As a written account, an ethnography focuses on a particular population, place and time with the deliberate goal of describing it to others. So, often, did the writings of nineteenth-century explorers, *missionaries, military agents, journalists, travellers, and reformers; and these contain much information useful to anthropologists. What distinguishes the first ethnography, *Louis Henry Morgan’sThe League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851), from these other writings are two qualities: its attempt to depict the structure and operation of Iroquois society from the Iroquois viewpoint (the ethnographic point of the anthropological triangle), and its grounding in the †monogenist anthropological theorizing of its time (the comparative point of the triangle), ideas to which Morgan would make major additions and reformulations. Morgan’s book detailed Iroquois †matrilineal *kinship, political and ceremonial life, *material culture, and *religion; the ethnographic basis for this information being Morgan’s partnership with the Western-educated Iroquois Ely S.Parker, his translator and cultural interpreter. The book’s attention to history, geography, the impact of White settlers and contemporary land-rights issues also established standards for pre-and postfieldwork contextualization (the third point of the triangle) that anthropologists continue to heed.
Morgan’s ethnography, still authoritative and readable, was not joined by comparable works until the 1880s. What ensued instead were increased efforts to provide standardized guides for gathering ethnographic data by local ‘men on the spot’ (few were women) in accord with the comparative goals of armchair theorists. Although Morgan did himself collect kinship data from American Indian groups on fieldtrips during the 1860s, much of the material he used in later writings arrived from missionary and other amateurs in India, Australia and elsewhere, who filled in and returned his kinship schedules. In England, †E.B.Tylor played a key role in drafting †Notes and Queries on Anthropology, first published in 1874 for use around the globe; he and other comparativists like †James Frazer helped shape up the resulting local work for publication, often first as articles in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, which dates to 1872. Through these efforts ethnographic standards slowly improved, and theoretical perspectives became more overt, but contextualization retreated, a victim of antihistorical and †ethnocentric *evolutionism or *diffusionism.
The fieldwork of †Frank Cushing among the Zuni Indians in the early 1880s made a great leap forward in ethnographic method. Cushing learaed to speak Zuni, resided at the pueblo over a four-year period, and combined observation of ongoing events with the seated-informant questioning more typical of the anthropological guide-users. Cushing’s sensitive Zuni Fetishes (1883) revealed the inner world of these people’s *cosmology, *mythology and *symbolism, and its connection to practical activities; so did his major work Zuni Breadstuff (1920), but its initial publication during 1884–85 in an obscure journal insulated its impact at the time. Cushing’s lack of influence on students and his death in 1899 combined to make his ethnographic advances a false start for anthropology (Sanjek 1990:189–92).
*Franz Boas’s ethnographic research among the Inuit in 1883–84 moved less thoroughly in the participant observation direction than Cushing, and his subsequent fieldwork through the 1890s among the American Indians of the Northwest Coast amounted mainly to the transcription of texts recited by seated informants (Sanjek 1990:193–203). It was this approach that he taught his cohorts of students during the first three decades of the twentieth century at Columbia University, and they took it with them as anthropology departments sprouted in the United States. Their goal was the †‘salvage ethnography’ of ‘memory cultures’ and not the direct †participant observation of human life as it is lived. In view of the devastated circumstances of Native American reservations, the Boasians recognized no other choice before †acculturation and *community studies became acceptable alternatives in the 1930s. Until then, American ethnographies increased in number, and improved in contextualization as historical interests supplanted evolutionary theory. But they stultified in method as participant observation regressed, and in theory as well, with little invigoration from the ethnographic point of the anthropological triangle.
In British anthropology, the division of labour between the armchair theorist and the person on the spot, already dead in the USA, entered obsolescence in the 1890s when Tylor and Frazer’s Oxford-trained protégé †Baldwin Spencer collaborated in participant observation with a seasoned local expert on Aboriginal life, †Frank Gillen. Their Central Tribes of Native Australia (1899) provided a vivid and detailed view of cosmology, *ritual and social organization that not only revealed unheralded cultural complexity amidst technological simplicity, but also sparked new theoretical currents in the work of †Émile Durkheim and †Sigmund Freud.
Even before Spencer and Gillen’s work was published, in 1898 a team of Cambridge scientists arrived on the spot themselves in the †Torres Straits expedition to the islands just north of Australia. Though less theoretically or ethnographically provocative, their results moved fieldwork practice beyond even the Australian ethnographers with crystallization of the *genealogical method of anthropological inquiry by team member †W.H.R.Rivers. Rivers demonstrated that the systematic collection of genealogies could produce far more than kinship terminologies; community history, *migration trajectories, *marriage patterns, demography, †inheritance and succession, and the relation of rules to actual occurrences could all be studied. With his application of this method in The Todas (1906), an ethnography of a South Indian group, Rivers also found that prior knowledge of kinship connections enriched an understanding of participation in ongoing ritual events (Sanjek 1990:203–7).
These British ethnographic innovations were incorporated into a 1912 revision of Notes and Queries. Novice ethnographer *Bronislaw Malinowski carried this with him to New Guinea in 1914, but soon became discouraged with the limits of even this more sophisticated use of the seated informant. In his ground-breaking Trobriand Islands fieldwork of 1915–18, Malinowski bettered Cushing. Not only did he learn the language, but he more actively entered the scenes of daily life and made the speech in action he heard and recorded there the basis of his ethnography. Moreover, he maintained detailed fieldnotes that he analysed topically while still in the field, and constantly reread to plan further research activities (Malinowski 1922:1–25). He found that topics like economics or law or land-use or *magic intruded on each other—the events recorded in his fieldnotes could be analyzed ethnographically from several of these institutional perspectives. Thus was his *functionalism born, ‘the mass of gears all turning and grinding on each other’ as his American contemporary †Ralph Linton put it (Sanjek 1990:207–15).
Malinowski’s students, a robust and gifted group, produced dozens of classic ethnographies during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps the most influential has been †E.E.Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940). Rich in ethnographic details, it is nonetheless highly selective in their presentation, subordinating them to a powerful theory of how *descent ideology organizes group life and cattle management against the vagaries of annual ecological transformation and population movement. In this work, influenced by the thinking of *A.R.Radcliffe-Brown, a strong relationship was evident between the comparative and ethnographic points of the anthropological triangle, and its impact was marked over the next quarter century. As critiques of The Nuer later mounted, it was the historical-contextual point of the triangle that was seen as most in need of bolstering.
In the US, Malinowskian-style ethnography took hold and Boasian fieldwork methods were largely superceded. †Margaret Mead, one of Boas’s later students, appears to have independently invented an ethnographic approach equivalent to Malinowski’s, against her mentor’s advice (Sanjek 1990:215–26). From the 1940s, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, a combination of strong ethnography but weak contextualization was widely visible in both anthropological theory and in ethnographies themselves. New demands for improved contextualization arose with the impact of *ecology, *regional analysis, *history and anthropology, and *world systems in the 1960s and thereafter. Today, there are hundreds of classic ethnographies, though perhaps none since The Nuer would be as readily so designated by a majority of anthropologists, or has been as widely read.
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