Ethnography
(Redirected from Ethnographic)
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology studying individual cultures, often involving "fieldwork" and subjective qualitative methods, such as by traveling to an exotic people or group, staying for an extended period, and creating a writing on one's observations and impressions. This risks becoming anecdotal evidence of dubious value and risks being influenced by the writer's own agendas and biases. However, this may appeal to individuals disliking rigorous quantitative methods and wishing to push an agenda. After the rise of Boasian anthropology and race denialism, the terms "cultural anthropology" or "social anthropology" are apparently often preferred to ethnography, presumably so as to avoid any impression that races are being studied.
- 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.[1]
