Ethnography and Ethnology
Contents
Malinowskian era and immersion:
Writing culture and
post-Malinowskian era:
Ethnology is the attempt to develop rigorous
and scientifically grounded explanations of cultural phenomena by comparing and
contrasting many human cultures. By contrast, ethnography is the systematic
description of a single contemporary culture, often through ethnographic field.
The two concepts are often combined in anthropological writings and they have a
close and complex historical relationship.
Origins:
The words "ethnography" and
"ethnology" appear to have been introduced in the late eighteenth
century. Hans Vermeulen (1995) cited the German historian and linguist August
Ludwig Schlözer's Allgemeine nordische Geschichte (1771) as probably the first
use of the term "Ethnographie," which Schlözer seemed to employ
interchangeably with the term "Völkerkunde" to designate the
descriptive and historical study of peoples and nations. Vermeulen noted
Schlözer's involvement with the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences and his
residency in St. Petersburg in the 1760s, where he ed with G. F. Müller, J. E.
Fischer, and other German scholars recruited by the Russian government to
report on the peoples of the newly explored eastern territories.
Usage:
There is a duality in the idea of ethnography.
On one hand, the word designates observations, ranging from isolated remarks to
extended studies of nations, tribes, or peoples, by anyone who has recorded
what he has seen or heard. On the other hand, ethnography also designated the
aspiration to collect systematically, and according to rigorous procedures,
facts about human languages, customs, arts, and achievements. Ethnography in
this sense included the culling of material from documents and interviews with
visitors returning from foreign lands and the redaction of this material into
learned treatises. The scientific ethnographer was someone who staked a fairly
large claim on erudition, breadth of learning, and capacious memory; thus
ethnography gained a certain reputation as a field for pedants.
Ethnology and ethnography developed, of course,
dialectically. As the antiquity of man became established in the mid-nineteenth
century and anthropological inquiry began to focus on evolutionary questions,
the need for better data became clear. In 1843, Prichard and two of his
colleagues drew up a schedule of questions to guide observations of native
peoples (Penniman 1935: 53). Lewis Henry Morgan began sending his first kinship
terminology questionnaires to missionaries and commercial agents in January
1859 (Trautmann 1987: 103). In 1874, the British Association for the
Advancement of Science published its first edition of Notes and queries on
anthropology, for the use of travellers and residents in uncivilized lands.
These attempts to guide inquiry sometimes had richer returns than their authors
anticipated, as recipients began to engage the larger problem of putting the
answers into local context. The outstanding example is the ethnographic of Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt in
Australia, culminating in Kamilaroi and Kurnai (Fison 1880), which grew out of
the missionary Fison's original correspondence with Morgan (see Stocking 1995:
17 34). By the last decades of the nineteenth century, there were several examples
of a new kind of ethnographic book in which the hypothetical pronouncements of
armchair theorists were tested against the author's own observations. Robert
Henry Codrington's The Melanesians (1891) and Baldwin Spencer and Frank
Gillen's The native tribes of central Australia (1899) exemplify this new,
theoretically informed style of extended firsthand observation. Also during
this period, the Bureau of American Ethnology began its publication of
ethnographic monographs based on systematic field.
Key
dimensions:
The underlying
contrast between the interview and ordinary (some might say naturalistic) conversation
remains at the core of scholarly on
ethnographic interviewing. Most generally, discussions of the ways ethnographic
interviewing differs from other kinds of interviewing have tended to emphasise how
ethnographic interviewing aims to be more like ordinary conversation. scholars
typically focus mainly on two key dimensions of the ethnographic interview process
that I have called embeddedness and openness.
Embeddedness:
The ethnographic interview is distinguished from
other kinds of qualitative interview in its striving for a high level of
embeddedness. The term embeddedness may be used in two senses: to describe the
degree to which the interview is taking place within the social world one is studying,
rather than in isolation from it; and to describe the degree to which the
interview is conducted from within a field of knowledge about the social,
cultural and material world of the interviewee. This embeddedness can result in
deeper understanding of the ‘other’ and produce ‘thicker’ description about
their life as they live (Geertz 1973).
Second criterion for embeddedness refers to the
degree to which the interview unfolds within the interviewee’s everyday social
milieu. The most embedded interviews in this sense take place within the context
of long-term participant observation, after researchers have made efforts to
establish a place within the nets of social relations of the people they will
be interviewing. By speaking the local language or local dialect, and by being
attentive to social norms, ideally they will have established rapport with
their interviewees, and earned their trust. This stands in contrast to
interviews that take place in isolated settings in which the interviewee knows
the interviewer only as a researcher, and not as neighbour, friend, co-er, or
perhaps, (fictive) kin. In much psychological interviewing, there is in fact an
effort to minimize the effects of the setting and to make sure the social
identity and opinions of the interviewer are obscured, so as to encourage
responses that are as little affected by external conditions as possible. In
ethnographic interviews, by contrast, interviewers deliberately seek to
approach their interviewees with an understanding of the complex social
relationships involved. Through a deep appreciation of the context of these
relationships, they expect to develop a richer and more layered understanding
of the social worlds they are studying.
Openness:
In addition
to embeddedness, the ethnographic can be
distinguished from other kinds of qualitative interview by its degree of
openness. It is informal because there are no lists of questions, the
ethnographer is not taking on the role of an interrogator, and it happens in the
course of everyday social interactions (Agar 1980: 90). In ideal typical terms,
structured interviewing, by contrast, involves asking respondents a
pre-established list of questions, sometimes using an interview schedule that
customizes the direction of the interview based on responses to previous questions.
In structured interviewing, the interviewer must be ‘directive and impersonal’,
and ideally, ‘nothing is left to chance’ (Fontana and Frey 2000: 650). Between
these two extremes are unstructured (or openended) interviewing and
semi-structured interviewing.
Approaches:
Ethnographic fieldwork tradition has a long
history and it is rooted from the 19th century enlightenment
philosophy. Roughly the ethnographic approaches can be divided into the
following traditions.
Ethnography
before Malinowski
While anthropology was developed with
enlightenment philosophy and British territorial expansionism, it is commonly
believed that ethnographic fieldwork which tends to dominate much of the
practices of anthropology started with Malinowski. Before Malinowski, there
were surveys and before that there was anthropology from distance popularly
known as the ‘armed chair anthropology’. A recent edited volume Ethnographers before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork,
1870-1922 by Frederico Delgado Rosa, and Han F. Vermeulen (2022) show that
there was serious ethnographic fieldwork being carried out by scholars before
Malinowski. Women practitioners and indigenous experts have been documenting society
and culture quite like an ethnographer during the era when 19th
century evolutionism was the dominant paradigm. For example, it was Franz Boas’
prescription to adapt to ‘their’ customs in order to become a fieldworker
hinting towards immersion based work.
Malinowskian
era and immersion:
As Malinowski did his seminal work in Trobriand
Island and published his principal work, Argonauts
of the Western Pacific (1922), which established him as one of Europe's
most important anthropologists he successfully influenced a generation of
anthropologist with his rather unique of method of participant
observation.[i]
He took posts as a lecturer and
later as chair in anthropology at the London School of Economics, attracting
large numbers of students and exerting great influence on the development of
British social anthropology. Over the years, he guest-lectured at several American
universities; when World War II broke out, he remained in the United States,
taking an appointment at Yale University. During this entire period of his
career he has been successful to influence social anthropologists all over the
world to embrace participant observation because, being there is seen as resulting in production of much superior information
and that has an advantage over the survey methods because there is a difference
between what people say they do and what they actually do. Even today, the
stereotypical ethnographer is seen as doing participant observation, but
researchers also perform quantitative, survey, textual, demographic, and other
types of analysis, depending on local conditions and the nature of the research
project. Until recently the optimal choice was to seek out as exotic a locale
for research as possible; choosing sites closer to home and writing library
dissertations were viewed as inferior alternatives. Researchers carrying out
traditional fieldwork are supposed to immerse themselves, taking in large
amounts of vastly different kinds of data. This range and abundance of
"raw" experience and observation helps put the more formally acquired
information, gathered through structured interviews, for instance, into
context. Supporters of traditional fieldwork also argue that a great deal of
learning about people and CULTURE needs to occur through direct experience, as
opposed to the distancing and objectivity of the scientific method. Learning
through senses other than seeing and hearing
by smelling or imitating habitual body postures, for instance should occur (Stoller 1989). Through using
their senses anthropologists serve as data-gathering instruments and
alterations in themselves become a way of knowing; or, as Susan Harding states,
"the only certain evidence of the reality that preoccupies ethnographers,
of shared unconscious knowledge, is experiential" (1987: 180).
Writing
culture and post-Malinowskian era:
The tradition of fieldwork set by Malinowski
and later anthropologists continued to embrace immersion and continue to
produce an authoritative accounts on
the natives until it was late 1980s and especially before the James Clifford
and George Marcus’ Writing Culture: The
Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Writing
Culture movement in the 1990s was by the “writing against culture”
movement, which expressed misgivings about a common form of anthropological thought
that imposed excessive and disadvantaging “otherness” on the cultures and
peoples studied. This movement implicitly reasserted the humanist universalism
of anthropology and pointed up how other cultures were described in terms that
distanced and dehumanized them. This was a very direct and forceful challenge
to customary descriptive and categorizing practices, and it provoked strong
debate in the discipline. Fundamentally they brought out a few uncomfortable
truths:
a)
How
far an ethnographer’s account of a people is accurate, especially in an era of
post-structuralism when it is well known that writing is fashioning and when
you write you tend to objectify reality.
b)
If
there is a ‘mispresentation’ of reality in ethnographic writings wheather the
finished ethnography is poetically
written to appease its readers, or political
written to appease their masters.
c)
What
about the individual biases that might result in (un)intentional creation of
fiction about a group of people.
d)
Where
lies the truth, is it in the diary that Malinowski wrote (A diary in the strict sense of the term) or in the ethnographic
account?
These questions opened up new possibilities for
ethnographic work and some of the new directions include:
a)
Experience
near ethnography – ethnographies which are being conducted by an ethnographer
on his/her own culture
b)
Self
reflexivity – when an ethnographer speaks openly about his/her own position in
the ethnography and more generally.
c)
Multi-site
ethnography – when an ethnographer is no longer documenting everything under
the sun but working on a particular research question at multiple sites.
[i] Participant-Observation
is long-term, intense interaction with members of a community during which the
researcher plunges into their activities as completely as possible, for
example, by attending rituals, "hanging out," or washing clothes at
the river with other women. It is considered to be the hallmark of traditional
anthropological field research. Advantages of participant-observation are
numerous. (1) It is virtually the only way to conduct ethnographic research
with people who do not speak a written language. (2) The researcher is
"there" all the time, and consequently sees what happens when people
are preparing for events or mopping up afterwards, behaving according to the
rules or breaking them. (3) Immersion in community life results in the
fieldworker becoming less intrusive, less of a stranger, and thus in increased
trust and tolerance on the part of members of the community. (4) Being on their
turf, the researcher can more easily discern the peoples' customary, unexamined
habits and perspectives than if they were in a setting less familiar to them.
(5) Behavior is observed first hand rather than elicited from peoples' accounts
of what happened. (6) Being there and speaking the language vastly increases
the chances of comprehending the meaning of what is happening from the peoples'
point of view.
The disadvantages of participant-observation include:
(1) the investment of a huge amount of time, some of which is not spent very
efficiently. (2) People may resent what they see as snoopy, sneaky behavior by
inquisitive anthropologists. (3) Participant-observation is sometimes difficult
to explain to people (and university committees interested in informed-consent
guidelines). (4) The presence of the anthropologist, at times strongly felt,
affects the behavior being investigated. (5) It is virtually impossible to
adequately demonstrate to readers of ethnographic reports why one's
conclusions, if based on participant-observation, should be accepted beyond the
assertion that "since I was there, my perceptions are accurate." This
is why participant-observation is not, properly speaking, a methodology
(although some speak of it as such: see Spradley 1980) and why researchers
always utilize additional structured or semistructured techniques such as
censuses, genealogies, projective tests, or structured interviews with a
carefully drawn sample.
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