Person-centered ethnography is an approach within psychological anthropology that draws on techniques and theories from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to understand how individuals relate to and interact with their sociocultural context.
Levy, a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, to describe his psychodynamically informed approach to interviewing during his anthropological fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal.
Not surprisingly, asking about these more intimate topics generally requires much longer acquaintance with an interviewee than do questions about more publicly available knowledge.
Within these, major topics of interest typically include: the experience of the self, morality, the body, illness and healing, emotions, and family relationships.
Person-centered interviewing comes out of a psychodynamically informed tradition within Culture and Personality studies and American psychological anthropology and shares a number of methodological and thematic concerns with clinical ethnography.