Ethnography

Historical Overview

Where a historical narrative of ethnography's origins might begin is a matter of reconstruction and interpretation. Although widely associated with anthropology and its 19th-century European origins, other sources can be identified. Some scholars locate its roots in ancient Greece, identifying Herodotus and Thucydides as proto-ethnographers because of the extensive detail in their travel accounts. Others look to non-Western worlds. David Deal and Laura Hostetler, for example, find a form of ethnography in bound collections of 18th-century Chinese hand-painted illustrations and handwritten texts that reveal how imperial China viewed culturally “other” populations—those minority ethnic groups living in frontier regions under imperial Chinese control. Still others oppose anthropology as the source of ethnography by pointing to its use in European colonial administrative practices and by missionaries, explorers, government officials, military officers, and local leaders before becoming identified with that discipline.

Origins aside, both anthropology and sociology have a rich history of ethnographic writing. Malinowski is widely credited with giving modern ethnography its character by arguing that its principal method of collecting data should consist of extended and immersed field work among the people being researched, preferably in their native language and in collaboration with native researchers. This established participant-observer ethnography as the expected form, replacing the late 19th-century armchair ethnography that had based its analyses on the accounts of the earlier travel writers, missionaries, colonial officers, and others. In the so-called Chicago School in the United States, anthropology and sociology were initially linked and used the same methods. As they separated into two distinct disciplines, sociology took the name participant observation for its more urban-focused studies of life within national borders, whereas anthropology claimed the term ethnography, using the same participant observation methods, for its predominantly overseas studies.

Riding the waves of colonization, decolonization, and finally globalization, ethnography has also been transformed. In the first half of the 20th century, ethnography was often used in support of a religiously and politically motivated, evolution-of-civilization theory of cultural progress. Moving away from this view in the 1950s, ethnography became the vehicle for defending a cultural relativism that stressed the uniqueness of predominantly non-Western cultures in a culturally homogenizing world. From the 1980s onward, however, ethnographic findings were increasingly used to bolster a growing cultural self-critique in the West. In this process, the classic one-ethnographer—one-field (tribe, neighborhood, etc.) approach has gradually given way to the realization that in the (post-) modern, globalized world, ethnography must evolve into a multi-sited, interpretive endeavor, as “native cultures” can no longer be restricted to the confines of single spaces and set time frames. This broadening of the field has stimulated ethnography to evolve from an anthropology-dominated research instrument into a research strategy increasingly attractive across the social sciences, and it is [Page 348]now practiced by many who have no formal training in anthropology departments. These much broader applications of ethnography raise the question whether, and to what extent, political ethnography, organizational ethnography, and other “marked” forms are developing distinctive sets of ethnographic practices reflecting the settings, actors, and theoretical questions that are of particular concern to them.

...