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Ethnography

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DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12065-3

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 Ethnography
Antonius CGM Robben, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Jeffrey A Sluka, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Ethnography is the investigation and description of cultures and societies through fieldwork. Ethnographers conduct
empirical research by immersing in local settings, establishing good rapport, and using qualitative methods such as partic-
ipant observation and open interviews. This intersubjective construction of ethnographic knowledge requires close attention
to forms of textual representation. The twentieth-century standard of long-term, face-to-face fieldwork has in the twenty-first
century been broadened by multisited fieldwork and computer-mediated research.

The term ethnography refers to the first-hand study of people,
cultures, and subjects in local settings, and to their description
and analysis in written texts. Ethnography is as much the
practice of investigation as the reporting of empirical findings.
The investigator is on the one hand the research instrument
that accesses reality through personal observations, experi-
ences, and interactions, and on the other hand the author of
ethnographic knowledge whose texts interpret the study object
through different forms of argumentation and writing. The
history of ethnography reflects its dual meaning as research
and representation. Most key shifts and innovations analyzed
here were pioneered by sociocultural anthropology, which
continues to embrace ethnography with its experience-near
data collection as the heart of the discipline. Sociology has
made several important contributions, notably in urban
studies, but has developed a growing preference for quantita-
tive methods.
The historical antecedents of ethnography date back to
classical antiquity in the writings of Herodotus and Tacitus
about the Egyptians, Scythians, and Germanic tribes. They
were travelers, like their medieval successors Marco Polo and
the Muslim contemporary Ibn Battuta, who spent short
periods at multiple locations and gathered knowledge
through personal observations and local conversations
(Launay, 2010). They developed a distinct genre of travel
writing that reflected a sense of wonder at humankind’s
sociocultural variation, and added creative imaginations to
contrast supposedly ‘superior’ civilizations with ‘inferior’
and ‘primitive’ cultures.
The rise of science and humanism during the Renaissance
encouraged a more systematic study of non-Western cultures,
an approach that had been predated in the fourteenth century
by the Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun. The comparison of
peoples and cultures called for scholarly reflection on
universal classifications and proper research methods. The
manual about data collection by French philosopher Joseph-
Marie Degérando, written in 1800, was formative for
ethnography. It served as the basis for the 1840 manual of the
French Ethnological Society and the Notes and Queries on
Anthropology of 1841 whose multiple editions were required
reading for generations of British anthropologists (Urry,
1972).
Mid-nineteenth-century ethnographic studies by social
scientists such as Morgan, Spencer, Tyler, and Frazer empha-
sized the classification of data according to evolutionary
principles. For example, Lewis Henry Morgan (1985) discerned
in his 1877 book Ancient Society stages of cultural evolution
by comparing human societies in terms of subsistence,
government, language, family types, religion, property, house
life, and architecture. The sociocultural evolutionists were
guided by a systematic data collection that distinguished
their scientific reporting from contemporary travel accounts.
Detailed ethnographic descriptions were presented according
to general classes, categories, types, and taxonomies that facili-
tated cross-cultural comparison.
By the late-nineteenth century, ethnography underwent
a major change when the quality of ethnographic data, the
comparative method, and cultural evolution theory became
questioned. Alfred Haddon’s expedition to the Torres Straits
islands presaged this change. First-hand empirical research was
conducted by a multidisciplinary team of scientists that
surveyed the archipelago as one cultural area, rejected specu-
lative cross-cultural comparisons, and collected local classifi-
cations in the native language, although hardly observing their
manifestation in people’s everyday practices. Haddon intro-
duced the term fieldwork into anthropology, and promulgated
the merging of the armchair anthropologist with the field
researcher into the ethnographer (Stocking, 1996). Franz
Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski came to personify this ideal
at the beginning of the twentieth century through their
epistemological critiques of, respectively, anthropology’s
evolutionism and ethnographic methodology.
Founding Fathers of Ethnography: Boas
and Malinowski
The German-American Franz Boas revolutionized ethnography
in North America by emphasizing in-depth data collection and
inductive analysis, while rejecting cultural evolution theory and
the comparative method. He criticized the classifications of
evolutionists as arbitrary, Eurocentric, and deduced from
unsubstantiated laws and principles. Cultural phenomena that
appeared similar were categorized erroneously into one
class, even though their functions and meanings differed. The
display of material culture in ethnographic museums demon-
strated this misguided approach. Nineteenth-century museums
decontextualized artifacts, such as bows and arrows, musical
instruments, baskets, and clothing, by grouping them in sepa-
rate display cases. Exhibitions were organized along the alleged

178 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12065-3

evolutionary development of material culture. Instead, Boas
argued that different artifacts of one society should be grouped
together as expressions of one cultural whole.
The understanding of cultures as integrated wholes, instead
of manifestations of evolutionary stages, radically changed
ethnographic practice and description. Data collection was no
longer guided by preestablished classifications but by a holistic
approach sensitive to the meanings, patterns, and internal
consistency of sociocultural phenomena and traits within one
culture. Still, Boas’ writings demonstrate the vestiges of earlier
styles of ethnography that clustered data in terms of analytical
categories such as material culture, mythology, social organi-
zation, the arts, and rituals. Boas did not possess a thorough
knowledge of local languages, and worked in partnership with
a key informant who was taught how to present and translate
local knowledge. These narratives were then reworked into
native texts that erased their dialogical production and gener-
ated authoritative accounts (Briggs and Bauman, 1999).
The lasting importance of Franz Boas to ethnography consists
of his emphasis on the detailed description of cultures as
integrated wholes, and his fundamental critique of the
comparative method.
The Polish-British Bronislaw Malinowski (1984) carried
ethnography forward by combining Boas’ concern for
rigorous data collection with experience-rich descriptions,
and adding the importance of language fluency and the study
of worldviews. Malinowski became the great synthesizer of
ethnography, both as field-worker and author, and defined
ethnography in terms of three objectives that required distinct
methods and types of textual notation. One, the ‘cultural
anatomy’ or ‘firm skeleton of tribal life’ must be delineated in
a holistic manner as patterns and regularities. People act
according to patterns unknown to them, so the field-worker
must derive them from their behavior through observation and
inductive inference. The field-worker records these regularities
through systematic, quantitative documentation. Two, the
‘flesh and blood’ or ‘imponderabilia of actual life’ must be
described by observing people’s ordinary behavior and
participating in their activities. The ethnographer’s attention is
not on the regularities of social life but on their individual
enactment – including the field-worker’s – and the subtle
deviations from the patterns. These daily observations are
recorded in an ethnographic diary. Finally, ethnography aims
to study people’s ‘spirit,’ ‘subjective states,’ or ‘typical ways of
thinking and feeling.’ The ethnographer is not interested in
people’s psychology but in their verbalization of worldviews,
opinions, and ideas as members of society. Speech is written
down verbatim in the local tongue to constitute a corpus of
native texts, very much like Boas had proposed.
Malinowski interpreted fieldwork as a dialectic of empathy
and detachment, and turned participant observation into eth-
nography’s key research method. Detachment enabled the
delineation of rules and regularities embedded in thought and
behavior through detailed observation. Empathy allowed the
ethnographer to assume an insider’s perspective through active
participation in the local setting. The ethnographer’s ultimate
goal was ‘to grasp the native’s point of view’ by drawing on the
systematic documentation, the diary, and the native texts.
Although other anthropologists had written ethnographies
based on fieldwork, Malinowski most fully developed the
Ethnography 179
research strategy under the influence of his intellectual mentor
Rivers and his method of intensive study.
The author Malinowski (1984) made an effort to establish
his ethnographic authority in his 1922 Argonauts of the Western
Pacific. Occasionally, writing in the first pronoun and in the
present tense, he described his lengthy residence among the
Trobriand islanders, his isolation from ‘white men’
(Europeans), and his participation in ceremonies and rituals.
Unlike Boas’ neutral texts composed along distinct categories
such as material culture and rituals, Malinowski’s three
ethnographies fuse his personal experiences with those of the
Trobrianders to evoke the life cycles of ritual interisland
exchanges, human reproduction, and agriculture. His studies
combine a scientific stance, an experiential approach, and a
narrative style that evokes lived experience (Payne, 1981).
Malinowski set the standard for ethnographic fieldwork in
sociocultural anthropology with research in a local setting,
conducted in the local language, data collection through
participant observation, and inductive rather than deductive
analysis. Similar developments were occurring in the United
States, not only among the students of Boas but also especially
among sociologists at the University of Chicago.
The Chicago School of Urban Sociology
During the 1920s and the 1930s, sociologists at the University
of Chicago, influenced primarily by the work of American
social psychologist George Herbert Mead, developed new
forms of mostly urban-based ethnographic research, which
became known as the ‘Chicago School.’ Led by Robert Park,
Earnest Burgess, Herbert Blumer, William Thomas, Albion
Small, Charles Horton Cooley, Florian Znaniecki, and Louis
Wirth, the Chicago School represented the first major attempt
to conduct systematic ethnographic fieldwork – particularly
community studies – in urban environments beginning with
Chicago but then spreading to other cities and to small town
life and rural settings such as Jim Crow segregation in the
south. Credited with institutionalizing, if not establishing,
sociology as a modern science, Chicago School sociologists
produced hundreds of monographs about topics such as Jewish
ghettos and other ethnic quarters, taxi-dance halls, professional
thieves, hobos, gangs, juvenile delinquents, labor strikers, and
salesladies. They encouraged their students to do fieldwork,
and reconceptualized their methodology around participant
observation, which they referred to as a ‘hands on’ or ‘getting
one’s hands dirty’ method and which they opposed to
‘armchair philosophy’ based on library research.
Their research combined emerging theoretical approaches –
mainly symbolic interactionism – with qualitative and quanti-
tative methods of field research. Defining the city as a ‘sociological
laboratory,’ many researchers lived in the community they
studied for an extended period of time. They analyzed the
everyday life and symbolic interactions characteristic of specific
groups and communities, focused on social structures and envi-
ronmental factors rather than genetic or individual personality
characteristics, believed that the ‘natural environment’
a community inhabits is the main factor in shaping human
behavior, and viewed the city as a microcosm: “In these great
cities, where all the passions, all the energies of mankind are
180 Ethnography
released, we are in a position to investigate the process of civili-
zation, as it were, under a microscope” (Park, 1928: p. 890).
The Chicago School ethnographers employed an ‘ecological’
approach (now called social ecology) to their studies, producing
spot maps of cities identifying the location of specific behaviors
such as alcoholism, homicide, suicide, psychoses, and poverty
based on official data including census reports, housing and
welfare records, and crime statistics, relating these data spatially
to different neighborhoods. They employed multiple methods
of triangulation and developed techniques of field research
including interviewing, diaries, self-reported life histories, and
case analyses to provide subjective balance to this quantitative
and spatial analysis. They also identified and distinguished
between ‘patterns’ (structures) and ‘processes’ (actions or
behavior) as the constituting forces in society. They were eager
to develop tools to not only research and understand society but
also change or improve it, particularly by directing urban
planning and social intervention agencies.
Chicago School ethnographers eschewed complex or
abstract theoretical language and their approach was system-
atically influenced by Mead’s ideas concerning the self, the
other, social interaction, and the human capacity to be rational
and take the role of the other. As Deegan observes, one of the
fundamental theoretical foundations of Chicago School
ethnography was Mead’s understanding that “the scientific
model of observation, data collection and interpretation is
fundamentally a human project. Sociologists can learn to take
the role of others because this is how all humans learn to
become part of society” (2008: p. 19).
The New Ethnography
In the mid-1950s, an American school of thought emerged that
called itself ‘ethnoscience’ or ‘the New Ethnography.’ Falling
within the Boasian interest in cultural knowledge, the New
Ethnography tried to develop a more rigorous ethnographic
method than the rather intuitive, experiential approach of the
Malinowskian tradition. Replication and reliability were the
tests of validity. If ethnographers could reproduce the findings
of previous field-workers, and could conduct themselves in
culturally acceptable ways by using the ethnographic knowl-
edge, then the research was considered valid.
Drawing on linguistic techniques such as componential
analysis, ethnoscientists set out to isolate cultural classifications
through structured interviews. The relations among contrasting
conceptual categories were used to arrive at the cognitive model
that determined people’s thoughts and actions. The ethnogra-
pher should determine the boundaries of a cultural domain,
such as a kinship system or a color system, and describe its
internal structure or folk classification. A useful method to
determine cultural classifications is through contrast sets.
Informants are asked to contrast one kin term or color term
with another. The answers are organized into taxonomies of
mutually exclusive components that share only one culturally
relevant feature, such as ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle,’ but not ‘canoe’ and
‘uncle’ (Sturtevant, 1964).
This research agenda posed the challenge of how to describe
cognitive models. Recourse was taken again to linguistics, and
in particular to Kenneth Pike’s adaptation of vernacular and
systematic descriptions of language to cultural phenomena.
Pike coined the terms ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ in reference to the
difference between phonemics and phonetics. The emic
approach reproduces local terminologies, and constructs the
cultural grammar underlying social behavior. The etic approach
consists of the culture-free anthropological lexicon that allows
the translation of local terms into generalizable knowledge. For
example, ‘aunt’ is an emic term meaningful only in Anglo-
American kinship terminology, while ‘mother’s sister’ and
‘father’s sister’ are the corresponding etic kinship terms. The
emic approach should not be confused with Malinowski’s
native’s point of view, which refers to people’s experience of
the world, not their cognition. The New Ethnography regarded
the emic approach as an ethnographic method to map the
tacit cultural logics, cognitive principles, and folk taxonomies
that organize people’s emotions, thoughts, and behavior
(D’Andrade, 1995).
Contrary to its name, the New Ethnography hardly
produced ethnographies but mostly articles on kinship and
legal terminologies, color categories, and plant and animal
taxonomies. A highlight of ethnoscience is the study Basic Color
Terms by Berlin and Kay (1969). The authors compare the color
lexicons of 98 languages and conclude that some societies
distinguish as few as two colors but that there are 11 basic
color categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown,
purple, pink, orange, and gray. Furthermore, all languages
have at least black and white, and may then add additional
colors along either one of two fixed temporal orders. Finally,
the combined temporal order is evolutionary: color vocab-
ularies with few color terms correlate with simple societies
and simple technologies. Such decontextualized, evolutionary
comparison seemed to defy the Boasian critique but
demonstrated how decades of thorough in situ fieldwork had
raised the quality of ethnographic data.
Criticism of the New Ethnography was raised with regard to
its privileging of language over practice, the reduction of culture
to cognition, the emphasis on the human mind, the neglect of
intracultural variation, and the lack of attention to meaning.
Ethnographic attention shifted during the 1970s from an
emphasis on cultural classifications to symbolic meanings and
local interpretations.
Thick Description and Reflexive Ethnography
The semiotic conceptualization of culture expounded by
symbolic and interpretive anthropology revolutionized
ethnography during the 1970s. Following the intellectual
footsteps of German sociologist Max Weber, American
anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) conceptualized culture
as a web of meanings spun by the people themselves.
Ethnography moved from its empiricist tendency toward
hermeneutic interpretation. Fieldwork became like reading an
old, partially faded manuscript with all the accompanying
misreadings and mistranslations. Drawing on French
philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1971), Geertz resembled cultures
to documents as systems of meaning embodied in symbolic
forms because of four similarities between cultural practices
and texts: they are both meaningful; have observable
objectifying consequences; supersede the original conditions,

relevance, and authorship of their production; and address
different audiences.
Geertz defined ethnography as thick description. Thick
description tried to unravel the conceptual structures and
frames of local interpretation by studying people’s conflicting
social discourses in order to arrive at cultural systems of
meaning. These systems are not emic analyses or descriptions
of the actor’s point of view but anthropological constructions
of the actor’s interpretations of his or her actions, emotions,
beliefs, and experiences. The test of validity is ultimately the
ethnography’s imaginative quality. Textual representations take
the form of detailed analyses of specific cultural phenomena as
interpretations of larger sociocultural realities. Geertz’s (1973)
interpretation of cockfights in Bali is a typical study. He
describes these events as social gatherings at which men
gamble and play putting their prestige, masculinity, and
social statuses at risk. The cockfight reveals the multiple fixed
social hierarchies of Balinese society without ever changing
them. It is therefore a metasocial commentary, a text about
Balinese experience informing people about the lives they live.
The attention of interpretive anthropology to local meaning
prompted the critique that the intersubjective construction of
field data remained untouched. Reflexive anthropology arose
in the 1980s to examine the narrative genres, forms, styles,
structure, and rhetoric of ethnographic texts (Clifford and
Marcus, 1986). This approach was strongly influenced by the
practice theory of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the
study of discourses of power by French social philosopher
Michel Foucault, and the dialogic theory of Russian
philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Ethnographic research became
interpreted as a practice of domination because of the
unequal power relation between the authoritative field-
worker and the local informant.
Reflexive ethnography implies the study of the field-
worker’s interpretive presuppositions and ethnographic
authority, the interaction with research participants, the inter-
cultural construction of ethnographic knowledge, and the
narrative style of research findings. Ethnographers became
conscious of how knowledge was produced in research and
reporting, as exemplified by Paul Rabinow’s (1977) analysis of
his fieldwork in a Moroccan town. Intercultural translation by
key informants required that they first understand their own
culture before they could describe it to a foreign researcher
who lacked any experiential knowledge of the culture under
study. Moroccan interlocutors who were situated at the social
periphery proved to be excellent interpreters because they
could see across social boundaries.
In an era in which researched ‘others’ increasingly ‘spoke
back’ to what was written about them, and with a heightened
awareness of the relationship between power and the
construction of knowledge, ethnographers sought to increase
the voice of the ‘other’ through more active involvement of
research participants. This was achieved by extensive use of
direct quotes, coauthorship, reciprocity, collaboration, and
partnership. Vincent Crapanzano (1980) addressed the
intersubjective construction of cultural meaning in an exegesis
of his research relation with the illiterate Moroccan tilemaker
Tuhami. He reproduced the dialogic quality of fieldwork by
presenting a literal transcription of distinct voices, questions
and answers of Tuhami and himself, intermingled with
Ethnography 181
anthropological commentary. Crapanzano chose an experi-
mental writing style to convey this field encounter; other field-
workers took an additional step toward ethnographic fiction
and poetry.
Narrative Ethnography, Testimonio, and Ethnographic
Fiction
The 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of new forms of
ethnographic writing, including narrative ethnography, testi-
monio, and ethnographic fiction. Testimonio or testimonial
narrative was based on first-person accounts of situations
involving violence, marginalization, or struggle for survival to
bear witness to and denounce human rights abuses. Mostly
emerging from Latin America, narratives such as the auto-
biographical I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guate-
mala (Menchú and Burgos-Debray, 1984) were intended to
give a voice to the voiceless. Testimonio refers to a narrative in
book form, told in the first person by a narrator who is a direct
participant or witness of the events they recount, and is
usually presented as a ‘life story.’ First and foremost, testimonio
was intended to be a tactic of empowerment and survival in
which the subaltern brought the existence of oppressive and
repressive conditions to the world’s attention in order to
achieve social and political changes. It represented a form of
experimental ethnography based on a new approach to
fieldwork and a new relationship between the ethnographer
and the ‘other’ (Beverly, 2004).
One of the most interesting developments in experimental
forms of ethnographic writing has been the emergence of
ethnographic fiction combining art and science. Ethnography
and fiction have been juxtaposed in a number of theoretical
areas, such as literary and postmodern interests in ethnography
as a form of literature. Although ethnographic fiction has been
criticized as inappropriate for consideration as ethnography,
there has been a long tradition dating back to the nineteenth
century of ethnographers writing fiction informed by fieldwork
experiences (Narayan, 1999). There have been two main forms
of juxtaposing ethnography with fiction, namely, fictional
ethnography and ethnographic fiction, both of which aim to
convey ethnographic realities. Fictional ethnography is written
by trained ethnographers who write fictionalized accounts
presented as ‘real’ ethnographies, whereas ethnographic fiction
is usually written as novels or stories by writers who lack
formal ethnographic training. Examples of the first include
Elenore Smith Bowen (1964), Carlos Castaneda (1968), and
Florinda Donner (1982); the second includes Susanna Kaysen
(1990) and Mischa Berlinski (2008).
Both Castaneda’s and Donner’s books claim to be ‘real’
ethnographies by ‘real’ ethnographers, but have been revealed
to essentially be ethnographically informed fiction or literature.
Goldschmidt characterizes Castaneda’s first books as “both
ethnography and allegory,” noting that it “demonstrates the
essential skill of good ethnography – the capacity to enter into
an alien world” (1968: pp. vii–viii). While Castaneda main-
tained that his experiences were real, his critics concluded that
his five Don Juan books were a hoax (de Mille, 1980). Donner’s
book was also presented as a ‘real’ ethnographic account, but it
too was revealed as fiction based on real ethnographic research.
182 Ethnography
Kaysen and Berlinski are not ethnographers. Their anthro-
pological novels are based on extensive research and achieve
what Bowen, Castaneda, and Donner are acclaimed for,
conveying both ethnographic knowledge about ‘other’
peoples and cultures and evoking the complexities of the
ethnographic encounter through fictionalized accounts.
While there is debate about whether this ‘creative nonfiction’
strays too far from fact into the realm of fiction, and about
the ethics of injecting fictional inventions within works
labeled ‘ethnography,’ Pratt (1986) and Narayan (1999) argue
that ethnography has much to gain from writing outside
established discursive traditions because the crossings between
ethnography and fiction have been mutually enriching for
both genres.
Engaged and Covert Ethnography
The first decade of this century has been marked by the
contradictory emergence of ‘engaged’ and ‘militarized’ ethno-
graphy. The trends described above solidified into a politically
engaged ethnography, which seeks to critically attract a wider
readership and contribute to public debate about the urgent
crises facing humankind today. Since its inception, social
science was intended as an applied science. As a product of the
European Enlightenment, it was based on the conviction that
reason could and should be applied for the reduction of
suffering and improvement of the human condition. In
a contemporary reaffirmation of this vision, the core ethos and
eidos of engaged ethnography is its ethical imperative to not
only ‘avoid harm’ but to intentionally work to ‘do some good’
where it is needed. Engaged ethnography sees ethnographers as
witnesses, instead of either dispassionate observers or political
activists, who connect their readers to the world’s trouble spots
and sensitize them to the suffering and struggles of dis-
privileged human beings. It seeks to generate public discussion,
influence opinion, and critically engage politicians and poli-
cymakers with the explicit goal of fostering genuine social
change (Sanford and Angel-Ajani, 2006; Sluka and Robben,
2012).
Unfortunately, that all is not well with the epistemology of
ethnography was revealed by the reemergence of covert
mission-related counterinsurgency research by social scientists
deployed by the US Army, which created renewed debate about
the ethics, practice, and praxis of ethnographic fieldwork today.
The goal of counterinsurgency research is population control
and is viewed by the military as an element of ‘combat power’ –
that is, as a weapon. Anthropologists first confronted the issue
of militarized ethnography during the Vietnam War. This
controversy led directly to the adoption of the first code of
anthropological ethics in 1971, which effectively banned such
research for over 30 years. However, in 2006, the US Army
initiated a new experimental counterinsurgency program called
the Human Terrain System, which began to embed social
scientists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan to
gather ethnographic intelligence. This generated renewed
controversy among anthropologists, most of whom view it as
fundamentally unethical, inherently harmful to those studied,
and an attempt to ‘weaponize’ or ‘recolonize’ ethnography as
an applied science of state control.
Militarized ethnography is a deceptive and unacceptable
form of covert ethnographic research because legitimate
consent cannot be given at the end of the barrel of a gun; the
people studied are subjected to the research rather than willing
participants in it; they are not informed of the real aims and
agenda; confidentiality is not guaranteed; the data obtained are
likely to be used to directly control, exploit, or harm them; and
the findings are officially secret and will never be published or
made available to them. Involvement of ethnographers in
counterinsurgency research is not a form of engaged ethnog-
raphy, as its practitioners pretend, but rather its antithesis
because it contradicts the fundamental intention of engaged
ethnography to function as a form of empowerment and
resistance to imperialism, domination, and exploitation.
Conclusion
The accelerating globalization in the 1990s affected the Boasian-
Malinowskian canon of fieldwork deeply. The idea of cultures
as integrated wholes and their study through a personal
immersion in one setting for the duration of 1 or 2 years became
untenable. Research of hybrid cultures, global interconnections,
translocal subjects, and new media demanded other ethno-
graphic approaches. Multisited ethnography has been one
strategy to examine the movements, paths, and connections
among people, goods, and knowledge in different locations
(Marcus, 1995; Hannerz, 2004). Field-workers make short trips
to a patchwork of sites, collaborate with other field-workers, and
skype with research participants. Netnography has emerged as
the latest development in ethnography. Computer-mediated
research of online communities and social media is combined
with ethnographic fieldwork (Kozinets, 2010). Online inter-
views, Web text analyses, and Internet crowd surfing have not
displaced participant observation and face-to-face interviews
but are becoming important additional research methods.
Ethnography thus continues to be a valuable strategy of
research and representation that adapts to changing empirical
circumstances.
See also: Anthropological Research, Ethics of; Anthropological
Writing; Anthropology and History; Anthropology: Overview;
Cognitive Anthropology; Community Studies: Anthropological;
Comparative Method in Anthropology; Culture Shock; Ethical
Practices: Institutional Oversight and Enforcement;
Ethnocentrism; Fieldwork in Social and Cultural Anthropology;
Fieldwork: Ethical Aspects; Informed Consent of Research
Subjects; Interpretation in Anthropology; Militaries and
Militarization, Anthropology of; Multisited Field Studies;
Objectivity of Research: Ethical Aspects; Privacy of Individuals
in Social Research: Confidentiality; Reflexivity in Anthropology;
Research Ethics, Cross-Cultural Dimensions of; War:
Anthropological Aspects, Historical Development of.
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Relevant Websites
http://savageminds.org/ – Savage Minds.
http://ethnographymatters.net – Ethnography Matters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography – Ethnography.
http://cead.org.nz – Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines.
Photoethnography.com.
http://architectonictokyo.com/Architectonic_Tokyo__An_Anthropology_of_the_
Moving_Earth.html – Architectonic Tokyo.
http://www.aaanet.org/resources – Anthropology Resources on the Internet.
http://www.topsite.com/best/ethnography; http://eth.sagepub.com/reports/most-
cited – 10 Best Ethnography Websites.
http://www.loc.gov/folklife/other.html – Ethnographic Studies Internet Resource Page.
Atlasti.com – ATLAS.ti: The Qualitative Data Analysis & Research Software.
http://www-bcf.usc.edu/wgenzuk/Ethnographic_Research.html – Center for Multilin-
gual, Multicultural Research; University of Southern California. A Synthesis of
Ethnograhic Research.