Drawing Culture: an architectural agenda (original) (raw)

Anthropology is the science that studies peoples past and present, their cultures, and their histories as groups. When anthropologists undertake a study of an unfamiliar culture, they typically write ethnography. Ethnographic studies look at the patterns of interpretation that members of a cultural group invoke as they go about their daily lives.

An ethnography is a highly descriptive overview of a group’s knowledge, its beliefs, its social organization, how it reproduces itself, and the material world in which it exists.3 In short, ethnography is a process referred to by Clifford Geertz as “Writing Culture”. The purpose for preparing ethnographic field reports is not only to describe and explain, but also to unfold a view of the world in which cultural alternatives can be measured against one another and used as a guide for the production of space (i.e. Design).