Doing Ethnography. Amanda Coffey
it is appropriate to issues and fields under study.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Uwe Flick for the invitation to write this volume and to contribute to The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit. I would like to particularly acknowledge his patience and support during the writing process. I would like to thank colleagues in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University for their continuing collegiality and support. Much love and thanks to Julian Pitt for keeping heart and home together, and to my wonderful children Jake and Thomas, just for being you.
Chapter One Introduction The foundations of ethnography
contents
What is ethnography? 2
A brief history of ethnography 3
The methodological contexts of ethnography 6
Feminist ethnography 8
Postmodernism 10
Principles and practices 11
Objectives
After reading this chapter, you will:
have a working definition of the term ‘ethnography’;
be able to differentiate between ethnography as a description of a research method and as a research product;
have an appreciation of the historical context of ethnography;
know about some of the key theoretical and disciplinary influences on the development of ethnography; and
understand some of the key principles and practices that underpin ethnographic work.
What is ethnography?
Ethnography is a term used within the social sciences and humanities to describe and define a social research method, or more accurately a set of methods for understanding and making sense of cultural and social worlds. In literal translation ethnography means the writing (‘graphy’) of people (‘ethno’). Ethnography encompasses a range of data collection techniques for gathering qualitative information about a setting, and usually incorporates some kind of researcher participation within the daily life of the setting. Data collection in ethnographic research actually draws on many of the skills and methods social actors routinely use to navigate their own daily lives – for example, using techniques such as observation, listening, asking questions, gathering documents and recording information. In ethnography such routine and everyday practices are used, in systematic and reflective ways, in order to generate analyses and understanding.
Ethnographic methods are part of a broad umbrella of qualitative research approaches for documenting and understanding social and cultural life. Indeed, the terms ‘ethnography’ and ‘qualitative research’ are often used interchangeably. Moreover, ethnography is often viewed as a foundation stone of contemporary, and increasingly varied, qualitative research practices. Qualitative research in general, encompassing and drawing on ethnographic methods, has become increasingly utilized across many areas of social science, humanities and cognate fields including social anthropology, sociology, criminology, religious studies, health studies and education.
Ethnography is, then, a term used to describe a set of methods for collecting qualitative information, in order to develop and inform our understandings of everyday lives and cultures. Ethnography is also a term that is used to describe the product of, or outcome from, ethnographic research. The production or writing of ethnography is a craft skill, enabling the researcher (as author) to draw together both diverse materials and interpretation in ways that tell of a place and people. ‘Ethnographies’ in this sense of the term, are crafted reports of research, utilizing qualitative data and analysis in order to provide rich descriptions of the social setting being studied. Such reportage is usually in the form of a written text, which provides narration, but can also include other kinds of data display – photographs, moving images, poetry, documents, performance pieces and artefacts – in order to ‘write’ of and re-present the setting.
A brief history of ethnography
The ethnographic approach to studying people in their social and cultural context has a long history, most readily traced back to the work of social and cultural anthropology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; where anthropological scholars became concerned with studying and understanding ‘other’ societies through close, lived engagement. For example, scholars in the first quarter of the twentieth century, among them the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and the English social anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, developed the idea of immersion and engagement in a setting in order to understand the human condition. Reflecting their time, such scholars drew on particular understandings and experiences of colonial life, undertaking anthropological fieldwork, often for extended periods of time, in places such as Africa and the Pacific Islands, in order to examine the ways in which ‘other’ societies functioned and were structured. The approach they took was, at the time in question, a significant departure in relation to researching traditional cultures, representing a move away from an evolutionary approach to societal development, towards a more detailed exploration of the everyday, practical accomplishment of social life through institutions and relationships. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that colonial influences had significant impact on the ways in which these ‘traditional’ societies operated, and indeed came to be understood by anthropological inquiry. That is, there is a persuasive argument that the anthropological gaze served to compound some of the very impact of colonial rule; extended anthropological field trips, often including long periods of residence, arguably did much to perpetuate the colonial ‘othering’ of particular cultures and people. A specific example of this is Malinowski’s ethnographies of the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific Ocean, of which one of the most cited works was titled The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929); such a title is almost unthinkable in contemporary postcolonial times.
In North America, the anthropological interest at the turn of the twentieth century was somewhat closer to home. Rather than focusing on distant ‘other’ cultures and societies, North American scholars developed a social–cultural anthropological approach to studying (and in some ways reconstructing) the cultural life of ‘native’ American peoples. One such researcher, Franz Boas, a German physicist turned US anthropologist, was particularly influential in developing the anthropological interest in culture and language. Dismissive of what were then evolutionary approaches to the study of culture (and indeed also of biological–scientific racism), Boas articulated more nuanced understandings of difference between societies or social groups as a result of social learning – that is, as differences of culture rather than of biology. In so doing, Boas developed the important anthropological concept of cultural relativism – which might usefully be described as both an imperative and a willingness to suspend one’s own cultural assumptions in order to understand social structures, belief systems and practices from within a culture. Cultural relativism provided a framework for studying and seeking to understand a culture on and in its own terms through its own cultural frame of reference. Boas helped to shape cultural anthropology in the USA and across the world, with many of his students, such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, going on to influence the discipline over the course of the twentieth century.
While there were differences in the development of the social and cultural anthropological traditions across both sides of the Atlantic, in relation to both choice of sites for study and the lens through which societies were seen, there were also considerable similarities of practice. These early pioneers of what came to be identified as ethnography advocated a prolonged engagement with the society or culture to be studied, with immersion of the researcher held up as a standard to which ethnographers should aspire. That is, there was recognition of fieldwork in the setting as a means to understanding the everyday practices in and of that setting. Ethnographic research does not have to involve extended engagement, perhaps