Theoretical and Historical Foundations of Critical Ethnography

Critical ethnography originated in the 1970s with studies of schooling. It developed out of a sort of marriage between previously competing ideas, concepts, and theories. Classical Marxism provided one key foundational leg for critical ethnography. Marxism posits that the economic structures in a society determine that society's cultural, familial, legal, political, and other structures. Capitalism requires workers and owners, and it is the relationship between these two groups, and between these groups and what is produced, that shapes everything else in society. Marx viewed capitalism as fundamentally an exploitative system (that is, it privileges the owners and oppresses the workers), but this exploitation is hidden in order to ensure its perpetuation. Marxism has been critiqued, however, for being overly mechanistic because it models society as a well-oiled machine. Marxism has also been critiqued for being overly deterministic because it fails to account for human action. Good critical ethnography is neither mechanistic nor deterministic, but it does take seriously the role of structures within all contexts.

Another foundational leg for critical ethnography is structuralism. Drawing on the ideas of Claude Levi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, structuralists assert that all phenomena have a basic structure that determines their elements and characteristics. These structures are real and exist, but they may not be obvious or immediately apparent. Meaning within a community is produced and reproduced through structures—such as the way gender norms are connected to, and carried out through, the institutions of family, work, and education.

And yet another foundational leg can be found in the ideas of culturalists, who center the role of human action and culture in explaining social phenomena. Rather than focusing on the role of structures and institutions, culturalists suggest that people and culture have primary roles in shaping meaning and experience. Whereas a structuralist might learn about gender norms by examining employment policies and practices, a culturalist might learn about gender norms by examining the personal interactions among people in a particular setting.

The debates among these competing camps gave birth to critical ethnography. Because Marxists and structuralists advocated the primacy of structures and culturalists advocated the primacy of human agency, the stage was set for a theoretical perspective and methodological approach that merged these two fundamental ideas about structure and agency.

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) offered empirical support for the Marxist and structuralist perspectives by arguing that schools teach differently to students from different social class backgrounds. Specifically, social reproduction occurs because working-class children receive an education that prepares them for working-class jobs, middle-class children receive an education that prepares them for middle-class jobs, and class hierarchies are thus passed on from one generation to the next. Bowles and Gintis argued that this reproduction occurs because capitalism requires it. But like Marxism, Bowles and Gintis were critiqued for being overly deterministic and mechanistic.

One year later Paul Willis published Learning to Labor (1977), and with it critical ethnography was born. Willis challenged purely structural accounts of schools as institutions of social reproduction by illustrating how British working-class boys produced a culture of opposition to schooling that simultaneously resisted the oppressive education system and contributed to their own social class reproduction. In other words, Willis's analysis accounted for the role of structures while also highlighting the way human agency influences social phenomena. His theory of cultural reproduction offered a merging of the previously competing social theories, and this merging is still what many critical ethnographers attempt in present-day research.

Thus critical ethnography developed in the 1970s as British and American researchers sought ways to resolve the tension between cultural and structural accounts of social and educational processes (Anderson, 1989). In addition to Willis (1977), Jean Anyon (1980), Lois Weis (1985), and Jay MacLeod (987) also produced some of the early work that attempted to marry structural analyses with cultural production explanations in order to highlight human agency in the face of structural constraints. Critical ethnographers initially focused on class issues and, especially, on working-class students' varied responses to schooling (Fine, 1991; Willis, 1997). A common theme in these studies is students as active agents in their education and, oftentimes, as resisting the schooling offered to them. More recent critical ethnographers, such as Michelle Fine, Stacey Lee, and Pauline Lipman, have investigated the intersections of various forms of oppression and continue to provide evidence of the ways class, gender, race, sexuality, language, immigrant status, and other categories are intertwined.