Ethnography is a term that carries several historically situated meanings. In its most general sense, the term refers to a study of the culture that a given group of people more or less share. The term is double-edged and has implications for both the method of study and the result of such study. When used as a method, ethnography typically refers to fieldwork (alternatively, participant-observation) conducted by a single investigator who ‘lives with and lives like’ those who are studied, usually for a year or more. When used as a result, ethnography ordinarily refers to the written representation of a culture. Contemporary students of culture emphasize the latter usage and thus look to define ethnography in terms of its topical, stylistic and rhetorical features.
There are three moments (discernible activity phases) associated with ethnography. The first moment concerns the collection of information or data on a specified culture. The second refers to the construction of an ethnographic report; in particular, the compositional practices used by an ethnographer to fashion a cultural portrait. The third moment of ethnography deals with the reading and reception that an ethnography receives across relevant audience segments both narrow and broad. Each phase raises distinctive issues.
The greatest attention in the social sciences has been directed to the first moment of ethnography—fieldwork. This form of social research is both a product of and a reaction to the cultural studies of the mid- to late nineteenth century (Stocking 1987; 1992). Early ethnography is marked by considerable distance between the researcher and researched. The anthropologists of the day based their cultural representations not on firsthand study but on their readings of documents, reports and letters originating from colonial administrators, members of scientific expeditions, missionaries, adventurers and, perhaps most importantly, faraway correspondents guided by questions posed by their stay-at-home pen-pals. Not until the early twentieth century did ethnographers begin to enter, experience and stay for more than brief periods of time in the strange (to them) social worlds about which they wrote. Bronislaw Malinowski (1922:1–25) is most often credited with initiating by example a modern form of fieldwork that requires of the ethnographer the sustained, intimate and personal acquaintance with ‘what the natives say and do’.
There is, however, a good deal of variation in terms of just what activities are involved in fieldwork and, more critically, just how such activities result in a written depiction of culture. Current practices include intensive interviewing, count-and-classify survey work, participation in everyday routines or occasional ceremonies engaged in by those studied, the collecting of samples of native behaviour across a range of social situations, and so on. There is now a rather large literature designed to help novice or veteran fieldworkers carry out ethnographic research (e.g. Bernard 1994; Hammersley and Atkinson 1983; Spradley 1979).
Yet much of the advise offered in fieldwork manuals defies codification and lacks the consensual approval of those who produce ethnographies. Fieldnotes, for example, are more or less de rigueur in terms of documenting what is learned in the field but there is little agreement as to what a standard fieldnote—much less a collection of fieldnotes—might be (Sanjek 1990). Moreover, how one moves from a period of lengthy in situ study to a written account presumably based on such study is by no means clear. Despite seventy or so years of practice, fieldwork remains a sprawling and quite diverse activity (Kuper 1983).
The second moment of ethnography—writing it up—has by and large been organized by a genre labelled ‘ethnographic realism’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Van Maanen 1988). It is a genre that has itself shifted over time from a relatively unreflective, closed and general (holistic) description of native sayings and doings to a more tentative, open and partial interpretation of native sayings and doings (Geertz 1973). Yet realism remains a governing style for a good deal of ethnography, descriptive or interpretative. It is marked by a number of compositional conventions that include, for example, the suppression of the individual cultural member’s perspective in favour of a typified or common denominator ‘native’s point of view’ the placement of a culture within a timeless ethnographic present and a claim for descriptive or interpretive validity based on the author’s ‘being there’ (fieldwork) experience.
Some ethnographers, though by no means all, express a degree of dissatisfaction with ethnographic realism (Marcus and Fischer 1986). Partly a response to critics located outside ethnographic circles who wonder just how personal experience serves as the basis for a scientific study of culture, some ethnographers make visible—or, more accurately, textualize—their discovery practices and procedures (Agar 1980). Confessional ethnography results when the fieldwork process itself becomes the focus in an ethnographic text. Its composition rests on moving the fieldworker to centre stage and displaying how the writer comes to know a given culture. While often carefully segregated from an author’s realist writings, confessional ethnography often manages to convey a good deal of the same sort of cultural knowledge put forth in conventional realist works but in a more personalized fashion (e.g. Rabinow 1977).
Other genres utilized for ethnographic reporting are available as well. Dramatic ethnographies, for example, rest on the narration of a particular event or sequence of events of apparent significance to the cultural members studied. Such ethnographies present an unfolding story and rely more on literary techniques drawn from fiction than on plain-speaking, documentary techniques—‘the style of non-style’—drawn from scientific reports (e.g. Shore 1982). Critical ethnographies provide another format wherein the represented culture is located within a larger historical, political, economic, social and symbolic context than is said to be recognized by cultural members, thus pushing the writer to move beyond traditional ethnographic frameworks and interests when constructing the text (e.g. Nash 1979). Even self or auto-ethnographies have emerged in which the culture of the ethnographer’s own group is textualized. Such writings offer the passionate, emotional voice of a positioned and explicitly judgemental fieldworker and thus obliterates the customary distinction between the researcher and the researched (e.g. Young 1991).
A good deal of the narrative variety of ethnographic writing is a consequence of the post-1970s spread of the specialized and relatively insular disciplinary aims of anthropology and, to a lesser degree, sociology. Growing interest in the contemporary idea of culture—as something held by all identifiable groups, organizations and societies—has put ethnography in play virtually everywhere. No longer is ethnography organized simply by geographic region, society or community. Adjectival ethnographies have become common and sizeable literatures can be found in such areas as medical ethnography, organizational ethnography, conversation ethnography, school ethnography, occupational ethnography, family ethnography and many more. The results of the intellectual and territorial moves of both away and at-home ethnography include a proliferation of styles across domains and an increase in the number of experimental or provisional forms in which ethnography is cast.
The expansion of ethnographic interests, methods and styles is a product of the third moment of ethnography—the reading of ethnographic texts by particular audiences and the kinds of responses these texts appear to generate. Of particular interest are the categories of readers that an ethnographer recognizes and courts through the topical choices, analytic techniques and composition practices displayed in a text. Three audience categories stand out. First, collegial readers are those who follow particular ethnographic domains most avidly. They are usually the most careful and critical readers of one another’s work and the most familiar with the past and present of ethnography. Second, general social science readers operate outside of ethnographic circles. These are readers attracted to a particular ethnography because the presumed facts (and perhaps the arguments) conveyed in the work helps further their own research agendas. Third, there are some who read ethnography for pleasure more than for professional enlightenment. Certain ethnographic works attract a large, unspecialized audience for whom the storytelling and allegorical nature of an ethnography is salient. Such readers look for familiar formats—the traveller’s tale, the adventure story, the investigative report and, perhaps most frequently, the popular ethnographic classics of the past—when appraising the writing. Ironically, the ethnographer charged with being a novelist manqué by colleagues and other social scientists is quite likely to be the ethnographer with the largest number of readers.
For each reader segment, particular ethnographic styles are more or less attractive. Collegial readers may take in their stride what those outside the field find inelegant, pinched and abstruse. The growing segmentation across collegial readers suggests that many may be puzzled as to what nominal ethnographic colleagues are up to with their increasingly focused research techniques and refined, seemingly indecipherable, prose styles. This creates something of a dilemma for ethnographers for it suggests the distance between the general reader and the ethnographic specialist as well as the distance between differing segments of ethnographic specialists themselves is growing. While ethnography itself is in little or no danger of vanishing, those who read broadly across ethnographic fields may be fewer in number than in generations past. This is a shame, for strictly speaking an unread ethnography is no ethnography at all.
John Van Maanen
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
References
Agar, M. (1980) The Professional Stranger, New York.
Bernard, H.R. (1994) Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology, 2nd edn, Newbury Park, CA.
Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (eds) (1986) Writing Culture, Berkeley, CA.
Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York.
Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (1983) Ethnography, London.
Kuper, A. (1983) Anthropology and Anthropologists, 2nd edn, London.
Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London.
Marcus, G.E. and Fischer, M. (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Chicago.
Nash, J. (1979) We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us, New York.
Rabinow, P. (1977) Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Berkeley, CA.
Sanjek, R. (ed.) (1990) Fieldnotes, Ithaca, NY.
Shore, B. (1982) Sala’ilua: A Seaman Mystery, New York.
Spradley, J.P. (1979) The Ethnographic Interview, New York.
Stocking, G.W. (1987) Victorian Anthropology, New York.
——(1992) The Ethnographer’s Magic, Madison, WI.
Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the Field, Chicago.
