth century were actively persecuted by the government, displaced from their lands, and forced into unsustainable lifestyles that led to starvation and warfare. Photographer Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952) has been criticized for reinforcing romanticized images of “authentic” native scenes. In particular, he is accused of having perpetuated the problematic idea of the noble savage and, in the process, distracted attention from the serious social, political, and economic problems faced by native people. [2]

Today, anthropologists recognize that human cultures constantly change as people respond to social, political, economic, and other external and internal influences—that there is no moment when a culture is more authentic or more primitive. They acknowledge that culture is fluid and cannot be treated as isolated in time and space. Just as we should not portray people as primitive vestiges of an earlier stage of human development, we also should not romanticize a culture or idealize another’s suffering as more authentic or natural.

In the throes of salvage ethnography, anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century actively documented anything and everything they could about the cultures they viewed as endangered. They collected artifacts, excavated ancient sites, wrote dictionaries of non-literate languages, and documented cultural traditions, stories, and beliefs. In the United States, those efforts developed into what is known today as the four-field approach or simply as general anthropology. This approach integrates multiple scientific and humanistic perspectives into a single comprehensive discipline composed of cultural, archaeological, biological/physical, and linguistic anthropology.

A hallmark of the four-field approach is its holistic perspective: anthropologists are interested in studying everything that makes us human. Thus, they use multiple approaches to understanding humans throughout time and throughout the world. They also acknowledge that to understand people fully one cannot look solely at biology, culture, history, or language; rather, all of those things must be considered. The interrelationships between the four subfields of anthropology are important for many anthropologists today.

Linguistic anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, for instance, examined interrelationships between culture, language, and cognition. They argued that the language one speaks plays a critical role in determining how one thinks, particularly in terms of understanding time, space, and matter. They proposed that people who speak different languages view the world differently as a result. In a well-known example, Whorf contrasted the Hopi and English languages. Because verbs in Hopi contained no future or past tenses, Whorf argued that Hopi-speakers understand time in a fundamentally different way than English-speakers. An observation by an English-speaker would focus on the difference in time while an observation by a Hopi-speaker would focus on validity. [3]

In another example, Peter Gordon spent many years living among the Pirahã tribe of Brazil learning their language and culture. He noted that the Pirahã have only three words for numbers: one, two, and many. He also observed that they found it difficult to remember quantities and numbers beyond three even after learning the Portuguese words for such numbers. [4]

Pirahã Numerical Terms

In this short film, linguist Daniel Everett illustrates Pirahã numerical terms .

Although some scholars have criticized Whorf and Gordon’s conclusions as overly deterministic, their work certainly illustrates the presence of a relationship between language and thought and between cultural and biological influences. Words may not force people to think a particular way, but they can influence our thought processes and how we view the world around us. The holistic perspective of anthropology helps us to appreciate that our culture, language, and physical and cognitive capacities for language are interrelated in complex ways.

ETHNOGRAPHY TODAY

Anthropology’s distinctive research strategy.

Ethnography is cultural anthropology’s distinctive research strategy. It was originally developed by anthropologists to study small-scale, relatively isolated cultural groups. Typically, those groups had relatively simple economies and technologies and limited access to larger, more technologically advanced societies. Early ethnographers sought to understand the entirety of a particular culture. They spent months to years living in the community, and in that time, they documented in great detail every dimension of people’s lives, including their language, subsistence strategies, political systems, formation of families and marriages, and religious beliefs. This was important because it helped researchers appreciate the interconnectedness of all dimensions of social life. The key to the success of this ethnographic approach was not only to spend considerable time observing people in their home settings engaged in day-to-day activities but also to participate in those activities. Participation informed an emic perspective of the culture, something that had been missing in earlier social science research.

Because of how useful the ethnographic research strategy is in developing an emic perspective, it has been adopted by many other disciplines including sociology, education, psychology, and political science. Education researchers, for example, use ethnography to study children in classrooms to identify their learning strategies and how they understand and make sense of learning experiences. Sociologists use ethnography to study emerging social movements and how participants in such movements stay motivated and connected despite their sometimes-conflicting goals.

New Sites for Ethnographic Fieldwork

Like the cultures and peoples studied, anthropology and ethnography are evolving. Field sites for ethnographic research are no longer exclusively located in far-flung, isolated, non-industrialized societies. Increasingly, anthropologists are conducting ethnographic research in complex, technologically advanced societies such as the United States and in urban environments elsewhere in the world. For instance, my doctoral research took place in the United States. I studied identity formation among undocumented Mexican immigrant college students in Minnesota. Because some of my informants were living in Mexico when my fieldwork ended, I also traveled to Veracruz, Mexico, and spent time conducting research there. Often, anthropologists who study migration, diasporas , and people in motion must conduct research in multiple locations. This is known as multi-sited ethnography.

Anthropologists use ethnography to study people wherever they are and however they interact with others. Think of the many ways you ordinarily interact with your friends, family, professors, and boss. Is it all face-to-face communication or do you sometimes use text messages to chat with your friends? Do you also sometimes email your professor to ask for clarification on an assignment and then call your boss to discuss your schedule? Do you share funny videos with others on Facebook and then later make a Skype video call to a relative? These new technological “sites” of human interaction are fascinating to many ethnographers and have expanded the definition of fieldwork.

Problem-Oriented Research

In the early years, ethnographers were interested in exploring the entirety of a culture. Taking an inductive approach, they generally were not concerned about arriving with a relatively narrow predefined research topic. Instead, the goal was to explore the people, their culture, and their homelands and what had previously been written about them. The focus of the study was allowed to emerge gradually during their time in the field. Often, this approach to ethnography resulted in rather general ethnographic descriptions.

Today, anthropologists are increasingly taking a more deductive approach to ethnographic research. Rather than arriving at the field site with only general ideas about the goals of the study, they tend to select a particular problem before arriving and then let that problem guide their research. In my case, I was interested in how undocumented Mexican immigrant youth in Minnesota formed a sense of identity while living in a society that used a variety of dehumanizing labels such as illegal and alien to refer to them. That was my research “problem,” and it oriented and guided my study from beginning to end. I did not document every dimension of my informants’ lives; instead, I focused on the things most closely related to my research problem.

Quantitative Methods

Increasingly, cultural anthropologists are using quantitative research methods to complement qualitative approaches. Qualitative research in anthropology aims to comprehensively describe human behavior and the contexts in which it occurs while quantitative research seeks patterns in numerical data that can explain aspects of human behavior. Quantitative patterns can be gleaned from statistical analyses, maps, charts, graphs, and textual descriptions. Surveys are a common quantitative technique that usually involves closed-ended questions in which respondents select their responses from a list of pre-defined choices such as their degree of agreement or disagreement, multiple-choice answers, and rankings of items. While surveys usually lack the sort of contextual detail associated with qualitative research, they tend to be relatively easy to code numerically and, as a result, can be easier to analyze than qualitative data. Surveys are also useful for gathering specific data points within a large population, something that is challenging to do with many qualitative techniques.

Anthropological nutritional analysis is an area of research that commonly relies on collecting quantitative data. Nutritional anthropologists explore how factors such as culture, the environment, and economic and political systems interplay to impact human health and nutrition. They may count the calories people consume and expend, document patterns of food consumption, measure body weight and body mass, and test for the presence of parasite infections or nutritional deficiencies. In her ethnography Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa (1993), Katherine Dettwyler described how she conducted nutritional research in Mali, which involved weighing, measuring, and testing her research subjects to collect a variety of quantitative data to help her understand the causes and consequences of child malnutrition.

Mixed Methods

In recent years, anthropologists have begun to combine ethnography with other types of research methods. These mixed-method approaches integrate qualitative and quantitative evidence to provide a more comprehensive analysis. For instance, anthropologists can combine ethnographic data with questionnaires, statistical data, and a media analysis. Anthropologist Leo Chavez used mixed methods to conduct the research for his book The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (2008). He started with a problem: how has citizenship been discussed as an identity marker in the mainstream media in the United States, especially among those labeled as Latinos. He then looked for a variety of types of data and relied on ethnographic case studies and on quantitative data from surveys and questionnaires. Chavez also analyzed a series of visual images from photographs, magazine covers, and cartoons that depicted Latinos to explore how they are represented in the American mainstream.

Mixed methods can be particularly useful when conducting problem-oriented research on complex, technologically advanced societies such as the United States. Detailed statistical and quantitative data are often available for those types of societies. Additionally, the general population is usually literate and somewhat comfortable with the idea of filling out a questionnaire.

ETHNOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES AND PERSPECTIVES

Cultural relativism and ethnocentrism.

The guiding philosophy of modern anthropology is cultural relativism —the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their culture rather than our own. Anthropologists do not judge other cultures based on their values nor view other cultural ways of doing things as inferior. Instead, anthropologists seek to understand people’s beliefs within the system they have for explaining things.

Cultural relativism is an important methodological consideration when conducting research. In the field, anthropologists must temporarily suspend their own value, moral, and esthetic judgments and seek to understand and respect the values, morals, and esthetics of the other culture on their terms. This can be a challenging task, particularly when a culture is significantly different from the one in which they were raised.

During my first field experience in Brazil, I learned firsthand how challenging cultural relativism could be. Preferences for physical proximity and comfort talking about one’s body are among the first differences likely to be noticed by U.S. visitors to Brazil. Compared to Americans, Brazilians generally are much more comfortable standing close, touching, holding hands, and even smelling one another and often discuss each other’s bodies. Children and adults commonly refer to each other using playful nicknames that refer to their body size, body shape, or skin color. Neighbors and even strangers frequently stopped me on the street to comment on the color of my skin (It concerned some as being overly pale or pink—Was I ill? Was I sunburned?), the texture of my hair (How did I get it so smooth? Did I straighten my hair?), and my body size and shape (“You have a nice bust, but if you lost a little weight around the middle you would be even more attractive!”).

During my first few months in Brazil, I had to remind myself constantly that these comments were not rude, disrespectful, or inappropriate as I would have perceived them to be in the United States. On the contrary, it was one of the ways that people showed affection toward me. From a culturally relativistic perspective, the comments demonstrated that they cared about me, were concerned with my well-being, and wanted me to be part of the community. Had I not taken a culturally relativistic view at the outset and instead judged the actions based on my cultural perspective, I would have been continually frustrated and likely would have confused and offended people in the community. And offending your informants and the rest of the community certainly is not conducive to completing high-quality ethnography! Had I not fully understood the importance of body contact and physical proximity in communication in Brazil, I would have missed an important component of the culture.

Another perspective that has been rejected by anthropologists is ethnocentrism —the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as a stick by which to measure all other cultures. People who are ethnocentric view their own cultures as central and normal and reject all other cultures as inferior and morally suspect. As it turns out, many people and cultures are ethnocentric to some degree; ethnocentrism is a common human experience. Why do we respond the way we do? Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we believe what we believe? Most people find these kinds of questions difficult to answer. Often the answer is simply “because that is how it is done.” They believe what they believe because that is what one normally believes and doing things any other way seems wrong.

Ethnocentrism is not a useful perspective in contexts in which people from different cultural backgrounds come into close contact with one another, as is the case in many cities and communities throughout the world. People increasingly find that they must adopt culturally relativistic perspectives in governing communities and as a guide for their interactions with members of the community. For anthropologists in the field, cultural relativism is especially important. We must set aside our innate ethnocentrisms and let cultural relativism guide our inquiries and interactions with others so that our observations are not biased. Cultural relativism is at the core of the discipline of anthropology.

Objectivity and Activist Anthropology

Despite the importance of cultural relativism, it is not always possible and at times is inappropriate to maintain complete objectivity in the field. Researchers may encounter cultural practices that are an affront to strongly held moral values or that violate the human rights of a segment of a population. In other cases, they may be conducting research in part to advocate for a particular issue or for the rights of a marginalized group.

Take, for example, the practice of female genital cutting (FGC), also known as female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice that is common in various regions of the world, especially in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Such practices involving modification of female genitals for non-medical and cultural reasons range from clitoridectomy (partial or full removal of the clitoris) to infibulation, which involves removal of the clitoris and the inner and outer labia and suturing to narrow the vaginal opening, leaving only a small hole for the passage of urine and menstrual fluid  Anthropologists working in regions where such practices are common often understandably have a strong negative opinion, viewing the practice as unnecessary medically and posing a risk of serious infection, infertility, and complications from childbirth. They may also be opposed to it because they feel that it violates the right of women to experience sexual pleasure, something they likely view as a fundamental human right. Should the anthropologist intervene to prevent girls and women from being subjected to this practice?

Anthropologist Janice Boddy studied FGC/FGM in rural northern Sudan and sought to explain it from a culturally relativistic perspective. She found that the practice persists, in part, because it is believed to preserve a woman’s chastity and curb her sexual desire, making her less likely to have affairs once she is married. Boddy’s research showed how the practice makes sense in the context of a culture in which a woman’s sexual conduct is a symbol of her family’s honor, which is important culturally. [5]

Boddy’s relativistic explanation helps make the practice comprehensible and allows cultural outsiders to understand how it is internally culturally coherent. But the question remains. Once anthropologists understand why people practice FGC/FGM, should they accept it? Because they uncover the cultural meaning of a practice, must they maintain a neutral stance or should they fight a practice viewed as an injustice? How does an anthropologist know what is right?

Unfortunately, answers to these questions are rarely simple, and anthropologists as a group do not always agree on an appropriate professional stance and responsibility. Nevertheless, examining practices such as FGC/FGM can help us understand the debate over objectivity versus “activism” in anthropology more clearly. Some anthropologists feel that striving for objectivity in ethnography is paramount. That even if objectivity cannot be completely achieved, anthropologists’ ethnography should be free from as much subjective opinion as possible. Others take the opposite stance and produce anthropological research and writing as a means of fighting for equality and justice for disempowered or voiceless groups. The debate over how much (if any) activism is acceptable is ongoing. What is clear is that anthropologists are continuing to grapple with the contentious relationship between objectivity and activism in ethnographic research.

Science and Humanism

Anthropologists have described their field as the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. Early anthropologists fought to legitimize anthropology as a robust scientific field of study. To do so, they borrowed methods and techniques from the physical sciences and applied them to anthropological inquiry. Indeed, anthropology today is categorized as a social science in most academic institutions in the United States alongside sociology, psychology, economics, and political science. However, in recent decades, many cultural anthropologists have distanced themselves from science-oriented research and embraced more-humanistic approaches, including symbolic and interpretive perspectives. Interpretive anthropology treats culture as a body of “texts” rather than attempting to test a hypothesis based on deductive or inductive reasoning. The texts present a particular picture from a particular subjective point of view. Interpretive anthropologists believe that it is not necessary (or even possible) to objectively interrogate a text. Rather, they study the texts to untangle the various webs of meaning embedded in them. Consequently, interpretive anthropologists include the context of their interpretations, their own perspectives and, importantly, how the research participants view themselves and the meanings they attribute to their lives.

Anthropologists are unlikely to conclude that a single approach is best. Instead, anthropologists can apply any and all of the approaches that best suit their particular problem. Anthropology is unique among academic disciplines for the diversity of approaches used to conduct research and for the broad range of orientations that fall under its umbrella.

Science in Anthropology For a discussion of science in anthropology, see the following article published by the American Anthropological Association: AAA Responds to Public Controversy Over Science in Anthropology .

Observation and Participant Observation

Of the various techniques and tools used to conduct ethnographic research, observation in general and participant observation in particular are among the most important. Ethnographers are trained to pay attention to everything happening around them when in the field—from routine daily activities such as cooking dinner to major events such as an annual religious celebration. They observe how people interact with each other, how the environment affects people, and how people affect the environment. It is essential for anthropologists to rigorously document their observations, usually by writing field notes and recording their feelings and perceptions in a personal journal or diary.

As previously mentioned, participant observation involves ethnographers observing while they participate in activities with their informants. This technique is important because it allows the researcher to better understand why people do what they do from an emic perspective. Malinowski noted that participant observation is an important tool by which “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.” [6]

To conduct participant observation, ethnographers must live with or spend considerable time with their informants to establish a strong rapport with them. Rapport is a sense of trust and a comfortable working relationship in which the informant and the ethnographer are at ease with each other and agreeable to working together.

Participant observation was an important part of my own research. In 2003, I spent six months living in two Mayan villages in highland Chiapas, Mexico. I was conducting ethnographic research on behalf of the Science Museum of Minnesota to document changes in huipil textile designs. Huipiles (pronounced “we-peel-ayes”) are a type of hand-woven blouse that Mayan women in the region weave and wear, and every town has its own style and designs. At a large city market, one can easily identify the town each weaver is from by the colors and designs of her huipiles . For hundreds of years, huipil designs changed very little. Then, starting around 1960, the designs and colors of huipiles in some of the towns began to change rapidly. I was interested in learning why some towns’ designs were changing more rapidly than other towns’ were and in collecting examples of huipiles to supplement the museum’s existing collection.

I spent time in two towns, Zinacantán and San Andrés Larráinzar. Zinacantán was located near the main city, San Cristóbal de las Casas. It received many tourists each year and had regularly established bus and van routes that locals used to travel to San Cristóbal to buy food and other goods. Some of the men in the town had worked in the United States and returned with money to build or improve their family homes and businesses. Other families were supported by remittances from relatives working in the United States or in other parts of Mexico. San Andrés, on the other hand, was relatively isolated and much further from San Cristóbal. Most families there relied on subsistence farming or intermittent agricultural labor and had limited access to tourism or to outside communities. San Andrés was also the site of a major indigenous revolt in the mid-1990s that resulted in greater autonomy, recognition, and rights for indigenous groups throughout Mexico. Politically and socially, it was a progressive community in many ways but remained conservative in others.

I first asked people in Zinacantán why their huipil designs, motifs, and colors seemed to change almost every year. Many women said that they did not know. Others stated that weaving was easy and could be boring so they liked to make changes to keep the huipiles interesting and to keep weaving from getting dull. When I asked people in San Andrés what they thought about what the women in Zinacantán had said, the San Andrés women replied that “Yes, perhaps they do get bored easily. But we in San Andrés are superior weavers and we don’t need to change our designs.” Neither response seemed like the full story behind the difference.

Though I spent hundreds of hours observing women preparing to weave, weaving, and selling their textiles to tourists, I did not truly understand what the women were telling me until I tried weaving myself. When I watched them, the process seemed so easy and simple. They attached strings of thread vertically to two ends of the back-strap looms. When weaving, they increased and decreased the tension on the vertical threads by leaning backward and forward with the back strap and teased individual threads horizontally through the vertical threads to create the desired pattern. After each thread was placed, they pushed it down with great force using a smooth, flat wooden trowel. They did the entire process with great ease and fluidity. When I only watched and did not participate, I could believe the Zinacantán women when they told me weaving was easy.

When I began to weave, it took me several days simply to learn how to sit correctly with a back-strap loom and achieve the appropriate tension. I failed repeatedly at setting up the loom with vertically strung threads and never got close to being able to create a design. Thus, I learned through participant observation that weaving is an exceptionally difficult task. Even expert weavers who had decades of experience sometimes made mistakes as half-finished weavings and rejected textiles littered many homes. Although the women appeared to be able to multi-task while weaving (stoking the fire, calling after small children, cooking food), weaving still required a great deal of concentration to do well.

Through participant observation, I was able to recognize that other factors likely drove the changes in their textiles. I ultimately concluded that the rate of change in huipil design in Zinacantán was likely related to the pace of cultural change broadly in the community resulting from interactions between its residents and tourists and relatively frequent travel to a more-urban environment. Participant observation was an important tool in my research and is central to most ethnographic studies today.

Conversations and Interviews

Another primary technique for gathering ethnographic data is simply talking with people—from casual, unstructured conversations about ordinary topics to formal scheduled interviews about a particular topic. An important element for successful conversations and interviews is establishing rapport with informants. Sometimes, engaging in conversation is part of establishing that rapport. Ethnographers frequently use multiple forms of conversation and interviewing for a single research project based on their particular needs. They sometimes record the conversations and interviews with an audio recording device but more often they simply engage in the conversation and then later write down everything they recall about it. Conversations and interviews are an essential part of most ethnographic research designs because spoken communication is central to humans’ experiences.

Gathering Life Histories

Collecting a personal narrative of someone’s life is a valuable ethnographic technique and is often combined with other techniques. Life histories provide the context in which culture is experienced and created by individuals and describe how individuals have reacted, responded, and contributed to changes that occurred during their lives. They also help anthropologists be more aware of what makes life meaningful to an individual and to focus on the particulars of individual lives, on the tenor of their experiences and the patterns that are important to them. Researchers often include life histories in their ethnographic texts as a way of intimately connecting the reader to the lives of the informants.

The Genealogical Method

The genealogical (kinship) method has a long tradition in ethnography. Developed in the early years of anthropological research to document the family systems of tribal groups, it is still used today to discover connections of kinship , descent, marriage, and the overall social system. Because kinship and genealogy are so important in many nonindustrial societies, the technique is used to collect data on important relationships that form the foundation of the society and to trace social relationships more broadly in communities.

When used by anthropologists, the genealogical method involves using symbols and diagrams to document relationships. Circles represent women and girls, triangles represent men and boys, and squares represent ambiguous or unknown gender. Equal signs between individuals represent their union or marriage and vertical lines descending from a union represent parent-child relationships. The death of an individual and the termination of a marriage are denoted by diagonal lines drawn across the shapes and equal signs. Kinship charts are diagramed from the perspective of one person who is called the Ego, and all of the relationships in the chart are based on how the others are related to the Ego. Individuals in a chart are sometimes identified by numbers or names, and an accompanying list provides more-detailed information.

Key Informants

Within any culture or subculture, there are always particular individuals who are more knowledgeable about the culture than others and who may have more-detailed or privileged knowledge. Anthropologists conducting ethnographic research in the field often seek out such cultural specialists to gain a greater understanding of certain issues and to answer questions they otherwise could not answer. When an anthropologist establishes a rapport with these individuals and begins to rely more on them for information than on others, the cultural specialists are referred to as key informants or key cultural consultants.

Key informants can be exceptional assets in the field, allowing the ethnographer to uncover the meanings of behaviors and practices the researcher cannot otherwise understand. Key informants can also help researchers by directly observing others and reporting those observations to the researchers, especially in situations in which the researcher is not allowed to be present or when the researcher’s presence could alter the participants’ behavior. In addition, ethnographers can check information they obtained from other informants, contextualize it, and review it for accuracy. Having a key informant in the field is like having a research ally. The relationship can grow and become enormously fruitful.

A famous example of the central role that key informants can play in an ethnographer’s research is a man named Doc in William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society (1943) . In the late 1930s, Whyte studied social relations between street gangs and “corner boys” in a Boston urban slum inhabited by first- and second-generation Italian immigrants. A social worker introduced Whyte to Doc and the two hit it off. Doc proved instrumental to the success of Whyte’s research. He introduced Whyte to his family and social group and vouched for him in the tight-knit community, providing access that Whyte could not have gained otherwise.

Field Notes

Field notes are indispensable when conducting ethnographic research. Although making such notes is time-consuming, they form the primary record of one’s observations. Generally speaking, ethnographers write two kinds of notes: field notes and personal reflections. Field notes are detailed descriptions of everything the ethnographer observes and experiences. They include specific details about what happened at the field site, the ethnographer’s sensory impressions, and specific words and phrases used by the people observed. They also frequently include the content of conversations the ethnographer had and things the ethnographer overheard others say. Ethnographers also sometimes include their personal reflections on the experience of writing field notes. Often, brief notes are jotted down in a notebook while the anthropologist is observing and participating in activities. Later, they expand on those quick notes to make more formal field notes, which may be organized and typed into a report. It is common for ethnographers to spend several hours a day writing and organizing field notes.

Ethnographers often also keep a personal journal or diary that may include information about their emotions and personal experiences while conducting research. These personal reflections can be as important as the field notes. Ethnography is not an objective science. Everything researchers do and experience in the field is filtered through their personal life experiences. Two ethnographers may experience a situation in the field in different ways and understand the experience differently. For this reason, it is important for researchers to be aware of their reactions to situations and be mindful of how their life experiences affect their perceptions. In fact, this sort of reflexive insight can turn out to be a useful data source and analytical tool that improves the researcher’s understanding.

The work of anthropologist Renato Rosaldo provides a useful example of how anthropologists can use their emotional responses to fieldwork situations to advance their research. In 1981, Rosaldo and his wife, Michelle, were conducting research among the Ilongots of Northern Luzon in the Philippines. Rosaldo was studying men in the community who engaged in emotional rampages in which they violently murdered others by cutting off their heads. Although the practice had been banned by the time Rosaldo arrived, a longing to continue headhunting remained in the cultural psyche of the community.

Whenever Rosaldo asked a man why he engaged in headhunting, the answer was that rage and grief caused him to kill others. At the beginning of his fieldwork, Rosaldo felt that the response was overly simplistic and assumed that there had to be more to it than that. He was frustrated because he could not uncover a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Then, on October 11, 1981, Rosaldo’s wife was walking along a ravine when she tripped, lost her footing, and fell 65 feet to her death, leaving Rosaldo a grieving single father. In his essay “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” Rosaldo later wrote that it was his own struggle with rage as he grieved for his wife that helped him truly grasp what the Ilongot men meant when they described their grief and rage.

Only a week before completing the initial draft of an earlier version of this introduction, I rediscovered my journal entry, written some six weeks after Michelle’s death, in which I made a vow to myself about how I would return to writing anthropology, if I ever did so, by writing Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage . . . My journal went on to reflect more broadly on death, rage, and headhunting by speaking of my wish for the Ilongot solution; they are much more in touch with reality than Christians. So, I need a place to carry my anger – and can we say a solution of the imagination is better than theirs? And can we condemn them when we napalm villages? Is our rationale so much sounder than theirs? All this was written in despair and rage. [7]

Only through the very personal and emotionally devastating experience of losing his wife was Rosaldo able to understand the emic perspective of the headhunters. The result was an influential and insightful ethnographic account.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Ethical guidelines.

From the earliest days of anthropology as a discipline, concern about the ethical treatment of people who take part in studies has been an important consideration. Ethical matters are central to any research project and anthropologists take their ethical responsibilities particularly seriously. As discussed throughout this chapter, anthropologists are oriented toward developing empathy for their informants and understanding their cultures and experiences from an emic perspective. Many also have a sense of personal responsibility for the well-being of the local people with whom they work in the field.

The American Anthropological Association has developed a Code of Ethics that all anthropologists should follow in their work. Among the many ethical responsibilities outlined in the code, doing no harm, obtaining informed consent, maintaining subjects’ anonymity, and making the results of the research accessible are especially important responsibilities.

First and foremost, anthropologists must ensure that their involvement with a community does not harm or embarrass their informants. Researchers must carefully consider any potential harm associated with the research, including legal, emotional, political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions, and take steps to insulate their informants from such harm. Since it is not always possible to anticipate every potential repercussion at the outset, anthropologists also must continually monitor their work to ensure that their research design and methods minimize any risk.

Regrettably, the proscription to do no harm is a deceptively complex requirement. Despite their best efforts, anthropologists have run into ethical problems in the field. Work by Napoleon Chagnon among an isolated indigenous tribe of the Amazon, the Yonomami, is a well-known example of ethical problems in anthropological research. In his groundbreaking ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968), Chagnon portrayed the Yanomami as an intensely violent and antagonistic people. The ethnography was well received initially. However, not long after its publication, controversy erupted. Anthropologists and other scholars have accused Chagnon of encouraging the violence he documented, staging fights and scenes for documentary films and fabricating data.

Today, Do No Harm is a central ethical value in anthropology. However, it can be difficult to predict every challenge one may encounter in the field or after the work is published. Anthropologists must continually reevaluate their research and writing to ensure that it does not harm the informants or their communities. Before fieldwork begins, researchers from universities, colleges, and institutions usually must submit their research agendas to an institutional review board (IRB). IRBs review research plans to ensure that the proposed studies will not harm human subjects. In many cases, the IRB is aware of the unique challenges and promise of anthropological research and can guide the researcher in eliminating or mitigating potential ethical problems.

Obtain Informed Consent

In addition to taking care to do no harm, anthropologists must obtain informed consent from all of their informants before conducting any research. Informed consent is the informant’s agreement to take part in the study. Originally developed in the context of medical and psychological research, this ethical guideline is also relevant to anthropology. Informants must be aware of who the anthropologist is and the research topic, who is financially and otherwise supporting the research, how the research will be used, and who will have access to it. Finally, their participation must be optional and not coerced. They should be able to stop participating at any time and be aware of and comfortable with any risks associated with their participation.

In medical and psychological research settings in the United States, researchers typically obtain informed consent by asking prospective participants to sign a document that outlines the research and the risks involved in their participation, acknowledging that they agree to take part. In some anthropological contexts, however, this type of informed consent may not be appropriate. People may not trust the state, bureaucratic processes, or authority, for example. Asking them to sign a formal legal-looking document may intimidate them. Likewise, informed consent cannot be obtained with a signed document if many in the community cannot read. The anthropologist must determine the most appropriate way to obtain informed consent in the context of the particular research setting.

Maintain Anonymity and Privacy

Another important ethical consideration for anthropologists in the field is ensuring the anonymity and privacy of informants who need such protection. When I did research among undocumented Mexican immigrant college students, I recognized that my informants’ legal status put them at considerable risk. I took care to use pseudonyms for all of the informants, even when writing field notes. In my writing, I changed the names of the informants’ relatives, friends, schools, and work places to protect them from being identified. Maintaining privacy and anonymity is an important way for anthropologists to ensure that their involvement does no harm.

Make Results Accessible

Finally, anthropologists must always make their final research results accessible to their informants and to other researchers. For informants, a written report in the researcher’s native language may not be the best way to convey the results. Reports can be translated or the results can be converted into a more accessible format. Examples of creative ways in which anthropologists have made their results available include establishing accessible databases for their research data, contributing to existing databases, producing films that portray the results, and developing texts or recommendations that provide tangible assistance to the informants’ communities. Though it is not always easy to make research results accessible in culturally appropriate ways, it is essential that others have the opportunity to review and benefit from the research, especially those who participated in its creation.

WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

Analysis and interpretation of research findings.

Once all or most of the fieldwork is complete, ethnographers analyze their data and research findings before beginning to write. There are many techniques for data analysis from which to choose based on the strategy and goals of the research. Regardless of the particular technique, data analysis involves a systematic interpretation of what the researcher thinks the data mean. The ethnographer reviews all of the data collected, synthesizes findings from the review, and integrates those findings with prior studies on the topic. Once the analysis is complete, the ethnographer is ready to write an account of the fieldwork.

Ethnographic Authority

In recent years, anthropologists have expressed concern about how ethnographies should be written in terms of ethnographic authority: how ethnographers present themselves and their informants in text. In a nonfiction text, the author is a mediator between readers and the topic and the text is written to help readers understand an unfamiliar topic. In an ethnography, the topic is people, and people naturally vary in terms of their thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and perspectives. That is, they have individual voices. In the past, anthropologists commonly wrote ethnographic accounts as if they possessed the ultimate most complete scientific knowledge on the topic. Subsequently, anthropologists began to challenge that writing style, particularly when it did not include the voices of their informants in the text and analysis. Some of this criticism originated with feminist anthropologists who noted that women’s experiences and perspectives frequently were omitted and misrepresented in this style of writing. Others believed that this style of writing reinforced existing global power dynamics and privileges afforded to Western anthropologists’ voices as most important.

Polyvocality

In response to criticisms about ethnographic authority, anthropologists have begun to include polyvocality. A polyvocal text is one in which more than one person’s voice is presented, and its use can range from ensuring that informants’ perspectives are presented in the text while still writing in the researcher’s voice to including informants’ actual words rather than paraphrasing them and co-authoring the ethnography with an informant. A good example of polyvocality is anthropologist Ruth Behar’s book Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (1993). Behar’s book documents the life story of a Mexican street peddler, Esperanza Hernández, and their unique friendship. Large sections of the book are in Esperanza’s own words and discuss issues that are important to her. Behar also includes pieces of her own life story and an anthropological analysis of Esperanza’s story.

By using polyvocality, researchers can avoid writing from the perspective of the ultimate ethnographic authority. A polyvocal style also allows readers to be more involved in the text since they have the opportunity to form their own opinions about the ethnographic data and perhaps even critique the author’s analysis. It also encourages anthropologists to be more transparent when presenting their methods and data.

Reflexivity

Reflexivity is another relatively new approach to ethnographic research and writing. Beginning in the 1960s, social science researchers began to think more carefully about the effects of their life experiences, status, and roles on their research and analyses. They began to insert themselves into their texts, including information about their personal experiences, thoughts, and life stories and to analyze in the accounts how those characteristics affected their research and analysis.

Adoption of reflexivity is perhaps the most significant change in how ethnography is researched and written in the past 50 years. It calls on anthropologists to acknowledge that they are part of the world they study and thus can never truly be objective. Reflexivity has also contributed to anthropologists’ appreciation of the unequal power dynamics of research and the effects those dynamics can have on the results. Reflexivity reminds the ethnographer that there are multiple ways to interpret any given cultural scenario. By acknowledging how their backgrounds affect their interpretations, anthropologists can begin to remove themselves from the throne of ethnographic authority and allow other, less-empowered voices to be heard.

Discussion Questions

What is unique about ethnographic fieldwork and how did it emerge as a key strategy in anthropology?

How do traditional approaches to ethnographic fieldwork contrast with contemporary approaches?

What are some of the contemporary ethnographic fieldwork techniques and perspectives and why are they important to anthropology?

What are some of the ethical considerations in doing anthropological fieldwork and why are they important?

How do anthropologists transform their fieldwork data into a story that communicates meaning? How are reflexivity and polyvocality changing the way anthropologists communicate their work?

Contested identity: a dispute within a group about the collective identity or identities of the group. Cultural relativism : the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture and not our own. Culture : a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways. Deductive : reasoning from the general to the specific; the inverse of inductive reasoning. Deductive research is more common in the natural sciences than in anthropology. In a deductive approach, the researcher creates a hypothesis and then designs a study to prove or disprove the hypothesis. The results of deductive research can be generalizable to other settings. Diaspora: the scattering of a group of people who have left their original homeland and now live in various locations. Examples of people living in the diaspora are Salvadorian immigrants in the United States and Europe, Somalian refugees in various countries, and Jewish people living around the world. Emic: a description of the studied culture from the perspective of a member of the culture or insider. Ethnocentrism: the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures. Ethnography: the in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people. Etic: a description of the studied culture from the perspective of an observer or outsider. Indigenous: people who have continually lived in a particular location for a long period of time (prior to the arrival of others) or who have historical ties to a location and who are culturally distinct from the dominant population surrounding them. Other terms used to refer to indigenous people are aboriginal, native, original, first nation, and first people. Some examples of indigenous people are Native Americans of North America, Australian Aborigines, and the Berber (or Amazigh) of North Africa. Inductive: a type of reasoning that uses specific information to draw general conclusions. In an inductive approach, the researcher seeks to collect evidence without trying to definitively prove or disprove a hypothesis. The researcher usually first spends time in the field to become familiar with the people before identifying a hypothesis or research question. Inductive research usually is not generalizable to other settings. Key Informants: individuals who are more knowledgeable about their culture than others and who are particularly helpful to the anthropologist. Kinship: blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups. Land tenure: how property rights to land are allocated within societies, including how permissions are granted to access, use, control, and transfer land. Noble savage : an inaccurate way of portraying indigenous groups or minority cultures as innocent, childlike, or uncorrupted by the negative characteristics of “civilization.” Participant observation: a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged. Qualitative : anthropological research designed to gain an in-depth, contextualized understanding of human behavior. Quantitative : anthropological research that uses statistical, mathematical, and/or numerical data to study human behavior. Remittances: money that migrants laboring outside of the region or country send back to their hometowns and families. In Mexico, remittances make up a substantial share of the total income of some towns’ populations. Thick description: a term coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures to describe a detailed description of the studied group that not only explains the behavior or cultural event in question but also the context in which it occurs and anthropological interpretations of it. Undocumented: the preferred term for immigrants who live in a country without formal authorization from the state. Undocumented refers to the fact that these people lack the official documents that would legally permit them to reside in the country. Other terms such as illegal immigrant and illegal alien are often used to refer to this population. Anthropologists consider those terms to be discriminatory and dehumanizing. The word undocumented acknowledges the human dignity and cultural and political ties immigrants have developed in their country of residence despite their inability to establish formal residence permissions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

She received her B.A. in anthropology and Latin American studies from Macalester College, her M.A. in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an M.A. in education and instructional technology from the University of Saint Thomas, and her Ph.D. from CIESAS Occidente (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Socia l –Center for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology), based in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Katie views teaching and learning as central to her practice as an anthropologist and as mutually reinforcing elements of her professional life. She is the former chair of the Teaching Anthropology Interest Group (2016–2018) of the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association and currently serves as the online content editor for the Teaching and Learning Anthropology Journal . She has contributed to several open access textbook projects, both as an author and an editor, and views the affordability of quality learning materials as an important piece of the equity and inclusion puzzle in higher education. [8]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Behar, Ruth. Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story . Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993.

Boddy, Janice. Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Chagnon, Napoleon. Yanomamö: The Fierce People . New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.

Chavez, Leo. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens and the Nation . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Dettwyler, Katherine A. Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa . Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2014

Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion . London: Macmillian Press, 1894.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays . New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Gordon, Peter. “Numerical Cognition without Words: Evidence from Amazonia.” Science 306 no. 5695 (2004): 496–499.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea . London: Kegan Paul 1922.

Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization . New York: William Morrow and Company, 1928.

Miner, Horace. “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist 58 no. 3 (1956): 503-507.

Nelson, Katherine. 2015. Between Citizenship and Alienage: Flexible Identity Among Informally Authorized Mexican College Students in Minnesota , USA. PhD diss., CIESAS Occidente (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social – Institute for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology).

Rosaldo, Renato. “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” in Violence in War and Peace, edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe I. Bourgois, 150-156.  Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Saints, Scholars, Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland . Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1979.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. “Science and Linguistics.” MIT Technology Review : 42 (1940): 229–248.

Whyte, William Foote. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993[1943].

• Franz Boas, “Foreward,” in Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (New York: William Morrow, 1928). ↵
• Examples of Curtis’ photography can be found in Edward Curtis, The North American Indian: The Photographic Images (New York: Aperture, 2005). ↵
• Benjamin Lee Whorf, “Science and Linguistics,” MIT Technology Review 42 (1940): 229–248. ↵
• Peter Gordon, “Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia,” Science 306 no. 5695 (2004): 496-499. ↵
• Janice Bodd, Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). ↵
• Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Kegan Paul, 1922), 25. ↵
• Renato Rosaldo, “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” in Violence in War and Peace , ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe I. Bourgois (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 171. ↵
• See: http://perspectives.americananthro.org/ and https://textbooks.opensuny.org/global-perspectives-on-gender/ ↵

People who have continually lived in a particular location for a long period of time (prior to the arrival of others) or who have historical ties to a location and who are culturally distinct from the dominant population surrounding them.

How property rights to land are allocated within societies, including how permissions are granted to access, use, control, and transfer land.

A dispute within a group about the collective identity or identities of the group.

The in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people.

A term coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz to describe a detailed description of the studied group that not only explains the behavior or cultural event in question but also the context in which it occurs and anthropological interpretations of it.

A type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.

A description of the studied culture from the perspective of a member of the culture or insider.

A description of the studied culture from the perspective of an observer or outsider.

An inaccurate way of portraying indigenous groups or minority cultures as innocent, childlike, or uncorrupted by the negative characteristics of “civilization.”

The preferred term for immigrants who live in a country without formal authorization from the state

The scattering of a group of people who have left their original homeland and now live in various locations.

A type of reasoning that uses specific information to draw general conclusions. In an inductive approach, the researcher seeks to collect evidence without trying to definitively prove or disprove a hypothesis

Reasoning from the general to the specific; the inverse of inductive reasoning.

Anthropological research designed to gain an in-depth, contextualized understanding of human behavior.

Anthropological research that uses statistical, mathematical, and/or numerical data to study human behavior.

The idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture and not our own.

The tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures.

Money that migrants laboring outside of the region or country send back to their hometowns and families. In Mexico, remittances make up a substantial share of the total income of some towns’ populations.

Blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups.

Individuals who are more knowledgeable about their culture than others and who are particularly helpful to the anthropologist.

Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition Copyright © 2020 by American Anthropological Association is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Anthropology and the Ethnographic Imagination (849L6)

15 credits, Level 7 (Masters)

Autumn teaching

You examine the establishment of ethnography as the primary method of anthropological research and as the main genre of anthropological writing.

You trace the development of ethnography from Malinowski to the present, through:

• an in-depth focus on specific 'classic' ethnographic monographs
• a critical examination of how they are understood and analysed today.

Contact hours and workload

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2024/25. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum. We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.