Etymologically, the word “ethnography” originated from two Greek words
ethnos (people) and graphia (writing). Therefore Ethnography accounts for
the written presentation of a people or a population. Ethnography has its
origins in the discipline of anthropology. Ethnography means a systematic
detailed study about a particular culture or society, primarily based on
fieldwork. Ethnographic research is conducted in the natural setting by
covering everyday activities of the subjects under qualitative investigation.
It also attempts to describe and interpret the symbolic and contextual meanings
of the practices that are conducted in the natural setting in every usual day.
In anthropology, ethnography provides a thick description of a particular
community, society, or culture. During ethnographic fieldwork, a researcher
collects data that he/she analyzes, describes and interprets in order to present
the ethnographic account. This written account may be in the form of an
article, a book, or film. The conventional ethnographic approach presumes
cultures as whole units that can be grasped or comprehended as such.
Traditional ethnographers live in small communities and study various aspects
of their culture such as customs, behavior, beliefs, social life, economic
activities, politics, and religion. Today for ethnographers a field could be
virtual site, where people interact with each other every second. For example,
they can conduct ethnographic research in social networking sites which
include Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and many other apps. An important
aspect of ethnographic research is to develop the skill to record the field data
in a systematic way.
Ethnographic study requires a holistic approach (from holos meaning whole),
as it is based on the idea that none of the properties of a complex system,
be it physical, biological or social, can be understood and explained in
isolation, but only if you consider all these components together. The whole,
the structure, is the one that determines the role and importance of its parts
(Bãlan, 2011).
The holistic ethnographic approach involves:
1) An overview of the environmental context of a society, its geographical
location, climate, vegetation and fauna (what in anthropology is called habitat). In this context, the local knowledge of flora and fauna must be
presented, under the name of ethno-botanical and entomological notions,
which are then explained and translated in terms of Western natural
sciences.
2) The description of material culture, i.e. the methods and means local
people employed to make a living, specific technologies, which are also
called elements of infrastructure and economic life, in the context of the
fact that they are essentially determined by the environmental conditions
presented before.
3) The description of non-material culture, which is preceded by a history
of the society in question, to the extent that it can be reconstructed from
data collected both on-site and from other sources. The elements of
non-material culture are the spoken language, together with its history
and its dialects, social structures (family relations, the rules that establish
the status of individuals according to gender, age, membership of a
particular clan, and the criteria of association between individuals),
explicit and implicit rules of social behaviour, religious ideas and rituals,
customs, ceremonial practices. Behind these more or less visible
elements, are the mental structures underlying them, such as the values
that members of the community share and ideas that constitute their
general image of the world – which in philosophical terminology is
called Weltanschauung (literally, “worldview”) – and the “ethos” of
culture, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) names it. (Bãlan, 2011)
Geertz defined culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in
symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop
their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (Geertz, 1973). One culture’s
ethos is the moral and aesthetic aspect of life and is the force that determines
all aspects of individual behaviour in that culture, the values and ideas that
together configure the motivation for all people’s actions: “a people’s ethos
is the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style
and mood; it is the underlying attitude toward themselves and their world
that life reflects” (Geertz, 1973). Ultimately the ethos is the underlying force
that determines in every culture the specific way of being human and
configures all the actions and attitudes of its members, so that it was always
the subject of a special interest from the part of ethnographers. (Bãlan, 2011)
In ethnographic study, a researcher involved himself/herself in the field and
lives with the community under exploration and gathers extensive data in
the field notes by using different methods, tools and techniques. Some of
these methods are discussed in detail in unit 11. “Ethnography in practice
has evolved from the classic approach, where it was assumed the researcher
could retain objectivity when exploring a new culture, to reflexive
ethnography, where the role and background of the researcher is included as
an integral element of the ethnographic undertaking” (Crowley-Henry, 2009).
According to Bãlan (2011), following are some of the famous ethnographic
monographs:
- The League of the Ho-de-no-or-nee or Iroquois (1851) by L.H Morgan,
- Ethnologische Excursion in Johor (1875), by Russian naturalist Nicholas
Miklouho-Maclay - The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by Bronis³aw Malinowski,
- Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead,
- The Nuer (1940) by E.E. Evans-Pritchard,
- Naven (1936) by Gregory Bateson,
- Tristes Tropiques (1955) by Claude Lévi-Strauss,
- The Lele of the Kasai (1963) by Mary Douglas,
- The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (1967) by Victor Turner,
- The! Kung San: Men, Women and work in a Foraging Society (1979) by Richard B. Lee,
- Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia (2009) by Bartholomew Dean (Bãlan, 2011).
In an ethnographic study different methods are used based on the topic and
aim of the research. Methods of the study are also dependent on the
methodological positioning of the researcher that enables him to answer the
relevant research question(s).
Some of the methods, tools and techniques that are used in ethnographic studies are:
- interview,
- observation,
- key informant,
- rapport building,
- questionnaire,
- Survey method
- focus group discussion,
- life histories,
- field diaries,
- historical method,
- genealogical method,
- participant observation.
According to Crowley-Henry (2009), “Given the variety of methods and
data collection tools open to ethnographers, ethnography can be malleable to
suit a particular research agenda, provided it is made clear how the researcher
is using the approach in his/her particular research undertaking”. The
underlying elements of ethnography are :
- the specificity of its study of a particular culture / subculture or population, and
- the use of observation in amassing field and contextual notes pertaining to that culture / sub-culture or population (Crowley-Henry, 2009).
In ethnographic work the researcher lives with or close to the people being
studied and interacts with them on a day-to-day basis for a long period,
usually a year or more. Fieldwork approach for a long period of time allows
the researcher to observe and examine all the aspects of cultural system,
specially those aspects that cannot be addressed through laboratory or survey
research. In ethnographic research they gather data from insider’s point of
view (emic approach). Emic approach is simply the understanding of the
study host(s) from their own system of meanings or perceptions. As
Malinowski (1922) pointed out in this work that the goal of ethnography is
“to grasp the native’s point of view to realize his vision of the world”
(Whitehead, 2005).
“Most anthropologists today point to Bronislaw Malinowski, author of such
landmark ethnographies as Argonauts of the Western Pacific (first published
in 1922), as a kind of founding father to ethnographic fieldwork, the practice
of “participant-observation.” Malinowski’s early twentieth-century
ethnographies were written in a voice removed and utterly unrevealing about
the nature of the ethnographer and his relationship to people studied. Since
Malinowski’s time, the personal account of fieldwork has been hidden away
in notes and diaries” (Hoey, 2013).
Ethnography also referred as a “thick description,” a term coined by
anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his book The Interpretation of Cultures
(1973) to narrate this type of anthropological research and writing. A thick
description explains the behavior or cultural event in question along with the
context in which it occurs. Ethnographic description also interprets the cultural
events in anthropological terms. Such descriptions help readers to 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 (Nelson, 2018).
“Good ethnography recognizes the transformative nature of fieldwork whereas
we search for answers to questions about people we may find ourselves in
the stories of others. Ethnography should be acknowledged as a mutual
product born of the intertwining of the lives of the ethnographer and his or
her subjects” (Hoey, 2013). “Fetterman (1998) describes the ethnographer
as:
…interested in understanding and describing a social and cultural scene from
the emic, or insider’s, perspective. The ethnographer is both storyteller and
scientist; the closer the reader of an ethnography comes to understanding the
native’s point of view, the better the story and the better the science” (CrowleyHenry, 2009).
Whitehead (2005) describes the following attributes of ethnography:
- It is a holistic approach to the study of cultural systems.
- It is a study of socio-cultural contexts, processes, and meanings within cultural systems.
- It is a study of cultural systems from both emic and etic perspectives
- It is a process of discovery, making inferences, and continuing inquiries in an attempt to achieve emic validity.
- It is an iterative process of learning episodes.
- It is an open-ended emergent learning process, and not a rigid investigator controlled experiment.
- It is a highly flexible and creative process.
- It is an interpretive, reflexive, and constructivist process.
- It requires daily and continuous recording of fieldnotes.
- It presents the world of its host population in human context Whitehead, 2005.