What is Ethnography?

Definitions of ethnography

A useful general definition of ethnography is provided by Sharon Macdonald, who refers to Miller’s description of ethnography as a perspective with the following commitments:

“1. To be in the presence of the people one is studying, not just the texts or objects they produce

2. To evaluate people in terms of what they actually do, i.e. as materials agents working with a material world, and not merely of what they say they do
3. A long term commitment to an investigation that allows people to return to a daily life that one hopes goes beyond what is performed for the ethnographer
4. To holistic analysis, which insists that….behaviours be considered within the larger framework of people’s lives and cosmologies.”

Miller, in Macdonald, 2001: 72

Other interesting perspectives on what ethnography is include:

“A study becomes ethnographic when the fieldworker is careful to connect the acts that s/he observes with the specific features of the backdrop against which these facts occur.”

Silverman, 1997

“Connecting up fragments and fields”

Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992

“Writing culture”

Clifford and Marcus, 1986

“Inscribing social discourse”

Geertz, 1973

“A process of creating and representing knowledge (about society, culture and individuals) that is based on ethnographers’ own experiences.”

Pink, 2009

Follow up on some of the references below on different perspectives on ethnography in order to gather a range of different interpretations of what doing ethnography means.

Key Further Reading: What is Ethnography?

Comaroff, J. And Comaroff, J. (1992) Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Oxford: Westview Press.

Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, University of California Press.

Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, London: Fontana Press.

Green, J. and Bloome, D. (1997) Ethnography and Ethnographers of and in Education: A Situated Perspective. In J. Flood, S. B. Heath and D. Lapp (eds.), Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts. New York: Macmillan.

Jeffrey, B. and Troman, G. (2004) Time for ethnography. British Educational Research Journal, 30 (4), 535-548.

Pink, S. (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography, London: Sage

Silverman, D. (1997) Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice. London: Sage