The word ‘ethnography’ has a double meaning in anthropology: ethnography as product (ethnographic writings—the articles and books written by anthropologists), and ethnography as process (†participant observation or *fieldwork). The product depends upon the process, but not in any simple A>B relationship. In constructing ethnographies, anthropologists do more than merely ‘write up’ the fieldnotes they record as part of the process of doing fieldwork. If ethnographies can be seen as the building blocks and testing grounds of anthropological theory, ethnographies and the ethnographic process from which they derive are also shaped and moulded by theory.
Ethnography (in both senses) may profitably be envisioned as one point of an anthropological triangle. The other two points are comparison and contextualization.
Together the three points of this triangle define the operational system by which anthropologists acquire and use ethnographic data in writing ethnographies. Fieldnotes are filtered and interpreted against *comparative theory and against contextual documentary materials. As they are read, ethnographies then stimulate comparative theoretical thinking, which in turn suggests new problems and interpretations to be resolved through further ethnographic fieldwork. Ethnographies, and the comparative theoretical reflection they spur, also regularly lead to new demands and rising standards for documentary contextualization (more history, more ecological or demographic backgrounding, more attention to *state policy, economic trends and the *world system). This anthropological triangle of ethnography, comparison and contextualization is, in essence, the way in which socio-cultural anthropology works as a discipline to explain and interpret human cultures and social life.
Ethnographies as they have evolved over the past century-and-a-half constitute a genre, a form of writing conditioned by the process of knowledge construction epitomized in this anthropological triangle. Ethnographies consequently differ from travel writing, gazetteers, interview-based surveys, or even the personal fieldwork accounts of anthropologists (which form a separate genre). Ethnography, both product and process, has a history and pattern of development of its own.
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