What's the State of Ethnography Today?

Ethnography as research methodology has undergone many changes since the first generation of anthropologists took to the field in safari hats just after the turn of the last century. The end of colonization in Africa and Asia in the 1960s and 1970s was accompanied by a strong postcolonial critique of anthropology as a discipline and ethnography as methodology. Anthropologists were criticized for their dependence on colonial governments for funds, patronage, and at times protection, and on missionaries who provided “grammars, transportation, introductions, and in certain cases … a deeper translation of language and customs than can be acquired in a one- or two-year visit” (Clifford, 1997, p. 65). Equally important, according to postcolonial scholars, is that the ethnographies that were produced reinforced the image of the colonialist subject (Asad, 1995; Clifford, 1997; Salemink, 2000).

These critiques led to vigorous debates within and across disciplines concerning ethnographic methodology, researcher positionality, and representation. Postcolonial anthropologists (Kondo, 1990; Limón, 1994; Rosaldo, 1989; Taussig, 1997) have challenged and blurred anthropological distance while examining the organization of power by colonial governments, the modern state, and market systems. Feminist ethnographers (Abu-Lughod, 2000; Behar, 1993; Mahmood, 2005; Strathern, 2005) have critiqued dualisms of subject-object, researcher-researched, nature-culture, public-private, and self-other, and advocated examinations of authority, reproduction, emotion, and agency. Critical ethnographers (see also Chapter Fifteen) have expanded the role of ethnographer to include advocate, have widened the ethnographic focus to include both structure and agency, and have focused the ethnographic aim to embrace social justice and transformation.

The result is that rather than “a normative practice of outsiders visiting/studying insiders” (Clifford, 1997, p. 81), ethnography has become a practice of attending to “shifting identities in relationship with the people and issues an anthropologist seeks to represent” (Narayan, 1993, p. 682). That change is visible in course work, conferences, and publications. Classes on ethnography regularly address ethics, fieldwork identities, and researcher reflexivity, and conferences on ethnographic research center around themes like those of the 2010 Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines (CEAD) conference hosted by the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand: emerging methods, practice and advocacy, and social justice and transformation. Increased reflexivity, or researchers' examination of their own sociohistorical locations, have typically become part of ethnographic narratives (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983). The goal is to replace the disembodied, all-seeing anthropologists with ethnographers who are politically committed and geographically and historically situated.