ethnography - Cultural and Social anthropology, Other related fields

A detailed description of the culture of a particular society, based on fieldwork by ethnographers or anthropologists, using the method of participant observation. In Europe, the subject is often referred to as ethnology.

Ethnography (from the Greek ἔθνος ethnos = nation and γράφειν graphein = writing) refers to the genre of writing that presents qualitative description of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other. Several academic traditions, in particular the constructivist and relativist paradigms, claim ethnographic research as a valid research method.

Cultural and Social anthropology

Cultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research and their canonical texts are mostly ethnographies: e.g. social anthropologists today place such a high value on actually doing ethnographic research that ethnology—the comparative synthesis of ethnographic information—is rarely the foundation for a career. Within cultural anthropology, there are several sub-genres of ethnography. Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, anthropologists began writing "confessional" ethnographies that intentionally exposed the nature of ethnographic research. Later "reflexive" ethnographies refined the technique to translate cultural differences by representing their effects on the ethnographer. In the 1980s, the rhetoric of ethnography was subjected to intense scrutiny within the discipline, under the general influence of literary theory and post-colonial/post-structuralist thought. "Experimental" ethnographies that reveal the ferment of the discipline include Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by Michael Taussig, Debating Muslims by Michael F.

Cultural anthropologists, such as Clifford Geertz, study and interpret cultural diversity through ethnography based on field work.

Other related fields

Sociology and cultural studies also produce ethnography. Urban sociology and the Chicago School in particular are associated with ethnographic research, although some of the most well-known examples (including Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by Clair Drake) were influenced by an anthropologist, Lloyd Warner, who happened to be in the sociology department at Chicago. Symbolic interactionism developed from the same tradition and yielded several excellent sociological ethnographies, including Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine, which documents the early history of fantasy role-playing games. But even though many sub-fields and theoretical perspectives within sociology use ethnographic methods, ethnography is not the sine qua non of the discipline, as it is in cultural anthropology.

Education, Ethnomusicology, Performance Studies, Folklore, and [Linguistics] are others fields which have made extensive use of ethnography. The American anthropologist George Spindler (Stanford University) was a pioneer in applying ethnographic methodology to the classroom. James Spradley is another well-known ethnographer, especially for his book, The Ethnographic Interview, published in 1979.

Ethnographic methods have been used to study business settings.

Increasingly, universities (such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) are using ethnographic methods as a technique to encourage undergraduate research in the humanities. For example, the Ethnography of the University (EOTU) program sponsors undergraduate research on UIUC and archives it in web-accessible form for the UIUC community.

Anthropologists like Daniel Miller and Mary Douglas have used ethnographic data to answer academic questions about consumers and consumption. Businesses, too, have found ethnographers helpful for understanding how people use products and services, as indicated in the increasing use of ethnographic methods to understand consumers and consumption, or for new product development (sometimes called 'design ethnography'). The recent Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (EPIC) conference, co-sponsored by Intel and Microsoft, is evidence of this. Where focus groups fail to inform marketers about what people really do, ethnography links what people say to what they actually do—avoiding the pitfalls that come from relying only on self-reported, focus-group data.