25 Ethnography: Immersion in the Field and Thick Description

Hia Sen

1. Objective

In this module you are going to learn about the ethnographic method and the various techniques of doing fieldwork and writing ethnography. The shift in the various genres of ethnography is discussed and a list of diverse kinds of ethnography and a bibliography are given at the end of the module.

2. Introduction

Ethnography as a method is closely associated with Anthropology. However, it is also used in other disciplines like Sociology and Political Scientists today and certain genres of fiction writing are also said to borrow from the techniques of ethnographic writing. It emerged as an approach that addressed Anthropology’s central interest in knowing about ‘other’ cultures, and at the same time made one sensitive to the peculiarities of what is considered one’s ‘own’ culture through observation of the ‘other’.

2.1 What is Ethnography?

What sets Sociology and Social Anthropology apart from the natural sciences is the distinct subject matter of people, processes and cultures. Ethnography is a research method that was initially distinctive to Social Anthropology and later came into use in Sociology and which has emerged to address this specific subject matter. The ethnographic method involves the practice of “fieldwork” in which the researcher produces an account of a culture or society through close interaction, observation and engagement in the everyday life of people from a particular culture. The written account, which emerges from these observations, is also known as ethnography.

2.1.1‘Being There’: The Field and the Fieldworker as Sources of Knowledge

The central tools of ‘knowing’ in the ethnographic approach are two. One is the “field” where the researcher records observations, learning from a close, engagement with people from a certain context over days and months. The other is the researcher herself or himself, whose presence and interaction with those in the field and analyses create knowledge about a culture.

This ‘being there’ or presence of the ethnographer in a place to be studied is crucial to the concept of ethnographic fieldwork. The classical model of fieldwork, which was influenced by British Structural Functionalist Anthropology and to an extent American Cultural Anthropology of the early twentieth century, valued the researcher’s immersion in the field, by spending a long period of time and forging a rapport with “natives” in the field.

2.1.2 Ethnography and Its Relation to other Qualitative Research Methods

· The Ethnographic Method does not rely on questionnaires or surveys or solely on interviews. However, notions of fieldwork have been shifting and often, ethnographers combine observation with techniques like dialogues, interviews etc.

· The Ethnographic Method is useful for studying a culture in the present, unlike the historical method. This can be a limitation for the ethnographer to whom a background of the past is crucial to make sense of the present. But this is often countered with the researcher also considering secondary material and in a few contexts archival data related to the ‘field’.

2.1.3 Techniques

Certain techniques are associated with the practice of Fieldwork.

The technique of observation is predominantly used as an ethnographic method, in which the researcher observes and records her or his observations of a culture and writes an account. This is borrowed from the model of the natural sciences.
The method of participant observation is commonly followed by ethnographers from the twentieth century onwards, its coinage being traced to Malinowski. In this method the researcher is not just an onlooker and scientist, but also a fellow person who participates in the life of the culture s/he is immersed in.
Learning the language of a culture is often thought a central prerequisite for ethnographic fieldwork.
Establishing rapport with the ‘natives’ of a field is a technique that ethnographers follow.
The ability to translate a culture with sensitivity and skill to a readership that is alien to the culture is an important skill and is integral to ethnographic writing.

3. Learning Outcome

To know how to apply the method of ethnography, one has to know how it has emerged and also transformed over the years, in a response to debates about what the objective of Anthropology and Sociology ought to be. This module would acquaint you with these shifts and tell you about the techniques of doing ethnographic fieldwork and genres of writing ethnography that you can choose from. Examples of various genres of ethnography are also given for reference.

4. Historically looking at Ethnography

Ethnography has been characteristic of Social Anthropology and is also used as a research method in contemporary Sociology; but it has at different points been associated with other disciplines and practices.

The ethnographic tradition finds its roots in the natural sciences, particularly in Biology in which scientists documented the habits and characteristics of flora and fauna on their expeditions. The zoologist turned anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon (1890) was one of the first scientists who collected ethnographic material from the Torres Straits Islands. The concept of “anthropological fieldwork” was most likely introduced by Haddon from the discourse of naturalists (Stocking 1985: 80).
The collection of empirical data about the ways of life of a people had a long tradition, particularly among missionaries and administrators of the European colonies in the nineteenth century. The earliest British anthropologists were in “a working ethnographic relationship with missionaries” (ibid.: 74). In the nineteenth century, ethnography emerged from the concerns of the colonial administrators and missionaries of amassing data about the ways of life and the rituals and beliefs of the natives in the colonies (Malinowski 1922, 1930).

As such for a long time the methods of observation in the ethnographic tradition bore the imprints of the positivistic sciences and the earliest ethnographers espoused the value of objective scientific data collection.

4.1 Founders of the Ethnographic Tradition: Malinowski’s Work in the Trobriand Islands

The work of the Polish born functionalist anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, “The Argonauts of the Western Pacific” published in 1922 is one of the canons of the ethnographic tradition. It is perhaps the earliest example of a researcher’s immersion in the field to produce an ethnographic account. Malinowski spent six years from 1914-1920 in the Trobriand Islands, making three expeditions to his field and writing up his work in the intervals on the systems of exchange of the Trobriand Islanders. Although scientists like Alfred Cort Haddon or Lewis Henry Morgan who worked with Native Americans in the nineteenth century had studied cultures by observing them, Bronislaw Malinowski also learned the language of the Trobriand Islanders instead of relying on native interpreters as his forbears had done.

In the Preface to “Argonauts of the Western Pacific”, Frazer writes “In the Trobriand Islands, to the east of New Guinea, to which he next turned his attention, Dr. Malinowski lived as a native among the natives for many months together, watching them daily at work and at play, conversing with them in their own tongue, and deriving all his information from the surest sources – personal observation and statements made to him directly by the natives in their own language without the intervention of an interpreter” (Frazer in Malinowski 2005: v). This became the standard procedure of ethnographic fieldwork.

Malinowski’s monograph is the most influential ethnography till date. He is known as the founder of the ethnographic approach and the method of participant observation. It set the parameters for the ethnographic method not only in Britain, but also spurred a debate among anthropologists in the United States of America, across Europe and indirectly influenced future generations of Social Anthropologists in India.

4.2 The Earliest Ethnographers

Though Malinowski is regarded as the founder of the ethnographic tradition, the method can also be attributed to the works of other scholars before his time or his contemporaries who contributed to the techniques of ethnography.

Lewis Henry Morgan was an American anthropologist who collected kinship terms of the Iroquois Indians in the nineteenth century, although he was not fluent in the language of the Iroquois.
Franz Boas was a German born anthropologist who worked and taught in America from the late nineteenth century till the first half of the twentieth century. He stressed on the importance of cultural relativism in fieldwork, asking anthropologists to contextualise the beliefs and practices of the natives in that particular culture.
Margaret Mead was a twentieth century American cultural anthropologist. Mead was a student of Boaz and her most influential work was “Coming of Age in Samoa” published in 1922, which was an ethnographic account of her fieldwork on youth and adolescence in Samoa. Mead’s work offered an alternate perspective to the American concept of adolescence by documenting practices in another culture (Mead 1928).

5. The Requisites for Ethnographic Fieldwork and Immersion in the Field

A long period of stay in the field is a requisite of ethnographic research. The kind of ethnography informed by the functionalist thinking conceptualises society as a whole. Therefore, the culture of a people in all its aspects has to be observed and documented, according to this position.
Linguistic proficiency is essential for ethnographers. The researcher would have to learn the language of those inhabiting the field so as to be able to communicate with them, follow idiomatic expressions, and understand conversations.
An ethnographer must ideally stay in close contact with the natives, and cut herself or himself off from her or his own culture during fieldwork.

6. Advantages of Ethnographic Fieldwork

The knowledge produced by ethnographic fieldwork of different cultures is different from that of archival research or of armchair Anthropology. It allows the researcher to record firsthand observations about cultures instead of relying only on textual and other secondary material.
In the Indian context, the interest in ethnographies of villages in the mid twentieth century emerged in the context of the nationalist imagination. They provided accounts of local caste practices, social transformations etc., in the villages as opposed to earlier works of Indologists who primarily relied on textual sources and on informants. The shift in perspectives arising from the use of different sources of data has been identified as the shift from the “book view” to the “field view” (Srinivas 1996: 200). The ‘locally contextualised’ perspective offered by informed, sensitive, observation of the systems of exchange and customs of the caste system was strikingly different from the textual understanding of the Varna system.

Self Check Exercise 1

What is the source of ethnographic knowledge?

The source of ethnographic knowledge is the experience of fieldwork, which is the extensive engagement over a period of time with a certain culture.

Who is one of the most influential ethnographers whose work has defined the parameters of the ethnographic method in Anthropology?

Bronislaw Malinowski, who worked on the systems of exchange among the Trobriand Islanders, evolved techniques like participant observation, and learnt the language of the Trobriand Islanders set the parameters of the ethnographic approach in the 1920s.

7. Ethnographic Concerns of the Twentieth Century

The archetypal notion of the field and with it the techniques associated with fieldwork began to be questioned from the 1940s onwards. The association of the anthropological tradition with colonial administration and the authority of the white male anthropologist writing the ethnography of the colonised natives attracted reworking of the agenda of Anthropology and of the ethnographic approach (Uberoi, Deshpande & Sundar 2010; Clifford & Marcus 1986).

7.1 ‘Native Ethnographers’ in India

In the Indian context, some of the earliest ethnographies of the twentieth century emerge from fieldwork in the Indian villages. While this was a break from earlier studies of caste practices based on texts like the Manusmriti, it also differed from anthropological accounts of Europeans, in that ‘native’ anthropologists began to interrogate and provide accounts of their ‘own’ cultures. M.N. Srinivas’ ethnography of the village of Rampura in the Mysore District, which was published in 1976 as “The Remembered Village” is a canonical text in this regard (Srinivas 1988). This work is both significant as it points to a shift in the objective of ethnography in the second half of the twentieth century, and because it opens up the debate of how, even a racially and linguistically “native” ethnographer of all intents and purposes, remains an outsider to her/his field.

7.2 Ethnography and Interpretive Anthropology

In the 1960s, the theoretical debates informed by the works of Parsons, by Weberian theory and the Frankfurt School Theories as well as a well defined critique of the colonial agenda of Anthropology gave rise to new concerns and techniques of doing fieldwork and writing ethnography (Marcus 1986; Gupta & Ferguson 1997).

The techniques of ethnography emerged with the changing conceptualisation of culture. The goal of ethnography was no longer to produce holistic accounts of bounded tribal cultures or making sweeping generalisations about customs and structures of ‘primitive’ societies to contribute to evolutionist theory or functionalist theory.
The positivistic model followed by Anthropology began to be questioned. Culture came to be seen as a text and ethnography could not be seen as a scientific method of collecting and writing up ‘facts’ about cultures. Rather, interpretation of cultures was called for. Ethnography would look at the systems of meanings in a particular culture, and representation of the ethnographer’s observations had to be given great thought, as the ethnographer herself or himself was located in a certain cultural context and was bound to “see” things in the field in a certain way.

7.2.1 Thick Description

The approach of ‘thick description’ in writing ethnography was popularised by the American Anthropologist Clifford Geertz in the 1970s. Geertz wrote about thick description in “The Interpretation of Cultures” borrowing the concept from Gilbert Ryle. Geertz employs the metaphor of culture as a text in which the ethnographer engages in the act of interpreting the symbolic acts of speech or gestures in the field to readers about the meanings in the culture that is being described. Thick description involves describing the contexts and the meanings ascribed to social action in the field and not just a description of observed actions. The approach is crucial to representation of a culture when writing ethnography. Geertz illustrates the technique by describing a situation in which a boy rapidly contracting one eye can be “read” by an ethnographer as having one of different meanings. Whereas a ‘thin’ description would give an account of a boy contracting one eye, a ‘thick’ description would interpret the meaning of the act through the context in which it occurred and differentiate between a conspiratorial wink, a rehearsed wink or a ‘burlesque’ wink in which the boy might be imitating someone who does not wink well. The approach has been illustrated by Geertz in his description of a Balinese cockfight (Geertz 1973).

Thick description as an ethnographic technique is still predominant. It also implies that the observer should interpret culture and not just record actions as “facts”. However, in recent years the hidden authority of the ethnographer has been criticised and the feasibility of thick description as a technique has been questioned. Crapanzano (2010) has pointed out that in thick description, researchers like Geertz have assumed to understand the meanings attributed to actions by natives without giving attention to experiences by natives.

7.2.2 Culture As Text

The changing conceptualisation of culture has meant that the ethnographic method gives importance to the process of fieldwork. Not only do the natives interpret situations and act accordingly, but the ethnographer also interprets the information collected through observation or participant observation. In contemporary academia, this kind of self-reflexive approach is a requisite in following the ethnographic approach. Ethnography then becomes not so much an observational activity as it was in the early twentieth century as an interpretive activity.

8. Changing Notions of the Field and of the Native-Outsider Separation

The traditional ethnographic approach of the early twentieth century clearly distinguished between the natives who were observed and the colonial white male anthropologist who was the “outsider” to the culture that was observed. This view has changed over time and with it, the techniques of doing ethnographic fieldwork. In the postcolonial context, the choice of fields is not restricted to a “primitive society”, a “tribe” or a “village” in one of the former European colonies. Anthropologists and Sociologists today explore a variety of contexts, even urban ones.

From the 1940s there have also been “native ethnographers” who have studied the same linguist, ethnic, religious or racial groups they themselves belong to. The dichotomy of the “native” and the “outsider” is questioned in these works.

It has also been debated in recent years that immersion in a field is never complete. No amount of familiarity with a language or sameness of physical appearance, religious affiliation, social location etc., means that the ethnographer is a complete “native” to the field. The position of M.N. Srinivas who did his fieldwork in the village of Rampura is a classic example. Srinivas spoke the same language as those in Rampura and was by all accounts more of a native to the village in Mysore State than a British anthropologist would be. At the same time his urban upbringing, his education in other states in India and abroad, his Brahmin identity and his class background set him apart from the villagers in Rampura, a position that is reflected in his ethnography.

With the interpretive approach in ethnography, a greater degree of self-reflexivity to the process of doing fieldwork is required. The meanings, contexts and locations of the “observers” or ethnographers also have to be analysed in the ethnographic approach. With the publication of Malinowski’s diary (Malinowski 1989), which recorded his loneliness, despair and sometimes contempt for the field, there was a renewed interest in the need to locate ethnographies in the personal experiences of researchers.

The interpretive approach has also revealed the centrality of the ethnographer as a tool. There are certain ethnographies of the same field by different researchers, which are startlingly different accounts of the same place. Annette Weiner (1992), for example, wrote ethnography of the exchange system in the Trobriand Islands from the 1970s to 1990s where Malinowski had done his fieldwork more than fifty years before. Her work among other things, explores the place of women in systems of exchange – a section that was invisible in Malinowski’s writing.

The concept of a spatially bounded field, which contains a culture, has also been questioned by contemporary Sociologists and Anthropologists. Patel (1998), for example, questions Srinivas’ tendency to overlook how urban India spills into the village of Rampura in his attempt to represent his “field” as essentially rural. Many contemporary Sociologists do not necessarily do their fieldwork in a place far away from their own culture (Gupta & Ferguson 1997). With the proliferation of theories of globalisation, e.g. the world-system theory, theories of hybridity, networks etc., what can be seen as one’s “own” culture as opposed to that of “another” culture is also being increasingly questioned and this has influenced the choice of many fields. Srivastava (2014), for example, does ethnographic fieldwork of the networks of slum dwellers and various other groups in the urban spaces of Delhi.

8.1 Multi-sited Ethnography

The classical anthropological tradition of treating villages or localities as territorially fixed, geographically demarcated, stable local cultures began to be questioned in the 1980s. In the 1990s, George Marcus proclaimed the need for decentring the field in a capitalist “world system” where migration, flows of images and ideologies across geographical and cultural borders meant that culture was not neatly bound to specific geographical territories (Falzon 2009). Changes in the University structures and reduction in funding of anthropological and sociological fieldwork also influenced the practice of ethnographic fieldwork. The concept of multi-sited fieldwork as opposed to ethnography of a unitary geographically bounded field was promoted.

8.1.1 Techniques of Fieldwork in Multi-sited Ethnography

The multi-sited field can be constructed by following people, things or metaphors (Marcus 1995).
Ulf Hannerz (2003) suggests that an ethnographer can construct the sites by looking at the translocal linkages of a site, as Hannerz himself had done in the study of foreign news correspondents in three countries. Sometimes the different sites can be constructed by following transnational linkages of respondents in any one site, e.g. Helena Wulff (1998) studied the transnational ballet scene in Europe; Christina Garsten studied the transnational organisation of the manufacturers of Apple.
Multi-sited Ethnography can mean the duration of “fieldwork” in any site is reduced. This can impact the nature of relationships with “natives” as opposed to the archetypal anthropological field. But multi-sited ethnography explores transcultural relationships and is not concerned about giving a holistic view of any bounded culture.
Ethnographers in a multi-sited field might rely more on informants than their predecessors in order to follow the transnational linkages of a site.
Participant observation is less likely in the multi-sited ethnographic approach.
There might be a possibility of a field without any real “natives” in a multi-sited ethnographic approach (Hannerz 2003).

9. Ethnography and Theory: Guidelines of Following the Ethnographic Approach

Though a lot of stress is given on observation and (primarily at the time of writing ethnography) on interpretation or self-reflexivity, it has to be kept in mind that what one observes in the field is underpinned by certain theoretical positions. Weiner’s work (Weiner 1992) is an example of how the predominance of certain Western theories of exchange influenced the findings of Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands. Similarly, the theoretical influences of structural functionalism, theories of shapes and flows of globalisation, postcolonial theories are a few of the many influences that determine what an ethnographer would “see” in the field and how that would be translated.

Developing a research question ought to be the first step in the ethnographic method. Identifying theoretical interests would also be helpful before a researcher goes in the ‘field’. An Interpretive approach has to realise that the act of ‘seeing’ is a subjective one.

Self Check Exercise 2

What is one of the principal shifts in the ethnographic approach from the second half of the twentieth century onwards?

In the aftermath of the Second World War and the decolonisation of the former European and British colonies, the colonial legacy and the positivistic values of Anthropology and the ethnographic method began to be questioned. Culture was seen as text, and the function of the ethnographer became that of interpreting culture. Techniques like “thick description” came into use in this kind of interpretive ethnography where the ethnographer not only observed, but also analysed the structure of meanings behind the actions recorded in the field.

Who is one of the earliest and most influential “native ethnographers” in Indian Sociology?

M. N. Srinivas is regarded as one of the earliest “native ethnographers” in India. Although he was trained at the University of Bombay and at Oxford, Srinivas returned in the 1940s to his home in Mysore and did his fieldwork in the village of Rampura in the Mysore District, living there for a year.

Who popularised the concept of thick description?

The term thick description was used by Gilbert Ryle. The Anthropologist Clifford Geertz popularised the concept and stressed its importance for an interpretive ethnographic approach, applying the technique to his own fieldwork in Bali.

Is the field always a village or a primitive society?

The archetypal field in classical Anthropology in the works of evolutionists and structural functionalists were often single sites, particularly the settlement of a tribe, an island or a village. However, from the second half of the twentieth century a variety of contexts from urban neighbourhoods to organisation began to be seen as fields. From the 1980s, the concept of a multi-sited field has also emerged.

10. Challenges of Doing Ethnographic Fieldwork

Researchers have to be careful so as not to romanticise the culture being observed. Malinowski (1930) cautioned against a tendency of ethnographers to notice and write about the sensational, and of treating customs and beliefs of a culture as a collector might treat savage “curios” (ibid: 217).
Researchers following the classical ethnographic approach of long periods of fieldwork might feel bouts of “homesickness” and a yearning for one’s own way of life.
Researchers must attain ‘communicative competence’ in the field and be familiar in the language spoken in the field. The linguistic requisite sometimes restricts ethnographer to English speaking sites in a transcultural multi-sited Ethnography.
The concept of doing ethnography has been reworked with shifting concerns of Anthropology and Sociology and changing perspectives about culture in the contemporary world. The researcher must not just record observations made in the field, but also try and understand the meanings attached to the various actions and practices of the natives in the field.
The researcher must conform to a code of ethics so as not to harm or breach the confidence of anyone. Also, a researcher is situated between intersecting roles of an individual, a scientist, and a cultural translator (Robben & Sluka 2011).
If a multi-sited approach is followed, a researcher must carefully constitute the sites of the field. The aim of multi-sited ethnography is not just to compare different cultural contexts, but to explore the linkages and relationships between a set of sites.
Where the distinction between the “home” and the “field” of the ethnographer is not valid, the researcher must be careful in problematising a culture that is familiar to her or him.
Fieldwork and immersion in a field in a culture, which is different from the researcher’s own, is challenging. But an ethnographer can face different kinds of challenges when the field is not too far away from “home”, particularly in a discipline where the tradition of a faraway “other” culture has been a model for ethnography (Robben & Sluka 2011). Thick description or being self-reflexive can pose challenges for an ethnographer writing about a context s/he otherwise takes for granted.
One of the principal challenges faced by ethnographers on “returning” from the “field”, from the hiatus of their everyday life is how to order the diffuse and varied materials collected in the field and write it up.

11. Challenges of Writing an Ethnography and Representation

· A common dilemma of ethnographers when writing up their observations is that of representing the “other” culture. While the tendency to sensationalise peculiarities of a culture is cautioned against, writing in a way to familiarise practices of that culture which might appear peculiar to readers also raises issues. This is particularly true of ethnographies that follow the tenets of cultural relativism.

· Self-Reflexivity of the researcher is an essential aspect of writing ethnography. In the contemporary academic context, approaches like “thick description” are valued. It is also essential that the researcher discusses the process of research. The researcher ought to reflect on her/his location in the field and its advantages, limitations and scope for doing fieldwork. This was also a concern of earlier anthropologists. Margaret Mead, for example, talked about a disciplined awareness of one’s own cultural standing (Mead 1928: 345).

· The issue of cultural translation when a researcher writes about a culture for a readership comprised of people from another cultural context is a challenge that researchers have to address.

· It has been argued by some that the interpretations not only vary with the cultural standing of an ethnographer, but also from other aspects of social location like gender. Anthropologists (Behar & Gordon 1996) talk about possibilities of feminist ethnography, which have been largely overlooked by other contemporary Anthropologists and Sociologists.

· The researcher can choose from different genres of ethnography when writing. The researcher ought to problematise the research question, have an understanding of the various theoretical strands and accordingly follow or evolve a style of writing.

12. Alternate Methods of Documenting the “Field”

Researchers have also sometimes used visual methods to record observations in the field. Pierre Bourdieu’s photographs of French occupied Algeria are an example of this approach. The photographs can act as aids to memory at the time of writing up ethnography (Bourdieu 2012).

Contemporary researchers also point to a possibility of ethnography of non-places. In temporary contexts, like conferences or music festivals, this is apparent. A few researchers have reflected on the possibility of biography as ethnography (Krismundsdottir 2006). In these contexts, an ethnographer can rely on textual sources like pamphlets, brochures, biographies or other sources like expert opinion to aid observations.

13. Genres and Applications of Ethnography

Many researchers experiment with genres of writing ethnographies. Scholars like Levi Strauss and Geertz were influenced by literary styles in fiction and literary theory. This is not just true of contemporary ethnographies. Even Anthropologists like Ruth Benedict are known for their ethnographic styles (Behar & Gordon 1996). Clifford& Marcus (1986) assert that ethnography is “hybrid textual activity” (ibid: 26) and conceives of the possibility of a poetics involved in writing ethnography. Although ethnography is long associated with the Anthropological tradition, it has also been used innovatively in a variety of contexts, e.g. Srivastava’s work of networks of slum dwellers in Delhi (Srivastava 2014), Garsten’s work on the transnational organisations of the manufacturers of Apple computers (Garsten 1994), PayalArora’s work on social computing in Himachal Pradesh (Arora 2010), to name a few. The ethnographic method has been used in a number of contexts like organizations, marketplaces, schools, subcultures, and states.

The writing of ethnography is as integral as fieldwork and the researcher must consider available genres and style before selecting a style.

14. Some Examples of Ethnographies (arranged alphabetically)

i) Classical Monographs

Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture, 1934.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People, 1940.

Malinowski, B. Argonauts Of The Western Pacific: An Account Of Native Enterprise And Adventure In The Archipelagoes Of Melanesain New Guinea, 1922.

Mead, M. Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928.

Srinivas, M. N. The Remembered Village, 1976.

ii) Contemporary Examples of Ethnographic Approach

Bourdieu, P. Picturing Algeria, 2012. (Primarily of interest for the use of visual methods of translating the field)

Garsten, C. Apple World, 1994. (Primarily of interest as an example of mulisited ethnography)

Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” In Interpretation of Cultures, 1973. (Primarily of Interest because of its Thick Description)

Srivastava, S. Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon, 2014 (Primarily of interest as ethnography of an urban space).

15. Limitations of the Ethnographic Approach

The ethnographic approach of doing fieldwork relies on the observations made by the ethnographer in the present. Events or situations in the past that give meaning to occurrences in the observed present are, therefore, not observed firsthand. Also, it is helpful for primarily those aspects of a culture that are observable.

A researcher can be conflicted between ethical imperatives of being neutral in the field and her/his own moral standpoint. It can be challenging for a researcher, for example, to refrain from interfering in a fight, or to make decisions about abandoning “scientific objectivism” in the field when someone faces the threat of violence.

The writing of ethnography can be challenging and relies to a great extent on the interpretations of the ethnographer. Works like that of Annette Weiner (1992) or that of Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon (1996) that talk about a genre of feminist ethnography, are examples of how the same spaces could yield starkly different ethnographic accounts by different researchers when viewed from the lens of gender.

Finally, the questions about what kind of distance is necessary for a context to be a ‘field’, the positioning of an ethnographer as a native or an outsider are not resolvable and researchers must evolve their own techniques of distancing or familiarising the alien and constitute a field according to their research interests.

Self Check Exercise 3

· What is one of the central challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork in another culture? The researcher must be wary of romanticising or sensationalising the “other” culture.

· Can an ethnographer be a native to a field?

An ethnographer can be a native in her/his field to an extent, for example, if s/he is of the same linguistic, racial or religious group. But beyond a point, an ethnographer by virtue of her/his training as a researcher, a certain social location and biographical experience cannot be a complete insider to her/his field.

16. Summary

In this module the different techniques in the ethnographic approach of doing fieldwork and writing up the observations of the field have been discussed along with the historical shifts in the kind of techniques and agendas of using the ethnographic method. The challenges and limitations of the ethnographic method have been discussed and a few works representing the varying styles of ethnography have been provided to give an overview of the genres and styles available to a researcher.

you can view video on Ethnography: Immersion in the Field and Thick Description

17. Some Useful Links and E-Sources

18. Bibliography

Arora, Payal. Dot Com Mantra. Social Computing in the Central Himalayas.(Voices in Development Management). Great Britain: Ashgate, 2010.
Behar, Ruth and Deborah A. Gordon. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. New York: Mentor, 1960 [1946].
Bourdieu, Pierre. Picturing Algeria. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Clifford, James and George Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Authority”. Representations, No. 2 (Spring 1983): 118-146.
Crapanzano, Vincent. “‘Hermes’ Dilemma. The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description”, In Clifford, James and George Marcus (Ed.). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010,p. 51-76.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. London: OUP, 1940.
Falzon, Mark-Anthony. “Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research”. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009.
Garsten, C. Apple World. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology 33. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1994.
Geertz, Clifford. Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Gupta, Akhil & James Ferguson. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Haddon, Alfred C. “The Ethnography of the Western Tribe of Torres Straits.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 19 (1890): 297–440.
Hannerz, Ulf. “Being There … and There … and There! Reflections on Multi-site Ethnography”, Ethnography 4 (2003): 229–44.
Kristmundsdottir, S. D. “Far from the Trobriands? Biography as Field”. In Simone Coleman and Peter Collins (Eds), Locating the Field. Space, Place and Context in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg, 2006, p. 163-177.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts Of The Western Pacific: An Account Of Native Enterprise And Adventure In The Archipelagoes Of Melanesain New Guinea. London: Routledge. 2005 [1922].
Malinowski, Bronislaw. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. London: The Athlone Press, 1989 [1967].
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