Summary

Ethnographic research enables us to better understand the role of culture in both everyday and special practices and events. The goal of ethnographic research is to describe ways of life from an insider's, or emic, perspective, in a manner that is comprehensible from an etic, or outsider's, point of view. Through prolonged fieldwork involving participant observation, interviews, and other research methods, ethnographers describe and interpret cultural patterns, identify social reproduction and cultural continuities, and examine resistance and cultural change. Both theory testing and theory generating, ethnographers seek out patterns that help us understand and address problems on the micro level of the classroom and on the macro level of global exchange networks. Coming of age alongside dramatic changes in post–World War II global power structures, ethnographers have been the focus of a postcolonial critique concerning their role in reproducing first world–third world and north-south power structures. The result has been an emergence of experimental writing, increasingly reflexive accounts of fieldwork, and ethnographies informed by critical and postmodern theories.