Ethnography

Abstract

Ethnographic fieldwork, carried out according to the method of long-term participant-observation, is what defines social anthropology. The method is inductive and open-ended. As such, the method directs the anthropologist to study that which is of significance to the community studied rather than test a number of hypotheses formulated in advance of the fieldwork. Anthropology is a comparative discipline, seeking to unravel the complexity and variety of human understanding and human social and cultural life. For this reason, anthropologists have sought out societies that seemed to be very different from their own and, during the first half of the twentieth century, most went to undertake their fieldwork in small - often minority - communities in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. While this is still the case to a large extent, today many anthropologists have directed their ethnographic gaze toward communities closer to home. Thus the method of participant-observation is found to be useful by those who, for example, study life in a large bank, or the gay community in an American urban setting, as much as in a settlement in the Malaysian rain forest. The method is based on the paradoxical activity of participating fully in peoples’ lives, while simultaneously observing it from a distance. To base one’s study on the ‘native’s point of view’, and to disentangle what really goes on rather than what people say goes on, is one central advantage of the method. This forces the researcher to allow herself to be open to the unexpected event or utterance. The ethnographer always engages with contemporary anthropological theory in her interpretations. Ethnographic fieldwork is thus performed in active relationship with anthropological theory.