Ethnographic methods

1. Ethnographic methods: a general statement of utility

As noted in the previous chapter, ethnographic methods have been adopted by scholars from many academic disciplines and professional fields. There are, however, several characteristics that are typical of the situations that lend them­selves to ethnographic research, regardless of discipline.

2. Illustrative ethnographic case studies

Throughout this book, two of the author’s own field research projects will be used to illustrate major points. This material is offered as illustrative only, not as a model to be followed exactly. The two projects are meant only to help concretize otherwise abstract concepts. The author is a cultural anthropologist and so the projects tend to reflect an anthropological take on ethnographic research; readers from different disciplinary traditions will adapt the procedures according to the standards of their particular field of study.

2.1. The Trinidad Project

This project was conducted in a setting fairly typical of traditional cultural anthropology: a relatively well-bounded community with a strong self-image (and recognized as a definite community by outsiders) in a setting outside the United States. Since the early 1970s the author has been studying the descen­dants of people from India who were brought to various parts of the British Empire under a system of ‘indenture’ following the official end of slavery. Indentured laborers were not technically enslaved since the period of their bondage was limited by contract. After serving out their bonds, the laborers were free to leave the site of employment. During the period of the bond, however, conditions for the laborers were virtually identical with those that obtained dur­ing slavery. Although the Indians were in theory free to return to India, very few of them did so; the cost of the return passage was too great for many of them, and others believed that having crossed ‘dark water’ they had lost the traditional ties to the village system back home – they had, in effect, become ritually impure. So the vast majority of them remained in the areas in which they had been inden­tured. The author’s particular interest has been in the West Indies, most specifi­cally the island of Trinidad. Indians were brought to Trinidad to work on the sugar plantations. The Trinidad indenture lasted from 1837 through 1917. Descendants of the indentured Indians now constitute at least half the population of modem Trinidad; until very recently they have remained a largely agrarian population cut off from the island nation’s political and economic mainstream. (See Angrosino, 1974, for a full account of the Trinidad project.)

2.2. The deinstitutionalization project

This study was conducted in a community closer to home. The author became inter­ested in the situation of people with chronic mental illness and mental retardation who had been ‘deinstitutionalized’ beginning in the 1970s when advances in psychiatric medicine made it possible to treat their symptoms outside of hospitals. The deinstitutionalization movement had motives that were both humanitarian (allowing people to live in the community free from the rigors of institutional con­finement) and economic (treating people on a case-by-case basis in the community was cheaper than ‘warehousing’ them for life). Some of the people affected by dein­stitutionalization have made an adequate adjustment to life beyond the hospital, although others have fallen through the cracks in the complex health and human services systems and form the core of a homeless population visible in most major population centers. The author’s research was centered on an agency in Florida that served a ‘dually diagnosed’ clientele – people with both severe mental illness and mental retardation – providing educational, vocational, and residential services. (See Angrosino, 1998, for a full account of this research project.)

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