Ethnography
The term ethnography is from Greek (ἔθνος éthnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω gráphō "I write") and encompasses the ways in which ancient authors described and analyzed foreign cultures.
[10] There is no ancient term or concept applicable to ethnography, and those writers probably did not consider the study of other cultures as a distinct mode of inquiry from history.
[11] Gerhard Friedrich Müller developed the concept of ethnography as a separate discipline whilst participating in the Second Kamchatka Expedition (1733–43) as a professor of history and geography.
[12] August Ludwig von Schlözer and Christoph Wilhelm Jacob Gatterer of the University of Göttingen introduced the term into the academic discourse in an attempt to reform the contemporary understanding of world history.
In this regard, the best way to integrate ethnography in a quantitative research would be to use it to discover and uncover relationships and then use the resultant data to test and explain the empirical assumptions.
[16] Ethnography is an effective methodology in qualitative geographic research that focuses on people's perceptions and experiences and their traditionally place-based immersion within a social group.
Robert M. Emerson, Rachel Fretz, and Linda Shaw summarize this idea in their book Writing Ethnographic Field Notes using a common metaphor: "the fieldworker cannot and should not attempt to be a fly on the wall.
Research can range from an objectivist account of fixed, observable behaviors to an interpretive narrative describing "the interplay of individual agency and social structure.
Cultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research and their canonical texts, which are mostly ethnographies: e.g. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by Bronisław Malinowski, Ethnologische Excursion in Johore (1875) by Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead, The Nuer (1940) by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Naven (1936, 1958) by Gregory Bateson, or "The Lele of the Kasai" (1963) by Mary Douglas.
The typical ethnography is a document written about a particular people, almost always based at least in part on emic views of where the culture begins and ends.
Material culture, technology, and means of subsistence are usually treated next, as they are typically bound up in physical geography and include descriptions of infrastructure.
Famous examples include Tristes Tropiques (1955) by Lévi-Strauss, The High Valley by Kenneth Read, and The Savage and the Innocent by David Maybury-Lewis, as well as the mildly fictionalized Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (Laura Bohannan).
Famous examples include Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight by Clifford Geertz, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco by Paul Rabinow, The Headman and I by Jean-Paul Dumont, and Tuhami by Vincent Crapanzano.
This critical turn in sociocultural anthropology during the mid-1980s can be traced to the influence of the now classic (and often contested) text, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, (1986) edited by James Clifford and George Marcus.
[38] Where Geertz's and Turner's interpretive anthropology recognized subjects as creative actors who constructed their sociocultural worlds out of symbols, postmodernists attempted to draw attention to the privileged status of the ethnographers themselves.
[44][43][45][46] 1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Sociology is another field which prominently features ethnographies.
Du Bois, Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr.
They include Living and Dying at Murray Manor, which describes the social worlds of a nursing home; Describing Care: Image and Practice in Rehabilitation, which documents the social organization of patient subjectivity in a physical rehabilitation hospital; Caretakers: Treating Emotionally Disturbed Children, which features the social construction of behavioral disorders in children; and Oldtimers and Alzheimer's: The Descriptive Organization of Senility, which describes how the Alzheimer's disease movement constructed a new subjectivity of senile dementia and how that is organized in a geriatric hospital.
In this sense, Tony Salvador, Genevieve Bell, and Ken Anderson describe design ethnography as being "a way of understanding the particulars of daily life in such a way as to increase the success probability of a new product or service or, more appropriately, to reduce the probability of failure specifically due to a lack of understanding of the basic behaviors and frameworks of consumers.
"[49] Sociologist Sam Ladner argues in her book,[50] that understanding consumers and their desires requires a shift in "standpoint", one that only ethnography provides.
Essentially, Fine maintains that researchers are typically not as ethical as they claim or assume to be — and that "each job includes ways of doing things that would be inappropriate for others to know".
[56] In 2009, the Association adopted a code of ethics, stating: Anthropologists have "moral obligations as members of other groups, such as the family, religion, and community, as well as the profession".
[56] The code of ethics notes that anthropologists are part of a wider scholarly and political network, as well as human and natural environment, which needs to be reported on respectfully.
[56] The Association acknowledges that the code is limited in scope; ethnographic work can sometimes be multidisciplinary, and anthropologists need to be familiar with ethics and perspectives of other disciplines as well.
[72] Genealogy or kinship commonly plays a crucial role in the structure of non-industrial societies, determining both social relations and group relationship to the past.
[73] A modern example of this technology in application, is the use of captured audio in smart devices, transcribed to issue targeted adverts (often reconciled vs other metadata, or product development data for designers.
[75] Gabriele de Seta's paper "Three Lies of Digital Ethnography"[76] explores some of the methodological questions more central to a specifically ethnographical approach to internet studies, drawing upon Fine's classic text.
Morgan's main objective was to highlight that the daily individual tasks that the beavers performed were complex communicative acts that had been passed down for generations.
The annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association began to host the Multispecies Salon,[80] a collection of discussions, showcases, and other events for anthropologists.
Meaning that relational ethnography doesn't take an object nor a bounded group that is defined by its members shared social features nor a specific location that is delimited by the boundaries of a particular area.
