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The International Encylopedia of Anthropology
Ethnography is at the heart of social and cultural anthropology. This has been true since the inception of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century. In one of its earliest forms, anthropology was called "ethnography," the social or human partner to the discipline of geography. If geography was about the geographic features of places around the world, including those distant from academic centers in Europe, then ethnography was about the ethnographic, about who lived where, what their beliefs and customs were, the languages they spoke, the worlds they created, and the relations they had with one another. Since this period, some aspects of the definition of ethnography have remained stable while others have changed. Whereas ethnography was once mostly something to know, it is now understood as a way of knowing. That is, ethnography was once understood as a specific way of being, one that anthropologists sought to know for individual peoples, but it is now also understood as a specific way of knowing. As a way of knowing the world, ethnography is truly unique. The term "ethnography" has its roots in the Greek words ethnos (folk, the people) and grapho (to write). Ethnography is to write about people, society, and/or culture, but it is much more than writing. It is also a method and a theory. As a method, ethnography is an embodied, empirical, and experiential field-based way of knowing centered around participant observation. Ethnographic research requires participation, not just observation. It is to participate in rather than just to observe the daily life, logics, rhythms, and contradictions of a cultural group or society. As such, it requires discipline and commitment beyond what is visible to someone not trained in ethnographic methods. As a theory, ethnography is to start on the ground, with the concepts that ground people's lives, worldviews, actions, and words in ways particular to that community. Together, these require a sense of the ethnographic as the goal. To understand ethnography as both noun and adjective is to assess culture as a thing and the cultural as a modifier, taking both as key aspects of human life. The American Anthropological Association (2004) defines ethnography as "the description of cultural systems or an aspect of culture based on fieldwork in which the investigator is immersed in the ongoing everyday activities of the designated community for the purpose of describing the social context, relationships, and processes relevant to the topic under consideration." This definition builds on the long-standing practice of anthropology as a field science, as first and most fully articulated by Bronisław Malinowski in 1922. Malinowski described ethnographic research as an effort "to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world" ([1922] 1984, 25). This was to consider both the objective and the subjective aspects of human life as the goals of anthropology. Malinowski argued that to record The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
Cultural / Social Anthropology and Ethnography
Cultural / Social Anthropology and Ethnography, 2011
Ethnography is the seminal contribution and backbone of sociocultural anthropology. For most sociocultural anthropologists, ethnography provides the basis of almost everything we do as scholars, from pedagogy to publishing, theory to policy. This chapter offers practical advice for how to develop your ethnographic knowledge into a form for dissemination within and beyond the academy. Whether presented as a linear narrative, case studies, poetic fragments, anecdotes and quotes, life histories, reflexive engagement, or something else, the point of ethnography is to keep human experience at the heart of the text, to present a compelling portrait or argument, to construct a story that is meaningful and accessible, and to contribute toward building theories of human life. Ethnography is anthropology's most powerful way to tell, translate, analyze, and critique human experience. While this chapter is more about how to plan a publishing trajectory than how to write, it is worth noting that one can strive to write ethnography that is captivating as well as edifying.
Ethnography is a practice and an expression with a capacious historical past that necessarily included political, philosophical, spiritual aesthetic elements. The study of ethnography is to define culture, people and society and "who they are and what they might become". In brief, it grew out of a master discourse of colonization. Observing the history of ethnography, it is found, the style and approach of writing ethnography is not a constant process. During the changing of time the process is also evolving. And its subject matter and praxis are also changing. Due to the evolving of ethnography how it is different from its earlier period"s ethnography, this is the important question of Ethnography. Earlier ethnography was only bounded with social ethnography but in modern and postmodern time "social ethnography is replaced by "cultural ethnography. Postmodern ethnography is an ethnography that goes beyond its traditional counterpart by expanding its reflexivity and its commitment to the groups it studies; it questions its truth claims and experiments with new mode of repenting. Postmodern ethnography derives its new goals from post modernism. That"s why it rejects grand narrative and "Meta theories" of modernism, with their pre -conceived and sweeping statements. "Reflexivity" is a paramount concern of postmodern ethnography, based on the belief that for too long, the rule and power of the researcher have been ignored by ethnographers.
Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, 2013
Introduction Ethnography is a qualitative research method that has evolved out of ethnology within the broader field of cultural and social anthropology. With the emphasis in research conducted within mainstream psychology on positivistic quantitative research, ethnographic research within the field of psychology has been slow to gain stature as a viable and rigorous form of qualitative research within naturalistic settings. Definition Ethnography is a research methodology that seeks to explore and describe emic or etic knowledge about specific cultural groups and cultural phenomena, and thus contributing to the understanding of the social and cultural life of humans. The concept of ‘culture’ is defined broadly to include any group that share and engages within a common psychosocial experience, within a given space. What constitutes a given space – the field – is also defined broadly to include any geographical space, large or localized, or any virtual space, ...
Ethnography Wikipedia20191105 126595 2fumti
Ethnography (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω grapho "I write") is the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. An ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group. The word can thus be said to have a double meaning, which partly depends on whether it is used as a count noun or uncountable. [1] The resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group. [2][3][4] As a method of data collection, ethnography entails examining the behaviour of the participants in a certain specific social situation and also understanding their interpretation of such behaviour. [5] Dewan (2018) further elaborates that this behaviour may be shaped by the constraints the participants feel because of the situations they are in or by the society in which they belong. Ethnography, as the presentation of empirical data on human societies and cultures, was pioneered in the biological, social, and cultural branches of anthropology, but it has also become popular in the social sciences in general-sociology, [6] communication studies, history-wherever people study ethnic groups, formations, compositions, resettlements, social welfare characteristics, materiality, spirituality, and a people's ethnogenesis. [7] The typical ethnography is a holistic study [8][9] and so includes a brief history, and an analysis of the terrain, the climate, and the habitat. In all cases, it should be reflexive, make a substantial contribution toward the understanding of the social life of humans, have an aesthetic impact on the reader, and express a credible reality. An ethnography records all observed behavior and describes all symbol-meaning relations,
Ethnography: A Simple Journey Today
European Journal of Business and Management, 2011
Ethnography is an in-depth study. In social science it has played a great role for understanding of human actions. Human reality is likely to be seen through ethnographic measurement. Human society is enlightened under the study of ethnography. It is provided that every cultural stimuli can be illustrated an ethnographical investigation. Sociology and cultural anthropology always stands on real investigation of ethnographic expedition. Ethnographic study is a part of Anthropology. Ethnography as defined by Lowie "is the science which deals with the'cultures'of human group"(1937;3). A very simple meaning is that total cultural description of particular community is described as ethnography.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2015
Ethnohistory is an interdisciplinary approach to indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial culture and history. Combining the approaches of history, cultural anthropology, and archaeology, ethnohistory has most often focused on the cultures and histories of the indigenous peoples of settler societies in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific, and South Asia. Ethnohistory encompasses both particularistic and comparative scholarship, and embodies productive tensions among historical, anthropological, and indigenous perspectives on cultural and historical processes.
Journal of Education and Educational Development, 2024
Ethnography is one of the richest research approaches within the qualitative research paradigm for studying the cultural life worlds of others and/or oneself at a deeper level of consciousness. Additionally, it is a genre of writing that uses multi-epistemic lenses to go deeper into the phenomenon in order to inform, reform, and transform lives. The term ‘ethno’(graphy) is a compound word made up of the words ethno and graphy, which stand for culture and writing, respectively. In order to conduct ethnographic research, a researcher must possess a thorough understanding of a specific cultural context, be able to communicate in the language used by the informants, and be able to bracket one’s biases, while understanding how to "recover meaning" from their complex lifeworld. In doing so, it gives the researcher—the ethnographer in the role of an outsider the chance to chronicle the ‘noodle moments’ of the insiders as informants, within their cultural context, by witnessing their way of life and recording what truly takes place there. To this purpose, through their involvement over an extended length of time, ethnographers must generate detailed accounts of the discussions, observations of the events, symbols, artifacts, festivals, and everyday activities of the researched, among other things. Through critically analyzing behaviors, it offers a window into the meaning that people attribute to their cultural sensibility and a source of insights to inform, reform, and transform communities. Thus, it is a more comprehensive way of examining through the perspective of an insider, which sets it apart from other inquiry techniques.