Article: The Ethnographic Paradigm (Peggy Reeves Sanday, 1979)

Overview:
In this paper, the author provides a brief overview of ethnography and the different
roles of different paradigms. In ethnography, the researcher engages in extended
participant observation over a long period of time and becomes a part of the
situation being studied, so that he gets a first-hand experience. In other words, the
researcher himself becomes the instrument of observation, data collection, analysis
and interpretation. To become a successful ethnographer, the researcher needs to
be comfortable in unfamiliar settings, be empathetic and be adept in taking field
notes. The author then describes paradigmatic ethnography, which depending upon
the interpretive style can be categorized as either being holistic, semiotic or
behaviouristic.
The holistic style, is represented by two opposing cultural theories with works of
Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead (called configurationalist) on one hand, and that
of A. R. Radcliff-Brown, and Bronislaw Malinowski (called functionalist) on the other.
The configurationalists proposed that culture selects a limited segment of
behavourial possibilities from an infinite repertoire which confirms to a
configuration. The functionalists on the other hand studied the social effects of
culture in terms of function. These scholars were committed to the study of culture
as a integrated whole and studied how culture regulates social life and social
structures (Radcliff-Brown) and how biological needs form cultural traits
(Malinowski)
The next paradigm is the semiotic style which was endorsed by researchers like
Geertz and Goodenough. The core of this paradigm is the focus on the “native’s point
of view”. The analysis of culture in this case is driven by the meaning a human give to
his own experience as and when he tackles the web of relationships, he is
surrounded in. This paradigm’s corner stone is thick description of events (symbols
are located in the hearts of men - Geertz) and componential analysis (supplementing
participant observations by various specialized techniques, and an exclusive focus
upon the unit of analysis of the operating culture - Goodenough).

The final paradigm is the behaviouristic style which focusses on the formulation and
examination of deductive propositions by the ethnographer. The primary focus here
is not on uncovering meaning but rather on providing observational data on
preselected, functionally relevant categories, to uncover patterns in the observed
behaviour. The most famous example of this paradigm is the six culture study by
Whitings.
Critique:

While the author, in this paper provides a nice distinction between the three
paradigms of ethnography, but the author did not address in which scenarios and
contexts which paradigms are better suited, or should all the paradigms be used
simultaneously.
In my opinion, sticking rigidly to one particular paradigmatic stance, will severely
limit the ethnographic study. It would also have been better, if the author could have
provided some well-defined guidelines for the new ethnographers to follow in each
paradigm, so that we might get a better idea of how to used these paradigms
practically. Also, while the author, suggests that in participant observation, the
researcher has to get intimately embedded in the culture to provide reliable
conclusions, the issues of researcher’s interpretation bias (based upon the
researcher’s political, religious and social beliefs) is not addressed in the paper.
Furthermore, since the conclusions of ethnographic research is highly based on the
field notes of the researcher, the only way to check the researcher’s interpretation is
to have confidence on the researcher’s integrity, experiences during all the stages of
research, the research questions considered and omitted and the type of research
design adopted. Thus, some good practices to design the research and derive
conclusions in ethnography could also have been described for each of the
paradigms.