A brief history of ethnographic research

Ethnography literally means a description of a people. It is important to under­stand that ethnography deals with people in the collective sense, not with indi­viduals. As such, it is a way of studying people in organized, enduring groups, which may be referred to as communities or societies. The distinctive way of life that characterizes such a group is its culture. The study of culture involves an examination of the group’s learned and shared behaviors, customs, and beliefs.

The ethnographic approach to the study of human groups began with anthro­pologists in the late 19 th and early 20th centuries who were convinced that the armchair speculations of earlier social philosophers were inadequate for under­standing the way real people actually lived. They came to the conclusion that only in the field could a scholar truly encounter the dynamics of the lived human experience. Those in Britain (and other parts of the British Empire, later the Commonwealth, such as Australia and India) developed one form of ethno­graphic research. It reflected their fieldwork in areas then still under colonial control, societies such as those in Africa or the Pacific that seemed to be pre­served in their traditional forms. In retrospect, of course, we can see that the colonial encounter drastically changed many of those societies, but a hundred years ago it was possible to look at them as being relatively untouched by the outside. The British therefore emphasized a study of the enduring institutions of society; that approach came to be called social anthropology. The two most influ­ential social anthropologists of the British school were A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski (McGee and Warms, 2003, see especially pp. 153-215).

By contrast, anthropologists in the United States were interested in studying native American people whose traditional ways of life had by then already been drastically altered, if not completely destroyed. The US anthropologists could not assume that native people lived in the context of social institutions that rep­resented their indigenous condition. If culture could not be found in those insti­tutions, then it would have to be reconstructed through the historical memory of the survivors. American anthropology thus came to be referred to as cultural anthropology. The most influential American cultural anthropologist was Franz Boas, who trained a whole generation of American scholars, including Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Robert Lowie (McGee and Warms, 2003, see especially pp. 128-52).

Malinowski and Boas were both strong advocates of field-based research and both advocated what has come to be known as participant observation, a way of conducting research that places the researcher in the midst of the community he or she is studying. Because of complications arising out of international condi­tions during the First World War, Malinowski, who was conducting a field study of the Trobriand Islands (Western Pacific), was stranded at his field site for four years. Although it has rarely been possible to duplicate that unplanned feat, Malinowski’s Trobriand ethnography has often been held up as the gold standard for the long-term total immersion of a researcher in the society under study.

Beginning in the 1920s, sociologists at the University of Chicago adapted the anthropologists’ ethnographic field research methods to the study of social groups in ‘modern’ communities in the United States (Bogdan and Biklen, 2003). The influence of this ‘Chicago school’ ultimately affected such fields as education, business, public health, nursing, and mass communications.

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.