Key Ideas

• Ethnography is the systematic study of a particular cultural group or phenomenon.
• Ethnography is naturalistic; ethnographers focus on real people and their everyday activities in their natural environment.
• Ethnographers engage in extended fieldwork to document beliefs and practices from people's own point of view.
• Written ethnographies have changed over time from texts exhibiting a disembodied, all-knowing perspective to experimental texts that are unconventional, polyphonic, and heteroglossic.
• Transparency in research methods and analysis improves the credibility and validity of ethnographic reports, as does the inclusion of researcher reflexivity and thick descriptions.

I have been intrigued by culture since I traveled to “the old country” with my grandmother at the age of ten. I was the oldest grandchild, my grandmother was widowed, and we were good traveling companions. We stayed in the village in southeast Austria where my aunts, uncles, and cousins lived. This was in the 1960s. I followed my older cousin as she took the cows out to the pasture every day. Her world, without indoor plumbing or electricity, was a far cry from my own in the industrial northeast United States. I learned then that people in other places lived lives that looked different from my own. I learned then that the differences, and also the similarities, were irresistibly fascinating. But I did not become an ethnographer until much later, after I found myself coordinating community-based development in the east African country of Somalia in the 1980s. Before moving to Somalia I had never had neighbors, colleagues, and friends who were no more than one generation removed from a nomadic existence. Although I understood the concept of culture, I remained confused in my interactions with my Somali friends and colleagues, and did not even know what questions to ask to address my confusion.

I studied to become an ethnographer in order to learn how to ask those questions. In the process I also came to understand that culture and cultural difference were not concepts applicable only to the old country or to pastoral economies on the other side of the globe. In fact, I conducted my first ethnography in the U.S. city in which I was living. In an attempt to understand how men and women negotiate the move from welfare to the workplace, I spent two years watching former welfare recipients assemble science kits in an area nonprofit business, care for elderly residents in a long-term care facility, fill prescriptions in an inner-city hospital pharmacy, and build spiral staircases at a woodshop in the suburbs (Riemer, 2001). In conducting that research I saw the powerful role that economic status, when combined with race or ethnicity, played in expanding or narrowing an individual's employment options.

My current ethnographic research is back in Africa, this time in the southern African country of Botswana, where I am examining literacy practices (Riemer, 2008). These two projects illustrate a basic tenet of ethnographic research—an ethnographer must be able not only to make the strange familiar but also to make the familiar strange. In other words, as an ethnographer my task in Botswana is to make what I find there, the strange, understandable to people living outside Botswana. My challenge in investigating welfare-to-work transitions, however, was to make the ordinary—in that case, everyday workplace practices—strange to those of us who go to work in similar situations every day. Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange is a way of highlighting the intriguing nature of culture. We take our own culture for granted to such a degree that most times we do not even recognize that what we do is cultural. And at the same time, we find others' culture so strange that we have trouble making sense of their practices. In order to truly understand a cultural group or phenomenon, ethnographers must make cultural practices both accessible to those outside the group and identifiable as cultural to those inside the group.

In this chapter I lay out these and other basic tenets of ethnographic research in order to provide an overview both for the novice researcher who wants to know more about ethnographic research and for the reader of research who hopes to gain a better understanding of the ethnographies on the bookshelf and at the bookstore. I discuss how ethnographers ask questions and employ particular forms of data collection and analysis in order to learn and write about culture. I also consider the issues of validity and reliability, critiques of ethnography, and issues of representation and authority.