What represents ways of studying cultures through methods that involve becoming highly active within that culture?

Conclusion

Ethnography can be considered a fundamental methodology of the social sciences. Over the past century, ethnographic methodology has led to the discovery of some of the most valuable concepts, theory and data produced in the social sciences. Without ethnography and its attendant fieldwork, the development of labeling theory, the level of understanding about the plight of the urban poor, and the appreciation of the subjective complexity of social interaction would have gained less ground.

Once marginalized by positivistic paradigms, ethnography has now evolved into multiple flourishing branches of social science methodology, each of which holds great potential for the investigation of an ever-expanding range of subject matter. Though some of this evolution can be attributed to researchers' aims to address ethnography's shortcomings, much of the recent methodological development is inherent within the methodology. Ethnography is an inherently flexible method and can be easily adapted to a variety of disciplines and their related interests. As a result, ethnography has been able to burgeon into a number of distinct forms that are well adapted to investigating specific social and cultural phenomena. As it divides into these increasingly specialized branches, the next hurdle ethnography may have to overcome is to determine what actually constitutes ethnographic study, as indicated by the important theoretical divisions that are emerging between naturalistic ethnography and survey-style ethnography.

As the world experiences wide-scale changes such as globalization, deindustrialization, and migration, ethnography has the capacity to adapt to dealing with these broader social trends. The rapid evolution of ethnography is very evident in the fact that ethnography was not long ago relegated to micro-level exploratory study, but is now gaining respect as a methodology that can generate first-rate data that can straddle both micro and macro levels. Perhaps ethnography's enduring feature is that it can be adjusted and adapted while data collection is taking place to produce better data. As such, all ethnographers can easily address Becker's warning that “methodology is much too important to leave to the methodologists.”

‘Ethnography,’ as used traditionally, labeled a research process where an anthropologist lived in a small community to learn the details of their daily life. It also labeled the book-length report that summarized that research. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the meaning of the term has shifted from definition to a list of debates. The debates center on several issues. Among them are: (a) whether ethnography is science or humanity or something else; (b) how to apply the term ‘culture’ in our complex, diverse world; and (c) whether the many ‘ethnography-like’ approaches in other fields should be considered acceptable or not. ‘Ethnography’ now serves as a cover term for fundamental issues on the nature of human understanding rather than a single recipe for doing social research.

Ethnography is an approach to research that has been a significant presence within the field of education since at least the mid-twentieth century. Initially, it was largely distinctive to anthropology, but subsequently came to be used by a much wider range of researchers. The term does not have a single, standard, clearly-defined meaning, either at the level of practical method or of methodological ideas. However, broadly speaking, it refers to work that relies primarily upon participant observation and/or in-depth interviewing, and that is guided by a concern with understanding the orientations of the people studied, and locating these within local and/or wider contexts.

Ethnography

Ethnography, a primary method used in the discipline of anthropology, is a systematic approach to understanding the beliefs, rituals, patterns, and institutions that define a culture. Classic ethnography was conducted by etic researchers in previously unexplored remote geographies of the globe with the aim of using knowledge of isolated cultures to reveal the universal commonalities of all cultures.18

There are numerous definitions the culture. Fun­damental to the construct is the set of patterns that characterize and thus define a group and its membership.19 Ethnography is thus the accepted method for coming to understand culture. Classic systematic ethnographic methods relied on the investigator becoming immersed in a distant culture for extended periods of time, during which observation, interview, and artifact review were conducted as methods to obtain information for subsequent analysis. The term “informant” emerged from this systematic approach. “Informant” refers to membership in the culture of study and the attribution that this insider status was the only criterion that constituted expert and legitimate knowledge of the culture.20

Contemporary ethnography retains some of the tenets and practices of classical methods but is enacted in diverse groups with essential characteristics that no longer are defined by geography. Given the ubiquity of the Internet and virtual worlds, it is not surprising that many investigators activate ethnographic methods to discover interactive constructions of electronic, social media, and gaming cultures among others located online.21

Ethnographic methods begin by using a range of techniques to gain access to a context or cultural group. Initial research activity involves observation to characterize the context and to begin describing a culture. Equipped with this understanding, the researcher uses participant and nonparticipant observation, interview, and examination of materials, texts, or artifacts to obtain data. Recording may occur in multiple narrative, text, voice, and video formats. Analysis of the data is concurrent with their collection, and thus is continuous, moving from description to explanation. The knowledge generated therefore begins with description and then expands to meaning and theory.

To ensure rigor, you would conduct specific methods to verify that interpretive analysis and thus the theory derived is endorsed as accurate by those emic to the group. Reflexive analysis, or the analysis of the extent to which the researcher influences the results of the study, is one of the most important strategies and involves the researcher examining the influence of his/her thinking and action on the knowledge generated (see Chapter 20).

We classify ethnography as a naturalistic design because of its reliance on qualitative data collection and analysis, the assumption that the researcher is not the knower, and the absence of a priori hypothesis derived from theory, or a theory imposed before entering the setting. However, ethnographers may draw on various theories to inform their query. It is the investigator who makes the decisions regarding the “who, what, when, and where” of each observation and interview experience. The belief that knowledge can be generated about the “other” without the viewpoint of the investigator influencing the study is a different philosophical approach from heuristic and endogenous designs. Furthermore, ethnography is a design that is capable of moving beyond description to reveal complex relationships, patterns, and theory.

Classical ethnography upheld the belief that through reflexivity, the researcher could remove personal bias from any interpretation and thus understand and analyze the “reality” of a culture. More contemporary forms of ethnography challenge some of those basic assumptions such as investigator objectivity and the presence of an objective social setting apart from its ongoing construction and reinvention through human agency.18 Current ethnographers aim to represent the participants' own views and ways of explaining their lives. The researcher therefore focuses on the interpretive practices of group members themselves, or how people make sense of their lives in context as reflected in their own words, stories, objects, and narratives. These concerns are similar to those of the phenomenological and life history approaches.

Ethnography has changed from its classic roots in other ways as well. Recall the discussion of critical theory earlier. If ethnography is used within a critical theory framework, its purposes and action processes become diverse and designed to develop and apply knowledge for the social change. In any case, one key element is essential to all forms of ethnography: the examination of cultural and social groups and underlying patterns and ways of experiencing context.22,23

Health and human service investigators increasingly turn to ethnography to obtain an insider's perspective on the meaning of health and social issues as a basis from which to develop meaningful health care and social service interventions or to promote policy and social change. Ethnography has also been used to understand various service environments. One example is the classic ethnography of a nursing home conducted by Savishinsky.24 Several data collection strategies, including interview and participant observation, were used to describe the culture of the nursing home and the meaning of life in that setting. Through analysis and synthesis of the perspectives of residents and staff, Savishinsky was able to identify ways to change that environment to improve the quality of life of the residents.

General ethnography is a type of qualitative research that identifies and describes, through long-term participant observation and interviewing, the activity of a whole small-scale social unit – the routine practices of everyday life and the meaning perspectives according to which those practices are conducted and interpreted by those who enact them. Classroom ethnography treats the schoolroom as if it were a small-scale society with a distinct local culture, emphasizing the formal and informal social organization of daily events and the implicit and explicit beliefs that are held by the teachers and students. Currently, classroom ethnography is being done by teachers and/or students themselves – insiders – as well as by researchers who visit the classroom intermittently as outsiders.

3.06.3.1 Questions

Ethnography comes into its own where the researcher is trying to understand some particular sub-cultural group in a specific setting. It tends to be holistic, focusing on the entire experience participants have of a setting, or their entire cosmology, rather than focusing on discrete variables or phenomena. This means that ethnographic questions tend to be general: What happens in this setting? How do this group understand their world? In Goffman's

(1961) Asylums he tried to reveal the different worlds lived by the staff and inmates, and to describe and explicate some of the ceremonies that were used to reinforce boundaries between the two groups. A large part of his work tracked what he called the “moral careers” of inmates from prepatient, through admission, and then as inpatients. Much of the force and influence of Goffman's work derived from its revelations about the grim “unofficial” life lived by patients in large state mental hospitals in the 1950s. In this respect it followed in the Chicago school tradition of expos´e and critique. Rosenhan's (1973) classic study of hospital admission and the life of the patient also followed in this tradition. Famously it posed the question of what was required to be diagnosed as mentally ill and then incarcerated, and discovered that it was sufficient to report hearing voices saying “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” This “pseudo-patient” study was designed with a very specific question about diagnostic criteria in mind; however, after the pseudopatients were admitted they addressed themselves to more typically ethnographic concerns, such as writing detailed descriptions of their settings, monitoring patient contact with different kinds of staff, and documenting the experience of powerlessness and depersonalization.

Goffman's and Rosenhan's work picks up the ethnographic traditions of revealing hidden worlds and providing a basis for social reform. Jodelet (1991) illustrates another analytic possibility by performing an intensive study of one of the longest running community care schemes in the world, the French colony of Ainay-le-Château where mental patients live with ordinary families. Again, in line with the possibilities of ethnography, she attempted to explore the whole setting, including the lives of the patients and their hosts and their understandings of the world. Her work, however, is notable for showing how ethnography can explore the representational systems of participants and relate that system to the lives of the participants. To give just one small example, she shows the way the families' representation of a close link between madness and uncleanliness relates to practices such as taking meals separately from the lodgers.

Another topic for ethnographic work has been the practice of psychotherapy itself (Gubrium, 1992; Newfield, Kuehl, Joanning, & Quinn, 1990, 1991). These studies are interested in the experience of patients in therapy and their conceptions of what therapy is, as well as the practices and conceptions of the therapists. Such studies do not focus exclusively on the interaction in the therapy session itself, but on the whole setting.

Although ethnography is dependent on close and systematic description of practices it is not necessarily atheoretical. Ethnographic studies are often guided by one of a range of theoretical conceptions. For example, Jodelet's (1991) study was informed by Moscovici's (1984) theory of social representations and Gubrium's (1992) study of family therapy was guided by broader questions about the way the notion of family and family disorder are constructed in Western society. Ethnography has sometimes been treated as particularly appropriate for feminist work because of the possibility of combining concerns with experience and social context (e.g., Ronai, 1996).

How Does Language Use Vary in Different Situations?

Ethnography of communication, associated with Dell Hymes and other anthropologists, emphasizes the competence to communicate and interact, involving much more than the formulation of isolated grammatical sentences. The approach also calls into question a narrow understanding of which features of speech performance fall within the scope of analysis. Linguists working in this tradition have looked at socially defined situations, social actions, and the speech performance patterns associated with them. Examples include greetings, narratives, question/answer sequences, prayers, testimonies, riddles, curing rituals, examinations, medical interviews, lectures, compliments, ritual insult duels, political debates, and trials. A complete list of situations and tasks would amount to a complete ethnography of a group. Nonwritten communication has been emphasized, but the approach is also fully compatible with the analysis of written genres.

Hymes formulated a mnemonic for fieldwork, the SPEAKING framework, that emphasizes the difference in the research agenda for this approach and for a grammatical strings approach. Communication and language behavior take place in Settings, the time and physical attributes of which often influence the behaviors involved. The Participants in a communicative event may be present, in different roles (speaker and listener, teacher and student, performer and audience, etc.), or not all co-present (as in the case of the recipient of a letter). Communicative events have Ends, both as goals of interactors and as results of interactions. What is communicated has both form and content, and both aspects of these Acts should be considered. The overall tone or manner of an interaction is indicated by the term Key, whether the event is mock or serious, perfunctory or full, or humorous or not, and similar variations. Instrumentalities refer to the channels used (face-to-face speaking, writing, telephone talk, silence, code or open signaling, singing, chanting, whispering, etc.) and to the forms selected from the speaker's repertoire of languages, dialects, registers, and varieties. Norms of interaction refer to expected ways of carrying out communicative events and are often detected by reactions when the norms are not followed. Finally, Genre refers to emically recognized types of communicative events in the speech community being studied.

The primary method for gathering data for an ethnography of communication is participant observation recorded in written field notes, tape recording, and video recording. Video recording seems the most obtrusive, but may still be mostly ignored by participants who are caught up in the interaction being recorded. It also provides more data than can be easily analyzed. Sampling problems also must be faced. How many “events,” selected on what bases, are needed to describe in order to talk about events in general? What about the numbers and types of members of a speech community who need to be studied in order to talk about the community in general? These issues tend to be dealt with on ad hoc bases, in each study or research project. Usually, extensive event-related observation of participants is carried out before tape or video recording is done, so that the ethnographer has a sense of what is normal for such an event and what might be significantly unique in the recorded interaction.

It should be noted theoretically that, in narrow terms, just as a language can be defined as an infinite set of grammatical strings, generated by a limited set of units and rules for combining them, such that ungrammatical strings can be identified but grammatical ones cannot be predicted or exhaustively listed, so communicative competence will lead to communicative performances that are unique, unpredictable, and “grammatical.” Thus, a small sample of speakers/actors/events should be sufficient. (Though ethnographers who take the communication competence approach tend to be very wary of the “one or a few” speakers who suffice for grammatical studies, in the narrow sense.) Often, published descriptions present one representative event (or a few) or a composite representation of a type of event.

3 Discovery Procedures: Listening

Ethnography's greatest strength is situated listening. Interviews become useful at later stages of fieldwork, but field observational research begins by listening to what British anthropologist Richards (1939) called ‘speech in action.’ Here the actors control topicality—talking to each other about what they usually do—and the researcher secures access to their turf—the locations they usually occupy. Early on, as rapport begins to be established, fieldworkers deliberately place themselves in a wide sampling of such situations. Then, as the research funnel narrows and other methods are deployed, the ethnographer becomes more selective about where to listen.

The importance of situated listening was emphasized memorably by Whyte. After he asked an intrusive question during illicit gambling activities, and stopping the ongoing flow of behavior, Whyte's key informant Doc told him, ‘Go easy on that “who,” “what,” “why,” “when,” “where” stuff, Bill. You ask those questions and people will clam up on you. If people accept you, you can just hang around, and you'll learn the answers in the long run without even having to ask the questions.’ ‘I found that this was true. As I sat and listened, I learned the answers to question that I would not even have had the sense to ask if I had been getting my information solely on an interview basis’ (1955 [1943], p. 303).

Situated listening becomes the basis for understanding both what can be talked about in later conversations and interviews, and what categories and evaluations the actors use to observe and interpret ongoing behavior.

2.2 Ethnographies in Social Anthropology

The ethnographies of this tradition took as problematic the social structure and functional integration of societies studied. Ethnographic accounts treat religion, kinship, economics, and political dynamics as all important and related. However social anthropologists differed in the weighting given to each domain, as did the societies they studied. Significantly, those ethnographers who treat craft production as a significant feature tend to have worked in relatively complex societies. Among them, Nadel's account of the kingdom of Nupe (Nigeria) is pre-eminent for its detailed accounts of a number of craft industries, and the way these relate to the Nupe court. Each craft is discussed in terms of the access to raw materials, technical processes, the organization of the division of labor within the workshop, authority and transmission of skills among craftsmen, design and fashions as these relate to consumer demand, and patronage by nobles and the court where this is relevant. Some crafts are ‘open’ in the sense that any man can learn by assisting a skilled worker (weaving, bead making); others are ‘closed,’ restricted to members of certain kin groups (blacksmiths, brass smiths). Craft skills are learned in informal apprenticeship. Closed crafts restrict apprenticeship to kin; this also serves to keep ritual and secrete knowledge within the craft kindered (Nadel 1942). Miner's account of craft production in Timbuctoo in the same period is less detailed, but closely parallels that for Nupe (Miner 1965 [1953]). Slave production of food stuffs and cotton was important, particularly in northern Nigeria, but does not appear to have been organized for craft production. However rural industry of the cottage craftsman kind in weaving and dyeing is documented around the city of Kano where certain villages were famous as centers of dyeing. The town of Daboya played a similar role as a center of dyeing in the precolonial textile industry of northern Ghana. (See also chapters by Pokrant and by Goody, in Goody 1982.)

2.2 Persons, Things, Systems

Early ethnography in Australia and Native America, and Bronislaw Malinowski's work on Trobriand Island gardening in Melanesia in the 1910s, revealed indigenous concepts in which human groups and spaces (however defined) were deemed aspects of each other, often inextricable from spiritual beings or forces. Research in colonial Africa in the mid-twentieth century depicted how land tenure tied tightly into cognition, language, and translation; kinship and friendship; political control and hegemony; religion and ritual; aesthetics and myth (Biebuyck 1963). Monarchs' and chiefs' control over land (as in Buganda or Ashantiland) appeared to be part and parcel with control over people, but their rights excluded alienation by sale and other rights often identified with ownership. Landholding was justified by clearing, residing, or working on the land, by conquest, by membership in a kin or local group, by chiefly assignment and tribute, or a mix of these. Multiple rights of different groups to use land for different purposes, for example farming, grazing, and thatch, firewood, or clay collection, overlapped in complex ways not captured by terms like ‘property’ or ‘ownership.’ In ‘acephalous’ (politically uncentralized) societies like those of Tiv in Nigeria or Chagga in Tanzania, land territories were often found closely linked to genealogy of clans or lineages, shifting and stretching as these moved, grew, or shrank. Here and elsewhere in Africa, land was spoken of as an active interest not only of the living, but also the dead and unborn. To Audrey Richards, Lucy Mair, and other British-trained social scientists, land tenure appeared as part of complex, functioning cultural systems. Max Gluckman's southern Africa-based work on ‘hierarchies of estates’ over land, for instance of use, transfer, and administration, influenced a generation of tenure studies. Gluckman (1965) observed that property is not just about rights of people over things, but also about duties between people with respect to things.