What Is Ethnographic Research?

Ethnography, from the Greek ethnos (“foreign people”) and graphein (“to write”), is the systematic study of a particular cultural group or phenomenon. Ethnography is the primary research methodology for anthropologists; it seeks to answer anthropological questions concerning the ways of life of living human beings. Ethnographic research is also conducted by social scientists in other fields, including cultural studies, education, linguistics, communication studies, health care, and criminology. Historically ethnography has been defined in ways that focus on both the what and the how. In 1909, according to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's later summation (1952), a group of British anthropologists defined ethnography as “the term of descriptive accounts of non-literate peoples” (p. 276). But Radcliff-Brown added two corollaries. He wrote that these “systematic field studies are carried out by trained anthropologists using scientific methods of observation,” and that “the field worker did not confine himself to simple description but sought to include in his account some sort of theoretical analysis” (pp. 276–277).

American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) famously differentiated ethnographic research from other kinds of research not by its methods, but by its “elaborate venture into thick description” (p. 6). By thick description Geertz refers to an action, practice, or event and the meaning and symbolic importance given to it by members of a particular society. Geertz's classic example is the difference between a wink, a blink, and a twitch. All three look similar, but their meanings are vastly different and are only understood within a broader cultural context. The concept of thick description suggests that ethnography goes a step further than simply describing. In fact, ethnographers talk about what they do as cultural interpretation. “Cultural interpretation involves the ability to describe what the researcher has heard and seen within the framework of the social group's view of reality” (Fetterman, 1989, p. 28). Interpretation of culture in its thick description requires both an insider's, or emic, perspective and an outsider's, or etic, perspective. The U.S. anthropologist Ward Goodenough (1970) advised ethnographers not simply to document facts about “a society, its organization, law, customs, and shared beliefs” but also to capture “what an individual must know to behave acceptably as a member of a particular group” (pp. 110–111).

This value on insider perspective shifts the relationship between researcher and research participant for ethnographers. Unlike respondents, who “respond to survey questions,” or subjects, who are the “subject of some experiment,” participants in ethnographic research are informants who “tell you what they think you need to know about their culture” (Bernard, 2005, p. 196). Informants are really teachers; they are experts about their lives and their practices. And if an ethnographer is fortunate, respectful, and successful, an informant will share that expert knowledge. As Richardson (1975, p. 521) wrote,

However, despite the best intentions of the ethnographer, informants are not always cooperative in providing open access to information.

Many ethnographers have written about the challenge of working with informants, who may provide different information in a private setting than they would in a public venue, who tailor information to create a certain impression, or who are simply uncooperative. Satish Saberwal (1969) recounted trying eighteen different times to obtain information from an informant in Kenya before finding any success. Norma Diamond (1970) wrote about the difficulties of working with Taiwanese women her own age who had no place to put Diamond's status as a single woman. Employing multiple informants and multiple research methods, relying on local assistants to make introductions and model appropriate social behavior, and allowing time to breed familiarity have all been cited as strategies to make the ethnographer's presence “more familiar and less threatening” (Sarsby, 1984, p. 118).

Ethnographers collect data in hospitals and family dining rooms, in geriatric centers and on the shop floor, in jungles and in recreational parks—wherever the activity in which they are interested takes place. In order to craft descriptions of cultural events and cultural practices, an ethnographer studies real people doing what they do to meet the everyday demands with which they are confronted. That is to say, ethnography is naturalistic; ethnographers focus on real people and their everyday activities in their natural environment, whatever that may be. Classic ethnographic research conducted in the early and mid-twentieth century was focused on a single society in a single place, and resulted in monographs on the practices of particular groups of people. Raymond Firth (1936) spent a year in Tikopia, in the western Pacific, and his account of that visit, We the Tikopia, has become one of the great classics of ethnography. Similarly, E. E. Evans-Pritchard studied the Neur people of east Africa and produced The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People, another classic of British social anthropology.

More recently ethnographers have found that the activities that are of interest take place over a range of sites, rather than at a single locale. Those ethnographies, termed multi-sited ethnographies (Marcus, 1998), cut across area studies to focus on process and connections through space and time, and often across borders and boundaries. An example of multi-sited ethnography is Nancy Scheper-Hughes's work on the black market for the trade of human organs. In her research Scheper-Hughes (2001, p. 2) follows

… and through various legal and illegal networks of capitalism.

It is important to remember that ethnographers do not study these sites—villages, classrooms, or global networks—themselves. They study in them. As Geertz () wrote, “The locus of the study is not the object of study” (p. 22). The object of ethnography is not the place, but particular cultural phenomena that happen to be located in one or several places.