Ethnography

Ethnography asWriting About the “Other”

[Page 619]The word ethnography was originally located in the field of anthropology referring to the written product of an anthropological study of a people, community, or group (not to a methodology). Many scholars name Bronislaw Malinowski as the progenitor of ethnography, although some scholars name W. E. B. Du Bois and his field work in Philadelphia as the historical foundation for their ethnographic research.

During World War I, Malinowski studied the “culture” of the people on the Trobriand Islands. He lived among them, taking field notes of how they organized, gave meaning to, and did family, government, food gathering and meals, rituals, life cycle events, religion, work and economy, and so on. His efforts were long term and based on being there and living with the people of the Trobriand Islands. His perspective was holistic and sought to understand how the parts constitute the whole and the whole constituted the parts; he sought to understand what and how things meant from the perspective of the people studied and he focused on their culture.

One can see in Malinowski’s research some of the foundational constructs associated with ethnography: long-term study in which the researcher becomes a participant in the site, the study of a bounded site (i.e., the conceptualization of an identifiable distinct community), holism (i.e., understanding the parts within the context of the whole), attention to the culture of the people, and a privileging of an emic understanding. However, one can also see the foundations of debates and disputes associated with ethnography. His field notes included ethnocentric commentary, raising questions not only about his work but about whether ethnographers can truly eschew their own cultural positionalities. Questions have also been raised about assumptions underlying holism and functionalist perspectives; that is, is it indeed the case that the various cultural systems and institutions of a culture nicely fit together and create a monolithic and coherent whole? Although Malinowski studied a group of people who were relatively isolated and whose culture might be studied as a bounded whole, it seems prima facie that overwhelmingly people live in and across many communities and groups and thus the concept of a bounded, integral whole seems a non sequitur. Also of importance is the relationship of the researcher and the people in the study. For Europeans, the people of the Trobriand Islands were an exotic other, and the ethnographic study of them—no matter how well intended—marginalized them as strange without sufficiently causing Europeans to see themselves as the other nor to question their own assumed hierarchy and the power relations that underlie exoticism. Such exoticism leaves unspoken questions about the responsibilities of the ethnographer to the participants and the difficulties of seeing the participants as more than objects of a study.

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