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Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D. 

 

 

What is Ethnography?

 
The term ethnography may be loosely applied to any qualitative research project where the purpose is to provide a detailed, in-depth description of everyday life and practice. This is sometimes referred to as "thick description" -- a term attributed to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz writing on the idea of an interpretive theory of culture in the early 1970s.  The use of the term "qualitative" is meant to distinguish this kind of social science research from more "quantitative" or statistically oriented research. The two approaches, i.e., quantitative and qualitative, while often complimentary, ultimately have different aims.

While an ethnographic approach to social research is no longer purely that of the cultural anthropologist, a more precise definition must be rooted in ethnography's disciplinary home of anthropology. Thus, ethnography may be defined as both a qualitative research process or method (one conducts an ethnography) and product (the outcome of this process is an ethnography) whose aim is cultural interpretation. The ethnographer goes beyond reporting events and details of experience.  Specifically, he or see attempts to explain how these represent what we might call "webs of meaning" (Geertz again), the cultural constructions, in which we live.

Ethnographers generate understandings of culture through representation of what we call an emic perspective, or what might be described as the "'insider's point of view." The emphasis in this representation is thus on allowing critical categories and meanings to emerge from the ethnographic encounter rather than imposing these from existing models.  An etic perspective, by contrast, refers to a more distant, analytical orientation to experience.

An ethnographic understanding is developed through close exploration of several sources of data. Using these data sources as a foundation, the ethnographer relies on a cultural frame of analysis.

Long-term engagement in the field setting or place where the ethnography takes place, is called participant observation.  This is perhaps the primary source of ethnographic data. The term represents the dual role of the ethnographer. To develop an understanding of what it is like to live in a setting, the researcher must both become a participant in the life of the setting while also maintaining the stance of an observer, someone who can describes the experience with a measure of what we might call "detachment." Note that this does not mean that ethnographers cannot also become advocates for the people they study. Typically ethnographers spend many months or even years in the places where they conduct their research often forming lasting bonds with people. Due to historical development and disciplinary biases, in the past most ethnographers conducted their research in foreign countries while largely ignoring the potential for work right here at home. This has meant that much of the ethnography done in the United States today is now being done outside of its disciplinary home.  Increasing numbers of cultural anthropologists, however, have begun doing fieldwork in the communities where they themselves live and work.

Interviews provide for what might be called "targeted" data collection by asking specific but open-ended questions. There is a great variety of interview styles. Each ethnographer brings his or her own unique approach to the process. Regardless, the emphasis is on allowing the person or persons being interviewed to answer without being limited by pre-defined choices -- something which clearly differentiates qualitative from more quantitative or demographic approaches. In most cases, an ethnographic interview looks and feels little different than an everyday conversation and indeed in the course of long-term participant-observation, most conversations are in fact purely spontaneous and without any specific agenda.

Researchers collect other sources of data which depend on the specific nature of the field setting. This may take the form of representative artifacts that embody characteristics of the topic of interest, government reports, and newspaper and magazine articles. Although often not tied to the site of study, secondary academic sources are utilized to "locate" the specific study within an existing body of literature.

Over the past twenty years, interest has grown within anthropology for considering the close relationship between personal history, motivation, and the particulars of ethnographic fieldwork. It is undeniably important to question and understand how these factors have bearing on the construction of theory and conduct of a scholarly life. Personal and professional experiences, together with historical context, lead individual researchers to their own particular methodological and theoretical approaches.  This too is an important, even if unacknowledged, source.

Ethnographic fieldwork is shaped by personal and professional identities just as these identities are inevitably shaped by individual experiences while in the field. Unfortunately, the autobiographical dimension of ethnographic research has been downplayed historically if not discounted altogether. This is mostly understandable given a perceived threat to the objectivity expected of legitimate science, to reliability of data, and to integrity of our methodology, if we appear to permit subjectivity to intervene by allowing the ethnographer’s encumbered persona to appear instead of adhering to the prescribed role of wholly dispassionate observer.

Finding Connections & Insight

Whether implicit or explicit in nature, one of the basic characteristics of an anthropological approach is that it is comparative.  My research interests are varied and based on two primary fieldwork experiences conducted during my doctoral training. One is located on the other side of the globe and deals with issues in the relocation of mostly landless poor, culture and identity politics, and post-colonial nationalism and nation building. The other is located here in the United States among middle-class working families and addresses the impact of post-industrial economic and social changes on the cultural meanings of person and place. Although different, these projects share important traits which express enduring intellectual interests including my desire to conduct community or organizational based research and a focus on issues of migration and relocation, community building and participation, personhood and place, narrative constructions and identity, and the personal negotiations between work, family, and self in different social and historical contexts.

My first major research project involved a year of fieldwork in Sulawesi, Indonesia in 1998. This research was conducted in four government-sponsored relocation settlements all part of the program known as “transmigration” that originally began during the Dutch colonial period. In this community-based work, I employed both qualitative and more quantitative approaches. I concentrated my participant-observation, in-depth interviewing and social-surveys in a single village as a primary field site. In order to test my early findings against other cases while comparing ethnographically interesting differences and similarities with other locations, I extended data collection into three other nearby settlements – each with a unique set of circumstances for their establishment and continued development as communities.

My dissertation fieldwork entailed two years of community-based fieldwork in the rapidly growing lakeside communities of Northwest Lower Michigan centered in Traverse City. The project was concerned with exploring the phenomenon of life-style migration – a form of non-economic, urban to rural migration that has led to the sudden, often unexpected growth of formerly declining non-metropolitan areas.

I value the depth and breadth of my research interests and experience.  Although at first glance the "distance" between these two projects and their sites appears too great to offer much in the way of comparative insight, this is not the case.  My work with Indonesian transmigrants offered insight into how I might interpret experiences of relocating professionals as life-style migrants. Specifically, transmigrants spoke of how they used the relocation to selectively edit out or enhance certain personal characteristics and even cultural elements of their ethnic group. I was able to reveal a similar process among life-style migrants who relocated in order to bring about what they felt was a necessary break from established routine. They used relocation to redefine priorities and, in many cases, to get in touch with what they describe as a more authentic self.

The value of ethnographic research conducted in a variety of social, cultural, and physical contexts is that it can encourage us as social scientists to be open to possibilities and to imagine new ways of thinking about what might appear too familiar to be worthy of in-depth consideration. This is another reason why I value the ethnography of everyday life. It is in neglected details of day-to-day life that real insight into the meaning of social and cultural change is most powerfully and relevantly expressed.

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